Give and Go
by Dave Fromm
I remember my dad’s Mazda, canvas roof ratcheted down against the January snow, with our sneakers in the trunk and a ball in the back seat. He started bringing me to his pickup games when I was eight, maybe, and I’d shoot along the side hoops when the action was at the other end, racing out to the foul line and beyond for a quick heave, hoping I could corral the inevitable miss before the older guys came back down court. Sometimes the ball would elude me and bounce out into the middle of the game and sometimes some of the more fired-up guys would kick it off to the stage.
My dad was the best player around. He wasn’t the biggest or the strongest or the fastest, but he played the game on a sort of higher wavelength than the other guys, a wavelength where he could see people moving before they moved, freeze them before they knew they were frozen. His hands were so quick. He had the featheriest jump shot, the kind of jump shot you develop shooting by yourself for hours on outdoor courts with chain nets that sound like cash registers when the ball swishes through. Turnaround jumpers from the top of the key, falling away. Passes behind an opponent’s ear, through an opponent’s legs. My dad had played in college for a decent Loyola team coached by an old school guy named Nap Doherty who once told my dad to deck a showboating opponent (my dad didn’t), and before that on the rough pickup courts of Catonsville, on Baltimore’s west side, where he’d guarded Si Green and Gus Johnson, whose name became a verb for dunking so hard you broke the backboard, and then in graduate school in Washington D.C., once holding his own against the great Sam Jones. He was always playing somewhere.
When I was about twelve I got into the pick-up games on a courtesy waiver. We played in Stockbridge at the Plain School with Ray Gun and Sanderson the Rare Book Dealer and a silent, hulking beast named Big Dick Chandler. Sometimes groups of them would gather after the Monday night run to watch Big East games and eat chili and drink homemade cider and smoke pot in the bathroom. My dad was a white-collar guy and skipped the pot. We played with Crockett McGarrity, an elm of a man who spoke his own language and took jumpers like a shot putter and was a self-employed furniture mover whose business card said “Camel Moving – Men Who Love Their Work” and who once called my house and said “Grab your zopper and let’s abscond to the planetarium” and then hung up and I understood him to mean that my dad and I were to meet him on the outdoor courts in East Lee, and who lived in his moving truck half the year and looked like a Viking shaman and got chronic Lyme disease and who once brought his dog into the lobby of the Marriott Marquis in downtown Manhattan and got them to let the dog stay in his room. We played with Danny Steinberg, who looked like Charles Manson’s kinder younger brother and who one August night in the Eighties said it was so unseasonably cold out he saw geese flying north and who was a master of the trick shot and wore tread-less sneakers on purpose so that he could slide his feet around and claim he wasn’t traveling and who later traveled to Myanmar for months at a time doing who knows what and who, one night after we’d known him for two decades or so, removed a rubber band from the scruff under his chin and unrolled two feet of never-before-seen beard. Danny, Crockett and my dad once went to a three-on-three tournament in Manhattan and Danny spent the night before the tournament walking the streets of TriBeCa because they were sharing one hotel room with Crockett and his dog and my dad snored and Danny was literally phobic about snoring but they hadn’t discussed it beforehand. They went back to that tournament the next year with an aristocratic Scandinavian guy named Sam, a tall guy who looked like a private school dean but was in fact a wood-worker, and when my dad and Sam were driving home to the Berkshires after the weekend Sam pointed to a field in Egremont and said “This might change the way you think of me but that’s where I saw the flying saucer.” One night, when the game got physical, Crockett threw an elbow and shouted, “I’m putting a firecracker in your underwear!” at pretty much the whole gym. Another night my dad drove past Big Dick Chandler twice and on the third time Big Dick pushed my dad into the stage under the basket, and I think my dad threatened to knock him out, which was sort of like an antelope threatening to knock out a rhino, and Big Dick just grunted at him and a few years later my dad saw Big Dick at the Five Chairs restaurant on the Pittsfield-Lenox Road and in a gesture of pick-up rapprochement asked him what was good at the Five Chairs and Big Dick described every single item on the Five Chairs menu in detail before recommending the Dinty Moore Beef Stew, uttering in that one report more words than he’d said in all the years we’d known him.
