Wrongway Schoonover, From the H.Schiddy Rant Vaults

Glob Your Eman

I'm reading Pat Conroy's "My Losing Season", and it inspired me to tell a story from the days of my youth. If some of you have heard this one, my apologies.
In eighth grade I was a basketball ball god. I think there are points in any athlete's career where he or she locks into a zone and achieves a level of grace, stamina, and agility that allow them to do things they normally could not do. When I was 14 I was full of the possibilities of what might be. There were no ceiling on the heights I could not climb, and I thought I could achieve on the basketball court. My hero was Julius Erving aka Dr. J. of the New York Nets from the American Basketball Association. I had never seen a player do what he did on the basketball court. The guy defied gravity, and would make moves to the basket with a mixture grace and creativity that would amaze. People would talk about the awesome artistry of Dr. J's dunks, but what made them so spectacular was not how he finished the throw-down, but how he started the move.
This guys would float, twist, switch hands, spin, and stuff the ball, while the ABA's big men stood there wondering what in the hell had just happen.

I could not dunk in eighth grade, or at anytime for that matter. But I figured I could imitate some of my hero's creativity on the basketball court. Basketball is the perfect sport for a shy, adolescent to play. So much of one's game can be worked on alone. Often pick-up games at the local schools allow for players of varying degrees of age and ability to play, as long as you know your pecking order on your pick-up team. So if I played with bigger kids, I knew it was my job to get them the ball. If I was with my friends my age or younger kids, then it was time for me to show what I could do.

And in the eighth grade world of street ball in Rochester, I could do some things. One of my favorite moves was to go at the big guys underneath the basket, jump as high as I could letting my momentum carry me slightly into them which would throw off their balance. I would hug the ball to my hip or chest. They would still have the height advantage on me but then as I descended I would quickly extend my arms and the ball underneath their arms and behind their hands and scoop the ball over the rim. This "dipsy-doo" as I called it, probably only worked a third of the time, but when it did it was spectacular.

Another favorite move of mine was to draw two defenders on a two on two fast break and then split them, fake the pass to my teammate streaking on the side, and go in for an uncontested lay up. The key to that move was selling the idea to the defender who was going to take the other guy. By moving slightly towards my teammate the defender would think that he could make a play on my dribble, then I would cross over or between the legs to avoid his ambivalent trap attempt which would send him scrambling back to his man to block the pass that I had no intention of making anyway.

I spent hours in the furnace room of my basement doing ball handling drills, and hours on the black top basketball courts of Hoover, Elton Hills, IBM Park, and in the gym at John Adams Junior High School. In March, tournament time, basketball fever would take hold and I would be down at the school dribbling around frozen puddles and mounds of snow as I played out imaginary games, dishing and receiving passes from Flip Saunders, Mychal Thompson, Meadowlark Lemon, and Julius Erving. In the end it would always be up to me to drain the long jump shot to beat the buzzer or drive the lane for an acrobatic twisting turning lay-up as time expired and the crowd went CRAZY!

Then reality set in. I was a good player, not a great player. In my middle school years I spent most of the time on the floor and not resting on the pines, but when I was on talented team I struggled to get my fair share of the minutes. I played on two teams my eighth grade year. My Junior High School, John Adams, had two eighth grade teams, and I was a starting guard on one of them. That team was a lot of fun, and I actually got a lot of playing time and was probably the second or third leading scorer on that team, mostly due to my fast break skills and my ability to penetrate and get off shots in the clogged lanes. We played one on one defense most of the time in that league. I remember my coach, a science teacher named Mr. Lueder, emphasized conditioning, defense and rebounding, and working on the fundamentals.
The other team I played on was a Rochester city youth league team coached by the Rochester Community College's head basketball coach Bill Fessler. His son Steve was my age and went to my school, and we had played together on several sports teams. Steve was a phenomenal basketball player, and with the clout of his dad had managed to entice or persuade several kids to join up with his team that were not necessarily in that teams neighborhood. The result was a talented group of eighth graders who received superior coaching and would go on to win the city league championship fairly easily that year. Because of the wealth of talent that Steve and his dad had recruited for that team, I was relegated to backing up the coach's son. Need I say more about the playing time I received that year? But I did learn a lot from Mr. Fessler that would help me a couple of years down the road about how to improve my game and skills.

