March 14, 2000 — “So Dan, what do you do?” a reader asked as I enjoyed an adult beverage at the Monkey Barrel recently.
This is a common question. Week after week, this column is filled with stories of my forays into other people’s hobbies. Invariably, my attempts are introductory ones — clumsy and gauche — and involve me mooching a great deal of equipment and expertise from my companions.
I have described myself as a sports dilettante, dabbling in many activities and mastering none. A true professional amateur.
The assumption by many is that I have no hobbies of my own, that until this column began 18 months ago I had experienced absolutely nothing.
“So Dan, what do you do?”
Well, I play basketball. Always have. Hopefully, always will.
Granted, a game of pick-up basketball doesn’t flood the senses like a whitewater canoe trip down the Chattooga River. It doesn’t buck the heart like a ride on the back of a bull.
But I find much beauty in basketball. It is complex in its simplicity.
While on one end of a rectangular court, one team wants to put a round ball through a raised round hoop. The other team doesn’t want that to happen. On the other end of the court, those roles are reversed.
The game has defined boundaries and a strict set of rules. But within those parameters anything can happen — from the silly to the sublime.
Basketball is never the same. It is the jazz music of sport.
I play basketball at the First Baptist Church Family Life Center in Gainesville, Ga. I am not alone.
We are the “11-to-2 club” — the “lunch bunch” — a semi-constant group that plays pick-up basketball three times a week during what for most players would be considered a lunch break. For me, it is the second thing I do during the day. The first: watching the 11 a.m. showing of “Magnum P.I.” on A&E.
Sports writers work weird hours.
Just before noon every Monday, Wednesday and Friday we file onto the hardwood court one by one. We are in our 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. We wear white collars and blue. But we all have one thing in common.
“I just love playing basketball,” said 57-year-old Tony Walker, speaking for the group. “I love running around with this bunch of knuckleheads.”
“You’re not here now because of your ego,” added 30-year-old “knucklehead” Kevin Boyd, of Boyd’s Cleaning Service. “We’ve already lost our speed. We’ve already lost our talent that we had. We’re out here just because we enjoy the game.”
Walker, an employee of Duncan Termite and Pest Control, is the elder statesman of the lunch bunch. He was part of the initial group that began playing its lunchtime basketball games at the Family Life Center in the early 1990s.
“I reckon that’s when the whole 11-to-2 club started,” said Walker, who has been playing three-to-five days a week — as much as his aging knees will let him — ever since.
The talent pool is diverse. Every day the 15-to-20 guys that take the court include those who have played the game since they could walk and those who never touched a basketball until adulthood.
Thirty-one-year-old Dan Marcone took up basketball at the Family Life Center eight months ago — and it turned him into a new man. I’m not kidding. He has shed 90 pounds so far, and now weighs 150. He looks at his ID photo and sees a stranger.
“I never even dribbled until I came out here,” said Marcone, an employee of Christian Financial Concepts, who began his weight-loss program in the Family Life Center’s exercise room. “I saw these guys out here and I said, ‘This really sucks on the Stairmaster, I’m going to go out and play with those guys.'”
And Marcone fit right in. Somehow everything, everybody comes together. And the result is a consistently competitive hour of sweat and set shots.
“Everybody plays to compete, but it’s not life or death,” said lawyer Andy Maddox, 39. “There’s no question it’s a slower game. That’s the cruelty of age, you understand the game better than your body will let you do it anymore.”
“You spend less time playing,” agreed 53-year-old government worker Phil Sumlin, “and more time recuperating.”
Camaraderie is also key. It’s actually nice to see the same faces day after day, especially when seeing those faces means you’re about to play basketball.
“I work at home and don’t see anybody,” said Robert Folsom, 42, a freelance writer and editor. “This is the extent of the real world for me.”
Ex-New York Knickerbocker and now ex-presidential candidate Bill Bradley once wrote, “In a world full of unrealized dreams and baffling entanglements, basketball seems pure.”
And perhaps that is what keeps the 11-to-2 club coming back — a little purity in what can often be an impure world.
Neckties are traded for T-shirts, briefcases for balls. Anonymity takes over on the basketball court. Jobs become meaningless. Last names are rarely used. The game is the great equalizer.
What’s left is a group of grown men with little more on their minds than a collective desire to put a round ball through a raised round hoop.
And what could be more pure than that?