In case you don’t know of the game HORSE, let me explain. It all goes down on the basketball court. You go first. You try a shot and if you don’t make it, it’s my turn. If you do make it, though, I have to make the same shot you hit (from the same spot, doing the same types of things, etc). If I then miss that shot, I get an H. The first person to spell HORSE loses.)
This game is the great equalizer. Whether you’re very young and agile (ahem) or getting older and less agile, you can always shoot the basketball with no one defending you.
So last summer this was exactly what my dad and I were doing. I’m 26, he’s 58, two very competitive guys who happen to love each other very much, so there’s a lot of ‘Are you ready? Do you need to warm up a little more?’ ‘We should play one-on-one after, Dad, cuz it would be fun to dunk on you,’ and other such attempts at gentlemanly humiliation and intimidation.
When we play, I’m always amazed that he can shoot so well for someone who does so like twice a year. He has a weird shot; I guess it would be called a set-shot, and thus is utterly and completely useless in a real game of basketball, as it would be blocked every single time. My shot, which is a jump-shot carefully styled after circa-1991 Michael Jordan, looks beautiful to the person I imagine watching me when I play alone (like when you do an Australian accent and it sounds just right to you, you know?) and never gets blocked, and goes in sometimes, too.
I insisted that Dad go first; he missed a free throw. I took him on a tour of the more standard shots in the driveway: The free throw, the three-pointer, the slightly-behind-the-basket, shoot-from-the-grass shot, the one-handed shot where I call swish. Everything was going well: He had HO or HOR by this point, but then he caught up by making some weird shots and by my missing a couple three-pointers. Then I hit this one one-handed shot I do from inside the garage, made it easily, told him I didn’t think it should count, and when my sister, who was watching the whole thing, said ‘Why not?’ I said it was because the shot only works with your left hand, and he’s right-handed. See? I said, and made it again. I think this was what crossed the line, what made him say to himself that there was no way he was going to lose. He accused me of trying to psyche him out, and I pled guilty.
A few minutes later, I had HORS, and he had HORS. We only do this once in a while, so it gets very, very competitive. This is my father who taught me how to bowl by making me imagine I was in Madison Square Garden, my father who coached me through the baseball game of my ten-year-old life, when I struck out the side to end a game, by guiding me through visualizations of stakes and crowds that were not actually present, that were never going to be present. This is my father who, in spectral form, makes it so that when it gets really busy at the restaurant I work at, and everyone else feels stressed out and ‘at work,’ I feel like I’m performing or playing a sport…I’m trying to explain this so that you understand that it was very, very important that at 26 I beat my 58 year-old dad at horse. If that in itself seems a sort of humiliating goal, then remember that HORSE is not ageist to the extent that most sports are, and that my dad has a good shot and is a real competitor when he wants to be. At any rate, there we were, evened up at HORS.
One of the most difficult shots in the driveway at 5414 S Piccadilly Circle in West Bloomfield, Michigan, is the one where you face away from the basket and try to get the basketball to bounce nicely off the chimney and into the basket. This is the kind of shot that is practiced for years and years in order that it be ready for use in a game, and I decided to go for it. What a story it would make to the family and friends if it worked. I thought I remembered the place on the chimney that you have to hit for the shot to work, so I eyed it up behind me turned around and launched. In and out. Fuck. Now I have to pray that Dad misses whatever shot he tries.
So he goes toward the chimney, laughing, and with me saying, ‘Uh, Dad, you know you don’t have to try that shot, right? It’s only if I make it…’ ‘I know.’ So he lines it up, bounces the ball a couple times, rolls it off the chimney and straight through the hoop. Both of us start running around the driveway cracking up, and by the time it settled down, I had to make a shot that was always fun, always a risk, always mine, and never, ever required . I don’t think Dad had ever tried that shot before, and I couldn’t believe that he had made it. Needless to say, with all that running through my head, I missed, and if you think it any consolation that what I did after was to have a plate of a salmon burger, french fries and a caesar’s salad, with a glass of wine, from one of the nicer restaurants in the area, bought for me by this same father, well: I would much rather have won the game, and taken him out to dinner, than to be reminded that there are some people who get really good at things when they obsessively practice them; that there are others who somehow find a way to win, whatever’s going on….And that if I am at times an example of the former, it would often be much more fulfilling to somehow find myself one of the latter.
Montreal, 2005
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