Ben and Me_ From Temperance to Humility - Cameron Gunn [65]
As I packed my gym bag and clothes after work on Friday night, I had my usual qualms about going away for a weekend. A young family calls for the presence of its parents, children need the attention of their father, and I have always had a reasonable level of guilt whenever I abandon that responsibility for even the shortest times. Going away for a weekend to play in a basketball tournament with other slightly overweight, creaky-kneed, graying, former athletes seemed an indulgence. There was also the cost. I knew that my beer and pizza bill was going to be substantially larger on this weekend.
In truth, I would probably not have gone to the weekend tournament had my mother not encouraged me. Earlier, when I told her that I was unlikely to attend, she said, “Oh, go. Everyone needs a break.” Her birthday present money to me was the registration fee.
The tournament was being held in a city an hour and a half away from my home, and so my team—a university professor, two IT executives, a grocer, a biologist, a salesman, an educator, and a prosecutor (all of whose knees and fitness had seen better days—crammed our gym bags into our cars and took a road trip. We converged on the site of our first game—lose and end up in the consolation round; win and our hope for glory remained. Forty minutes later, we knew the elation of advancing to the next level (and the anxiety of overtaxing our cardiovascular systems). A trip to a local pub for a celebratory drink, a game of pool, and a late-night pizza and I felt the cares of the week passing away.
I shouldn’t really have been surprised that I was having a good time. I love basketball—any team sport really—and I loved being part of a team again. Maybe it’s the pack mentality of humans or some latent martial instinct that man never escapes, but team sports hold a special place in most men’s hearts (I know I am being sexist, but indulge me for a moment)—no matter how bad the team. And it had been a good year. Our team’s personalities jelled, we played well in our league, and we usually enjoyed some postgame socializing with some of the other league teams.
After our Saturday game, another victory—this time over one of our city league opponents who also made the trip to the tournament—there was a social at a private club. After the meal, as I sat watching some of my teammates hold a pool table against all comers, I marveled at the effect of our short return to the games of boyhood. Grown men, men burdened and blessed with the responsibilities of adulthood, acted like the children they had once been. The jokes were juvenile, the razzing unrelenting, and the competition friendly (for the most part). A sort of euphoria had come over most of us, temporary though it might have been. I could see real joy in the faces of people whose brow wrinkles revealed the effects of age and worry, and I wondered why it is that we lose the joy of youth so easily. Why do we, as adults, deprive ourselves of the fun, camaraderie, and sometimes plain silliness that mark our early years? Maybe if we remembered, and lived, a little more like kids, then the burden of responsibility wouldn’t seem so heavy.
On Sunday, our final game—the Masters “B” Division Basketball Championship—was played in front of a fluctuating but enthusiastic crowd of between four and ten. Despite an early setback, our team rallied, played as stifling a defense as thirty- to forty-five-year-old knees would allow, and emerged as champions. You would think by the high-fives, embraces, expressions of pure joy when the medals were presented, and postgame locker room toast that we had