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December 01, 2004
after the buzzer
another short bit that made its way onto the Jordan website...
He sat on the bench, watching the teams run, watching the tide turn from minute to minute, offense to defense, the conflict of effort and resistance. He had lived hundreds, probably thousands of lives here. Win or lose, each game was a new life, a new universe, a beginning and end, with a certainty of struggle and result, victory or defeat, that real life doesn't always offer to its participants.
Now he was the old man, a spectator. Now he sat and watched, and waited, for the nod that would never come, that he could never again answer if it did. That final day, that final game, had come like an inescapable first death, after years of feeling and playing through the ever-increasing stiffness and pain, seeing the move and struggling to spark his muscles to respond, as if he were mired in a nightmare, helpless. Playing fewer and fewer games on each outing, he came home, took ibuprofen, rubbed his knees, still eerily cold from the ice packs, quietly begging them to give him one more day on the court. But the day did come that he knew he couldn't go, and he sat quietly by himself all that evening, feeling the ending, the feel of finality, of a journey's end.
In the days that followed, he realized it was difficult to feel the urgency of time with no shot clock, and only the deceptively long measures of life and youth that would one day surprise him with the buzzer and the end of the game.
He held the ball in his hands, pebbled grain on tired, wrinkled skin. He pulled it close to his chest, and once again, life and game intertwined, and there for him were all the things shared in the game. A child, hugging the new ball as he falls asleep, feeling its solidness and breathing in the scent of leather on Christmas night. A young girl cradling the ball after the rebound, the static electricity of youth and enthusiasm and hope crackling and sparking all around her and through her. Even the greatest to ever play the game, falling to the floor, clutching the ball to his chest after the game- and championship-winning shot, weeping for his joy and his pain, for everything gained and lost.
The old man smiled through tears, awash in twilight's promising glow, soaking through the fabric of space and time, still alive in the game.
Posted by Rob at December 1, 2004 05:49 AM