Basketball with Obama

Basketball this time round
My playground skip with Barack
By Terrance Gavan
My very early years I spent playing hoops on the hardscrabble cement courts in Ottawa’s Sandy Hill, a hoops paradise surrounded by a phalanx of four-storey, red brick walk-ups. Living on Goulbourn Crescent, that’s what you did all summer. Watch the older ‘legends’ hearken Oscar Robertson, Jerry West and Bill Russell, whiling away the springs and summers, spinning, juking and jiving on the haggard courts. And when they left, the young kids, young starry-eyed plunkers like me, got to play, shoot around and otherwise drill tirelessly on 15-foot hanging jumper till dusk drooped drearily into another July day.
On those Sandy Hill courts in the Goulbourn Project, I learned to dribble, to hawk, and I learned the only three plays in basketball. Oh, you will look to those NBA playbooks and call me stupid. You will allude to those well-stretched Xs and insipid Os drawn so lovingly on those newfangled dry erase court replicas and you will tell me there are 10,000 plays in the naked hardwood city.
You would be wrong. There are two commandments, not ten, and there are three plays in Dr. Naismith’s beautifully constructed game. From two absolutes dribble the rest of those 10 amendments to the Golden Rules: Love thy neighbor as thyself; and do unto others as you would have them. And in basketball, the pretty picket fence, Mississippi Quicksand trap, The Kansas Shuffle, the rolling triangle, the 3-2, the 2-3, the 1-3-1 and the transcendentally and multi-layered philosophies pattered in Pat Riley or Phil Jackson playbooks, with the squiggles, droops and gee-gaws, all flow flawlessly, flimsily from the triune Holy Grail of Hoops Law. Three plays. Only three.
Give and go, pick and roll, back door. That’s it folks. Basketball redux. Three and only three. From these three the house of cards is built.
I learned that in Sandy Hill. When I first picked up a ball. When I played my first playground game of three on three. Three on three is the game. I learned that when I was six.
On the Goulbourn Project courts. The macadam was cracked and worn and the lines were wobbled and bleached by a decade of summer sun, burnished to a beige from intended white.
I learned to play there with some guys who later went on to play at Lisgar Collegiate, Ottawa’s perennial basketball power way back in the 60s and 70s. I learned from Paul Armstrong, the Stoqua brothers and from the Love brothers that there are but those three plays, and the rest trickles from there.
I moved away from Sandy Hill in the mid-sixties I moved to Nepean, just a few blocks down from the high school I would attend. St Pius X Preparatory Seminary was its mildly intimidating moniker back when I first attended in 1968. We were an all-boys school back then and in my first year in grade nine I think we had 422 students. A lot of priests lived at the school. We also had boarders, students who lived there five or seven days a week.
My uncle Joe Gavan was the treasurer of the school and another uncle, the irrepressible Rev Donald Francis Gavan was the principal. (I won’t even get into my aunts’ contribution to the mix. Suffice to say that the Gavan family imprimatur on Pius X was indelible and lasting.) I spent most of my waking hours in the old gym. Uncle Joe had a white house on the edge of campus, and halfway through my freshman year, the old gym became my second home. Uncle Joe would come roaring in, seeing the lights on at 10:30 pm, and he had one of those unpredictable Irish tempers. He would peruse the gym and if he saw me, he would frown and then smile. “Make sure you turn the lights out when you leave … before midnight.” Uncle Joe was unpredictable, but I was a favorite. If I didn’t happen to be there, the game would be shut down and uncle Joe would oversee the closure. We played basketball every night from 7 to 10 pm and there were some nights I remember going to midnight. It’s why Pius remained a basketball power back in the 60s and 70s. Unfettered access to the Grail. Two cross-court games going all night long. Pick and roll, back door, give and go. And the credo … no blood no foul.
