COURT WIZARD
When I was about fourteen years old I discovered the game of basketball and quickly became obsessed. My dad was the head custodian at an all black elementary school in Pontiac, Michigan where I first saw the grace and athleticism of the players. Here were the superheroes that I’d been reading about in comics in real life…and I wanted to be one of them.
When I was alone in the gym I’d quickly grab a ball and try to emulate some of the things I’d seen. I remember teaching myself how to shoot a layup by suddenly grabbing the ball, jumping in the air and throwing it at the basket. Learning was a slow process. Mostly I played at the gym where my dad worked since I lived in the sticks of Auburn Heights and there weren’t a lot of neighborhood basketball courts I could play on. And with Michigan weather playing outside was often limited.
Over the next couple of years I started to play in occasional pickup games of one on one or two on two. My friend Ralph Landry explained the basic rules to me…but Ralph’s ideas about fouling were pretty liberal. Having never played organized sports I had no idea about conditioning so I was never in great shape athletically.
In my senior year I went out for my high school basketball team, and it was pretty much a disaster. We had a terrible team. We had one great basketball player who was a junior but in trouble with the coach. Our senior star was a good athlete, but never in great basketball shape. While he was 6’1”, at 5”10” I had the same wingspan, so what height he had wasn’t an asset. Our best senior athlete wasn’t a great basketball player. The junior star was the only player with a true jump shot. We were short, and not very good. And I was the worst of them all. I think high school basketball was the biggest failure I’ve ever experienced in my life.
The only reason coach kept me on the team was because I knew how to run the clock for the JV games. The highlight of the season for me was during an intersquad scrimmage when I hit a long set shot from beyond the top of the key. Coach blew the whistle and stopped practice and congratulated me and then asked where that came from. My only asset was that I could shoot a little bit and I had a great vertical leap. But I quickly learned if you didn’t have the skills and the athleticism needed for the rest of the game you were not going to get many opportunities to shoot.
While most of the guys I played ball with in high school lost their love of the game fairly soon, I just became more obsessed. I got in great shape, learned how to shoot a jump shot and make some nifty moves around the basket and generally had a great time playing in as many pickup games as I could find…or just spending hours in the gym honing my shooting and ball handling skills.
Late in my college experience I was in the Oakland University Gym when the new basketball coach, Gene Bolden, came by and asked me if I’d try out for the team. While I demurred, I was pretty impressed, until I realized he was asking everyone in the gym the same thing. Still…. While I was never a great basketball player, I did get to be a very good one.
After college I coached a couple years at the middle school level, but it never had the same thrill for me as being in the actual games. Over the years as a gym rat I saw some pretty remarkable players: the amazing Russell bothers, Frank and Campy, Dan Fife, Tom Zaligaris, Sam Brady, Jon Manning , Tim Megge and so many more…including baseball star Mike Squires. (I only knew him as a great athlete that played in a lot of pickup games with us; he once complimented me by saying if our team played a game to 11 and he made sure I got 12 shots, we’d win. I only found out about his fabulous career with the White Sox later.)
So Court Wizard is love song for the game and and my high school experience. This one is for Tony Bellisario, Mike Dean, Ralph, Larry Walter, Gary Roediger, Randy Polasek, and the hundreds of others I played in games with from Pontiac, to Detroit, to Nashville, to Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, to Los Angeles, and even Aukland, New Zealand. That’s where I played in my last full court game at the age of 60 with the crew of the Narnia films. While I didn’t do much in the game I did discover I was the talk of the studio the next day. One of my true disappointments in life was that I never got to go back and play in front of the old high school crowd.
And a disclaimer to all my old friends. While there are elements in the story that are taken directly from my life, the characters are always conglomerations of the folks I knew and played the game with. While Lou has some of my characteristics, I certainly was never the skilled star he was. Lou is actually based on equal parts of Tony, Tim Megge, Bill Bradley and Pete Maravich. So if you think you see yourself in the story and you’re doing something particularly nasty, don’t take it personal…I was probably only using your likeness and the bad stuff was all based on someone else.
Best, Mike Vosburg
Next week, Lou's saga continues in his senior year.