We played in Lee at the middle school and then at the high school and, in the summer, at the court outside the pizza place next door to the Unsworths’ house across from the church, with the great Pete Cinella and Teddy Collins and the tall Unsworth boys Tom and Chris, who were both called Uns, where the hoops were slightly lopsided and where my dad when he was still in his forties would engage Pete Cinella in mid-game shot-making duels. We played with Danny Kelly, an affable house-painter with a self-destructive streak, who had the flattest jump shot ever and who would just throw the ball at certain spots on the soft backboard and it would die there and fall in, and with Bob Denley, who was always referred to by his full name, and who would throw so many fakes they began to look like seizures. Sometimes it felt like he had lost track of the fakes he was throwing and was then trying to fake out the guy who was reacting to the first round of fakes. We played with Bobby Gall, already in his sixties and covered in so much hair his torso looked like a beaver’s pelt but who still chucked up and made heart-breaking twenty-foot game winners, and with Hack Walker, the Lee High legend who never met a shot he wouldn’t take, and with Beez, a sweet guy who every single night would attempt at least one thing far beyond his capabilities on the court – like dunking or blocking a layup from the foul line – and wind up collapsing flamboyantly into a heap, as if he were a marionette whose strings had suddenly been snipped. It was scary the first time you saw it but then like clockwork Beez would pick himself up, reassemble his limbs, raise his hands and say “Sorry, guys, I’m so sorry.”
We played in Lenox, at the high school and the community center and Hope Church, the advent chapel where the young priests frowned at you if you swore, and at Cameron Elementary, the key to which my friend Arment and I got the local hardware store to copy, where they had eight-foot side hoops on which we filmed a dunk video set to The Jackson 5’s “ABC” after sneaking in but before the police arrived. On Sunday nights at the high school my dad played with his friends Rolando and Hank and Alan and Tack, who had an older brother called Spike, and then Yarmo replaced Alan when Alan had his hip replaced, Yarmo who was a dentist and a decade younger than the others and would get breakaway layups he would miss so consistently that the rest of the team joked about pooling their money to send him to finishing school. Rolando was the superintendent of schools and thus Sunday night commissioner, he unlocked the gym and disarmed the security system and made age-appropriate teams, which meant that I played with rumbling Shepherdson, who’d lost his front teeth in an amateur boxing match, and Verne the Flying Knee and Omar, who had the furtive hands and audacity of a gambler and then later in life became a real gambler and also briefly ran afoul of the law. Once I made the mistake of pump-faking on a fast break against Verne the Flying Knee, who was a pit bull of a guy, muscle and no control and probably on drugs, and wound up with a mouthful of Verne’s flying knee, and when I was younger I was guarded week after week by a weathered older guy named Tommy O. who would apologize with bourbon-sweet breath for his fouls and my dad was guarded by a good but sort of chippy younger guy named Dean-o and my dad once got so mad at Dean-o after Dean-o undercut him twice on jump shots that he threatened to knock him out, too, though to my dad’s credit he immediately went after Dean-o to apologize. Those are the two times in my life I remember seeing my dad lose his composure, a total of about twelve seconds’ worth of time over forty-nine years. I’ve probably forgotten some others.
We played in Richmond at a middle school with a weird plastic floor and in Great Barrington, in East Lee and Pittsfield and Dalton. We played on the hoop in my driveway, and before that on the hoop at the Haus’s driveway across the street or the hoop in the Keators’ backyard next door, where the court was clay and stuck in our sneaker treads. We had outdoor and indoor balls, the outdoor ones smooth like suede, and favorite shorts and sneakers we’d only wear on certain courts. My dad would shoot foul shots by himself and made 80 in a row once, most of the shots dropping through the net so perfectly that the ball would bounce right back to him. We called a tree in the corner of our driveway Mount Mutombo and in the spring I would stack bags of mulch up under the basket and try to dunk over it.