On the dais of the pickup game, I learned early, that the measure of a man – or a boy – could be ascertained by how he handles the pressure of the game. The knocks, the jarring pick, the knee, the elbow and the quick slap on dribble drive. I learned to mediate mettle on the floor, to get a sense of the measure of a man, in the way he would handle the tempo of the game.
Last summer, I discovered a news piece written by Jodi Kantor of the New York Times. “Sports has been used, correctly or incorrectly, as a personality decoder for presidents and presidential aspirants. So, armchair psychologists and fans of athletic metaphors, take note: Barack Obama is a wily player of pickup basketball, the version of the game with unspoken rules, no referee and lots of elbows. He has been playing since adolescence, on cracked-asphalt playgrounds and at exclusive health clubs, developing a quick offensive style, a left-handed jump shot and relationships that have extended into the political arena.”
That churned some wheels. I wanted to do a piece on Barack, but I knew the interview would be a tough nut to crack.
So instead of the interview request I went with the gyp and flip, dipsy doodle dive.
I wrote an email to the candidate last May and asked him for a game. I told the good Senator that I grew up playing mostly pickup ball, and I challenged him to some one-on-one. I told him I was a sportswriter and I said that if I won, he would promise me an interview in January of 2009, just after the inauguration. (I’m an optimist, what can I say – and I also saw the tide risin’) And, I added, that if I came up on the plus side, I would also get to participate in the first full-fledged game of three-on-three at the newly installed White House basketball court. I told him in the email that building the courts in the White House should be his first redecorating move.
I sent the email under the sportswriter’s motto of last resort. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”
I got a phone call the next day. “Hold for Senator Obama,” said the young male voice on the other end.
“Sure,” I said. I hadn’t told anyone of my hasty decision to write an ill-advised email to Obama, so I figured it was legit.
“Okay, Gav, can I call you Gav,” said the unmistakable voice of the Illinois Senator.
“Of course Senator, if I can call you O?” I replied. I remembered that I had signed the email with my simple “cheers, gav” endline.
We set up a game of one-on-one for the following week, at a high school gym in South Bend, Indiana.
He had a busy day planned. We decided on a quick game to five. Two rather large men in suits hovered close by. We played playground. He gave me first ball. He’s a lefty and I hate playin’ southpaws. My first move was a juke left, roll right, hammer through to the basket, quick flip and reverse finger roll and I’m up.
Scorer keeps ball and I looked in his eyes as he checked ball and fired it back to me. And I saw all I needed to see in those eyes. “Game on, gav … game on.”
On my next drive the good Senator popped a shoulder, placed me on my butt and picked me up. “My bad … your ball.”
I shook my head and flipped him the ball. “Playground rules Senator, no blood no foul.”
He scored the next five. I never saw the ball again. He trash-talked me at 4-1 and then went left to the twine with a short pull-up.
We shook hands. The eyes were smiling once again, the steel was gone.
“You really think I should build a court in the White House?”
“Senator, we’ve had eight years of that baseball bumpkin’s administration, I really think the nation could use a change,” I laughed.
I got a call yesterday.
“Gav?” said the voice on the other end.
“Yes Senator?” I replied.
“The White House court’s on the way, we’ll see you for that game of three-on-three sometime early February.”
“But I lost,” I said. “The deal hinged on me winning.”
“Call it a compromise,” laughed the President elect.
“Okay,” I said. “But, I get Larry Bird and Magic Johnson … think you can pull those strings Mr. President?”
“Look Gav, we just popped Hillary as Secretary of State … after that … Bird and Magic? Piece of cake.”
And for anyone who’s worried about the state of the nation. Or the fact that he may be tested. This good young man. Tested by those forces who may question his resolve.
Rest assured. This man comes from compassion, nurture and compromise, but he’s imbued with that inherent steely reserve. Stuff we saw in Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
How do I know? I saw it in the eyes … on the hardwood.
Intrinsic goodness backed by hard edge. Three plays. Basketball redux. And the measure of the man