I was playing pickup basketball just before the basketball season. I was in 10th grade, the start of my sophomore year, so I was 15 years old. And my big thing as a basketball player was, I played 100%, all the time. Like, I didn’t always feel like I was quite as gifted from a skill point of view, so I felt I had to make up for that with effort and hard work. And all I knew was, I couldn’t bring that effort and hard work to an actual game if I wasn’t practicing that in practice. Like, it’s like a classic, “You have to practice how you play” type of thing. So even in open gyms, I was a hard worker, and I didn’t like to give up on plays.
And so, I remember there being a point where, in this open run that counted for nothing, one of my friends broke out into the open floor. Looked like he had a wide open layup. There’s no one else back on defense to stop him. But I loved chasing players down. I loved a good chase-down block. And usually, I kind of just lurk in the shadows and wait for them to feel like they’ve got a step on me, and then I meet them at the rim and I would try to swat their shot away. But this time my friend on the other team was so far ahead that I was like — in my head I was like, “I don’t think I can get this one. I think – I don’t know what I’m doing. What’s the point of — why am I even running?”
And to even have the vaguest shot at affecting this layup, I had to run at a full sprint, and then I could not set my feet when I jumped. You know, a lot of times there’s a little like one-two step that you take prior to elevating in basketball, or a lot of athletics. But I had no time for that. So I was running at a dead sprint and my jump had very little elevation ‘cause I was going so fast I couldn’t really spring and explode. And I jumped off of one foot, and it seemed like there was no deceleration in my jump. However fast I was running is exactly how fast I was moving in the air. Which is also uncommon when you jump. And it was a complete horizontal leap, as opposed to one where I jump up toward the rim, and – like a long jump.
And so the interesting thing is, I was able to deflect the shot. It wasn’t as authoritative as I usually like my blocks to be, but I got a fingertip on it. But the bad news was, I was going so fast and jumping so horizontally that when I landed, I was right next to the wall and still moving at full speed. No deceleration. So, I landed about a foot away from the back wall. Thankfully, it had one of those like, pads you see on basketball courts in high school. So I did hit the pad first, which I’m grateful existed. I did see stars. Probably one of the last times I saw stars, which is not a bad run for the last 20-plus years.