Unrequited Love
Scenes from a Basketball Girlhood
On a Saturday morning in eighth grade, my mother drove me to a university in Irvine for an all-day scrimmage session. The air in the car felt thick with anxiety, cut occasionally by my mother’s hollow words of encouragement. We could have been driving to a funeral.
Basketball was serious to me — or at least it became serious in fifth grade, when my coach emailed my mother to say it was awesome that I had such a great attitude but that it was clear I was falling behind the other girls on the team — so my mother took it seriously as well. When I was as young as eight years old, she videotaped my Sunday night games on a grainy camcorder so that I could watch them to debrief and agree that yes, I did run kind of weird. Because I ran kind of weird, she enrolled me in community exercise classes to work on agility. She found different clinics and coaches across Orange County for me to try out. There was Evie, whom I called “Coach Angel” and who helped me with layups at a public park in La Palma. There was Roland, at Champion’s Quest, who told me he liked coaching Asians because they listened better. There was JT and KW who had me lay down on the gym floor and shoot at the ten-foot basket as I sat up. Then I grew out of clinics and found myself in the world of middle school club teams, a three-year arena in which red-faced fathers invest as much time and capital available to them to achieve the ultimate feat: their daughters making it onto their high school’s varsity team as a freshman. My mother and I first entered this territory through a team called Lady Panthers, and so began a month-long era where I spent my Friday nights jogging behind a herd of girls who all had matching uniforms, who already knew how to do the spider and dodge defenders with flawless spin moves, who did not introduce themselves to me. After feigning illness two weeks in a row, I freed myself from Lady Panthers by writing my mother a persuasive letter in which I threatened to run away from home. The organization behind this scrimmage session was our second try at club.
Outside the gym, I lined up against a cement wall with all the other girls. There were four coaches drafting their team for the scrimmage. I was far from the youngest or smallest, but I stood anxious as everyone else beside me was chosen to join teams. Usually, a drafting scenario ends after the first few rounds, with the leftovers gracefully sorted by chance, but in this case, they kept drafting to the very end. The end being me, of course. Later, when I managed to make a layup, the praise my coach gave me was tempered with the humiliation of being last pick. He made an example of me: wasn’t it so great that I still gave it my all and didn’t let the embarrassment or insecurity get to me?
I don’t think I was designed to play basketball. I suspect God made me with a lifetime of spreadsheets and dinner parties in mind. I’m not pushy or spontaneous or quick-thinking or large or loud. Once, when I was playing point guard, a coach requested a time out because I wasn’t calling out the plays loud enough. He told me he would take me out of the game if I didn’t spend the entirety of the 30 seconds shouting at the top of my lungs.
But if there is any virtue I possess, it’s persistence, which is maybe just a rebranding of some stubbornness I inherited from my mother. I am addicted to reversing rejection, and for me, rejection happens often. I apply to the same programs and competitions year after year. I took my driver’s license test three times. I am drawn to tasks that take time and care and practice. I have no trouble trying again and again.
With most activities, talent is helpful, but persistence is the magic ingredient, all you need to see improvement over time. When I was seventeen, I practiced the Moonlight Sonata’s third movement every single day for months until I could fly between the keys, the notes on the sheet music becoming less a reference than a shape to chart the dynamic trajectory of sound. I fell in love with physics, with the thrill of approaching problems in different ways until I got them right. I started writing more seriously, which meant editing more seriously, which meant going over the same sentences again and again until they almost started to seem clever.
I don’t know if the 10,000-hours-of-practice-for-mastery rule applies to sports. Even though I have practiced basketball several times a week for several hours at a time for most of my life, I still am filled with performance anxiety every time I hold the ball. When I was in high school, I perfected the free throw, but it didn’t matter because I never drew a foul. I was accurate enough with three pointers that my high school coach nicknamed me “Zone Killer.” None of the teams in our league played a zone.
Maybe it would have been easier to let go of basketball, to call it a wrap and go on with my life peacefully if I hadn’t fallen into its rubber grip at the tender age of five. I’ve been battling the sunk cost fallacy ever since. I started playing basketball when I was five years old because I was a fourth-generation Japanese American kid in Southern California; there’s not much explanation beyond that. Japanese American basketball leagues can be traced back to internment, as baseball and basketball were popular recreational activities for nisei in the World War II concentration camps my mother’s side of the family was sent to. My mother didn’t drop us off at Saturday Japanese school or take us to Obon celebrations, but as soon as we were an eligible age, she enrolled both my brother and me in the South East Youth Organization (SEYO) basketball league. As the small Orange County town we grew up in was mostly white, SEYO became the dominant social backdrop for our Japanese American identity formation. SEYO was my Asian American childhood.
Normally, in SEYO, kids start a team very young and grow up with them into adulthood. If everyone stays in the area, maybe the team will join an adult league and share a court for a lifetime. I started with a team called Sparks. I left it in fourth grade because my coach, my parent’s friend whom I called Uncle Ted, felt alienated by the organization it was associated with. It might have had something to do with the fact that he was Pilipino, not Japanese like the majority of the leadership. So, we joined Karly’s team; she invited me because we went to the same elementary school. She was also half Japanese, and from the ages 10–13, she was one of my best friends. In seventh grade, Karly joined a club team and eventually left the Shooting Stars because we were holding her back. Around the same time, she unsubscribed from my friendship, unfollowing me on Instagram because I posted too much and complaining to all our school friends that I was so bad at basketball, so slow, so awful at playing post. When we crossed paths again three years later, playing together for our high school’s team, she behaved courteously, as though she had never known me at all.
