In the spring of 1978, I moved to Durham, North Carolina. My reasons for having done so seem dubious in retrospect. It was not unlike when I went to Lexington, Kentucky the year before. Both were southern college towns—the University of Kentucky in the case of Lexington and Duke University in Durham. In those footloose days, I saw nothing wrong with going somewhere, getting a blue-collar job, making some friends and just seeing what might happen.
What I remember most clearly about the eight months I spent in Durham was playing basketball. There was a park, the name of which I have forgotten, not far from my home with two courts, and they were seldom empty. You could always find a game, whether full-court or the half-court version which I preferred. Three-on-three, half-court basketball. If you make it, you take it—which means when a team scored a basket, it retained the ball. Games went to 15 points (one point for a goal), and fouls were almost never called. I suppose there was an unspoken agreement that with sufficient adherence to the rules, we did not need to call fouls.
Would that it were unnecessary to speak of racial matters, but I must. I am of European-American descent, and all of my fellow hoopsters at that park in Durham were black. I would never have gone there if I had doubts about my ability to play basketball or handle myself in the sometimes macho give-and-take that goes with it. I do not wish to make sweeping generalizations, but who can deny that black people tend to play basketball well? The briefest glance at pro, college or high school games attests to the fact. I hate to get into an us-versus-them thing, but they are usually better than us.* So naturally, some of the guys were skeptical when I first showed up.
*Many examples would suffice, but one is that the gold–medal winning 2008 U.S. Olympic basketball team did not feature a single European American.
Lest it sound as if I fancy my younger self Jerry West, Rick Barry and Pete Maravich rolled into one, I do not. I played some in high school but my aspirations were dashed because of a back operation in 1970. I recovered from that and was a fairly regular participant in pickup games at Gregory Gymnasium during my UT years. I was in my mid-20s and had been involved in sports since boyhood. I could play the game.
Even so, I found that when on the court with guys of African descent, I tended to play better. If none of them were awestruck at my basketball skills, they knew I belonged. Whether it was shooting the ball, passing it or playing defense, I contributed to the success of whatever team I was on. I truly enjoyed dribbling, making a move, and lofting a shot that went through the net. (I had no qualms about using the backboard, either.) Or mixing it up with the bigger boys. Or getting a rebound and passing the ball to a teammate for a quick score. My teams did not always win, but we won a lot. The winners stayed on the court and faced the next team, while the losers had to sit for a while.
I usually stayed at the park for two hours at a time, and the workouts I got were quite vigorous. There were some rough guys and a fair amount of yakking, but I do not recall a single instance in which I was treated badly or with disrespect. I think this goes back to what I mentioned before—if you can play the game, you are welcomed. If not, however, you should probably go elsewhere. I sometimes looked around and wondered where the other European Americans were: “Damn, I’m the only one here!”
I lived upstairs in an old house with some Duke grad students, and sometimes we would pile into my 1967 Ford station wagon and travel across the city to a different park. It was mixed but heavily black. I knew I did well, and that was confirmed later when we were driving home as some of my buddies made comments like, “Wow, Richard, you can really play.” I usually deflected their kind words by saying I had my biorhythms going that day. Such a response was made with the tacit understanding that biorhythms do not exist and are a lot of pseudoscientific baloney.
I was in Durham when I had the only serious injury of my basketball “career.” This time, it was not on a hardscrabble outdoor court but indoors, in a gym on the Duke campus. Since I had a 44-inch vertical leap—OK, I exaggerate slightly—there was always some danger of hurting an ankle. I came down and landed on an opponent’s foot, tearing ligaments in my left ankle. I should have known to get some ice on it immediately, but I did not. That slowed my recuperation considerably. Even now, more than 30 years later, I sometimes feel it.
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