One on One
The painful love of being a dad, as it plays out on the basketball court.
My son, Beckett, thirteen years old, shoe size 8, is about to beat me in one on one. It could happen any day. That it didn’t happen last night, in the dusty gym where we often play basketball after dinner, is little consolation. It took everything I had to fend him off.
A couple of years ago the final score might have been 21-2, a year later 21-12, but last night he answered my three-pointers with threes of his own, dodged my desperate attempts at steals, and when midway through the game he crossed me over at the top of the key and drove right past me for a reverse layup, it felt like a metaphor. With flare, with little hesitation, he was leaving me, had already left me, behind.
I won by two points. I grabbed a long rebound and drilled a corner three to go ahead, but afterward I didn’t feel the least bit triumphant. I felt winded. I felt my age. In the past, when our games have been close, even on those rare occasions when Beckett has come out on top, it’s been by design. Dad stuff, you know. You’re up ten so you make new rules. Next score counts twenty, next miss goes back to zero. Beckett, savvy, scrappy, will take what he can get, but he knows when I’m going easy on him. Last night I did not go easy, and I was this close to losing.
I have been trying to remember the first time I beat my dad at basketball. Our court, if you could call it that, was my grandparents’ driveway. They lived a quarter mile from us, on a hill outside Nashville. One Christmas my grandfather said he had one last gift. We stepped into our boots and followed him through the screen door. In the driveway, uncharacteristically emptied of cars, he pulled a sheet from a new basket mounted to the light pole between the holly trees. From the bed of his El Camino, he produced a ball. When people ask me about favorite Christmas presents, that’s still what I say.
Basketball sounds, the bounces, the swishes, so unlike the splitting of wood or the revving of engines, seemed incompatible with that setting. The drive flanked a big open field that gave way to a barnyard and thick, coyote-haunted woods. Football, which my uncle grew up playing, was more in keeping with the spirit of the place. Axe-throwing and bull-riding, they were even closer to the bone. Basketball felt like an import from elsewhere, from Louisville, say, or Cincinnati, the places my dad lived before he met my mother at college and moved with her back home to Tennessee.
The sport, I discovered, took a fine touch. If football was a sledgehammer, basketball was a paintbrush, less about the forearms, more about the fingers, the wrists. The pivoting, the dribbling, the driving, it was dance-like, it generated its own rhythm, it echoed, it ramified across the hilly landscape, and soon enough, the world around seemed to move in step.
Unlike other sports, you could play basketball alone. It paired well with thinking, with dreaming, with neglecting homework and studying, even as it reset your mind. Once I was shooting at my grandparents’ place after mowing the yard and I got so lost in thought I didn’t realize a truck had pulled into the driveway. How long had it been idling there? In the passenger seat, her arm hanging out the open window, sat Maria, a beautiful girl from up the road. Her dad was on the porch talking to my grandfather.
As I went to retrieve it, I couldn’t help it, I glanced to the side to see if she was watching and when I turned back, I ran smack into the pole. You should have seen me stagger. You should have heard the ding.
I felt my sunburned face rekindle. I took another shot. I tried not to let on that I had seen her. The ball hit the edge of the concrete and skittered into the field. As I went to retrieve it, I couldn’t help it, I glanced to the side to see if she was watching and when I turned back, I ran smack into the pole. You should have seen me stagger. You should have heard the ding. In a hollow somewhere, the sound still echoes, as it must do in Maria’s memory wherever she is now.
Nashville didn’t, still doesn’t, have an NBA team. The Hawks were the closest franchise, and at one point I regularly wore a knockoff Stacey Augmon jersey to school, but the Bulls were my, were all my buddies’, obsession. This was the mid-’90s. Nashville was Vegas was London was Beijing—we all wanted to be like Mike, but no one could be like Mike, at least not on a ten-foot goal, so after supper at my grandparents’ house my brother and I would lower the basket to seven feet and dunk until our palms were bruised and the rim looked a little crooked, then we’d raise the goal again and take turns playing Dad in one on one.
He had played guard in high school. He blew out his knee after college. He was no longer quick, but he was strong and he could still shoot like the devil. He’d get on a big roll. If you were playing make-it take-it and he made it, you might not get the ball again until the next game. For the life of me, I cannot recall when I first defeated my father. What I remember, instead, are two distinct eras: one where he won every single game, one where I did. In my recollection, when he fell from grace, he fell for good, but can that really be true?
What I can say with greater confidence is that after that first loss, we didn’t play as much. I no longer needed to. Beating your dad at basketball is like finishing your first Faulkner novel. A formidable challenge, yes, and a long time coming, but now you know how to do it, so you put it on the shelf and take down “Absalom, Absalom!” Maybe you set Faulkner aside and go for Woolf or Joyce. In any case, from my grandparents’ driveway I graduated to various church gyms and the community center across from the furniture store in town. The old man coached me for a couple of seasons in park league. When I made the school team, he took a seat in the stands.
The summer Beckett turned seven we moved across the country. I took a job teaching English at a small college outside Chicago. Perhaps out of fear of what the move would do to him but also because we didn’t know a soul and there wasn’t much else to do in the winter months, which stretched on and on like interminable nights, years of them, we started playing basketball. Up to that point, he’d played soccer, a little tee-ball too, but it was hoop that captured his imagination.
