The Family Roll

The Family Roll

I Married a southern girl. The “Mid South” as they call it down there, my wife is from northern Mississippi, about 30 minutes south of Memphis, in a town called Hernando. Half her family still lives down there and so every year we cross the good ole’ Masson/Dixon for Smith family Christmas. I don’t mind going down there because they live on a big piece of property in the country and its good to get away from the city every once in a while to see the stars, enjoy the quiet and it also doesn’t hurt that the temperature fluctuates between 60’s and 70’s in December-a far cry from the frozen tundra of Chicago this time of year. It does take some getting used to though. Everything you hear about the South is true: It is racist, it is “religious” , it has dry counties, Mega Wal-Marts everywhere, and they refer to anyone not from the South as “Northerners”. Once, I was buying gas and I had to show the clerk my I.D. (which was Missouri at the time and a state that I’m pretty sure fought mostly for the South 200 years ago) and upon seeing it, he scoffed, mumbled “Northerner” under his breath and refused to look me in the eye. So, you have to learn to roll with the punches; to not get caught up in how bass-akwards everything is, not get into debates about politics, religion or abortion, never openly insult anything or anyone and remember that the rest of the world is not like this region. That was my general rant about The South. It’s not all bad, its pretty, people are polite, everything down there is dirt cheap-seriously-and it’s slower there, which I particularly like. I need to fully unwind at least twice a year, I get tangled up so tight that I don’t even notice until I go there and feel-literally feel-my bones and sinew and muscles start to loosen and go back to their original shape. it’s exactly the relief I need.

My greatest source of relief comes from the basketball hoop in their driveway. I played in high school and was always a decent athlete and then time and weight and age and general laziness all got in the way and I stopped playing all together. So once a year, when we go down there, I say my hellos, eat food, make the appropriate amount of small talk, and then when all the sisters get together (my wife is one of 5 siblings, 4 of them girls) I slip outside basketball and beer in hand, and shoot hoops until its pitch black outside and my fingers are cracked and bleeding and there are several empties lined up on the driveway. This is how it started; me, alone on the driveway, because none of my wife’s family give two shits about sports-watching or playing. At first I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, but slowly, my muscle memory came back and I was soon draining shots from everywhere on the pavement. My love of basketball is a deep one, I see a rim and I know there’s a ball around and I start to get an itch, a fever, like a junkie for heroin and I can’t wait to start shooting. Lines where pavement slabs meet become free throw lines, three point lines, out of bounds. I learn the contours of the driveway, the give of the backboard and especially the bounce and angle of the rim. This rim in particular is one of the more fucked up I’ve ever played on. It has to be the original which would make it at least 20 years old. Hanging, half rusted, on the original backboard, its bolts are loose and it slopes from left to right and an angle barely noticeable until you start missing and can’t figure out why. So you alter your shot, play to the rim and pray for the right bounce as the shot leaves your hand, that the ball will hit the rim in a favorable way and you’ll get the roll you deserve. The “Family Roll“. To explain: As I said, it started out with just me on the court shooting by myself. Soon, my brother in law- my wife’s sister’s husband- also bored of the sisters came out and we started shooting around together. This developed quickly-as we are both competitive to a fault- into heated games of H-O-R-S-E. I’m not going to say that I won them all but I won a lot. But my brother in law, always the good sport (mostly) wanted to keep playing and so we did, every night we were down there for hours and hours or until all the beer was gone. And so this became a tradition. We go to the South, the two boys play basketball. Soon, we were joined by a third, my wife’s other sister’s boyfriend, and we now had three for HORSE. Now it got serious. We developed drinking rules like “beer in hand” games where the shooter must always be holding a beer, or taking whiskey shots every time one obtained a letter. The drunker we got the more fun we had and the less shots we made, most of which relied heavily on this rim. Thus the “Family Roll”, a term I coined when the rim was favorable. See, to be good on this court, you have to spend time on it and learn the rim, the evil bastard rim that sounds like a spring giving out when it’s struck and will decide at the moment of impact whether to grant your shot a decent bounce or send it flying back at you or towards one of the cars strategically parked out of the way to make room for a decent court. To spend time on the court, you have to be part of the family and invited to the house, so when you get that nice roll where the ball hits the front of the rim, kicks to the backboard, and drops through the twine you call that the “family roll”, a gift you buy into when you join the family.

For three years now, we’ve been meeting on this court, the three of us and It’s always the thing I look forward to the most each year. I love everything about it; the crisp country evenings, the sound of the ball on the pavement and the cracking open of new beers, the shit-talking we hurl at each other with brutal and unrelenting tact, and the level of drunkenness we reach while having mostly full control over our motor skills. Sometimes we get an audience from the sisters when they decide to check on us, but mostly its just the guys, lining up ridiculous, far-fetched shots as the sun goes down over open pastures and cheering if the ball sails through the net or jeering when it misses terribly. And beer, lots of beer, bought before Sunday because in the South, all the liquor stores are closed for Jesus.