City Champs!

So I just so happened to sit on a steel chair set up directly beneath the basket on the north end of the court last week at church (we're worshipping in a school gym temporarily), and I couldn't help thinking that that rim looked twenty feet off the earth--waaay up there.

I hadn't really looked at a basketball rim from beneath it for a long, long time, and it just seemed impossible that one night at a gym in Orange City, Iowa, during warm up layups, on the court of our rivals who we all knew would beat us, I was somehow hyped enough to get up and over that rim and actually stuff the basketball. (I doubt such an event myself, but don't smudge a dream.)

There I sat beneath the bucket, thick black bands up around my left calf to keep a brace in place beneath my left foot, a limb which no longer appears to cooperate when my body asks it to. I don't walk well, not well at all, although the brace keeps  my limp from being advertised. It doesn't help that I couldn't really imagine myself shooting a basketball or rebounding or moving downcourt on a fast break--no matter, that rim seemed impossible.

I spent years playing ball, stopped slo-pitch when I was almost sixty, even though at that age I likely slammed more big fat pitches out of the park than any of my teammates. It just was time. 

Two days ago, I walked into the indoor athletic field at Northwestern, on my way to a workout designed for this new condition of mine, and watched as a softball coach hit grounders to a couple of infielders. The sound of the bat on the ball sounds nothing at all like it did years ago, but I stopped, stood and watched, wishing, just wishing that the coach would see the old bald guy with the brace and offer me the bat. I'd have given anything for fifteen minutes hitting grounders.

It would be impossible for me to tally the hours I spent on a basketball court. Add in a baseball diamond, and we're talking about most of my life. 

All of that and more, and then a sweet ex-student sends me the picture up top from my teaching days in Wisconsin. That's me in the sweaty Calvin College shirt--and no, I didn't go there. I remember the team that won the Monroe (WI) City Basketball League Championship that year, 1971, I think. We were a tough bunch, that square man in the middle knew how to muscle the ball into the basket. He wasn't quick, wasn't graceful, but get the ball into him in the pain and he bulled in to score.

For a long time I had a little individual trophy--we must have each got one. I think it's gone now, tossed finally in one of our attempts to slim down, and I remember the picture too well. It was in the Monroe Times, a daily, and I loved it being there, not necessarily because I was so proud of our win but because--I can hardly believe I'm admitting this--because I hoped that some Calvin grad would see it, someone of the tribe I knew as my people would recognize the peculiar name of the college--and call me, just someone who knew the name Kuyper.

I love remembering those two years in Wisconsin, loved it because I loved my students, one of whom sent me that picture when she saw it in a display at a birthday party for the guy who'd get ball in the paint and somehow muscle it in. This party was, of course, at a bar--it's Wisconsin after all. A recent college graduate, someone who left the fold angrily in fact, I had a lot to learn.

When I remember back to that time today, I remember the students--it's hard for me to have to admit that they're all, long ago retired at this time, just as balding and paunchy as their four-years older teacher. But I also remember the loneliness, stark and painful loneliness that I felt, something of an alien.

It's painful even remembering that, but honestly what I remember about that picture just now sent to me from one of those students from long ago, is wondering if maybe some Calvin grad in Green County, Iowa, would look at it and pull out a phone book. 

It's not that I had no friends. Besides, kids really adored me--they still write. But what I remember, what I can't quite forget, is loneliness. Sometimes things looked, even back then, as if they were somehow far out of reach.