The 94 Feet That Conquers "Can't"
The 94 Feet That
Conquers “Can’t”
By Blake Richard
If there is no writing about sports, let there
be writing about love. If there is no writing about love, let there be no
writing at all. If there is no writing at all, let the world delete to cereal dust
and disappear into a bowl of oblivion. Perhaps no one really knows where love comes
from, but you do not have to know where it tips off to know it is the hardwood
of anything on this planet; something to get a steady footing on, to care for,
to believe in, to write about. It is found in all molecules of being, ounces of
ocean, sidelines of songs, and it is certainly within every one of us—sports
enthusiast or not. I for one have fallen so deeply in love with basketball that
an essay is not really about a game at all.
In high school, just like everyone else, I was
told a college essay, along with those suffocating standardized tests, would be
some of the most important things to get me to where I wanted to go. They were
going to propel me across that stage with a diploma in my hand, ready to take
on anything because I was now educated enough to get a job. Maybe most
importantly, a diploma was the key to the starting lineup of that job. But how
did they know where I wanted to be or what job I wanted to have? Hesitant to
admit I did not even really know where or what that was, it was often confusing
to feel like I should have figured that out; I should have a plan because goals
are important in life, and the itinerary is going to guide me to success and
happiness. I liked this and that, had a passion for something or another,
thought about taking a career path or two, but truly loved only one thing.
Whether of my own free thrown volition or a
compiling of quotes from those who educated me, I came to believe that the
college essay gives paper-pushing admissions staff a brief synopsis of “this is
who I am,” and more importantly, “this is why you should accept me.” It is a
sort of theatrical typing of do or die words that seemed like they would author
the rest of my existence. Nearly every time a high school teacher talked about
these life changing words I so desperately had to write, I vividly pictured a
scene like young Ralphie’s daydream in A Christmas Story. In this fantasy,
his feather-capped teacher with earrings slung to her shoulder is grading
papers for each one of his peers yelling “Margins! Margins! Margins!” before digging
up the one she will accept as worthy (Ralphie’s of course), holding it against
her heart and sobbing an almost inaudible “the theme I’ve been waiting for all
my life!” In my own version of Ralphie’s reverie, she is not grading—she is
dividing a young student’s life into piles of accepted or rejected. One stack was
probably a bit heftier than the other; the one I was told I was going to find
myself at the bottom of if I wrote my essay on a theme I have been playing
for all my life.
We all sat at our desks writing our hook, or
attention getter, to hand to the teacher for approval to start the rest of our
essay. The hook was the first sentence of the paper, and it better be good
because it had to show Ms. Admissions that my essay was at least above average
enough to continue reading. Her attention had to get got with those do or die
words. After the first foot, she had to feel like the next 93 were just as good
or better. I was usually a decent follower of directions, but I must have been
having a daydream of my own when my teacher told us we could not write about
sports—which was one of those somethings I was pretty passionate about. Surely
it was easy to convince myself because, by golly, I was going to get someone’s
attention with a sentence on the amazing capacity of a game. Their focus was
going to not only be hooked on sports, but they were going to be at the edge of
their seat reeling in the game of basketball. Of course, this act of rebellion
or lack of listening backfired when my teacher called my name and sent my slip
of paper hustling back to me and said—in front of the whole class—“you can’t
write about sports.” How embarrassing it was to consider the creation of well-thought-out
words that were not even worth the bat of an eye or the shooting stroke of my
pencil. At the time, I accepted it as true and moved on to a carelessly crafted
opening statement that set the tone for a flagrantly foul essay. It only breaks
my heart now that it took four years of college basketball—one of the purest
forms of love I have known—to ask myself “why not?” It well may be that you
really cannot write about sports, but it is also entirely possible that is the
dumbest thing I have ever bought into.
I could recognize a storyline about basketball
may cause headaches of mundaneness for those that might interpret hundreds of essays.
Whoever was going to read my inspiring words may not be as embedded in
basketball as I was, I understood that concept. They might not even know that a
basketball court is 94 feet long, so at least they would maybe learn something
new! However, would they believe me if I told them there was something even
more ordinary than sports? Sentences on sports were challenging enough, but
this was a much bigger obstacle—to get somebody to believe in something else
and say “hey, maybe this kid has a point.” This ordinary something is a part of
everyone’s story, not just the abbreviated version whose final draft appears
before the eyes of any admissions personnel. Somehow, it is common enough that
each and every person on Earth finds themselves all wrapped up in it (yet we
still write about it). Those who hopelessly try to box it out get lost between
the baselines as seconds tick down on the clock we all wind (and we painfully write
about that too). It, like sports, is extraordinarily extra ordinary simply because
it is the crux of commonality. As dull as the pencil everyone wrote their essay
with, it is layup line lame enough to maybe even hear a coach spew words that
should not be repeated at the dinner table. So painstakingly mundane, typically
three-man woven, downright drab, and silently forgotten even the keenest of
attention spans can be bored of it, yet it would hardly ever be placed at the
bottom of a rejected stack. Love is a stack of ultimate acceptance, and is love—a
puzzle of essays more common and ordinary than basketball—not something worth
writing about? Good writers ought to know it is up to them to transform the jump
shot everyone sees into a national-championship-winning-buzzer-beater-former-players-sue-the-NCAA-over
type of jumper. Thankfully, the thing about love is, like sports, it is
ordinary enough to be relatable, yet extraordinary enough to be unique. “Put
that on a plaque and hang it at your next job.”
