The Mostly Unfabulous Homepage of Ethan Green

Just after Thanksgiving -- which my dad and I spent at home while Claudia and Raina went down to San Diego -- my team held our annual alumni game. The purpose of this event was twofold -- to give us a practice run, along with the earlier scrimmage, before our first official game; and to encourage alumni interest in the current team. Often teachers showed up to cheer on the old stars they'd once had in their classes, and afterwards, all of the players would go out for pizza.

We still had plenty of time before the game started, so I went to the bathroom, and then to my locker, where I got one of the wristbands I always wore when I played. On the inside of my locker door there was a newspaper clipping -- the report of our loss in the playoffs the previous winter. We'd only made it to the second round before being upset by a lower-ranked team, and I was still haunted by that defeat, by my subpar performance. I stood there and read the article twice.

By the time I got back out to the court, about ten of the alums had arrived and were warming up at the far basket. Most of them were people I knew -- girls who'd been seniors or juniors when I was a freshman -- and the first thing I noticed, as always, was how much weight they'd put on since their playing days.

"Yo, Nance!" yelled out one of them, a big center named Tracy. "Come over here and talk to my son."

"Wassup, Tracy?" I yelled back, and then I walked over to Chris, her three-year-old, and squatted down to talk to him. "Wassup, little man? You've grown about two feet since last year." He was wearing a Bulls cap and a black sweatshirt, and trying, without much success, to bounce a basketball. He stared up at me in a daze, and then looked back at his ball.

"What you been up to, Tracy?" I asked his mother as I stood back up. The last I'd heard, she'd dropped out of junior college.

"Not much, homegirl," she said. "Got a job now, but other than that, just kickin it, tryin to take care of him." She nooded toward her son. Chris had the round eyes and broad nose of his father, who'd been killed in a drive-by two weeks before Chris was born.

"That's cool," I said. "Gotta keep getting paid, right?" I didn't know what else to say to her. Too many of my former teammates had similar stories -- junior college, a dead-end job, more school for a while, and then nothing. Three other girls besides Tracy had their kids with them that night, and I couldn't believe these were the same girls I'd played and partied with just a couple of years before. There was another girl, Letrice, who was sinking jump shots from the corner -- she'd been just this side of good enough for a scholarship. Now she was an assistant manager at Lady Foot Locker in the mall, and it was the best job held by anybody there. In the bleachers sat another ex-player -- Pauline Rider, who'd been sure to get a scholarship until she'd blown her knee out the summer before her senior year. She never went anywhere, not even to a JC, and I didn't know what she did with herself now, but she often showed up at our home games and then left without saying a word. Only one of my ex-teammates had made it to a four-year college -- Vicki Stewart, who had a scholarship to Oregon. . .

The same people were playing for the alumni team as the previous year, minus one, my friend Rhonda Craig, who was doing time for selling speed. I chatted with them all for a few minutes before heading back to our side of the court. Then I heard a voice behind me shout, "Hey, it's the Asian Invasion!"

I turned around and grinned. It was Rhonda. "Wassup, girl?" I said. "When'd you get out?"

"Couple of weeks ago, and shit, am I glad."

We walked toward each other and I hugged her, the most genuine hug I'd given anyone that night. Rhonda was short, 5'4", and stocky, but muscular and deceptively fast. She'd been like a big sister during my first year of high school. She was a senior point guard when I was a freshman, and she'd named me "Maddog" for my overzealousness on the court. That year she'd driven me around to open gyms at different schools, taken me out with her drinking buddies, given me all kinds of advice on high school and how to deal with team dynamics. The speed thing hadn't started until after she'd finished school, when her mother had stopped working because of a shoulder injury and Rhonda had wanted to help out. She'd just dabbled in sales, sold a little on the side of her regular job at Vons, and luckily, she'd never gotten into crack. Even though we were still hanging out a lot when she started with the speed, I didn't follow her down that path. I had done speed, and weed, and wasn't adverse to dabbling in other mischief; I'd gone along for the ride a few times when some of the friends I had then had broken into cars at the beach. But Rhonda, despite her own choices, had picked me up by the collar and set me firmly on the high road. She was the one who had made me understand the value of my talent in basketball, and once I believed it could lead me into a future, the mischief didn't seem so appealing anymore.

Copyright © l998, Nina Revoyr.

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