Tête-à-Tête-Tête

I spent a couple of hours Saturday morning in an elementary school gymnasium watching 10 year old kids play basketball.

I always get a big kick out of that kind of thing and since my children are both grown I do very little of it anymore.

I was there to watch my nephew. My brother is one of the coaches and the kids are pretty good. They have lost but one game and I have not taken time to watch them play so Saturday worked out to be a good day to do it. Plus, my niece was having her 13th birthday party afterward so two birds with one stone.

After I arrived at the gymnasium with my mother and my wife we paid our dollar and took our seat. Before the game started it was obvious that the opposing team was not going to offer up much competition. My nephew’s team consisted of about 15 players with a good ethnic mix while the opposition had a total of 6 players, all Hispanic. It was also crystal clear that for whatever reason one team had a huge following and plenty of “parental involvement” while the other guys were pretty much on their own. In fact the other team only had four members until about one minute before the tip off. This thing just had blow out written all over it.

The game starts and as I had already anticipated it was a bloodbath. To make matters worse the underdogs could not get anything to fall for them. Even their good shots rimmed out and who knows why shit like that happens? I was pulling for them to do well but I had made peace with the fact that they were going to get destroyed long before the start of the game.

My wife and my mother just could not seem to get over the fact that these guys were getting so mercilessly routed. Then one of them noticed that one of the kids on the losing side was wearing shoes that were obviously too small for him. And then they noticed that another was wearing shoes that were meant for girls. Suddenly all of the great cosmic injustices that exist everywhere in the world were on display for all to see in an elementary school gymnasium. Not only did those kids not have any basketball talent. They also had no basketball shoes and no hope at all of keeping the game close.

To make matters even worse, after the ”game” the parents of the kids who had just won by 50 points brought in individually wrapped goody baskets for each player of the victorious team. So now the losers have to walk off the court in shoes too small and in shoes meant for girls. They also had to walk by a team that not only had just pasted their ass to the wall but that was now munching on chips and drinking soda.

None of this bothered me very much because I was just there to watch 10 year old kids play basketball. But my wife and my mother cornered my brother after the game and let him know about their feelings on the matter.

I knew that he had played his “B” team for almost the entire game. He had done everything he could do as a coach to keep the score down. Even the officials were doing all they could to keep the score down and nobody in the stands complained.  He explained to my wife and his mother that the snacks after the game was a team tradition and that they do it and have always done it win or lose. It was not an attempt to make the losers feel even worse.

After listening to their egalitarian concerns for longer than he wanted to he looked at me, rolled his eyes and said, “Buck, those same guys beat the shit out of us during soccer season!”

That was good enough for me.