Photo by TJ Dragotta on Unsplash
Many of the great basketball players have had rhyming nicknames like Wilt the Stilt, Earl the Pearl, or Dean the Dream. Although even I would never compare myself with those immortals, as a teenager I was known by the alliterative – if not rhyming – appellation of Steve the Shot.
The only problem was that in a game of big men sprinting down the court and then pulling up for deadly jump shots, I was the last high school basketball player to live and die by shooting fifteen- and twenty-foot set shoots. For those of you too young to have even heard of this shot, it’s quite simple. You stand there holding the ball chest-high, draw a bead on the basket, and swish!
For me, set shots were almost as easy as shooting fouls. I would hit three-quarters of my shots, even with an opponent waving his hands three inches from my face. If you look up the records of all the New York City high school players from my era, not one of them came even close to my record for accuracy.
But our high school coach – once an All-American college basketball player -- would tell me that not only had the game passed me by, but that the set shot was obsolete years before I was born. The man clearly knew what he was talking about since he had taken our team to the finals of the city championship more often than any other coach in New York.
He did keep me on the team, but about the only chance I got to play was during what’s known as “garbage time,” when we were in a blowout. “Steve,” he would say, “You’re too short and you’re too slow, so even if you’re the greatest shooter in the world, you’re never going to make it in this game.
I suppose I should have been grateful that he kept me on the team, but he warned me that no college team would want me. I wanted to prove him wrong, but the only team that showed any interest was a tiny school in Ohio that had fewer than 200 students. They couldn’t give me a scholarship, but they managed to cobble together a package of student aid, some loans and a promise to be a starter for my entire college career. It was an offer I could not afford to refuse.
Believe it or not, I quickly began getting tons of press coverage because of my prolific scoring. I took half our shots and made three-quarters of them.
Newspaper reporters and even TV guys came from all over the country to cover my anachronistic shooting skills. When I scored sixty-three points against Sitting Bull College – and if you don’t believe there is such a school, go ahead and google it – our team became America’s team – even if such a team played only against such rivals as Slippery Rock, Stanley Kaplan University, and the Bible College of the Ozarks.
But as we know, all good things come to an end. After a four-year career in which I set seasonal and career scoring records for players at the nation’s unranked colleges, I finally graduated. And all I had to show for it was a stack of newspaper clippings and tens of thousands of dollars in student debt.
When I came home to Brooklyn, just a few of my friends were still around, and no one even called me “Steve the Shot” anymore. My career was over and I needed to get serious about not just paying off my student loans, but thinking about what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
My parents were glad to have me at home again, but I knew that they were too polite to even ask what my plans were. And if they had, I don’t know what I could have told them.
To stay in some kind of shape, I decided to join one of those rag-tag teams of former high school ballplayers that essentially played for beer money. But I got the shock of my life. None of them wanted me. I was tempted to come back with all my clippings and throw them in their faces, but what would that get me?
I don’t know if it was worry or simple genetics, but my hair started going gray. In an effort to keep my youthful appearance, I shaved my head. Then I realized that that made me look still older. One of the black guys I had played with in high school kidded me that that hairstyle worked only for black guys who were going bald.
“You just joined the wrong race, Shot.”
Then, one day, it suddenly hit me: I knew immediately that I had not only found a way to make a good living, but that I would also extract some measure of revenge for how I had been treated – not to mention how unjustly my talents had been overlooked.
Brooklyn has dozens of playgrounds and in most of them there are plenty of teenagers who are so sure of their talents, they are always looking to play basketball for money. They’d play one-on-one, two against two, and sometimes three-man basketball.
I liked one-on-one because there was virtually no way I could lose. In the customary game the first to get ten baskets was the winner. And the guy who scores last takes out the ball. So, if one guy got very hot, he might win ten-zip, ten-one or ten-two.
Usually, we’d play for a couple of dollars, but I had heard there were games where the stakes were considerably higher. Some guys could walk away with close to a thousand bucks.
I knew that I had two big things going for me. My great set shot and how my opponents perceived me. Remember the old saying from the sixties – don’t trust anyone over thirty? Well, let’s put it this way: No one trusted my basketball talents – not to mention their suspicions that I was probably pushing thirty.
