For recreational/competitive/but mostly health reasons I joined a rec basketball league. I made sure and joined the C/D league, which was the worst one available to ensure my being able to still run to the same side of the court everyone else was running to before I had to slow down the ol' body train and change directions.
Still, however, this is a pretty competitive league, and I'm playing with guys who played college basketball in the NCAA tournament.
Now, not to give too much away about myself here, but I am not what one would consider "college ball" material when it comes to basketball. Let's just say I played football in high school, not basketball (overweight and built to run for 5 seconds then take a 20 second break). And, as chronicled in earlier posts, jumping must have been forbidden in my ancestry because I couldn't be more tied to the Earth than a rock that has a rope around it and is tied to a brick that someone glued to a piece of metal somewhere. And an elephant is standing on the metal. And the elephant has a 80lb. dumbbell in its trunk.
So needless to say, I'm not the best person on the floor at any given time.
But that's another story I'll write more about later.
This blog's more about going to play street basketball at an entirely new place. I'm talking 100 miles+ from where you're used to playing. It's always an interesting experience. I get to the court today and there are 2 separate courts; one that had players who would be in an A league- were we giving them rankings based on the rec league I'm in, (I think Kobe was playing there today...) and the other one....would probably go somewhere into the number system, opposite the way mario's lives would if you got more than 99.
Out of the 30 or so people there, I was probably the 3rd tallest, and one of the fittest as well. Again, if you've been reading any of these posts, I don't consider myself to be at the apex of physical fitness. So I started playing, and I was dominating for a few baskets- out running, out shooting, even out jumping everyone, until I realized one thing: home court advantage. For those of you who never play basketball at parks, let me explain this to you- there was no concrete where I was. I'm pretty sure the ground was covered in butter, and whenever we would get to a point where I thought my team had won, more points were being added to the game. I think we played until 34 one time. (11 is the norm where I come from) And there was some sort of language I couldn't understand. People were talking about "slow jams", someone called a "keep two" at one point, and I think someone on the other team yelled at me to stop with the "hoofsies". Not sure about that last one though. Everyone there spoke Spanish so it was the whole "I think they're making fun of me" thing- I tried to just smile and play on.
One thing that translated though, that I love about playing basketball on a public court, is the guy that's always there who thinks he's way better than he is, and invariably chucks up a 3-point air ball, then proceeds to swear at himself and blame the wind/other guy/Zeus for the next 5 minutes.
All-in-all it was fun experience, we won "ocho" to "siete" after 20 minutes of playing (not quite sure how that math worked) and I ended up letting everyone know that I "leche y frio" and went home.
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