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Friday, Nov 21, 2008
Afraid he'd blow it, my ex-husband didn't want to coach our daughter. He changed his mind -- and we all won.
Dec 7, 2005 | When my husband and I bought our old farmhouse, only three blocks from where we'd both been born, I fell in love with the driveway. It was gravel and dirt, lined with the original cement curbs. I raked the cigarette butts and lug nuts from the gravel, and my husband lined up his tools on the curbing.
It was our first driveway. He held court there in his discarded barber chair, while his friends and brothers worked on old engines and talked continual smack. A friend bragged how he used to bring down starlings with a slingshot and cook them in the field, and a brother-in-law laughed about the door to his Pinto, stolen by Midnight Auto Supply, two friends who lifted car parts on order.
But eventually, all the men mentioned the same thing.
"When you gonna put up a hoop for your kids?" they'd say to my husband.
"When you havin' kids?" they'd say to me.
He'd been a basketball star, a pretty big name in Riverside, where we were both born and raised. I'd met him in the ninth grade, hanging out after his summer league basketball games, where I'd wandered over from the tennis courts after practicing my backhand for the tennis team.
Through high school, we were a couple, and I kept the books for varsity basketball. Dwayne was 6-foot-4, 190, a good size for a power forward back in 1978. His jumper was low-trajectory, but it went in, and he had a huge wingspan for blocking shots and pulling down boards.
Our senior year, we went to the finals for Southern California, and he made second team for Riverside County. He went off to junior college in Monterey, where he was a juco All-Star. I went to USC, played only intramural sports, and became a sportswriter and editor. Dwayne moved up to a Cal State school, played for a coach he didn't get along with, and a team that faltered into a losing season. He came home to Riverside.
We got married in 1983, and he began working as a correctional officer at a juvenile facility. I began teaching. We bought the old farmhouse, with the gravel driveway, and he put up the homemade plywood backboard and iron hoop before the first baby was born.
But we didn't have sons. We had three daughters, we hit the hard part of life, and we got divorced. Not suddenly but steadily, the driveway became a girl place, with skates and scooters and bikes replacing my ex-husband's engines and spare tires. But our middle child, not the tallest but the one spare and mean and small like me, turned out to be a serious ballplayer -- a natural. She did have big hands, a long wingspan, and speed. By the time Delphine was 10, she'd been holding her own for two years against boys in YMCA and roughneck Park and Rec ball. She needed a new hoop.
I took down the old backboard, and cried a little in private. My neighbor put up a new one with a breakaway net, and then he poured a concrete driveway.
For the next two years, I spent hours out there guarding her while she brought the ball down the long driveway, aiming for the chalk marks where I told her she should take off for her layups. I tried to trim the nodding English roses, but their reaching thorny branches necessitated her development of a sweet head fake.
"Fifty layups!" her dad would call that summer, revving the engine of his truck after dropping the girls off. "Then put your right hand in your pocket and dribble past your mom left-handed."
"Anytime you want to step in here," I would holler back, as she was getting taller and faster. He'd just grin and drive away.
Almost every day, I was in the driveway chasing my daughter at top speed while she fended me off and launched her jumper. She practiced a long-range three-pointer by standing in our next door neighbor's driveway and shooting over the block wall. But one day, I held the ball while she stood with eyes gleaming under a scrim of tears and said to me, "They don't want me on their team cause I'm a girl."
The boys on her teams wouldn't pass her the ball. She was too good, and they didn't like it. The boys on the opposing teams had taken to gashing open her lip with elbows, when the ref wasn't looking, and when she got knocked down, one boy stomped on her hand.
She played the rest of the game with a fractured finger. She only got angrier, and better.
But that day, I knew I had only 10 seconds to decide -- comfort her, or arm her.
"It's always gonna be like this." She turned her head so I wouldn't see the gleam. "You have two choices. Get sad and be a victim, or get mad and kick their butts."
She took the ball and shouldered past me for an aggressive layup, then started shooting free throws with angry precision. With my toe, I nudged the big V-shaped dent in the old curbing, the mark of a missed hammer years ago when someone tried to pound a U-joint into submission. Then she passed me the ball, but she said, "I wish Daddy would coach."
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