I met Lee in kindergarten. He liked the Cowboys. I liked the Redskins. It’s always been that way. Still is.
Other than that, very little has ever separated us.
We grew up two blocks from each other. We played together constantly. In my backyard, we played one-on-one basketball for hours. They used to say if Lee and I played 100 games one-on-one, we’d each win 50. That wasn’t true. Lee won more often. In his backyard, we played one-on-one baseball with a dead rubber ball and a taped-up black wiffle bat. The tape made it heavier. I’ve never seen a bat like that since. I bet Lee still has it. Lee was better than me so he batted lefty to make it even. He still won. We played one-on-one football in the snow on Dr. Hawke’s front lawn next door to my house. I still say no one could beat us in two-on-two street football. (Though my other next-door neighbor Jerry Hillard would be the first to make my Street Football Hall of Fame.)
Upon awakening, all Lee and I wanted to do was play games. We organized games with other kids. We rode our bikes to places where we heard that other kids were playing. We hung around older kids because we wanted to play in their games. That was a high honor. And if no one else wanted to play or there was no place to play, we invented games.
We played pick-up games of every type for every sport: home run derby, pitcher’s hand baseball, run-down, playground basketball (winner stays on, always), tackle nerf basketball, and on and on and on. We organized our own games, chose sides, kept score, enforced rules and settled disputes -- without supervision. We’d play any variation of any sport just to play.
In junior high school Lee and I played on three basketball teams: our public school team, a CYO team and a traveling team that some parents put together. Traveling teams were unheard of back then, unless you’d heard of us.
Lee and I went on to become the starting backcourt for our high school for three years. That never stopped us from coming back to the blacktop in my backyard just for some one-on-one … or some H-O-R-S-E or Twenty-One or Knockout or Taps or who could make more hook shots from each side of the basket using a best of five hook shots from straight-on as a tie-breaker.
Now, whenever I get out to Cincinnati (and that’s a pretty big whenever), we play two-on-two with his teenage boys in their driveway. That’s after epic wiffle ball in the backyard. They still can’t beat the old guys.
Today there are hundreds of organized sports leagues and scholastic athletic programs in New York City for almost anything a kid, 0-18, wants to play. From squash to basketball to double-dutch, thousands of coaches work with tens of thousands of kids supported by hundreds of thousands of parents and family. And I watch them. I go to the games, the clinics, the gyms, the ball fields and look at their faces. I know that look.
You can take them out the uniforms, take away the trophies, remove the referees, coaches, trainers and it all comes down to the same thing -- a thing that can’t be given or taken away (or bought). It rises up out of the same place that makes you want to see how many times you can skip a rock across a pond. It’s free. It’s in you. Anyone can have it and you can have it whenever you feel like it. Whether it’s skateboarding, softball, soccer or spud, you don’t need much. Get up, look around, pick up a ball and just play. That’s how it was for me and Lee, and we didn’t turn out half bad. Well, I’ll speak for myself. He’s still a Cowboy’s fan.