The Gift My Father Gave Me (for basketball, writing and life)

“Short.”

I’m 12 years old in our backyard in Liberty, Missouri. The August sun is blazing, and I’m hoisting up shot after shot on a Huffy hoop cemented into our sloping driveway.

My dad steps outside to observe. Every time the ball hits the front of the rim—more frequently than I’d like to admit—he repeats himself.

“Short.”

It’s annoying. He’s not raising his voice or trying to belittle me. He’s analyzing my misses and correctly identifying that I need to use more of my legs.

I can’t stand it.

But I also can’t shake that he’s right. The man has unimpeachable credibility on the subject. He’s coached a high school team to an undefeated regular season, helped develop a future college basketball star, and been a standout player himself. ?

Being a coach’s son certainly came with perks. I got to sit behind his team at games, hang around his practices, and go to basketball camps for free. It all felt like a privileged life.

But my dad could also give frank assessments of my play. He understood that the game requires a combination of precise movements and sound decision-making at high speeds. Exhorting me to practice with pace, he would repeat his favorite Johnny Wooden line: “Be quick, but don’t hurry.”

He preached that basketball was a game of angles—and that on offense, I see the whole floor, and on defense, I get low to the ground and anticipate where the ball is headed. As John McPhee wrote in his book on Bill Bradly, “A Sense of Where You Are,” “Every time a basketball player takes a step, an entire new geometry of action is created around him.”

My dad also understood the importance of repetition to gain the fundamentals. To perform in a split-second in an infinite number of situations requires muscle memory, which can only come from hours and hours of practice. “However hard you’re working, you can always work harder,” my dad frequently told me.

To be sure, he was liberal with praise and always encouraging. But he insisted I could do more, even when I didn’t think I had any more to give.

I didn’t appreciate it as much then, but I know now my dad was giving me a gift. He was teaching me that it’s worth learning to do hard things. And that there’s no end to how much you can improve. Progress comes slowly and painfully at times, but it comes, and with it, satisfaction and confidence. ?

Thanks to that gift, I learned to find joy in being alone and working on my game. When other kids were riding their bikes or going to the swimming pool, I was content to be on the court with my ball.

Of course, not all work ethics are created equal. Mine certainly had limits. And all the work I put in didn’t amount to much external glory. In high school, as a 5’8” point guard, I averaged a pedestrian 10 points per game during my senior year. Not exactly the resume college coaches drool over.

But the discipline I learned from my dad—and the realization that I always have much to improve upon—has served me well. Finding the right word—“a large matter—it’s the difference between lightning bug and lightning,” as Twain said—is often lonesome and daunting work. I fall short often, but when I succeed, it can be supremely satisfying. ?

This Father’s Day, I’ll be reflecting on the gratitude I have for my father and the lessons I hope to pass on to my daughter.

A LeBron James-ish Writer

My dad always encouraged me to find the best competition to play against because it would make me better. I don’t play ball anymore, but I try to read the best writers in the hopes that by letting their prose wash over me I'll improve my writing.

Sebastian Junger is one. If he were a basketball player, he might be compared to LeBron James because he can do it all. As readers of The Perfect Storm can attest, he’s a master reporter and storyteller,

After reading his latest book, I’m reminded of the precision required for great writing (one of the things that generative AI is not great at). “In My Time of Dying” recounts his near-death experience from a ruptured aneurysm, his brush with the afterlife, and the contours of our existence.

It’s a weighty book despite its slim 138 pages. As a lay reader without any advanced degrees, I cannot vouch for the accuracy with which he writes about subjects like biology, physics, quantum theory, and cosmology. But his prose leaves the impression that you, as a reader, are in the hands of someone who has chosen his words carefully.

The rigorous treatment he gives to subjects like near-death experiences is why, in my mind, his insights are so well-earned and credible. One of my favorites: “The idea that you will appreciate life more after almost dying is a cheap bit of wisdom easily asserted by people who have never been near death,” he writes. “When you drill down into it—which you must—we are really talking about the appreciation of death rather than of life.”

He saves his shiniest pearl for last. Throughout the book, he weaves in the story of his father, a physicist who died several years ago but who reappears on the ceiling above him as doctors search for the rupture in his abdomen. The book is, in part, a quest to understand what that was all about.

No reader will expect that he will find any answers. But the search keeps you turning the page. I’ll leave out the details of the final anecdote but quote his beautiful summary of what it means to be human. ?

We’re all on the side of a mountain shocked by how fast it’s gotten dark; the only question is whether we’re with people we love or not. There is no other thing—no belief or religion or faith—there is just that. Just the knowledge that when we finally close our eyes someone will be there to watch over us as we head out into that great, soaring night.