Hoop dreams of days gone by

The recurring dream is as vivid as it is frustrating.

I'm dribbling a basketball in an empty gym. The sound of the ball rebounding off the hardwood echoes familiarly. Sunlight beams in through ceiling-level windows.

Gradually, I move into position for a shot, drifting toward a spot in the left-hand corner I always favored. Readying myself, the distance suddenly seems too demanding. I dribble in closer. Still too far. I move in again. And again.

Finally, I set my feet, spin the ball, cradle it in my left hand and place my right hand gently atop it. I flex my knees, raise the ball above my head and . . . freeze.

I can't rise from the floor to shoot a jumper. I try a flat-footed shot, but the ball won't release from my hand, as if something unseen were holding it there.

It's a telling image. Once, in my most frequent dream, I was able to fly. These days, I'm helplessly earthbound.

The dream may just be a metaphor for the impotence of aging, a reminder of all that time takes from us. But, in my case, it more likely symbolized a congenital inability to discard the past.

I loved basketball once. Now, even though I'm 64 and the game has attained an irrelevance I never thought possible, it apparently clings to my subconscious the way the ball is stuck on my palm.

It wasn't just the sport I cherished, but the basketball itself. As an adolescent, it was my faithful companion, one I seldom was without.

I carried it everywhere. You never knew when a game might break out. And, since in my mind basketball players were humanity's ultimate development, the ball lent a little coolness to a teenager who otherwise had none.

I didn't drive a car until I was 22. The long walks that cultural shortcoming entailed were made more palatable by seeing how long I could maintain my initial dribble, how often and how deftly I could go behind my back or between my legs.

For all that dribbling, I was never able to master the technique of walking and casually bouncing the ball between my legs on every stride, the way I'd seen Villanova's Fran O'Hanlon do. When a friend, Gene Downs, added that move, I was manfully jealous.

Gene and I had a fantasy we often discussed when we should have been learning calculus. After graduating from high school, we'd gather a few friends and head to Europe. We'd bring our ball, of course. We imagined ourselves, in worker khakis and high-top Chuck Taylors, bouncing it coolly down the Champs D'Elysee, wowing the French kids with our strange American talent.

My ball also seemed to possess a magical power.

Normally I was far too shy to speak to girls. But, in much the same way as Raj Koothrappali of The Big Bang Theory uses alcohol, I could make conversation if I was dribbling a basketball.

And by bouncing one up and down Hampshire Drive's sidewalk, I had legitimate cover the summer I constantly walked past a certain girl's house, hoping she'd peek out her window and swoon at my ballhandling skills.

A family friend who lived on Hampshire once phoned my parents and asked why their son was dribbling a basketball past their house in the dark. I didn't bother to offer an explanation.

On other occasions, my ball and I hitchhiked a couple of miles to Marple-Newtown High School just so I could shoot and show off on the court adjacent to where a friend's cute sister had field-hockey practice.

She didn't seem to notice, but Marple's basketball coach did. Assuming I was a student there, since he passed me each afternoon en route to his car, he asked why I hadn't come out for his team. I told him I was a Catholic, not a Public.

Thoughts of my senior prom can still induce terror. And that April afternoon in 1967, the only way I could quell my anxieties was to take my basketball to the neighborhood courts. There, all alone, I shot the ball for hours. It must have worked. I left it home that night.

Once, I even took the ball into the Palestra, naively assuming I'd devise a way to get Villanova's Bill Melchionni to autograph it.

Aside from all that, there was a certain tactile delight in a good, properly inflated ball. Mine was a Rawlings, and when we were both young, its deep ridges and pimply grain were as familiar and comforting as a mother's touch.

Eventually, the grain and the ridges wore down, and I went off to college. The ball wasn't in the large trunk my mother packed and shipped off to my freshman dorm in Wisconsin.

By the time I got back to Broomall that summer, there were other, more compelling interests.

I still played basketball through my 20s and early 30s. But I'm not sure whatever happened to my ball.

Last week, about the time I had my most recent basketball dream, I may have found it.

Our old picture albums are filled with color snapshots. But looking through one marked " '79-'81" I discovered a single black-and-white photo. In it, my son and oldest daughter are smiling at an object in the foreground.

It's a basketball. Maybe it was my Rawlings, or maybe it wasn't. Maybe their obvious delight was the result of a game they were playing, or maybe it wasn't.

It's been too long to know for sure. Too many years and too many dreams have passed.

But I'd like to think the kids were smiling because, if only for that instant, they were seeing that ball through their father's eyes.