The Mostly Unfabulous Homepage of Ethan Green

In December of 1984, when Raina and I were sophomores, my high school held it's first and last annual girls' winter basketball tournament, the Inglewood Christmas Classic. The next year, an hour before the first-round games were to start, a light fixture fell from the ceiling and left a six-foot hole in the floor, and the indignity of having to cancel the tournament once convinced my coach we shouldn't host it anymore. This was a shame, because the first Classic was the only tournament we ever actually won. It was also the place I met Raina. I was running the clock on the first day when my coach came over and told me Raina Webber had just walked in, and that I should pay attention to her. He didn't add -- he couldn't have known -- that a few months later, our parents would meet and fall in love, and that eventually the four of us would live together. All he knew was that Raina and I were two of the top sophomores in Los Angeles County. That day, when her game began, I sat and watched her in awe, so dazzled by the way she slashed through the other team's defense that I kept forgetting to add points to the scoreboard. Midway through the second quarter, Raina dove for a loose ball and landed smack on the scorer's table. She'd knocked the scoreboard control box into my lap, and she lay facedown, her head between my hands where the box had just been and her legs trailing onto the floor. Dazed, she looked up into my face for a moment. Then her eyes began to focus.

"Hey," she said smiling. "You're Nancy, right? I'm Raina. That was a hella sweet pass you threw against Crenshaw yesterday, and I know their coach called you a hot dog 'cos you passed behind your back, but shit, there was a defender kinda standin in your way, and besides, if you got it, you should use it, don't you think?"

She stood up, pulled the box off my lap and placed it on the table, and then ran back onto the court before I had time to answer. To me, that first encounter would repeat itself in various forms through all the years I knew her -- Raina would land in front of me and I would flounder.

Basketball, for Raina and me, was more a calling than a sport; it was our sustenance; it underpinned our lives. Every Sunday morning, as I drove the twenty-eight miles from our house in Inglewood to a gym in Cerritos, I saw well-dressed people on their way to the churches, mosques, and synagogues that were scattered throughout Southern California. I was en route to my Junior Olympic team's weekend practice, but my intention wasn't really so different. That drive to Cerritos was my weekend ritual, but it made up just a fraction of the time I gave to my sport. I was reverent and devout. The only differences between my faith and theirs were that I wore workout clothes instead of my Sunday best and that I worshipped every day.

Los Angeles was a great place to live if you were a basketball fanatic, because the sport was all around you. Besides being the only city that had two NBA teams -- the Lakers and the Clippers -- it was the home of half a dozen major colleges. Better yet, the players were part of the scenery. In the mid-eighties, when I was in high-school there, it wasn't unusual to run into Magic Johnson at the mall; see Byron Scott drive through the neighborhood on his way to visit his mother; or spot Cheryl Miller, the great USC star, dancing up a storm at a local nightclub. Each August, Magic, Isiah Thomas, and other NBA stars would play pickup games at UCLA, and I'd go watch them as often as I could. The world was perfect on those summer afternoons. If Jesus himself had finally shown up, I wouldn't have noticed unless he'd worn sneakers and had a dangerous jump shot.

Copyright © l998, Nina Revoyr.

Back to The Necessary Hunger

Back to the Stonewall Inn