Having A Ball

For Angelica Baker, summer camp at Michael Jordan Flight School meant going one-on-one with greatness.

WHEN I WAS TEN YEARS old, I attended a basketball camp on a sprawling university campus in southern California. I was certainly no athlete. My nose was constantly in an Agatha Christie book, and I was more or less legally blind without the new contact lenses I despised.

But I loved basketball. It was the only televised event my family watched together. Each June we’d sit on my parents’ bed, in the one room in our Los Angeles house with air-conditioning, to follow the NBA playoffs. On family vacations, my younger brother and I would pass The Kids’ World Almanac of Basketball back and forth until its blue paperback spine began to disintegrate.

Our family’s origin story revolved around my parents’ courtship during the infamous Lakers–Celtics rivalry of the eighties—my father lived for years in Boston, and my mother is a lifelong Californian. But by that summer, we were a house newly divided. Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls had just beaten the Utah Jazz, my father’s team, and he insisted that Jordan was “overrated.” The rest of us, like most other Americans, unapologetically believed that Jordan was the greatest player in the world.

Michael Jordan Flight School, as our camp was called, promised daily appearances from the great man himself, who had established the program a couple of years earlier. I had never been to sleepaway camp, and I was incredibly awkward around strangers. But my parents reassured me that I would make new friends. On the first day, I struggled to look like I was having fun as I filed into the gym with the rest of the campers. We all sat down cross-legged on the floor, waiting. And then Michael Jordan entered the room.