The risk of humiliation didn’t stop one DC transplant. 🏀
When I moved to DC in 2019, I could barely dribble a, shot 20 percent from the field, and had heard of just a single guy on the Wizards: Bradley Beal. I’d hardly even stepped onto a basketball court since graduating from junior high. But after arriving in a new city, I was short on friends, and the local outdoor courts seemed like a good place to start. I needed whatcaricatured as a “man park”—somewhere I could safely bond with other emotionally closed-off American men about a shared interest.
I scored my first invite to these nightly gatherings through a guy named Danny, whom I’d met via a mutual friend. Within minutes of our first interaction, Danny—a diehard organizer in Shaw’s active scene—asked me to play in a weeknight game at Kennedy. It was clear that his interest in my participation was due exclusively to my slightly above-average height.
My on-court debut that fall evening fell into the dorkiest of the three categories: playing for exercise. With a freshly purchased basketball in hand, I showed up well before the start of the first game, which gave me time to ease in via the unstructured pregame shoot-around. This is a strangely tense moment on a pickup-basketball court, with its own rules and rituals. Participants share a ball or two and eye one another while shooting alone.
The start time came and went without the materialization of an actual game. I soon discovered that things kick off only when enough people have arrived and, more important, the self-anointed best player on the court calls the game to order and picks teams. This on-court alpha also assesses each available ball, inspecting it the way your grandmother handles produce at the market—carefully checking feel, pressure, and bounce.
My aforementioned height and those few pregame shots from beyond the arc had temporarily concealed my general inability to dribble, and unfortunately Kenny decided to select me first for his team. To be clear, I’m typically a fourth or fifth pick at best. So once play began, things went downhill fast: After half an hour, I committed a humiliating travel on game point, essentially handing my team—Kenny’s team—the loss. Kenny dismissed me with a withering look of disgust.
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