**I apologize for the delay between posts. This posts discusses the up’s and downs of my early basketball career and Ironically enough I have been fortunate enough to start a new job at a wonderful winery in my home town. This has caused a few delays in finishing and editing posts, but that will soon be resolved. I hope you enjoy Part 1 of Part 3 of A Foundation of Lies: The Horrible Truth!!!**
So before I reveal what, to this day still, logically makes absolutely no sense to me, let’s recap what I had been told up to this point. First, that I could be anything I wanted in this world as long as I worked hard. While this moral had still had held up at this point, it did have some holes in the logic surrounding this statement. Of course, preadolescence Alex had no clue how large those holes were, but he would eventually. Second, I was told good things happen to people who work hard and do things the right way. Now on the surface this would appear to be an accurate and flawless plan for accomplishing previously stated outlandish goals. But of course, after some soul crushing experiences and heart-wrenching defeats, I would be told the cruel truth about the real world for the first time in my life. It was a truth so devastating and so ass-backwards that I can only believe it is the sole reason why the Kardashian’s, Paris Hilton, anyone from the Real World….better yet any person who has a reality television show about their lives, who are famous and make a lot of money off all their “talent”. This rule would come to shake me to my core as it stood against everything I stood for. The rule stated: Life isn’t always fair.
Now a lot of you reading this will know this as a truth. Some of you may have learned this at an extremely early age. I’d even be willing to bet that there are even a few of you douche-mongers out there who have never experienced this.
*Note*: If you fall into this category sleep with one eye open because I WILL use time travel to travel back in time to this exact moment that you are reading this and totally wreck your world. That ought to teach you a lesson or two….and if need be three. That’s right. Three. Whole. Lessons.
But for a kid like myself who had a bunch of lying, false hope giving parents (love you guys), this seemed improbable. In all honesty I hadn’t really experienced this rule early on in my playing years. I was the play maker, the baller, shot-caller, Lil’ Iverson, The Snake, Alexander the Great okay no one called me that last one, other than myself in my dreams. The point I’m trying to make is that I was the little man and I always had a plan. However right around the time I turned 10 things began to change for me. No longer was I playing city league Basketball and Baseball. No, I was entering the world of competitive sports leagues. Growing up I had heard stories of where all the great kids played baseball, basketball, and football growing up. Finally I was going to get my shot. Finally I was going to be put on the grand youth stage to demonstrate my skill sets.
It sadly began slowly with my Morada Little League debut, but quickly shifted into CYO Basketball for St. Anne’s. Now St. Anne’s had two teams, an A team and a B team. Obviously the A team contained the better players of the two teams, but what I didn’t know as a kid was the reason a majority of those kids made that team were because they went to the school, or for other political bullshit. So when tryouts came I was determined to not only make the A team, but to be a starter.
Now….let’s play a guessing game everybody. Did I:
A. Make the team but did not start
B. Make the team and start
C. Not make the A team but start for the B team
D. Not make either team
E. Absolutely Demolished in tryouts and got moved up a grade
Go ahead and lock in your guesses.
Okay, so if you guessed E then I apologize because I probably led you to believe I was the next Lebron James with all that prodigy talk. If you guessed D you are not only incorrect, but I hope all the bad things in life happen to you and you alone 😉. If you guessed A or B then you will be just as shocked as I was to find out that I would be on the B team. Not only was I shocked, I was an emotional wreck. Most of you might not have cared in this situation because you made the team, but I most certainly did. I cried that night for hours, unable to deal with my “failure”. It made no sense as a few of the kids on that team I could outplay in high heels and with a blindfold on. It twas on that very night my father looked me dead in the eyes and uttered those 4 words that completely baffled my fragile little mind. Life isn’t always fair…..son. If life isn’t fair, then why have I been playing by the rules? Why have I been doing things the right way? Why couldn’t my parents be rich, send me to a private school, and buy my way onto a team? At the time of course I was not thinking that last one; need to stop projecting, my bad everybody. Anyways, another blow to my self-esteem had been dealt, but unlike the Morada Little League incident I was determined to show everyone how wrong they were.
