December 3, 2002
12/3/02 11 degrees Fahrenheit is
11 degrees Fahrenheit is a different beast than 35 degrees, or even 25. 11 is a serious outside condition. 11 is cold enough that when you pick up a basketball, you run the risk of shattering it.
I know this because I spent part of the late night outside, or basically outside, up in the second floor of the barn, winging the basketball as hard as I could against the ancient wooden backboard. I can take a loss as good as anybody, but a 27-point shellacking at the hands of Illinois (who kept shooting 3-pointers even while their team was up 20 with two minutes to play) reminds me too much of last year to keep my psyche from bubbling over into a fine froth.
2001-2002 really sucked apart from my personal life with Tessa; a moronic monkey stole the White House, a terrorist attack claimed 3,000 of my fellow New Yorkers, the stock market took a historic dive, Dook won another national championship, my own team went 8-20 (the worst record since 1911), I got fired, I went broke, I went crazy, I went on Celexa.
I've done a lot of work to get myself back to emotional fighting weight again and I forgot to mention that we made a movie in there somewhere – but sometimes a 27-point loss, even in something as irrational as a college basketball game, can bring up strong feelings that aren't quite ironed out.
So at midnight, I lit the court with halogen lamps, took a ball, and lunged it at the backboard enough times to feel better. Then I calmly sunk 7 out of 10 foul shots, which wasn't bad, since I couldn't feel my hands.
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in warmer times: Jon Gray prepares to sink a 25-footer over Easter holiday in the barn (click pic for bigger image, or here for Steve's pics from last Xmas)