Sometimes a Dream Needs a Push

    I hadn’t thought about that when Mr. Evans from our church asked me if I wanted to join a wheelchair basketball team he was starting.

    “We won’t have the experience of the other teams in the league,” he said. “But it’ll be fun.”

    When I told Mom, she was all for it. But Dad just looked at me and mumbled something under his breath. He does that sometimes. 

    Mom said that he’s chewing up his words to see how they taste before he lets them out.  

    Our van has safety harnesses for my chair, and we drove it to see a game between Madison and Rosedale. It was awesome to see guys my age zipping around in their chairs playing ball. I liked the chairs too. They had special wheels. Very cool.

    I couldn’t wait to start practicing. At the game, Mom sat next to me, but Dad went and sat next to the concession stand. I saw him reading a newspaper and only looking up at the game once in a while.

    “Jim, have you actually seen wheelchair games before?” Mom asked on the way home.

    Dad made a little motion with his head and said something that sounded like “Grumpa-grumpa.” Then he mentioned that he had to get up early in the morning. 

    I didn’t know what to make of Dad’s reaction, but I knew I wanted to play.

    The next day zoomed by. I hadn’t told any of the kids about my father coming to practice. I wasn’t even sure he was going to show up. He had made promises before and then gotten called away to work. 

    But he was there. He sat in the stands and watched us go through our drills. I was so nervous, I couldn’t do anything right. We finished our regular practice, and Mr. Evans motioned for my father to come down to the court.

    “I was watching the teams play the other day,” Dad said. He had both hands jammed into his pockets. “Neither of them were running baseline plays, and almost all the shots were aimed for the rims. Shots off the backboards are going to go in a lot more than rim shots if you’re shooting from the floor. ”

    Dad picked up a basketball and threw it against the backboard. It rolled around the rim and fell through. He did it again. And again. He didn’t miss once.

    “I happen to know that you played pro ball,” Mr. Evans said, “and you’re good. But I think shooting from a wheelchair is a bit harder.”

    “You have another chair?” Dad asked. 

    Mr. Evans pointed to his regular chair sitting by the watercooler. Dad walked over, sat down, and wheeled himself back onto the floor. He put his hands up and looked at me. I tossed him a ball. He tried to turn his chair back toward the basket, and it spun all the way around. For a moment he looked absolutely lost. He seemed a little embarrassed as he glanced toward me.

    “That happens sometimes,” I said. “No problem.” 

    He nodded, then turned and took a shot. It hit the backboard and fell through.

    “The backboard takes the energy out of the ball,” he said. “So if it does hit the rim, it won’t be so quick to bounce off. Madison made about 20 percent of its shots the other day. That doesn’t win basketball games, no matter how good they look making them.”

    There are six baskets in our gym, and we spread out and practiced shooting against the backboards. At first I wasn’t good at it. I was hitting the underside of the rim.

    “Start thinking about a spot on the backboard,” Dad said. “When you find your spot, you’ll be knocking down your shots on a regular basis.”

    Nicky G got it first, and then Kwame, and then Bobby. I was too nervous to even hit the backboard half the time, but Dad didn’t get mad or anything. He didn’t even mumble. He just said it would come to me after a while. 

    Baseline plays were even harder. Dad wanted us to get guys wheeling for position under the basket. But we just kept getting in each other’s way. Our plays looked more like a collision derby. Dad shook his head and Mr. Evans laughed.

    We practiced all week. Dad came again and said we were improving.

    “I thought you were terrible at first,” he said, smiling. “Now you’re just pretty bad. But I think you can play with that Madison team.”

    Dad only comes to practice once in a while now, but he comes to the games when they’re on the weekend. At practice he shows us fundamentals, like how to line your wrist up for a shot.

That made me feel good even if he would never talk about the games when he wasn’t in the gym. I didn’t want to push it too much because I liked him coming to practice. I didn’t want to push him, but Mom didn’t mind at all. 

    “Jim, if you were in a wheelchair,” she asked, “do you think you could play as well as Chris?”  

    Dad was on his laptop and looked over the screen at Mom. Then he looked over at me. Then he looked back down at the screen and grumbled something.

    I figured he was saying that there was no way he could play as well as me in a chair, but I didn’t ask him to repeat it.