I decided to start small. I’d play teenaged kids for just a buck or two a game. I quickly realized that I needed to brush up on my defensive skills. Some of the taller guys would bull their way to the basket. I quickly figured out how to distract them by constantly calling offensive fouls.
In playground basketball you call a foul by yelling, “I got it!” All that means is that play is stopped for a few seconds. Then it resumes pretty much where you left off. But I found that I could upset the rhythm of my opponent and also make him think twice about bulling his way to the basket for an easy layup.
Still, my main weapon remained my set shot. No one could believe my accuracy. They’d just stand there, several feet away from me, daring me to shoot. And I did, again, and again, and again.
It’s pretty hard to beat a guy who could routinely hit more than three-quarters of his shots from around the circle. Especially such an old out-of-shape guy.
I knew that I couldn’t keep playing in the same four or five playgrounds every day since it wouldn’t take long for the kids to be on to me. And besides, most of them couldn’t afford to bet more than a few bucks on a game. But luckily, I had discovered the private school crowd – essentially a bunch of spoiled rich white boys.
These fellas almost all had highly inflated opinions of their basketball talents. Still, had I been a tall black guy with flashy moves, they would never have taken me on.
By now I had developed an effective financial strategy. I’d flash a wad of bills before the first game. And I’d make sure – win or lose – that first game was pretty close. Then, I’d offer to double the stakes. After just four or five games, I’d walk away with six or eight hundred bucks.
These private school kids loved playing two-on-two. As they caught on that I was a deadly set shot shooter, my team-mate would gladly keep feeding me the ball.
I became friendly with a few of them. We’d hustle games together with other groups of private school boys. Soon I could count on a steady income of over a thousand dollars a day.
I decided to let my hair grow in. At the same time, I stopped shaving. Just as I suspected, when my beard started growing in, it was white. One morning, when I looked in the mirror I saw an old friend I had once read about. His name was Rip Van Winkle.
My new appearance really helped my image and boosted my earnings. Who could resist taking money from this crazy old man? On some really good days, I was winning as much as two thousand dollars.
Then I made a very smart business decision. Since I no longer needed the money, I would preserve my career by carefully picking my games and my playing partners. By playing just on weekends, I could extend my career. Indeed, I found myself playing for the fun of it even more than for the money.
Who would have thought that my playing days would last much longer than those of my old high school teammates, several of whom actually went on to careers in the NBA and still others who played in the European professional basketball leagues? And what would my old coach have thought?
But time passes quickly when you’re having fun. In my case, that time was measured over decades. One day I woke up and realized that I would soon hit the big five-oh. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could keep playing.
I had already made some adjustments. I scaled down my bets and was once again playing for just a few dollars a game. I was even losing a bit of my competitive edge. And I began to think seriously about a life after basketball.
One day, after I mopped the floor with a couple of teenage kids, we sat around chewing the fat. Reggie said he’d like to ask me a personal question “if that would be OK.”
“Sure, you can ask me anything.”
He looked at his friend, Chas, and then he asked me how I had managed to keep in such great shape.
“Well,” I replied, “I do three things every night.”
I saw that I had their attention. I guess they really wanted to know my secret. Maybe, when they were as old as I was, they could be just like me.
“I know I may not look to you like someone who indulges, but I do like to have an occasional drink.”
“What do you drink?” asked Reggie.
“I happen to like vodka. I drink a fifth of it every night.”
“Seriously?”
“Of course, Reggie!”
“Wow! So, what’s the second thing you do?” asked Chas.
“I don’t get much sleep. I’m lucky to get more than two or three hours.”
“That’s amazing!”
“Amazing, but true.”
“And the third thing you do every night?” asked Reggie.
“I sleep with a woman – and sometimes more than one woman.”
The two of them just shook their heads. Was this old guy just putting them on – or was he actually being straight with them?
Finally, Reggie wanted to know if it would be OK to ask just one more personal question.
“Of course.”
“Do you mind my asking how old you are?”
“Of course not!”
I watched their faces, letting them wait for my answer. Then, after clearing my throat, I looked them straight in the eye.
“Just a few weeks ago I turned twenty-three.”
A recovering economist, Steve Slavin earns a living writing math and economics books. The third volume of his short stories, To the City, with Love, has recently been published.