Thumper & Sons

Going toe-to-toe with a patriarch and his Large Sons

April 6th, 12 p.m.

Two weeks ago, I met a new group of guys at one of the rec centers in town where I typically work out on my own. They asked me to play that day, and, sensing that they were a coherent group, I asked about the details of the run. They’d been playing together three days a week for many years at the downtown Denver YMCA, but were displaced when they Y permanently closed a few months ago. Ever since, they’d been looking for the perfect gym to host their standing run, a wandering tribe of aging, nice-guy hoopers, but had struggled with the local rec center network due to its ever-shifting programs that frequently occupy the basketball courts during prime hooping hours.

Anyway, I liked the vibe of this crew right away and joined their group chat. I had been getting the feeling over the last year that I needed to find a less intense run, both in terms of physicality and in the group dynamics. What’s more, this game meets at noon, which I have yet to find anywhere in Denver and feels like a Godsend.

With a handful of significant life events on the near horizon, let’s just say I need to keep the drama of the 6 a.m. pickup community in perspective, and the tendons in my knees intact.

All the stars were aligning for this to be the perfect run. For the first four or five days of playing, it was. Competitive but not aggressive or over-macho games, a solid mix of ages and skill levels that made for a fairly harmonious, dare I say utopian style of pickup basketball.

Until today. Before I even start writing this, I’m going to admit I may come off as less than magnanimous in today’s games. I don’t know for sure because I haven’t processed it yet, and that’s part of what this journal is supposed to be—an honest account of what happened on the court, though obviously skewed by my own limited retelling of events. Maybe some day I’ll discover a parallel newsletter that recounts some of the games I’ve written about, and I’ll have to issue a long and convoluted defense of my version like Jon Krakauer in the later editions of Into Thin Air.

But probably not. So you’ll have to trust me. A few new faces showed up today. I guess one of them is sort of a regular, but from what I could tell he didn’t have the friendliest rapport with the rest of the group. He wasn’t alone—this guy, who appeared to be around 40, 6’4’’, and at least 230 pounds, brought his two grown sons with him as well.

My first thought was: cool. A dad showing his sons what an adult men’s pickup game looks like. Basketball is for everyone, and I welcome this opportunity to share the game with the next generation. After playing driveway hoops for over an hour with my family yesterday, I’ve been feeling warm and fuzzy about the game for a couple weeks now. How sweet of me.

Both of the sons were about as tall as their dad. The first one, who I overheard was home on spring break from college, was built like him. The other one looked to me to be a junior or senior in high school, but he was about 6’ 4’’ and lanky in the way kids who will soon be humungous usually are.

Playing basketball with high school or college-age dudes—and I’m going to say dudes because if you saw one of them, the word “kid” does not seem physically appropriate—can be a mixed bag. If they are serious players, they’re usually very athletic but fairly raw in terms of skill. I find “generation discourse” annoying, but there are several very clear indicators between basketball generations. The current rising crop are, from what I can tell, completely hamstrung by an obsession with iso-ball dribble theory that makes many of them valuable to your team for approximately one out of every 10 possessions, and completely useless for the other nine.

Now I sound exactly like the person I would like not to be, which is a crotchety old traditionalist.

But as the games got going, it became clear there was a specific dynamic at play. I’ll try to describe it. I was guarding the really tall kid. He was a tough assignment. Rangy and quick, but spastic and somewhat uncoordinated. He was flopping his body all around, flailing his head backwards in a way that can lead to bonking heads. He kept attempting a push-off that is very popular with a certain type of NBA guard right now, but he didn’t know how to do it so he was just throwing his forearm in your chest and fully extending to create space. The other one was super strong and tossing his body into people in the paint, a few times while they were in the air. Their dad was fouling heavily, too. All of them were handsy, which seems more acceptable from smaller players but feels stifling and unnecessary from big guys.

But this is part of the game. It seemed like it was just going to be one of those days—over-physical but not worth calling every single thing. The annoying part is that this makes for pretty ugly basketball that almost no one really enjoys. From what I can tell of this new run, it seems like most of the guys are after that elusive but attainable version of pickup—the satisfactory game.

