Creeking More In The ATL (with your host Nate Creekmore) Episode #11

I’m not from Atlanta, but I live here, and (because I live here) people who don’t live here ask me, “Creek, what’s Atlanta really like?” I don’t know what Atlanta is really like, but if you’d like to know what it’s like for me, I invite you to sit back and enjoy another episode of “CREEKING MORE IN THE ATL (with your host Nate Creekmore)”!!!

[Latvian Legend]

 

In the city of Atlanta, I am considered to be an abnormally tall individual.

If I was to find myself amongst the Watusi people or the citizens of the Netherlands (what an ominous name for a country…) or on an NBA court, I would not be considered especially tall at all.

But, as the majority of my time is not spent amongst the Watusi or the Dutch or the NBAers, I often do feel abnormally tall.

Being abnormally tall feels like sitting atop an ambulatory tower in a cockpit with switches and levers that control the direction in which the tower lumbers.

You can make your way through large crowds of people and, if you just look straight ahead, you don’t have to make eye contact with anyone.

But every now and again you’ll see someone else ambling along in a tower as tall or taller than yours and, honestly, it’s a little unnerving.

If the person is perched higher than you, they have the right to decide if you’re tall or not. They can include you…

…or not…

And if they do not include you, if they choose to cast you down with those of less peculiar height, your world is turned downside up. Maybe you’re not so tall afterall. Maybe you’re just *gasp* a little above average…

But eventually you’re struck in the forehead by a ceiling fan or a door frame and all is right again.

There are obvious challenges that come along with being unusually tall. It can be hard to find clothes that fit, especially pants.

And people reasonably assume that I should drive a larger car, but in fact, I’ve been driving small cars for my entire life and now, when I get into a car that is actually designed to more comfortably accommodate my lanky frame, it feels too big.

But if there’s one thing that unites all men above a certain height (especially when those men are also brown) it is a particular question that is asked of them within the first two minutes of having met a new person…

Personally, I think it is a fair question. Basketball must certainly have been specifically invented in order to create a sport wherein being tall gives an athlete a distinct advantage. I’m not saying that basketball cannot be enjoyed and/or mastered by the un-tall, but it was clearly not made primarily with them in mind. I don’t know that there’s any special advantage in being tall while playing something like soccer or baseball or (gods help you, why?) football, but in basketball height is a definitive plus.

But the reasonableness of “Do you play basketball?” is negated when it is followed with, “Why aren’t you in the NBA?”

I used to have a lie readily available to feed any stranger bold enough to imply that I ought to’ve been a professional basketball player.

But I’m trying to be a better person so, instead of lying, these days I wrinkle my brow, place my hand on my chin, and act as though they’ve just proposed a completely original, thought-provoking idea that I’ve never before pondered.

And I just keep standing like that until it’s so awkward that the person leaves.

But, because I’m deeply in love with all of you fine people and am overjoyed that you’ve taken the time to read this tedious blog post, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I don’t play in the NBA because no one plays in the NBA…

Most of the athletes you see in those games on TNT are photoshopped onto the court. Ever wonder why you’ve never seen anyone as massive as Lebron James or Dwight Howard in real life? It’s because they don’t actually exist. I mean, not everyone in the NBA is photoshopped, but even the ones that aren’t are REALLY good and REALLY tall. And there are only, like, 400 players in the entire NBA and there’s 400 million tall people (I just made that number up) on the planet! Some of us just aren’t going to make it. I’m one of the ones that didn’t.

And anyway, I wasn’t that great at basketball, even back when I was still in my prime. I mean, I was a’ight, but I wasn’t anything to write home about. Actually, now that I’m unburdening myself, do you mind if I lay down on this couch and tell you the sad story of Nate Creekmore’s Basketball Career? Yes, you do mind? Well, too bad because here I go…

I grew up with the kind of super-hero Dad who takes his kids to carnivals and wins them prizes at the basketball-shooting booths.

We’d stay up at night, me and him, watching basketball games together. And I’m talking about BASKETBALL games. This was back in the 90’s when Jordan was giving people the business.