So on my eighth grade junior high school team, there was the opportunity to start and get more minutes in games, and really test what I could do to become the no-vertical-jumping-bad-haircut-pimply-faced-13 y.o. white Dr. J. that I aspired to be. It never occurred to me that say, working on my jump shot might be a better way to score points. So I plowed into the lane, spinning faking and dipsy dooing to some limited success. My coach Mr. Lueder, was not particularly thrilled with my freelancing tendencies, but my skills were more advanced then a majority of the players on the team and I definitely did not "hog" the ball, so he let me get away with it a couple of times a game and for the most part gave me a lot of minutes. Our team was one of the better teams in a six team league, and we were in 2nd or third place as the season wound down. As I recall with about three games left in the season we hosted one of the teams from Gage Junior High School. We were taller and more physical then they were with Bubba Macy and Quentin Humphrey playing an aggressive power forward and racking up the points and rebounds, but they had quicker guards than me. We managed to hold them off the whole game, and were up by two points with about 5 seconds left.

Coming out of a time out the other guard in bounded the ball to me. I scanned the court and there appeared to be an open lane to the basket. Even though we had the lead and could just run the clock out unless they fouled us, I decided to take this opportunity to "put an exclamation point on the victory" as they say and finish the game with a score. As I drove to the basket my defender seemed to melt away and fall behind me, which was weird because he was quite quick. I thought I heard my coach yell GO! Or was it NO!? At any rate I laid the ball in and turned around as the other players slapped my on the back and shook my hands thanking me. My ear to ear grin quickly turned to some other type of weird facial contortion as I realized I was being congratulated by the other team. A quick look to my coach and team confirmed that I had, indeed, scored the game tying basket for the other team at the buzzer to send the game into overtime. I had shot at the wrong basket!!!

We did win the game in overtime, but I don’t recall the score. My memory gets a little bit hazy. I am fairly sure Mr. Lueder let me ride the rest of that game out on the bench. I can still see the grimace on his face whenever he would look over at me. And in the locker room, Quentin gave me a new nickname…”Wrongway.”

And if that is not bad enough, I have to say that I did not learn a lot from that mistake either, as I repeated it in a city league game a couple weeks later. Fortunately, it did not send the game in to over time and I distinctly remember us trouncing our opponents that day.

Over the weeks and months that followed that game things died down. I wasn't referred to as "Wrong Way" nearly as much, although Quentin continued to call me "Wrongway" all through high school. I've heard worse. I team mate of mine who was not particularly well endowed was referred to as "inny". At least I did not have to carry a humiliation like that around with me. As the season played out in eighth grade I did not see nearly as much playing time on for either team as my directionally challenged disposition was revealed, but somehow I was o.k. with not being the focus of attention. I continued to play basketball through tenth grade, mostly riding the pines. I think, that day I made the first wrong way basket, sitting in the locker room at John Adams, somehow I knew though my Dipsy Doo days were over.

So why bring this baggage up almost 25 years later? I guess when your on losing teams as I was, there is a message that you some how are not made of the same stuff as players on winning teams. That is not true. It is the people that suffer loss year after year, time after time, and keep getting up and getting back in the mix that are made of the good stuff. Michael Jordan's defining moment in his basketball career did not come when he won any of his M.V.P's. scoring championships, team championships, or shoe endorsements. His defining moment came when he got cut from his eighth grade basketball team, and he did not quit, but came back to make the team the next year. If that doesn't happen, everything else is meaningless. He showed his character in his losing, not his winning. Oh and in his net worth from endorsements as well.

25 years later I'm proud of my "Wrongway" nickname. The wrong way led me down a path which led to my present loving family and cool job. Robert Frost chose the road less traveled. I came to a fork in the path, and turned around and went back the way I came. And that, Schiddy Nation, has made all the difference.