“It Rained in Vancouver the night Kobe dropped 81.”
Anyone familiar with the city would not have a hard time believing it rained in Vancouver on the night Kobe hit Jalen Rose with a mean crossover. For us, the rain that fiercely poured down onto us sometimes it sounded like an echo of applause when it hit car roofs hard enough. We learned to treat every unexpected puddle like another defender and if you got too close to the shallow pool of water, it would slow down a basketball’s dribble like a prime defender. The constant hammering of the ball soaking up the water led to us often playing with a ball that had none of the traction or grip left that it had in its younger days. Would you believe that in our neighbourhood, even in basketball’s golden days, none of the players would take to the courts on the day after rained because it was too risky: the court at Kitsilano, known for legendary full-court games filled with our cities basketball royalty. The court had always been uneven, and the slickness of even a little rain made the surface treacherous, something that many players, stars for their high school teams, couldn’t risk. Kobe wouldn’t let the rain stop him, so why would it stop us? Four kids with no keys to the gym, just a flat slippery concrete surface outside my moms’ house that caused the soles of our shoes to hydroplane with every pivot. Thrift store Laker purple and gold colours running from our jerseys onto the flesh of our skin, perfect, now we were him.
You will believe that I once wore baggy shorts that dragged until the bottoms of them split into small white flags of surrender and you will also believe that I dreamed of having enough money to buy my way into the kind of infamy that came with surviving any kind of proximity to poverty. You will believe, then, that I remember all of this by the way the ball felt in my hands as I stood on the court alone the next day, pulling the wet ball from one hand to the next and feeling the water spin-off of it. You will believe that I only imagined the defender I was sliding past in my gripless shoes, pushing my way to the foul line. And even as I missed shot after shot, I still cheered. Alone in the wet aftermath of a night when I first saw the player I imagined myself becoming. A shot, finally finding the bottom of the net, and my hand, still extended, to an audience of no one.”
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