Be Like Wilt
/By Neema Avashia
Jamaica Plain, MA
I stand on the foul line at the Cross Lanes Methodist Church gym. I am 9, the only girl playing on an all boys’ basketball team. The only brown kid on a team of white boys, my puny arms, thick glasses, and long, oiled braid setting me even further apart from their wiry, muscular bodies and cropped blond haircuts.
Why has Carl Bradford chosen me for his team? I wonder about this. His sons are two of the quickest, highest-scoring players in our local league. In 1988 in Cross Lanes, West Virginia, there is no designated league for girls, and when I try out one Saturday in October, there are only two other girls in the gym with close to 80 boys.
“Try-outs,” in this pre-AAU, pre-hyper-competitive era, involve dribbling up and down the court, shooting two lay-ups and a couple of foul shots. Every kid is guaranteed a space on a team. The question is simply which coach will choose to take them on.
Each girl is selected for a different team. Some teams have no girls. Mr. Bradford doesn’t have to pick me, but he does anyway. In doing so, he also takes on the responsibility of chauffeuring me to and from practices and games. Basketball is not a sport my immigrant parents understand, and the parental time commitment it requires is not something their lives leave space for. By opting to play, I take a step further away from my nuclear family, and closer to my West Virginia community.
Still, my Indian genetics make me short, weak, and terribly uncoordinated. When I shoot the ball overhand, it falls short of the basket by several feet. When I play defense, my teammates say I look like a praying mantis, my hands weaving in front of me instead of out to the sides. I love the game, but I am about as far from a natural talent as my parents’ hometown in India is from this gym.
One evening, Mr. Bradford proposes that I shoot the ball a different way. Not overhand, as I’ve been trying to, but underhand. “Granny-style,” my teammates disparagingly call it.
“Some of the greatest basketball players of all time shot underhand, Neema,” Mr. Bradford says. “Wilt Chamberlain shot underhand.” His blue eyes, magnified by round, wire-rimmed glasses, probe mine.
In my adult life, I have listened to entire podcasts about the accuracy of the granny-style shot, about how Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in the one game where he shot free throws underhand, and Rick Barry’s career free throw percentage was a chart-topping 89.3 because he opted to do the same. But at age 9, this feels like yet another way in which I am being set apart from my peers. Raised by fathers who were players of the game, taught to play at driveway hoops as soon as they could walk, they can shoot overhand. I cannot.
How do you assimilate into the dominant culture when your own culture is so invisible to the majority? My small group of Indian peers and I answer this question in different ways. The only Indian boy at my elementary school, who all of the white kids either think is my brother, or insist I should date, speaks with an exaggerated twang, drinks heavily through high school, and loudly votes Republican later on. Some of the Indian kids who live in the city of Charleston emulate their wealthy white classmates, picking up tennis or golf as entry points into American culture.
As for me, I choose basketball. I play the sport constantly, watch it obsessively on the TV in our basement, rock my turquoise and purple Charlotte Hornets jacket daily, and not simply because I love the game. I do, but basketball is more than just a sport to me. It is my way into a world where I otherwise don’t seem to belong.
I blush hard at the suggestion to shoot underhand, dribble a basketball against the white linoleum flooring of the gym, and stare at the black curve of the key instead of making eye contact with Mr. Bradford. I know he is right, but am not sure I can find the courage to shoot granny-style in a game where all of my teammates and classmates from school will be watching.
Much later in his career, Chamberlain explained why he only shot underhand for one season, and reverted to the less accurate overhand free throw afterward.
“I felt silly, like a sissy, shooting underhanded,” he said. “I know I was wrong, I know some of the best foul shooters in history shot that way. I just couldn’t do it.” Even though I haven’t heard this explanation in 1988, I struggle with the same sentiment.
Eventually, however, my desire to make a basket overwhelms my fear of judgement. Game day comes, the point guard gets the ball into my hands, and I position the ball between my legs before hurling it upwards.
Swish.
It isn’t a buzzer-beater. It’s not the game-winning shot. It is just two points scored midway through the third quarter in a regular-season game. But the entire gym erupts in cheers, the crowd chanting my name. Someone even calls my mom from the payphone in the corner. I grow so dizzy with this temporary but overwhelming sense of belonging that I fail to register the final score.
After the game, Mr. Bradford gives me his slow, sweet smile.
“See, Neema? It doesn’t matter how you shoot the ball. It just matters that the ball goes in.”
Mr. Bradford drafts me for his team each of the next three years. At the end of my last season, he persuades all of the coaches to jointly award me the league’s “Heart and Hustle” trophy, given not to the most talented player, but to the most dedicated team member. It remains, to this day, the award I cherish most. When I age out of his league, he recruits me as an assistant coach for his younger son’s team. His red Jeep Cherokee is a fixture outside of our house at least three days a week, as he continues to drive me to and from practices.
Each evening, we drive over Goff Mountain after practice. The headlights of the Jeep cast the only light on the dark and winding road that takes us past a pungent chemical landfill, and through a dense stand of trees.
“Close your eyes now,” he commands as we approach the summit of the mountain.
In the backseat, the boys and I giggle and grin, close our eyes, take a deep breath. Mr. Bradford hits the gas, and we soar over the first hill, our stomachs dropping, roller-coaster style. The Jeep bounces hard onto the concrete, then takes flight again as we hit the second decline.
For this brief moment, we are Bo, Luke, and Daisy in the General Lee. Our screams of delight replace the sounds of “Dixie” in this reimagined “Dukes of Hazzard,” and I am wildly, freely American in a way I can never recapture outside of Mr. Bradford’s presence.
Neema Avashia teaches civics in the Boston Public Schools, where she has worked since 2003. She was born and raised in southern West Virginia, the daughter of Indian immigrants who came to Appalachia to work in the chemical industry. Her work has been published in places including Still: The Journal and the Superstition Review, and is forthcoming in the Kenyon Review.