3rd Grade Girls

Saturday mornings are for kids.

Most of us had a period in our lives in which we woke up with the sun, fixed ourselves a bowl of sugary cereal (or three or four) and sat in front of the television enjoying cartoons until the a.m. turned to p.m.

There was no guilt about this period of our lives. Back then, I never thought, "Gee, I'm so lazy. I really ought to go out and run a mile to get my exercise."

To be fair, I don't think that now either.

Saturday mornings were what compelled us through the doldrums of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. The entire point of Saturday was its morning cartoons.
Eventually, Saturday mornings shifted from being the cartoon Mecca of the week to the period of time binge drinkers recovered.
I don't know if the networks even show cartoons on Saturday mornings anymore and not knowing this (or more specifically, not caring) bugged me. I decided to rediscover my Saturday mornings. I'm tired of sleepily ignoring, what was once the greatest period of my entire week. And while I can't claim to still enjoy the bevy of cartoons I did 15 years ago, I have figured out a way to make Saturday mornings about kids again.

* * * * *

For the past four weeks I've been the referee of local pee-wee basketball games. Technically, they don't call the leagues pee-wee anymore. I think a dwarf or little person complained that the term "pee-wee" was demeaning to small people and so they got rid of the term.*
I've never refed a game of basketball in my life, but I've played plenty of them in my day. Each game causes me to run or jog 1.7 miles over the course of 45 minutes. I never ref less than three games, sometimes I ref up to six. That's a lot of miles, man. I didn't know how much I'd have to run, but I did know the rules to the game - at least the basic rules, which I figured were all we'd be using.
Being a referee in a 3rd and 4th grade game of basketball is tough. Not because it's difficult to make proper calls, but because there is actually very little basketball being played.
I'm not alone when I ref. I'm usually stuck with any number of ragamuffin 17-year-olds who were forced to get jobs and whom, in no reasonable sense of the ideal, have any desire to be awake at 9 a.m.
If I'm not stuck with Shaggy and Scooby, it means I'm stuck reffing with Joe. Joe is the 40-year-old, clubfooted park district manager with a disarming inability to look people in the eye.

I love Joe like a brother, but he's gonna get me killed. Joe thinks that 4th grade boys are old enough to understand the finer points of the game, whereas I'm just hoping the boys remember to dribble the ball. While I'm keeping an eye out to insure the boys don't foul one another, Joe's calling lane violations and illegal defense.
If you're reading this and you don't know what "illegal defense" means - imagine how a 10-year-old feels. The first game I ever refed, Joe gave me a busted whistle** and made sure I took the area of the court where all the angry fathers were standing.
Joe proceeded to call ticky-tacky fouls that would confuse LeBron James, leaving me to answer to the steroid-clad father trying to live vicariously through his son. And Papa Steroid's kid would be successful too, if only Joe would stop calling over-and-back fouls.
I've imagined myself dying a million different ways – usually, I've pictured my death in relatively cool ways.*** Never once have I imagined a 300-lb bruiser choking me to death with my own pre-broken whistle.

One of the angriest fathers I dealt with was my 8th grade woodshop teacher, Mr. Burton. I had to admit to being surprised to see Mr. Burton because Mr. Burton is one of the most physically unattractive men walking the Earth. His presence at the game either meant that he miraculously found someone willing to procreate with him, or he wasn't a parent to one of these children and was just there to watch.

I found myself uncomfortable thinking about either scenario.

It's worth sweating through the boys games though, in order to get to the girls games. There's nothing better that's going to happen to me on any given Saturday than being a ref in a 3rd/4th grade girls' pee-w... I'm sorry, midget basketball game.

I'm not sure what it is about the girls, but it's as if they've never been introduced to the game before stepping onto the court on Saturday morning.
I don't mean to imply that they aren't happy to be playing, quite the opposite. They love being there.

