Hoop Nightmares

I stand there under the basket, alone, isolated, watching the action at the opposite end of the court, instead of being in it. Soon I am called back into action as the basketball arches high across the court to land awkwardly in my arms, or to bounce short. If that happens then I have to chase after it, or put my twelve-year old body in front of it, hoping to control its bouncing before it’s too late. I turn to the basket, and try to take a moment to settle down and picture the ball falling through the hoop as Coach taught us. My hands move up, pushing the ball into an arc, trying to will it into the basket. My cheeks burn as I hear a CLANG! instead of the SWISH that would finally signal a successful attempt.
 
I scramble to recover the ball, again sending it through the air, again the magic sound eluding me. I am instead rewarded with a thump as the ball hits the backboard and careens off to the left, sending me running after it yet again. I can hear the crowd yelling and cheering, but not what they’re saying. I’m amazed that I have not burst into flame yet, my ears and face so red from imagining the laughter, the ridicule, the pity that must be emanating from them.
 
Finally, mercifully, the other players catch up and someone takes the ball from me, or rebounds one of my endless failures, and adds to his own statistics, or dribbles back down to the other basket. Once again I stand, forgotten, forgettable, glancing at the scoreboard. I don’t check the score, because the game was over mathematically halfway through the last quarter. I’m checking the time, not to see if I might be able to get another chance to score my first points of the season, here in the last game, but to see how much longer I must endure this. I watch the seconds tick by impossibly slow, wondering if the timekeepers are in on it too, trying to prolong my suffering.
 
With a few seconds left, we get a technical foul, and Coach calls for me to take it, thinking he is being kind in trying to ensure that I end my basketball experience on a positive note. He doesn’t realize how cruel he’s being, showing everyone how uncoordinated I am, focusing every eye in the gym on the pathetic boy struggling to make even one single basket. At last, after yet another pointless effort, the buzzer sounds, freeing me from this torture, allowing me to skulk off to the locker room, and back to anonymity.