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say “incident,” but I suppose I might as well say “brawl,” that broke out when a few Beamsvilleians—and when I say “Beamsville-ian,” I mean, more accurately, “inbred hillpeople”—took offense at my distinctive style of encouragement. I guess some punches were thrown. Well, the whole truth of the matter is that punches were thrown, first by me, then at me. Let me tell you, those bumpkins pack a mean punch—even the bitches! Thankfully, when you’re three sheets to the wind you don’t feel a whole lot of anything. Coach Auerbach politely insisted I curtail my attendance.
    Meander down the sidewalk checking out the games. The majority are tactless, bulling affairs: guys heaving off-balance threes and clanging running one-handers off the front iron, banging bodies under the boards for ugly buckets. It’s really quite a painful ordeal for me: a classically trained pianist watching chimpanzees bash away on Steinway pianos. Stop to watch an old-schooler with Abdul-Jabbar eyegoggles and socks hiked to his knees sink crafty hook-shots over a guy half his age; the young guy’s taking heat from his teammates for the defensive lapses.
    The final court has drawn a huge crowd; can’t see more than flickering motion between the tight-packed spectators, but from what little I do it’s clear this is serious. A true student of the game can tell right off: something about those confident movements, that quickness, the conviction that lives in each and every gesture.
    Push through the crowd and there’s my son.
    He’s at the top of the three-point arc. Long black hair tied back with a blue rubber band, the kind greengrocers use to bind bunches of bananas. Apart from giving you the look of a pansy, long hair has a habit of getting in a shooter’s eyes. But the boy refuses to cut it so one time I chased him around the house with a pair of pinking shears, screaming, Swear to Christ I’m gonna cut that faggot hair off ! I was gassed at the time; you tend to do crazy things when you’re gassed. He locked himself in the bathroom. I told him I’d cut it off as he slept. He passed the night on the floor, those hippie locks fanned out over the pissy tiles.
    He takes the ball at the top of the key and bounces a pass to Al Cousy, a thick-bodied grinder on Jason’s high-school team. Al’s a bruiser with stone hands who’s going nowhere in the sport. Way I see it, the sooner he comes to grips with this, the sooner he can make an honest go at something more suitable: he’ll make a great pipefitter with those strong mitts. However it works out, years from now Al can say, hunched over beers or gutrot coffee at some union meeting, he’d once played ball alongside Jason Mikan—yeah, that Jason Mikan.
    Al pivots around his defender, gets blocked, shovels the ball out. Jason catches it a few feet beyond the three-point line, throws a head-fake to shake his defender, steps back and lofts a shot. The ball arcs through sparkling June air, a flawless parabola against a blue-sky backdrop, dropping through the center of the net.
    â€œNice bucket!” I call out. “Thattaboy!”
    Jason looks over, spots me, glances away and claps his hands for the ball.
    Watching that shot, the unstudied perfection of it, I think back to all the time we spent practicing together. Every day in good weather we’d be out on the driveway hoop, shooting until the sun passed behind the house’s high peaked roof. Before Jason could quit he had to make fifteen foul shots in a row; he’d sink twelve or thirteen easy before getting the jitters. I even built a pair of defending dummies, vaguely human plywood cutouts with outstretched arms. These I mistakenly destroyed: stumble home less than sober and spy two menacing shapes in your unlit garage—who wouldn’t kick them to splinters? One night I came back a little greased and dragged Jason out of