Credentializing the author or “being the Harvard point guard before it was cool”
I spent an earlier chapter of my life not as someone who played basketball, but as someone whose entire identity was structured and defined by being a basketball player. The level of devotion had a nearly religious feel — or perhaps cultish is the right word given my induction at a young age and the existence of a core cohort of gifted young boys with whom I shared the devotion, the set of rites and practices perpetually repeated, and the many pilgrimages that intensified the devotion.In seventh and eighth grades, the reason for baggy jeans was so you could wear your basketball gear underneath. You never knew, after all, when a game was going to break out. By the time we were 11, we had played an international tournament 1,000 miles from home; by 13 most of us played basketball year round and exclusively; by 15 entire families moved homes so that many of us could play together in high school. Books — or clinical case studies — are yet to be written on why our parents indulged us.