Past My Prime

I am on my firm's city league basketball team. We play basketball every Wednesday night.

This past Wednesday we played our second game of the season. Here's what happened: the other guys were big. I was bigger (and a lot slower) than most. My teammates passed me the ball sometimes and I did what I could to put it in the basket. I got lots of rebounds, blocked a few shots, and generally did what I could to legally push people around and keep them from putting the ball in the basket. We won.

If you sensed any lack of enthusiasm in that last paragraph, please forgive me. For years now I've been struggling with the increasing feeling that I'm bored with basketball, and I'm not sure what to do about.

Basketball used to be what defined me. My last years in high school I gained some notoriety in my home town and surrounding communities as a basketball player. I even spent my freshman year of college on a Div. III basketball team, where I also gained some notoriety. It was cool to be a basketball player, to read my stat lines in the newspaper, and even to have people sometimes recognize me at the grocery store as a basketball player (I took my pleasures where I could find them).

Ah, but those days are long gone. I went on a mission after my freshman year of college. For some reason, my mission destroyed my knees such that they could no longer endure daily practices (or even daily pick up games) without swelling up. This is the reason I've always given for why I never made it to the tryouts for the BYU basketball team when I came back. (My attentions were also diverted, however, by the woman I would soon make my wife).

So since then, my basketball exploits have been limited to intramural leagues, and now city leagues. Somewhere in there I started realizing that the punishment my body takes each time I go out to play isn't quite worth the benefits or joys of the game.* In fact, after finishing a disappointing fourth in my last intramural season at Harvard, I vowed to my friends that I had retired from the game for good.

I was coaxed back into it, though, when I learned my firm was putting together a team in anticipation of my arrival. I thought, too, that that the city league would give me a chance to get to know the people at my firm and in the community. Now that I'm back playing again, however, I just keep longing for those days when I can again step away from the game. The beatings my body takes have continued, and my skills have diminished just enough that there's no longer much, if any, finesse to my game. As a result I'm relegated to what I call the grunt work of the game, finding success only as I'm able to be more physical than my opponent. I'd say it's a living, but it's not. I get no other benefits from it now other than the exercise and some moderate degree of notoriety with the firm. That'd probably be enough if my body didn't take such a toll.

So at this point in my life, is it wrong that I'm quite contented to get my exercise instead by putting 10 miles on my exercise bike every morning? with a tennis match? or walking 18 holes? Few seem able to understand why I'd want that, though, and people's disbelief at my reticence to play these days almost makes me question whether I have made some great error in my calculus.

Hopefully, though, this post has helped convince some of the otherwise incredulous.


* Because of my size, I have almost always e been subjected to punishment from other teams above and beyond what most players experience. For some reason, being bigger than everyone else translates to most people (including referees unfortunately) that I can be subjected to more punishment than everyone else, more cheap fouls, hacking, and hanging on, simply as a matter of course. I used to accept the bruises, scratches, and injuries almost as an honor or badge of courage, but now I just kind of hate it. All the more because it now takes often takes me three or four days to recover from one night of basketball.