King of the court

My 17-year-old son David innocently asked me if I wanted to go to the basketball court with him Sunday. Since he’s at that cute age where he rarely speaks a sentence to me that doesn’t begin with the words, “Can I have..”, I said sure.

I warned him, though, that I was not going to play him in an actual game. I’m too out of shape for that foolishness. I might hurt myself or, in a much worse outcome, I might actually lose.

He’s been trying to bait me into a basketball game for some time. The other day he was trash-talking and I said, “Have you forgotten who won the last time we played? That’s right, it was me.”

He responded by reminding me that it was three years ago when that happened, when he was still in the eighth grade. Oh, big deal. Like there’s much difference between an eighth-grader and an 11th-grader. I mean, I haven’ t changed that much in three years, so what makes him think he has?

Anyway, we got to the court, and we started shooting, and I realized the little booger knew what he was doing. He knew there was no way I was going to let him stand unchallenged on the court. Finally I said, “Ok, I’ll run you a quick one. Let’s play to seven.”

No, he said, we always play to 12. Fine, I said, knowing I couldn’t back down. If you show weakness to these urchins, they’ll kill you in your sleep and steal your debit card. So I agreed to play to 12, which in retrospect, was a poor decision.

The game started out calmly enough. I drained a couple of jumpers, he made a layup here and there. By the time the score was 3-1, there had already been three timeouts for injury. It may surprise you to know that two of those times, he was the one who got hurt. He kept foolishly running into my elbow.

The other time, I jammed my fingers quite badly when I reached for the ball and accidentally hit his hard head. As evidence, my middle finger on my right hand is swollen to the size of a bratwurst and is turning black. Having a middle finger out of commission severely hampered my morning commute. But I stayed tough, and took a 7-4 lead, and would have at that point been the winner had I stuck to my original plan.

Then, he began to catch up, and I began to move a little more slowly. I was going to my left with all the quickness of a sea turtle on Quaaludes. After he tied the game at 7-7, I looked up and saw my wife drive up in her car. She had come to watch the fun. Trust me, I had no illusions about who she was pulling for.

It’s a good thing she showed up when she did, because it gave us an excuse to stop the game for a few minutes, and I was about 5 seconds away from a cardiac event.

“How are you doing?” she said, and I told her that I was doing just fine, but it might not be a bad idea to dial 9-1-1 on her phone and have her finger hover above the “send” button, just in case. She smiled, told me that she had faith in me, and asked me where the life insurance policies were.

The game resumed and, as you can surmise, what with my concentration thrown off and my finger hurting and the fact that the baskets were 3 inches higher than regulation, not to mention it was really a bad biorhythm day for me and my astrological signs were lined up poorly – well, I lost.


Don’t worry, though, I handled it maturely. I congratulated him, and secretly vowed to work over the next few weeks to get ready for a rematch. I’ve hired Larry Bird as my shooting coach, I’m doing conditioning work with Lance Armstrong, and I’ve begun taking steroids. If all that fails, I’ll remind him of all the times I let him win when he was younger. I’m not above accepting charity.