So I was taught to love the game. The first time I ever played organized, non-driveway basketball was waaaaaay back in 5th grade. I was a starter, and we lost every game we played.

During summers, as a kid, I always went to basketball camps. They taught us basic things, like how to make a layup, how to dribble a basketball, how to play basketball with no shirt on, etc…

And every boy at those camps KNEW he was going to the NBA.

I remember playing basketball during recess, back when we lived in Upper Michigan and North Dakota. We had to shovel snow off of the court before we could play.

When I got older, I’d go to the base gym (I grew up on Air Force bases) and play with the soldiers. In Stuttgart, Germany, the best gym was on Patch Barracks (Kelly Barracks had a good gym, too). Sometimes Germans would come in the gym too and we’d get to see how they played the game. Turns out, they played pretty much just like us, except they cussed in German.

I remember throwing down my first dunk…

I think it was during the summer before 9th grade. I was about 6’3″. An older high school kid was clowning me for not being able to dunk. He threw the ball at my head and I caught it and decided that I was going to dunk the ball. Up until that point, I’d only been able to do those backboard-slapping layups. But when I jumped this time I kept going up and up and up until my whole hand was over the rim and I was slamming the ball through.

That was easily one of the best days of my life.

I remember spending the rest of the day just dunking over and over and over and when I got home that night I excitedly showed my dad all the bruises on arm from where I’d been banging it on the rim.

I made the JV team my freshman year of high school, but the head coach liked the way I played so he gave me Varsity minutes as well. We were a ragtag bunch, the Patch American High School Panthers, but we weren’t bad. We didn’t really have any set plays. We just got out there and played. We’d spent so much time together at those base gyms that we all knew how to work together.

When I was a Sophomore, I was only playing Varsity. Coach made me a team captain (which is less impressive than it sounds. He did this weird thing where he rotated the team captains every couple of games). But then, halfway through that season, we moved from Stuttgart to Bellevile, Illinois. I showed up at the school and practiced with the team. That was a good day too, as I recall. They were all very excited about the way I jumped.

But they were decidedly less excited about my inability to learn the plays.

The team at Mascoutah Community High School was probably better than the team I played with in Stuttgart. A lot of the kids at MCHS had grown up playing together and the Indians (we were very politically incorrect, mascot-wise) were far less ragtag than the Panthers (Patch High’s mascot looked like it had been ripped off from the Black Power movement of the 60’s). Anyway, I had to sit out the second half of my Sophomore season because of Illinois’ athletic eligibility rules.

I never quite figured things out at Mascoutah. It was fun and I liked all of my teammates (and I think most of them liked me…), but I was falling out of love with basketball. Going to practice after school was mostly a way to relieve the stress of those long days of high school.

In college, I played intramural basketball and it felt closer to what I’d had in Stuttgart, just a bunch of guys playing a game and every once in a while we’d do something spectacular.

When I graduated and started working as a cartoonist (on top of having regular day jobs), I had less and less time (and inclination) to play basketball. I’d play with my roommates and with guys from church, but my time on the court was getting rarer and rarer. By the time I lost my job as a cartoonist and found myself with the free time to do things like play basketball, the desire to do so had pretty much left me.

But I still played sporadically, until one day when I went up for a rebound, came down on someone’s shoe, and ended up with the world’s worst ankle sprain.

That was the last time I played any pickup basketball.

Here’s the thing, as you get older, you jump less high. I can remember floating effortlessly above the rim. Nowadays, my dunks look like layups. Basketball is way less fun when you can’t dunk. I don’t know how people do it.

So that’s the story of my basketball career. But if you see me out walking around in my tower and you ask me if I play basketball, there’s still a pretty good chance that I’ll give you some hokey untruth about having played professionally in Eastern Europe.

There you have it foks, another exciting episode of “Creeking More In The ATL (with your host Nate Creekmore)”! Be sure and come back for the next installment wherein I try to imagine what it must be like to be a short person and I end up insulting and angering a great number of people.