Ball Was Life

CC and I used to play together every single day.  We were best friends and inseparable from the age of seven all the way through high school.  We are still friends to this day, but we took very different roads in life after high school.  But that’s another tale.

At some point a few years after CC moved into his house, his dad put up a basketball goal in the backyard.  I guess I should paint a picture of how the houses were in my neighborhood.  The garages on most of the houses were detached and in the backyard.  So, there was a driveway that ran along the side of the house back to the garage in the back.  It was along this driveway, right in front of the garage, that his dad placed the basketball goal. 

The other odd thing about the houses was that the electrical lines ran along poles at the back of the properties in-between the houses.  So, wires stretched from the poles to the garages, and finally from the garages to the houses.  One of these electrical wires ran right in front of the basketball goal that CC’s dad put up.  So, the wire became part of the game, as we had to shoot high arcs over it to make baskets.

As if this wasn’t enough of an obstacle, CC’s dad also did a lot of woodworking in his garage.  So, he built a quite large wooden table that he kept in the driveway in front of the garage that he used to hold stuff while he was building it.  This table also became part of the game, as we had to shoot from behind it and run around it while we were playing.  The distance from behind the table and over the electrical wire was about the distance of a free-throw. 

So, many of our games (like 21) involved shooting from behind the table and trying to run around it to get the rebound before the ball bounced (or bounced twice, depending on the game).  The goal was to predict which way the ball would bounce off the rim, so you could choose which direction to run around the table.  Pick the wrong way, and you probably wouldn’t get there in time.  I was pretty fast when I was younger, so I had a good chance of tracking the ball down regardless, but CC was not blessed with those same skills.  Which meant that I usually won most games.

There were many such obstacles on our court, like the fire hydrant placed randomly on one corner of the driveway, the raised slab behind the house that was the foundation for an extension that was never completed, or the massive pecan tree that grew over the back of the goal.  As you can imagine many, many injuries were sustained on that court, but I can’t remember having more fun in my entire life.  I lived to come home and go over there and play, sometimes three or four hours at a time.  Ball was life, and I couldn’t get enough of it.