I am not an athlete. I do love sports though. I just downloaded using Lucy’s modem with unlimited internet the Steelers and Ravens game from January. In college I went to about sixty basketball games and only missed about four home football games. I am asked a lot what game is my favorite and I tell them golf. Every time that I tell someone that I like golf I hope that they will play it too so maybe we could play together, but that hasn’t happened yet. In elementary school I played little league and would never swing and when I was in the outfield I would sit on the ground and pick dandelions. In middle school I played one season of football. The daily practice killed me. I really had no idea how to play football even at the end of the season. I didn’t even know the rules until I started watching it in high school. In high school I played the base drum as well as other assorted percussion instruments in the marching band and I was also a boy scout. I learned a lot in boy scouts including a love for hiking, but I spent a lot of hiking trips at the back and even alone because I couldn’t keep up with everyone else when we hit those hills.
Last weekend Mulindi visited Rushaki on Saturday for a field day. Rushaki is the school where Lucy works. I was told that I would be playing basketball, also that I needed to bring my camera. Because I work for the school and own a camera I have become the schools photographer. It is easy to feel like I’m being taken advantage of, but I realize that cameras are rare here so I’m just the friend of convenience that they never had before. No different than if I was to ask my friend to help change the oil on my car because he knows something about fixing cars (that is if I had ever owned a car). All the same I still don’t like it when people ask me if they can have my camera or computer or to give them pictures but that’s because I don’t know how to explain that I can’t print them.
After they told me I would be playing basketball with them I kept getting asked if I knew how to play. I told them yes and they would respond with “we will win.” I don’t exude confidence on the court by any means so I don’t know where they got the idea that having a big uncoordinated white guy on their team would give them the win. I told Lucy about this and she expressed what they were thinking by saying that having an American on your team is like having an NBA player. I on the other hand was thinking about all of my experience of playing ball in America that I don’t stand a chance playing with all these black guys. I’m pretty bad among white guys.
I thought that the game would be the teachers of Mulindi versus the teachers of Rushaki, but students were playing too. Before we started I could already tell that we were going to lose because other than everyone thinking that I would be their best player, my team was taking pictures while the other team was doing layup drills. When we did start the coach asked me which position I was and I told him I could play center, but the positions that they were using were more like soccer than basketball positions. There were two “defenders” under the hoop. The center was at the foul line and then the “offence” was at the three point line. According to the coach I was in the wrong position as soon as the game started because I was standing too far back and I was blamed for giving up the first basket and taken out of the game after a minute. I watched from the bench as my team got destroyed because of in my opinion our terrible zone defense. At half time the score was 24 to 6. The coach kept trying to be the gym class hero by taking outside shots and had about ten air balls.
During half time the coach was yelling at his players, which I couldn’t understand so I tried to encourage them to change to a man defense which I had to do in English because I definitely don’t know basketball terms in Kinyarwanda. I asked them if they understood which they said yes, but if they did they ignored me because they did not “man up” like I told them to. I got put back in and this time I bodied up with whoever was near me. I made my presence felt the best I could. I feel like I was playing pretty good defense, but they wanted me out again after five minutes. I told them no because I felt like I probably wouldn’t go back in. I kept getting fouled as well so I started performing for the ref who called maybe five fouls the whole game and three were because I elicited them. I went out at the end of the third quarter after we went 8 – 0. Even though we didn’t score in that quarter we played our best defense.
The final quarter we bled points. The coach finally made one of his desperation shots though. I took over the substitutions at this point to try to give everyone else some more time and get the coach out of the game because he was taking this friendly game way too seriously. The final score was 66-9 I told my friend Sera about this and she asked me the only logical question – “Were you playing the Globe Trotters?” I of course replied with yes and then started humming the song.
After that we got some food with all the teachers and I endured some criticism for not scoring. The ref thought I was a good player though. I told him that he was probably the only one who thought so. I wasn’t the worst player out there but far from the best.
Being so bad at sports has made me very uncompetitive. I used to be pretty competitive at video games, but I gave that up when I started losing at that a lot too. I do enjoy pretending like I’m competitive sometimes, but I rather congratulate whoever beat me than gloat when I win.
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