Before bed we would watch slam-dunk videos on YouTube, Vince Carter 360s, MJ taking flight from the free-throw line, and when we first hit the court, Beckett gave off a palpable feeling of letdown, as if he didn’t understand why he couldn’t leap out of the gym, but soon enough he adjusted and set about figuring out how to get the ball through the net from his distant remove.
The first thing to improve was his ball handling. He went from running around with the ball under his arm to slapping at it like a djimbe to dribbling it, at least with his right hand, in what seemed like a few days. I would laugh and say good job and then show him what I could do, dribbling through my legs and behind my back, reprising basic moves I’d turned into muscle memory in high school but which I hadn’t practiced in years. Did he think I was a legend? Was he in awe of my skills? Not in the least. He wanted the ball back. He wanted to try for himself.
It was fun. He was frustrated. He was getting better. “Dad,” he said one day, “I know how to do a layup. Watch this.” A week later, “I made five shots in a row. How many can you do?” His jump shot was neither smooth nor pretty, not like it is now. The wicked spin of the rock coming off his fingers seemed cribbed from knuckleball pitchers or tennis drop-shots, but he’d found a way to score that fit with his body, and what he really wanted to do was play one on one.
From the start, the rules were set. I could shoot three-pointers only. I could not block his shot. We played to 21 by ones and twos instead of twos and threes, a way to extend the action and increase the chances for a comeback. In the last year, though, as Beckett has grown several inches and polished his moves in countless pickup games with buddies, these rules, sacrosanct for years, have been broken and finally suspended altogether as it has become apparent that in order to beat him I need to be able to drive the lane and play actual defense.
Fatherhood, it gets you playing again. It’s a second wind. It’s like lowering the rim. You’re indomitable for a while. It feels a little wrong. Mostly it feels great. But your opponent grows. By virtue of playing against you, someone with more skill, someone stronger, taller, he makes strides, and when the goal gets lifted this time, it’s farther away than ever.
He’s on his way up, I’m on my way down. What awaits him are new moves, greater quickness, bigger sneakers. What awaits me is knee surgery, a limp, a walker, a wheelchair, the grave. Before all that, what awaits me is a loss to my son.
Is Beckett thinking about beating me? Even now, up there in his room among the stacks of books and basketball cards where he’s spending more and more time alone, is he plotting how to cross the finish line? I doubt it. Just as my impending loss is one of many future defeats, his coming victory will be one in a series, the length of which is sure to render this one meaningless. He’s on his way up, I’m on my way down. What awaits him are new moves, greater quickness, bigger sneakers. What awaits me is knee surgery, a limp, a walker, a wheelchair, the grave. Before all that, what awaits me is a loss to my son.
Should I quit now, before it happens? The next time he asks to play should I say, “Sorry, I’m on deadline?” Should I reply, “Son, don’t you have Algebra homework to do?” I could fake a sore leg, a hamstring pull. I could say I need new shoes first. If I stalled for long enough, he might stop asking altogether. At his graduation, his wedding, on my deathbed, I could say, “No, you never did beat me, not when I didn’t want you to.” I could do that, I guess, but who would I be fooling?
One time I heard a preacher say, “When you sign up for love, you sign up for pain.” You could fill libraries with lines from sermons I’ve forgotten, but I’ve never forgotten that one. If I recall correctly, the preacher was talking about friendship. But the words hold true for parenting as well. Painful love. There’s fatherhood for you. Flip the words around, riff on them a little. Even the reverse resonates. The beautiful ache. The necessary agony.
I’m not happy about the thought of losing to Beckett in one on one. Even if it costs me my Achilles or what’s left of my pride, I’m not going to just let him win. Mercy, I’m going to miss our games when it’s all over, which may be soon, as soon as tomorrow. My daughters are big into musical theater and ballet. Maybe it’s time for me to sign up for dance lessons or an improv class. “The art of losing,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote, “isn’t hard to master.” Indeed, you can do it all over the place.
Tonight, sitting here in the living room with Faulkner, Woolf, and Finnegan’s Wake on the shelf behind me, what I’m feeling is this: I’m here for it, here for it all, all the love and the pain, for what is life, in the end, but defeat made respectable, made halfway glorious, not through denial or even ultimately through resistance but by the kind of sober acknowledgement, if never giddy acceptance, that frees us, indeed that compels us, as the old coaching bromide goes, to leave everything out on the court
If I can’t pinpoint the game when I was Beckett and my dad was me, there is one basketball memory I can’t shake. We’re in the driveway. I’m nine, maybe ten. It’s night out. Bugs and bats slap against the big floodlight that half-illuminates the court. All around, cicadas and bullfrogs roar like mighty crowds. I launch a shot. It goes through the net and rolls a long way across my grandparents’ field.
I rush to retrieve it but somewhere in the shadows between the court and the barnyard I lose sight of the ball. I hear something in the woods. I think it’s getting closer. I retreat to the driveway, empty-handed and flushed. What my father says in response I can’t remember. What I know is that he does what’s called for. He disappears into the darkness. He reemerges a few moments later with the rock under his arm. He isn’t afraid. He wants to keep playing. “Check,” he says and passes me the ball.
Drew Bratcher is the author of Bub: Essays from Just North of Nashville. His writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Oxford American, Los Angeles Review of Books, Nowhere Magazine, Garden & Gun, Image Journal, Military History Quarterly, Washingtonian, and others.