The thing that started to really get to people was this: the dad was calling fouls on other people who were guarding his sons. As in, when I committed a plausible foul on his taller son, the one with that broccoli haircut everyone makes fun of, the dad called the foul on me, while his son merely uttered the sound “bruh.”

This is an absolute non-starter. A pickup commandment. You can not call fouls for other people.

After the second time this happened, I expressed strongly that the kid had to call his own fouls. The dad seemed to agree, at first, and barked to his boy: “Use your voice.”

Go, Dad. Solid parenting. But then, it kept happening. The kid, who was floppy by nature to begin with, started flailing his body around more and more, and his dad kept calling fouls for him.

Everyone was getting fed up with the way Thumper & Sons were fouling everyone on defense themselves, then running their own little family refereeing racket on the other end.

“We’ve got family members calling fouls now?” another guy said.

But due to all being over six three and their whacking people all over the court, they kept winning.

In the second to last game, as I was sitting on the bench trying to stay cool and not yell at a teenager, the best player in the gym made his voice heard. This guy, Ty, had been getting fouled hard all day. A strong athlete and great ball handler, he was getting to the rack often, only to meet hard contact from all sides.

I love it when a person who everyone else respects puts their foot down like this. “This is ridiculous,” he shouted, among other things. Everyone but papa bear and his cubs agreed. He responded with something I literally couldn’t understand because his barking was so deep and incoherent.

Then, after that game, dad approached Ty and suddenly broke into a big smile. “We good?” he said. Oh man. I’ve learned over the years that the fastest glad-hand on the court after a tiff is often the least genuine.

I’m being hard on this guy, I know. They were just doing their thing. That’s what a lot of basketball comes down to—people just doing their thing. But when that “thing” is so clearly at odds with what everyone else wants to do—which in our case is playing hard without hurting or fighting each other—I find the lack of awareness egregious.

This guy was trying to teach some kind of lesson to his big boys about being tough around grown men. I appreciate he was trying to teach them something, but it was unclear what the lesson was besides “Look how fun it is to kick someone’s ass.”

If they were better basketball players it would have been easier to accept getting beat by them. But if they were better basketball players they wouldn’t have had to foul and whine so much.

In the final game, while I was playing defense under the hoop, the college brother set a screen with his knees bent and splayed out, one of which collided with the side of mine and bent it inward. Nothing pisses me off in pickup more than someone doing aggressive shit with their lower body in the paint, because that is how you injure people. People get hurt unintentionally often enough, and funny business with your hips or legs makes it significantly more likely to happen. I had to walk it off for a minute and am still feeling it as I write this.

The next play, the dad called a ticky-tack foul while going to the rim on a guy half his size.

“If you’re playing football out here” I yelled, my frustration finally boiling over, “you can’t call that bullshit.”

“Play better defense,” the kid goes. As a former high school teacher, I’ve heard every illogical comeback you can imagine. So I let this go.

But after I narrowly missed a 12-footer the next play, he yelled “Nice shot!”

Lazy trash talk. I glared at him and tried to laugh it off, probably unconvincingly.

I shouldn’t be affected by the behavior of someone half my age. But basketball brings a lot of things to the present—for me, it brings many athletic moments to the present. Including playing against guys who are dicks. I don’t blame the kid for picking up the energy his dad was putting down. If anything, seeing the two generations play together felt like a microcosm of the toxicity you see in men in other moments in life. It’s all inherited.

But at the end of the day, I’ve seen a lot worse on the court. Daps were still exchanged, but not happily from me. I’m not a fan of the fake nice guy routine between games, but that’s cultural.

I don’t believe basketball reveals character, like all those moralizing coaches would like to believe. At most, it reveals characteristics. But what is often great about pickup is that everyone brings their own agenda and channels it into a game—into the common goal of competing at something.

The shared goal of this family team didn’t align with what everyone else was going for, which was basically a satisfactory game of basketball. They were after something else—something more about their family unit than the game. But nobody got hurt, so it came out fine in the end. They’d probably say they were just trying to win.

Well, congrats. You win.

gg.

-Paul