Now to say that I had a historic season for St. Anne’s B team would be putting it, well, lightly. By no means was this any ordinary season. In all honesty it is the thid best season I’ve ever had at any level, PERIOD. Now let’s keep in mind that I was roughly 10-years old at the time. What would you expect a bunch of 10-year old kids to be scoring per game? If you are thinking to yourself around 10 points per game, congrats because that is a well thought out and logical estimation; especially since most games for 10-year olds fall into the 20 to 30 points per game range (High School scores average around 40 to 50 per game). However, as I have so obnoxiously pointed out, I was no normal 10 year old. That first season I averaged close to 30 points per game as we put up 50 per game and trounced literally everybody on our way to the Championship game. There were very few to no losses and I can only recall one bad game I played that season. The reason for my recollection of this particular game was due to it being the worst game I have ever played….at any point in my life….in any sport….EVER. My father also took the opportunity to remix the tragedy that unfolded on that October day into a little video entitled “Alexander’s No Good, Horrible, Very Bad Day!” Yes. My “loving father” remixed the worst game of my entire life into a 15 minute highlight real of my failures from that game. Thanks dad…..
So at this point many of you are thinking,
“Why is this guy complaining. He got put on the weaker team, he went out and dominated, his team was successful, and he proved all the doubters wrong. He should be happy.”
To this I say, you are right. I was EXTREMELY happy. Not only was I easily the best player in the “B” league, but my team had almost won the championship and I had shown everyone how talented I actually was. I had gone from a discarded afterthought, to the kid that every player and coach in the St. Anne’s program was talking about. However good things never last, and that is when I learned about Murphy’s Law. This law states: Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. It can go by a few other names such as: quicksand, tailspin, falling off the horse, depression, stuck in a rut, etc. Any emotion or action in which bad or negative things continually seem to happen without something positive occurring is a symptom of Murphy’s Law. So you can imagine for an over the top kid like myself, who had the world seemingly in his hands, Murphy’s Law was something I would want no part of. However this is not how the world works. Good comes with bad, and bad comes with good, but for the 10 year old version of myself, there were no bad things happening. He was having fun, dominating, and chasing down his dreams……well at least until the next basketball season.
A year passed and with a new season came a new twist; YOUR BOY WAS ON THE A TEAM!! That is right, in one short year I had gone from an afterthought to hanging out with the “A” team and being one of “their guys”. The way I saw it I was going to have to bust my ass, but I would be a starter before playoffs began. So I came and worked every practice, I got better, I played hard, learned the system, locked down on defense, and averaged 5 minutes per game for the entire season……Yeah, they played me my 5 minute minimum and left me on the bench to rot away like the kid who gets stuck in the outfield during tee ball because he wont get in the way out there. I had gone from averaging almost 30 points a game, to averaging 4 points in 5 minutes; which is still fantastic seeing as I’m pretty sure they were playing keep away from me on the floor. I had gone from being extremely happy and excited to play basketball, to feeling like I didn’t belong and disliked by my teammates. In other words, Murphy’s Law was in full effect. It was the most awkward year of sports I had ever been a part of. I knew I was disliked by my teammates because I wasn’t part of their group. I was an outsider who didn’t go to their school, who didn’t come from a family with a lot of money, and who was just as good as them on the basketball floor. This made me a threat and different, and kids don’t like things that are different. The coaches all had sons on the team who played ahead of me, and their sons treated me like garbage. Whether it was not including me from sitting with them pregame because I was a “nerd”, or made fun of me because I did not have practice shoes, yes that really happened; they went above and beyond to let me know that I was not only different, but that I didn’t belong. But I pushed it aside, I put the team first, and I just waited for it to be over. After losing in the championship game again for a 2nd straight year, I informed the coaches that I would be going back down to the B team the next year. They looked stunned and unhappy that I was choosing to play against “Less Talented Players” and even tried to talk me out of it. But I was through talking and listening to a bunch of hypocrites. The way I saw it, I was going to play where my teammates appreciated me, my coaches made me feel important, and where the team was a family. I was going home!
With the passing of another year It was time for basketball yet again and this time there was no uncertainty, no doubt, no fear, I was ready to lead us back to the title game. Now I could cover step by step what occurred that season but I’ll summarize it as such:
- I averaged 30 Points per game
- I can count the Number of losses we had on 1 hand
- I set career Highs in points scored in a game at 48 and 52.
- Officials had to stop making calls against our team because we were kicking the living crap out of everyone.
In other words… I WE dominated yet again, our team was successful, and the officials screwed us out of a Championship. It was the most fun I had experienced with basketball except that damn title game and once again everything was going how it should. But Murphy’s Law was getting ready to rear it’s ugly head, and I was about to experience how unfair life could truly be. Of course had I known at that age that with the good comes the bad, I would have been prepared for my first season of tackle football, and the horrors that would come with it……If only if only.
Until Next Time Internet….
-Alex
The Irrelevant Journey 
You’re welcome
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