We played in leagues and against countrymen. My dad coached me in middle school one season but we both found the experience unsettling. We played one-on-one and I lost for years until I got a big boost from Father Time. When I was in high school, my dad filmed my games with a tripod-mounted camcorder, usually missing most of the action because the camera was huge and hard to turn and the zoom function took ages to work, by which point whatever play he was zooming in for was over. He got a lot of footage of foul shots. When I was a junior we had a great team led by the sublime Jeff LaFave and Dave Hathaway, a kid who did pretty much everything well. Jeff was the coach’s son, a smooth six-foot lefty with a whole bag of lefty tricks, and when they instituted the three-point shot in our division he was nearly unstoppable. Dave Hathaway was only about 6’1” but grabbed every rebound and was maybe even a better three-point shooter than Jeff. He was also a the best high-school golfer in the state and beloved by pretty much every girl in a four-grade radius, or at least it seemed that way. We ran with the mighty St. Joe’s teams led by Vernon Percy and Armand Borden and Paul Culpo, who was a New York City homicide detective trapped in the body of an altar boy, and the fearsome Taconic kids led by Paul Brindle, who was so quick it was like he was playing the game three seconds in the future. The Unsworths were on those St. Joe’s teams and Teddy was scraping by in Lee. We beat our rival in triple overtime but lost the division on a fluke Saturday morning defeat to Mt. Greylock. Then we lost at Belchertown by one in the Western Mass playoffs when all our starters except Jeff fouled out and the refs gave Belchertown four foul shots in the last five seconds. St. Joe’s won the state Division Three title.
We lost seven of our top eight players after that year and went 5-18 the next season and three of those wins were against the same slightly-more-hapless team. I had 24 against Wahconah in a game we lost by thirty, 21 against five defenders in a bad loss to Taconic and for a December weekend was a top-five scorer in the county. All downhill from there. We lost to Teddy twice in Lee, got drilled by the scary hill kids at Drury and were little more than an afterthought to Ant Gamberoni in Taconic. We lost to teams – Hoosac Valley, McCann Tech – we’d beaten up on the year before. Towards the end of the season we lost to our arch-rivals 44-18 in a game where I got called for traveling six times and afterward nearly cried in the showers. My dad took me to Joe’s Diner for late-night cheeseburgers and we talked about how shitty the season was and how hard it was to lose over and over again or to be much of a leader for a young, overmatched team. And then we lost the last game of my senior year to Mt. Greylock – always with Mt. Greylock – and at the end of the first half our small forward got into a fight with their off-guard and the whole gym went crazy and we tried to come back and close a ten-point deficit but they held us off and then our coach was so upset he pulled our whole team off the court before the handshake line.
The last time my dad and I played two-on-two was in 2008, at the community center of the town where I now live, against a couple of college kids with headbands and fancy socks, and we whipped them three games to one, running pick and rolls and pick and pops and backdoor cuts and just basically bamboozling those youngsters over and over again. In the last game, my dad inbounded to me on the left elbow, then came over as if to set a pick, but then slipped the pick and rolled to the hoop where I hit him with a behind-the-back bounce pass for the game-winning layup and these kids, man, they looked at each other like they’d just found out the earth was round. My dad and I laughed all the way home. Even the college kids were laughing. Those two kids, if you combined their ages on that day you got 38. If you combined my dad’s age and mine you got one hundred. It’s more now.
The court outside the pizza place next door to the Unsworths’ house is a playscape now and the younger Unsworth brother, Chris, who was my friend, died of cancer a couple of years ago. People move on. My parents still have a hoop in their driveway but the neighbors don’t. I saw Crockett at Haven Café in 2015 and it was like seeing Banquo’s ghost. They still play occasionally on Sunday nights at the high school, a few hangers-on from the old days and a bunch of younger guys who never had to fight through the dreaded triple pick that Rolando, Alan and Hank used to set for my dad back in the heyday. Rolando’s living on Martha’s Vineyard now and Shep opens the gym. The last time we were there, maybe a decade ago, my dad took Danny Steinberg down into the post and Danny said, “I guarded you in my thirties, forties, fifties and now sixties. I’ve been guarding you my whole life. And if there’s an afterlife I’ll be guarding you there too.” The games started and I put up jumpers, most of them missing, over Shep and the youngest of Omar’s five brothers and a few other sons of Lenox. Late in the last run of the night, I fed my dad in the low post and then a crease opened so I cut down the lane and my dad tossed a blind pass over his shoulder and I caught it in stride and made the layup. That was all we talked about for days. Well, not all we talked about, but you know.
Dave Fromm is the author of a sports memoir entitled Expatriate Games, which chronicles his season playing semi-pro basketball in the Czech Republic in the mid-1990s, and a novel entitled The Duration. He lives in Western Massachusetts with his wife and kids.