My Dad had an achievement filled life, no doubt. A senior partner at a major law firm, a Harvard Law grad, well respected and loved by all his co workers, he was a winner in every superficial way possible. And then there was the basketball.
Dad was a college basketball star. And he was a star not just on any team, but on a UCLA championship team. Under legendary coach John Wooden. Dad's team won three championships with him as guard. He played with the likes of Kareem, Mike Warren and Lucius Allen. Any college basketball fan (and they are legion) knows who my father is and what he did on that team. I never had a PE teacher who didn't recognize my last name, ask if he was my father, and then interrogate me on my sports prowess. I remember one teacher, at a 7th grade parents' night, was reduced to a stammering wreak upon being introduced to my Dad (ok, yes: that was an extreme reaction).
Yet, his basketball years were barely mentioned when I was growing up. I had been there, as a baby, for some of them; my mother first pregnant and then a new mom sitting on the sidelines. I knew he had been drafted to the pros, but left training camp after a short while and went off to law school at Harvard instead. He told my mother that, the moment he got to pro training camp, he knew he wasn't going to be a star. If he couldn't be a star, there was no point in going. I can understand that; the shock of being downgraded in an instant from big college star to slightly too short bench sitter was probably an eye opener. My Dad was a competitor, but he knew when to throw in the towel.
The way his basketball and sports background manifested around the house was in intense sports watching. He would follow a basketball game with such intensity, it's a wonder he didn't have a stroke. Every weekend when he wasn't working was pretty much devoted to sports. He'd make himself some chili or a tuna melt, and settle in to watch a marathon of events. My mother was convinced he'd watch anything; she once found him studying curling, an obscure far northern sport played on ice with big weights and brooms. She thought it was funny, but in a sad way.
Needless to say, my sister and I were not really encouraged to watch with him. He was so intense that, if you asked him something, it might take him three minutes to respond. He didn't have patience when explaining games and strategies; apparently we were supposed to learn such things through familial osmosis. And there was no way to play any sort of game or sport with him. "You throw like a girl," he jeered at me once. Well, I was a girl. And thank god for that, because being a boy would have been really difficult.
It took me years to get over thinking I was bad at sports. Gawky and half blind, I was terrible at racquet sports and anything else involving eye/hand coordination. I could run well, though, and was pretty strong for a skinny girl. My skiing wasn't bad. Later in my life, I became a gym rat, then a Pilates instructor, and now an amateur aerialist. I think the aerial trapeze actually freaked my Dad out a bit, because it was something he honestly couldn't imagine himself doing in any way.
In the last 20 years of his life, my father couldn't play basketball or tennis anymore, because his knees were shot. He ended up becoming a yoga enthusiast, investing in a popular yoga studio in Santa Monica and attending class often. But he was, ironically, competitive about yoga. I was wise enough at this point to stay away from yoga. It was too slow paced for me and I didn't like the scene. But that didn't keep him from asking me if I could get into this or that yoga pose. Of course I could, because I was young and female. The question was, why was he trying to compete with his daughter who didn't even practice yoga? He'd already shown himself to be more competitive, more successful, and more accomplished than his children, but even I knew that age, when it came to physical prowess, mattered.
When I was young, we never saw any of the guys Dad played basketball with at UCLA, but later on once he remarried they appeared on the scene. Dad would host team reunions up at his house. He always had a relationship with "Coach," who was a formidable guy I met several times over the years (the first time I met Wooden, at age 29, he rattled off my Dad's stats to me as if he was still coaching that team). In fact, I didn't speak much with any of the team members until Dad got sick, and then they visited him at home and in the hospital. They were, and are, really lovely guys. The consensus, always, was what a good sport and team player he always was, no matter what ego nonsense was going on with the other players. It was reminiscent of the same things my Dad's co-workers said about him.
Again, it's hard to reconcile the selfless team player with the ultra competitive Dad who used to cheat on board games just so he could win (he ran the bank and stole money in Monopoly, and hung ships over the edge of the board in Battleship with unsinkable results; I actually find that pretty funny). Just a couple years ago he got in a fight with my daughter, then nine, while playing handball. Not liking her take on the rules of the court, he apparently threw the ball into a wall of trashcans and then stormed into the house. My daughter, not intimidated in the slightest, followed him in and, in front of the entire family, asked "Why did you do that?" My Dad had no answer. "Welcome to my childhood," I told my appalled husband.
I only got a real insight into the impact of his basketball years once. Dad told me a story of how, although Wooden hated giving any player the spotlight, in one game he let each of the starting players go onto the court with the second stringers. That way, each star knew all the cheering was just for him. Dad described just how heady the feeling was of having thousands of people cheering for him. It was intoxicating, seductive, wonderful. And it never happened again, at least not on that level. Sometimes I think his raging at televised sports was the frustration of a supposed team player who only got the drug like fix of total adulation once, before having it yanked away.
In the end, I think, the basketball stardom was just one more thing that separated him from his family. It was something none of us could understand. It wasn't something he wanted to explain, and maybe he couldn't really articulate it anyway. But when I think back, to all those weekends of him watching sports and getting angry, it just seems so lonely. It was just him and the game and nothing else at all.
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