Unsurprisingly, I cannot say that my actual
college essay was one of those talented skillsets to draft number one overall.
There is a good chance it was one of those last four into the big dance. It was
written with a hampered heart shot down in flames to torch a court of conformity,
staked to the claims of killed creativity and words going nowhere except out of
bounds. My best shot at a decent essay was, most definitely, without a doubt,
an airball. I was not all that proud of it, and it certainly was not written on
the premise of the only thing worth writing about: love. If you are not
writing out of love, part ways with your paralyzed pen and go win a goldfish at
the carnival. I have been there and done that, so let this jump ball reset the
shot clock on those carelessly crafted words that came from somewhere other
than the heart.
Who I am today simply wouldn’t be
without the game of basketball. If I did not love, and love with every ounce of
that ocean (or maybe even lake), I would have convinced myself a long time ago
that life was truly not worth living. So, I myself buried everything at the
bottom of the stack hoping it would vanish in the varnish. Suicides conditioned
up and down and back and forth, regretfully touching fine lines but thankfully never
crossing them. Saying I thought about quitting the ultimate game is no exaggeration
of the “so help me God” truth. But a love of basketball kept the light at the
end of the tunnel just bright enough to continue to discover tomorrows and find
a time when everything felt like it was going to be okay. Is anyone really after
something more than that?
For
how common it is, love warrants us to do some wildly worthwhile stuff. It
compels us to compromise, strengthens us to sacrifice, resows trust when it
uselessly unravels, encourages us to establish excitement for someone else, and
wields us to withhold our woefulness and do whatever it takes. If that is not at
least some of love, I may never find out what is. Maybe 23 years is still just
too young, too inexperienced, and too uneducated. After all, I have heard 23 is
part of a lost generation hopelessly trying to navigate with an atlas and use a
rotary phone, though I cannot imagine a scenario where the latter will ever be
used. True love might be the only thing that has dialed up the change anyone
wants to see in the world, and this may not sound so crazy anymore, but my own
little balled up world has been altered many times by the amazing play calling
of love. Up in the press box, our neurons signal the crinkly complicated and dreadfully
difficult choices we should execute.
Out of an act of picking love, I would roll
out of bed before the sun even thought to and lead a squadron of my high
school’s finest ballers through laborious speed ladders and dribbling drills
intended to make us fail to nothing but a fleck of something. It was a song on
repeat for hours at a time, knowing anyone could love the game as much as us. We
were all there because of love—or at least a sliver of likeness—for a game no
one should bother blabbing by way of ballpoint about. Old school or new, everyone
has a story of love, and much of mine was written on that high school hardwood,
handled by those that healed me simply by showing up. Of the millions out
there, I could not name any other incentive, conjure an image of
a different way of life, or default to the likeness of missing one of
those mornings. Love appears in basketball, and basketball reveals a love that
is never to be cheaply won.
Love
was the only reason I saw moms and dads in high school hallways supporting
their daughter and her love. A life changing chain of halfcourt heaves holding
the door open for, yep, you guessed it. The thought of quitting, drizzled with
a dash of giving up and tumultuously throwing in the towel dissolved with the
same love that made me believe the most important thing in my life was a nearly
2,000-mile spontaneous voyage to a gymnasium on the gouging shores of Gitche
Gumee where I endured a myriad of gauntlets built to discourage and break me. Some
even did, but they were fragments reassembled in that very gym.
Based
on love, whole families have rallied to travel, entire cities have erupted over
bleachers, and student-athletes who thought their career was over have crutched
beneath the basket and true-love-kissed one more bank off the glass in front of
those families and cities. And how unimaginable is this: basketball has
unified, not divided, members of a team who wanted nothing more than to work
towards a common goal and to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Technical
tempers often had to take a heat check, but we always found a way to bounce a
pass back to unity. That is what love does. That is what basketball does. And I
love it. I miss those behaviors so pure we ask ourselves what the problem is
rather than who is to blame. Hate points the rotary phone finger, but love extends
the atlas-grasping hand.
I
held out that very hand to accept the item I was expected to care enough about to
hang on the wall of a somewhere office, but I could not even point my finger to
tell you—about one year removed from college—where that piece of paper is.
Maybe it got lost in the rush of moving across the country to a job it gave me
experience for, or maybe it is covered in dust on my childhood bookshelf to educate
only the books that sandwich it. I know it was on display to celebrate my
graduation, but after that it might as well be in the nosebleeds. My wall is
instead covered by a jersey much more valuable than an inflated degree. It is,
of course, still something to be proud of and maybe even resurrect, but is
nowhere near the heartfulness I feel when I recall sitting in a pewter gray
folding chair sensing love leak out of my eyes and fall down my cheeks after
the final buzzer blasted. If anything, that moment is where I was
motivated and optimistic enough to take on the world, a prompt completely
exempt from the original drowning dialect.
A slam dunk of that kind of love can pour out
enough courage to advise anyone who thinks basketball, or any sport, cannot be
written about to get stuffed by the infinite entourage of what they call
writer’s block. Writer’s block…a dreaded blowout scoreboard when a writer feels
like they cannot find their way with words. Usually it is described as
temporary, though it may seem like it flirts with forever even more regularly. The
people with pens create it only from within, and it was a block I did not even
have the freedom to rebound when it was sent into the seventh row by a “can’t”
someone else should claim. So let nylon narrate words that deserve to be written,
because my sporting chance at life is found, and quite nearly always has been,
between the 94 feet that conquers “can’t.”
