For 13 years, Jeff Albinson has performed a valuable service to a select group of basketball players in Pinellas County. He personally organizes a standing, invitation-only game at 8 a.m. Saturday mornings. He rents the gym, collects the money (and usually covers the shortfalls), makes sure there's the right number of players, and breaks us up into teams. He spares us veterans the pain of playing in an open-gym situation, where streetball hotdogs want to prove how many times they can dribble the ball between their legs before making a move.

Albinson, who works at Marshall, Dennehey, Warner, Coleman & Goggin law firm in Tampa, almost had to bronze his sneakers in the mid '90s. A car accident left him with stenosis in his neck. While waiting for some details to be worked out before surgery, he decided to play one last game in the Seminole summer league. An opponent ran him over and Albinson lay on the floor fully paralyzed for "a couple of minutes." He then felt a tingling, and was soon able to get up. Obviously in shock, he resumed playing. "It was like a drug dream," he recalls. "I have this vague recollection of running around."

That night, Albinson felt like his whole body was on fire. His spinal cord had been bruised and was swelling. The doctor said he'd have to put what Albinson calls an "erector set" in his neck, which would end his playing days. "I knew I'd literally go nuts if I couldn't go back and play sports," he says. Albinson found a surgeon who said he could restore his athletic career, and after a lengthy rehab he's been playing at least three days a week since, including twice a week at 5:30 a.m.

"I think of it prospectively, like, 'This is great, it's 5:30 and I get to do this," he says with a grin. "It's a tool for clearing the brain the rest of the day. The rest of the day I have to deal with the intellect, but with [basketball] I can get into a zone, that realm of unconscious just playing the game."

Albinson owns up to diminished skills but thinks he might be able to deal with them better because he very nearly had the game taken away from him. "One knack I had, I used to get two to three baskets a game on tip-ins," he says. "Now I might get one a month. Every now and then, though, it all feels perfect, everything in synch, and that really makes the game worth playing."

This article appears in Jul 8-14, 2004.