The Shooting Stars broke records as the worst team in a league that wasn’t competitive to begin with. We lost every game for a year straight — winter season, fall season, spring season and summer. After a surprising tournament win no one could have predicted, I ended up leaving this team too, because the team rep had been routinely icy to my mother for years. I moved to a team connected with an Asian American Presbyterian church. We wore purple uniforms and prayed together before every game. Instead of just feeling bad for losing, I could now also feel like a sinner when I cursed the refs in my head.
The “playing basketball” part of playing basketball was the worst aspect of SEYO. In between tournament games, various minivans took us to Hawaiian restaurants in the South Bay, the mall, or maybe Hometown Buffet. When I played for the Shooting Stars, we had a four-hour long kickoff meeting and holiday party each year in which all the teams would sit in the Buddhist church and eat Little Caesar’s Pizza and sushi dip. When we neared the end of middle school, tournaments offered dances in odd hotel venues with bad DJs and photo booths. I learned how to keep score and spent my entire Sunday at the gym each week, watching and tracking game after game, building up a rapport with the refs as we complained about the annoying parents. I worried the relationship we built would be broken at the end of the day when it was time for me to play my game, and my striped friends found out that I was better behind the table than on the court.
Throughout these years, I usually had one special basketball friend at a time — a friend whom I talked to after the games and made laugh as a consolation for being an unreliable teammate. After a while, we’d become less close, or maybe I’d leave the team, or maybe they disappeared for reasons I couldn’t explain. There, of course, was Karly, who introduced me to late 2000s radio hits because my car mostly played worship music. There was Shayla, who looked better in skinny jeans than I did and made my birthday cards by hand. There was Lori, who was going to be at least six feet tall and helped me understand how to use Tumblr. Tiana was a couple years younger, but she laughed at my jokes and tried to make me feel included even though Cara and Annie didn’t like me very much.
My mother thinks maybe my brother doesn’t identify as Japanese too strongly because the first experience he had with other Asian kids was rejection — being put on the bench. There were plenty of mixed kids like us in the league — there had to be, as the Japanese American community has one of the highest rates of outmarriage — but I imagined they were too busy making layups and getting steals and bringing the best snacks after games to feel self-conscious about it. I held my mother’s hand in the Japanese market countless times as we picked out shelly senbei and passion fruit drinks, but somehow we were always outdone by the show-offs who brought in full catering orders of teriyaki beef and spam musubi.
In high school ball, after one of my earliest games, my coach pulled me aside and told me I was going to play a lot of minutes that season. I felt giddy as my parents took me to get a celebratory frappuccino afterwards. I didn’t end up playing that many minutes, really. Even though I had played for ten years of my life up to that point, girls who were just introduced to the game improved and improved quickly. I was told I needed to get faster, so I tried to get into shape, losing about twenty pounds in the process. But then I was too small, too easily pushed around, too fragile. A team only needs so many point guards.
Basketball was never just basketball, though. That was the problem. When I was younger, I didn’t feel very good at being a girl, so I used to cover my face and wear big baggy clothing because trying and failing to be feminine would be more embarrassing than rejecting it out right. Maybe it’s an affirmation of another stereotype, but the fact that I was bad at basketball felt like I failed to correctly reject being a girl also. In elementary school, I had the look of a tomboy without any of the athletic affinity to back it up.
Basketball was about making connections in an Asian American community from which I felt largely detached. Basketball was also somehow about Christianity: when I went to a Bible camp associated with the same Presbyterian church, the same kids who knew exactly when to raise their hands and close their eyes to the worship music were the same kids who won the annual three-on-three tournament. Basketball was about being the funny one, or the loud one, or the butt of the joke so that I could be forgiven for my many turnovers and loved by my teammates anyway. Basketball was about the praise my coaches poured on me for losing weight, and for losing the weight so quickly. Basketball was about unrequited love. Basketball was about feeling unlovable.
To perfectly shoot a free throw, first you must be fifteen years old and hate your body. You must return from school every day at 2:15 P.M. sharp, eat a puny sea salt chocolate-flavored granola bar, sit in bed, and look at pictures of food for two hours with all the guilt and hunger of a church boy discovering pornography. After you feel you have been punished enough, go to the front yard and practice shooting for at least two hours. Warm up with some layups. Shoot 20 jump shots in at least five different locations. Set yourself at the spot you have marked as approximately free throw distance. Make at least 50. Feel like that’s not enough. Do another 50. Don’t allow yourself to stop until you have made 10 or maybe 20 in a row. Even then, don’t feel too satisfied.
Go to sleep each night feeling a little hungry. If you dream about basketball, it will probably be something like you forgot your jersey and have to play the whole game in your underwear. If that’s the case, play anyway, play with your whole heart. Stay planted a few inches behind the three-point line, ready to shoot and make the buzzer-beater that wins the whole game. The crowd will be so delighted they won’t care what you’re wearing or not wearing. Look at the scoreboard and soak it all in. Your teammates are thankful; you’ve never let them down. In dreams, they will never leave you. In dreams, you can always win.
