Beginning of the greatest career EVER
This year marks the 10 year anniversary of one of the most epic meltdowns in recent sports memory. No, it wasn’t Ron Artest vs the Detroit Pistons. It wasn’t Latrell Sprewell choking PJ Carlisimo. Those epic displays of poor judgement and idiocy pale in comparison to this; no, this episode was much worse. What am I referring to? What happened? My personal MELTDOWN at the 2003 Big Play Classic in Indianapolis.
I suppose I’ll give you a little background on me and the event. First off, I love basketball more than anything in the world besides God and my wife. With that being said, I feel that I am the greatest player that I have personally ever stepped on the court with. Is that opinion true? Depends on who you ask and since you’re asking me, then yes. It’s true. moving on…. The Big Play Classic was a basketball tournament held in Indianapolis yearly for a select group of the population with something very big in common: their religion. While I won’t mention what that is, I will say that the purpose was to associate with our brothers while having a great time playing the game we all love. At the time I lived in Cleveland and took it upon myself to captain a team from our city to compete in and ultimately dominate this event. My confidence was sky-high. We had big men. We had guards. We had leapers and we had shooters. We couldn’t lose…. only, we DID LOSE. And quite spectacularly I might add. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me explain…
We took 2 car groups for our team and drove from Cleveland, got a few hotel suites and paid our registration. From there all we had to do was win the tournament before we lost 2 times. Didn’t happen. We were disjointed, undisciplined and poorly coached. Part of this was due to us not really practicing, some of it was due to over confidence. Our frustration mounted which led to internal arguing and haphazard substitutions. Even with all of this, we were within one shot of winning our elimination game. Let me take you inside the huddle… “Look guys, we’re down by 2 and there’s 6 seconds left. That’s plenty of time to get a great shot off. We’ll inbound to BRANDON who will dribble right and hand off to Rasheed who will take the 3 if he has it or drive to the basket. We’ll live with the result; Sheed get’s buckets.”… the only part of that play I seemed to hear was “inbound to Brandon…”
The ball is inbounded to me, 6….5…. I dribble to the left, then through my legs twice (hit’em with that Tim Hardaway crossover!) 4…3…. I get to the corner and take a fadeaway 3 pointer…. The arch is good. Backspin is good. I leave my left hand up because my follow through is perfection… shot hits the front of the rim…2….1…. Cleveland is eliminated. 2 and out. $400 wasted. It’s 11 AM and it’s time for us to go home. We’re OUT… My teammates shake the winner’s hands. I shake no one’s hand. I sit on the bench and pout. Loudly. Then all of a sudden I stand on the bleachers, at the top. I begin berating my team ( i.e closest home boys) about how they don’t deserve to ride in my car back home. Then I take a water bottle and slam it on the court. It explodes. Then I slam a Gatorade bottle. Same result. At this point I’m physically removed from the gym by a well-meaning friend who doesn’t want me to throw the REST OF my reputation away (Shout to Jimmy) and given a much-needed speech about maturity.
I don’t remember much else about what happened that day, or the rest of the weekend for that matter. It was a low point for me… In the decade since, I’ve learned to control my emotions much better on the basketball court and seen the importance of camaraderie and sportsmanship in making the game the beautiful thing that it is. I still play often and enter every tournament that I can with the same goal: to WIN. It’s just that since I’m over 30, I realize that if we don’t, it’s not the end of the world….
Sincerely Keeping It Real,
Mr. H
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