Well... everyone except Joyce. Poor Joyce is a little Jewish girl who hasn't yet realized that she doesn't actually enjoy basketball and in fact, probably hates all sports.

Joyce wears jeans under her shorts.

But everyone else digs being there. But they dig it in a weird way that I'm just not used to seeing in sports. When two girls are going after the basketball, they'll both grab a piece of it, realize they're fighting over the ball and will let go of it simultaneously. So while the ball bounces pitifully between them, the two girls both look at each other and giggle.
There's always one girl on the court with a killer instinct that I'm pretty sure comes from her father. Dad always ends up pushing this girl into lesbianism sometime down the road. And while dad's pressure might cause some headaches for him later on in life, his little bruiser-angel usually racks up eight points a game because she's the only one willing to fight for the basketball.
Eight points in a game from a 3rd grade girl is like the night Kobe Bryant dropped 81 points on the Toronto Raptors: everyone knew it was possible, but they just never imagined they'd be there to see it happen.

Kobe Bryant is my least favorite player in basketball, so whenever the 3rd and 4th grade girls games get a little slow, I like to play a game inside my head called "What if Kobe Did It?" The rules are simple, one of the girls on either team will do something out of character for a basketball player and I'll imagine Kobe Bryant doing it in an actual NBA game.

A precocious blonde girl named Dayle made sleepover plans with her teammate Lucy while dribbling up the court. It's the middle of the third quarter and I hear:
"You can just come with me to Caitlin's. My mom will pick us up and you can just change clothes with us at my house."
I almost blew the whistle on the girls, but I wasn't sure what foul to call.
I had to distract myself, it was the only way I was gonna let these girls play. I imagined Kobe Bryant offering Lamar Odom a ride to his house after the game so that they could watch "The Princess Diaries."

Later in the game, I actually did blow the whistle on a girl because she took too long to inbound the ball. The rules state that you have 10 seconds to throw the basketball into play. If you don't throw it within 10 seconds, the other team gets the ball. Because no one in 3rd or 4th grade actually plays defense, inbounding the ball never seems to be too much trouble.
But one girl named Katie held the ball over her head for a few seconds and then began laughing uncontrollably.
Her faced reddened, her knees buckled and I worried that she was nearing collapse. This made everyone on her team start laughing along with many of the parents.
When Katie finally gasped enough breath to explain herself, she said, "I just passed gas! That's why I'm laughing so hard! I just passed. I passed gas!"
As far as I could tell, no one misunderstood her meaning, but through her laughter and my eventual whistle-blowing (a solid 20 seconds after she was told she could inbound the ball), little Katie kept reiterating that her laughter was because she was passing gas.

This of course, was made funnier when I imagined Kobe in the same situation.

Okay look, I want to make clear before I continue that I don't find it funny when one of the girls wrestles for a rebound and gets knocked square in the nose. I'm not saying it's funny when she begins bawling, drops the ball while it is still in play and runs toward the sideline into her mother's arms. For the record, I'm not saying any of that is funny, okay?

That would be heartless.

But I am saying it's funny when I imagined Kobe Bryant doing it.

I know that I have the potential for greatness. Frankly, I think most of us have that potential and I know that recreating some of the Saturday morning fun isn't the most succinct path to my untapped greatness. But there can be no doubt that watching three little girls idly standing around bickering over who gets to dribble the ball up the court this time, only to have the one bruiser on the opposite team steal the ball at the behest of her muscle-bound father, has got to be some sort of step in the right direction toward untapping this greatness.

At the very least, it can't be a step in the wrong direction.

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* I wonder… if I were to angrily call a midget a "3rd grader," would they become upset by that? Does that count as a taunt?

** I didn't even know whistles could wear out. It's a piece of plastic with a wooden ball in it - how does this happen?

*** My favorite is the one where 'Free Bird' blares on the radio inside the convertible I accidentally drive off a cliff. I picture me plunging to my death right when the fast guitar solo kicks in.