I think of heaven sometimes as a place
where basketball is God's elected sport—
an adolescent fantasy no doubt—
but see they float up and down the court
soundlessly calling encouragement and praise
in a delirium of the phantom body's
immaculate control:
the breathless wonder of its ways
Recently Jeanne and I breakfasted at Pincho's with friends from Indiana, who were in St. Petersburg because the wife, Gayle Herrli, is a ceramic artist with a booth in the Mainsail show. We were lingering over our large cups of coffee, when the husband, looking conspiratorial, reached under the table, and produced a burnished plaque on which the above stanza was handsomely printed. Underneath them was my name, simply: Meinke. These are lines from a poem of mine called "The Basketball Coach at Fifty," and I liked the one-word credit. For a moment I felt like Chaucer or Churchill, or maybe Cher.
David — the husband — is an old basketball player (whereas I'm a very old ex-basketball player), and has played for 30 years in a senior league in Indianapolis, on a team called "The Freudian Slips." During the last dozen years, at the beginning of each season, the player who's nearest to 50 reads the poem to the team; and the plaque commemorates this pleasant tradition.
These days, when I say to Jeanne that I'm going to act presidential, instead of replying "Uh-oh," or "It's about time," she knows I'm just going to watch the NBA play-offs, which President Obama has made a respectable activity. (He watched part of March Madness on Air Force One.) The nice things about watching professional basketball is that, although the final five minutes last half an hour, that's all you need to catch both the flavor and the excitement. Another good thing is that they don't grab their crotch and spit every 30 seconds, like baseball players. And of course, I think about when I played.
We moved from Brooklyn to New Jersey after the War, in 1946, and our house had an eccentric driveway that went steeply downhill, and then turned in a complete circle to enter the garage below. The circle made an ample basketball court, on which I'd shoot baskets with the teenager's ability to focus on a single activity for hours without getting bored: in sunlight and rain, in snow, at night (our dad selflessly put up a floodlight), with older kids, with my younger sisters, with my father, with my friends, and strangers passing by; before and after dinner, chores, homework, I dribbled and shot the basketball. I felt the same as I would eventually feel while writing: just doing it was completely satisfying. Not the games, not the crowds, not the cheerleaders, though they were exciting in a complicated sort of way. Just doing it soothed my tormented psyche. (Aren't all teen-agers tormented? Isn't everybody?)
What I mainly remember about the games is that, on a defensive-minded team that played a pressing one-three-one, I was the one in front, chasing the ball as it moved up the court, running back and forth like a demented chipmunk, trying to disrupt the other team's rhythm. Looking back, I'm fond of that poor chipmunk: he couldn't have played any harder.
At any rate, I was surprised and pleased to receive this plaque. Now it's on a ledge in my office between a "Manifesto" by nature poet Wendell Berry and a rubber penguin blackboard eraser. I use an old blackboard to help my soggy memory with dates and ideas — it's not unlike the blackboard our coach, Tony Ciardi, would draw up plays on during half-time. (In intense moments, Coach Ciardi, who never uttered a swear word, would come up with weird euphemisms like, "Gosh-hang it, Meinke, you call that defense?")
Above the plaque hang an ancient print called "Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims" and a wintry photo Jeanne took of me peering down at W. B. Yeats's gravestone in Sligo: Cast a cold Eye / On Life, on Death. / Horseman, pass by! I remember it was Election Day, November 8th, 1960; and the next day Sligo's newspaper shouted, "Irish Vote Puts Kennedy Over the Top!" Nearby leans an old etching of the bookstalls along the Seine, with Notre Dame looming faintly behind them. Like a Hall of Fame, the ledge is a place of honor.
Now Jeanne and I only play tennis. Neither we nor our friends actually jump any more, though we sometimes stand on tiptoe during emergencies. (We of course practice safe sets.) Our knees, and often other joints and appendages, are braced. We love playing tennis, and the days of racing headlong down the basketball court are long gone . . .
…But still I love the game In all my dreams
the baskets that I've made and missed return
slow motion in the dark a not-so-instant
replay of those rare times when body eyes
and heart conspired to work together…
—from "The Basketball Coach at Fifty," in Night Watch on the Chesapeake (U. of Pittsburgh Press 1987)
Peter Meinke (www.petermeinke.com) was small forward on the All-County Basketball Team when he played for Mountain Lakes High School, NJ, in the late 1940s, back when they let poets play sports. He claims he'd lull opponents to sleep with a few lines from Prufrock, but the 30-second rule doomed his basketball career. His jersey number was #3; Meinke has retired, but his number was not.
This article appears in May 20-26, 2009.