Everyone Plays

In Benchwarmers Basketball, no kid sits out

- Joe Bock

 EVERY DAY, THE HUMILIATION BEGAN anew. At the Jewish high school I went to in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, we didn’t have a gym teacher. For PE, we all lined up, as if facing a firing squad. The two most athletic boys picked teams for basketball.

The best players were chosen first, a rigid caste system that seemed passed down by Moses. I looked on, hoping God would make another miracle happen and let me not be the last boy chosen.

“Not him,” I heard the other boys whisper. “Not Joe.” It shattered my self confidence. Through four years of high school, I never touched the ball.

I didn’t blame the guys. I was a total klutz. The ultimate bench warmer. Hopeless at any kind of manual dexterity. I was a whiz at math, but figuring out the area under a parabola wasn’t going to win me any friends. Not like basketball could. I loved the speed, the back-and-forth, the smoothness of a jump shot and the drives to the basket. But my Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood of Orthodox Jews had no courts to even practice on. I was never going to be one of the jocks. During senior year, I took a job aptitude test. The results: accountant or engineer. If only I could be a gym teacher… If I were in charge, I’d make sure that kids like me weren’t excluded. But to be a coach, first you had to be an athlete. As if that would ever happen…