End of an Era

Tomorrow I am going to visit my parents. I just called my mother and gave her fair warning. I informed her that I was going to bring my laundry with me so I could use her washer and dryer and save myself a few dollars. I stated that I would come over in the afternoon rather than the morning so Dad would be there. My mother said that my father would be home in the morning too.

My father is 62 years old. He played his last basketball game on Tuesday. Tuesday he partially tore his Achilles tendon near the end of a game. According to Mom, the injury causes him to walk with a slight limp. It will take months to heal and he has been strongly advised not to play basketball again.

My dad started playing adult basketball with a group of guys in 1974, shortly after he returned home from Vietnam and got his discharge. Most of them were high school friends. They would rent a court on Saturday morning and sometimes a weekday evening too. The men played year-round. They had a roster of regular players but it was not a league and there were no referees, nevertheless, they kept score and actually competed hard but good-naturedly… well, at least most of the time. Over the decades guys would quit for one reason or another, replaced by friends or coworkers or neighbors who wanted to play basketball. But my father played throughout. In fact, he rarely missed a game. One Saturday morning in the spring of 1981 Dad played basketball, that afternoon he married my mother.

When I was a little girl Dad would often take me with him to the gym on Saturday morning so my mother could have some time to herself. I would sit on some bleachers and watch the men play for a while, but eventually I would become bored and head outside to the playground, weather permitting. But one day when I was about 7 years old there was a steady rain and I was stuck in the gym, playing with spare basketballs along the side of the court. I remember it vividly. That morning I was not paying any attention to the men playing basketball when all of the sudden an argument broke out. I had never heard grown-ups speak to each other in such angry tones. It was actually a little scary. Then Dad stepped over to the two disagreeing men and barked at them something like, “If there are going to be arguments, then we might as well let my daughter Katie play. She can’t shoot or dribble a basketball but she can out-argue anyone here.”

There were a few seconds of silence followed by a couple of chuckles. My father looked over to me and winked. The heated discussion went no further and the men went back to playing basketball. 

About two or three years ago I stopped by the gym one Saturday morning just to watch my father play. I had other things I had to do so I did not stay long, just a few minutes. I sat on the same bleachers I had sat on almost twenty years before. Just like years before, I was watching 30 and 40 year-old men playing basketball, that is, except for my father who was about 60. But he was as slim as anyone, and he did not embarrass himself. He played with a kind of childlike joy that made me smile. My father sometimes comes off as being kind of gruff, however he will at times display joy, but only on a basketball court was that joy childlike.  

I think my mother is secretly happy and a bit relieved by my father’s career-ending injury. She is happy because playing basketball was priority-one on Saturday morning for my father and now she'll be able to get him to do other things. My mother is relieved because the injury is a relatively minor one and not something catastrophic like a compound fracture.

Dad played basketball for almost 40 years and he will miss it. But there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that in a tiny way, basketball will miss my dad too.