What is good?

Second real basketball game of the season, not counting a scrimmage or two, and the final game before our first tournament. It was sweating hot in the gym and we sat closely packed on the bleachers. Why? It was a 6^th grade match-up, in Nowhere, Oklahoma, during football season, for heaven’s sakes. But word had gotten around. I even got phone calls from the county seat this week. Was this tightly knit, strangely prescient group of budding adolescents really good enough to beat any high school team in the county?

As I learned tonight, that is really not the question.

My kid’s 89 year-old great grandmother sat just behind the bench, pounding on my father’s arm when Annie started, controlled both the beginning and half time tip-offs, then gave this one game everything she had at this one moment to put up ten solid points out of the 28 made and jerk down 15 precise rebounds. Annie’s other great-grandparents, much younger at 80 and 83, sat beside Granny and my own parents, watching this child practice physical control beyond her years.

My team and I sat behind the family, nudging for space amongst every other kid’s family. My point guard, my low post, my wing and myself were all jammed in a careful row. Ann is named after the point guard and the low post. Just behind us sat the second generation…girls who are as much as ten years younger, whose children just happen to coincide and who have their own claim to whatever it means to be good. We were all there to see magic and the team knew it. I notice that the young woman coach, filled with big dreams, kept glancing up at us.

The coach is not from here. And that gives her an objectivity I wish I had. But she works in that gym, every day. There is no way she could not know that the football jersey number 33 is not worn anymore because the school retired it when my father graduated from high school. There is no way that coach failed to look at the walls of glass-enclosed trophy cases that she passes by every day where I am showcased as the county’s most valuable player in ‘79. That coach knows that the point guard sitting to my right was all-state runner up in 1980 and that the low post sitting on my left was all state two years in a row and the best damned athlete our town ever produced. As for the row behind me and my team, Annie’s coach knows that the mothers of two of her other starters played together in 1989, when they lost the state tourney by two points but were both rewarded with places on the Parade All-American Team. Nearby sat the players’ teachers….two of them from the state championship team of 1968. Our coach knows, she has to. Pressure or a very understandable standard? LOL.

28-28 and the final buzzer whizzed. We were playing what is historically the best team in the county, the same team that kicked my ass in the county tournament in 1979, sending me to the hospital with a concussion and a skull fracture that robbed me of two months of my senior season. Our coach may spend an hour plus with this team every day, training and instructing, but the same team convenes at my house every night and wants to talk about what basketball is REALLY LIKE. They were prepared in the best way I could manage in my small way when they took the court tonight, knowing that in ’79 my point guard and low post trapped a girl and snapped her collar bone during the county championship game with this team, before I got my bell rung and had to take a seat.

Sport is rough and dangerous and exhilarating and bloody. And I am not talking about boys. Annie is not the only star on our team. There are three of them, all legacies, all bursting with heart and strength beyond their years. Annie, Janie and Katie. That’s what is good.

They played with everything they had. The three of them were more than they were yesterday and less than they will be tomorrow. Their math scores are decent, their reading scores are outstanding and their game is uncanny.

Two overtimes of pounding, sharp-edged basketball. The crowd was on its feet. Ann scored once, menaced many times and got that look on her face that only my father and I understand.

I’ve never played a game that physical. Annie came away hurt. She is on the couch with an ankle swelled up twice its size. Her lip is busted and the blood from the strawberry on her knee is just now slowing to a trickle. Katie came away pretty much unscathed. Janie, who fouled out, has a lump on her head.

They lost, 30-28 in double OT. All the teams in our stands mobbed them. They are carrying us on….

There will be many more wins and a few losses. The definition of “good” escapes me. The local newspaper tries to define it in articles my mother dutifully clips for the scrapbook. Maybe good is tired, happy, being a winner despite losing and knowing that you have, at 12, just joined the ranks of those who came before you….