Hoops and Hopes

(Note: still more recycled stuff)

As I was saying, I didn't have much of a drill playing ball at high noon.

Then again, if my uncle was still around that time, things might have been much different.

Got an uncle. Real Pinoy playground legend. Stood a shade under six feet, maybe smaller. Could dunk. One mad game on the side. Probably got no jumper, no matter. Real strong. Worked with weights to up his leap.

That was in the early, early 80s. 1983, I think. Pylometric training, pylometric even, well, wasn't even a word yet. Spud Webb's jumpsoles hardly had a beta version back then.

Uncle got no pencil though as he dropped out of school, ran away, drifted. Then he was just, gone. Bless his soul. One day I woke up to find my grandmother sobbing with a telegram in her hands.

As the rest of the household started getting up, a certain gloom, like a dust cloud, loomed over it. Each aunt was crying and my uncles were quiet.

Uncle, the baller was dead.

I couldn't cry. I didn't know the man well enough. We weren't too tight, at least not that I can remember. Although now I recall being told that one time we were out of town on some picnic and we had to cross a hanging bridge replete with squeaking rails andhe bore me over his shoulders.

Uncle, the baller was dead.

He had been buried in some cemetery down in Negros, killed for trying to stop two drunks from fighting. He was hacked with a bolo the type they use around the farm for breaking open coconuts and splitting bamboo stakes.

Tsk, tsk. I still remember the pictures, of his body being unearthed and the unnamed stench melding with the anguish stretched across an aunt's face.

Then again, if uncle was around, maybe not. We weren't tight. He hated my Mom for chastising him and his misdemeanors. Mom particularly hated his dropping out of school and floating around.

Still, I'm tempted to think, what if he were just around a bit longer to get into organized ball?

A sportswriter once did a sort of study slash history slash documentary on the New York blacktop playgrounds and its legends.

The curse of every playground legend is this: they won't do as well in organized ball as they do on the streets, Coney Hawkins being exhibit A. Sure he became an all star. A few times over. But the stuff of lore brought out of the NYC borough stayed there.

The product failed to fully live up to the hype.

To paraphrase the same sportswriter the lore that made the legend, was for most part, a blanket the community wrapped their blacktop warriors in, a blanket that was more like an extension of the individual members' of the community's humanity.

The heroes and legends of the playground were supposed to achieve the dreams the 'hood could not even take a blind shot at.

And as that old ax went, "You miss 100 percent of the shots you don’t take."