Last week as I tucked myself into bed, I must not have realized how strongly I had been affected by watching the nail-biting finish to the UConn win over Duke in the NCAA finals. Shortly thereafter, I found myself in that surreal state of suspended animation – an inescapable dream that looped over and over again for what seemed like all night. It didn’t of course, but it seemed like it did, and that’s the nature of dreams – unpredictable and mysterious, filled with reels that speak a language all their own. As Sigmund Freud, the famed psychotherapist noted, dreams are the “the royal road to the unconscious.”
And so, through the night, all the complications and conflicts that ensued in the last seconds of the game that sent UConnn to the final four kept playing in my head. I watched the crowd explode out of their seats a hundred times, and their mouths were moving in slow motion, and they were pronouncing words I can’t repeat here on a podcast. And then, there were the orange ping-pong balls floating through the air, and there sitting next to me was my former math teacher from fifth grade dressed as a referee, yelling at me about X and Y and some incredibly complicated algebra problem I couldn’t do if my life depended on it.
Why in the world would anyone want to be doing math in the middle of a NCAA game? And why was Mr. Lyles there for Pete’s sake yelling at me as the last few seconds ticked off at the end of the game? I wanted out of this psycho mess, out I tell you. I felt myself trying to move away, through the crowd, but no one would let me through and my math teacher, always particular about things like decimals and carrying the zero was pointing his finger at me, while everyone else was hugging each other and saying words I can’t use here.
Well, Freud would explain all that as our minds working things out from our past. Somewhere in that basketball game I had apparently gone backwards in time and called forth some mathematical event that had been eating at me for years in the deep dark recesses of my mind. As the final seconds ticked away, and UConn sent a little orange ball through the air to snatch the game away from Duke, Mr. Lyles, my former math teacher, had decided to carry a precious three points over on the scoreboard of my brain, and, coincidentally, send the crowd into something close to a collective cardiac event.
Of course, none of it had any relation to real life, other than the fact than as some version of kookoo that played in my head as UConn staged one of the greatest comebacks in modern basketball history. If you watched the game, it was living testimony of endurance, grit and determination, but in my frontal cortex it was living testimony of pandemonium, havoc and major bedlam.
To make matters worse, somewhere, in the chaos of re-living the game while I slept, I was pulled aside by Mr. Lyles and given an assignment to recite a long paragraph to the crowd as a part of the halftime entertainment. I know, there is no rhyme or reason to that, but remember I’m in some sort of twilight zone where information and subtle associations are all flying past me in living color. Freud would have loved it, but I was wrestling my sheets, kicking my wife, and yelling words that cannot be used on a podcast.
Since I’ve never been that great at memorization, the level of anxiety was building up like a Mediterranean teapot. To make matters worse, the paragraph I was given, a random selection of unrelated phrases, was almost impossible to recite. I don’t remember the details exactly of course, but I’ll give you the gist and tone – it read something like this:
“A scoreboard is only as good as the society it comes from and a stadium divided cannot stand, unless it is divided by the square root of pi over the circumference minus two. Therefore, we pledge allegiance to a sum of the square of the other two sides, one nation under God.”
Try to deliver that in front of a stadium of screaming fans! By the third or fourth attempt at that monstrosity, I woke up in a sweat, managed to stumble out of bed, and find a safe corner of my kitchen to gain some composure. I made some coffee, gathered my wits and rather suddenly came to the overwhelming conviction that I never wanted to see another basketball game as long as I lived. I think some of this anxiety comes from a childhood being raised by a father who wasn’t that crazy about basketball and yet corralled some tickets to watch the Evansville Aces ramp up to the national championships under the coaching of basketball legend Arad McCutchan. Attending those games, with the Purple Aces virtually burning up the courts, bleachers went all the way to the ceiling to accommodate the fans, and I thought we might fall to our deaths as crazy fans cheered and screamed and wildly stomped their feet. Psychologically speaking, I could see the beginnings of my wild nightmare begin to take shape.
There was also the memory of an amazing player named Jerry Sloan playing for those Purple Aces, who began making this incredible shot now known as the “ally-oop.” Supposedly, but my father, who knew little about basketball, insisted he had invented the ally-oop playing badminton. In any case, this hook shot is like watching poetry in motion, whereby a player with his back to the basket, takes a step away from the defender and arches the ball over a shoulder. The roundhouse shot is virtually undefendable because the ball is unblockable by a defender.
Naturally, as a born dreamer, I came out of those national championship games thinking I had, by pure osmosis, acquired this undefendable “hook shot.” As a rather short dreamer, I not only imagined I could make this shot over much taller players, but also that I would be able to introduce it to my classmates at school, a feat I thought that would gain me some much-needed traction on the popularity scale. It was a kind of March Madness going on in the dark recesses of my head, the kind my later dreams were made of, mind you – the kind that make you get up in front of people and break any number of classroom rules.
As I sipped my coffee, bits and pieces of my past came more clearly into view – in fact, I can hardly believe the whole incident didn’t come out better than it did. I was in fifth grade math, learning the rudiments of the almighty “X,” the unknow that would be a staple in all the future math problems for the rest of my life. I had noticed that my math teacher had retreated to the back of the room to give a student some help, which gave me a rare opportunity to practice my new hook shot to the wastebasket next to his desk.
I wadded up a sheet of paper, made my approach, then went fully air-born with a left hook that rounded the edge of the can and fell in. Emboldened by my success, I tried again and again, gaining fans and onlookers with every shot, some of whom were now applauding quietly and giving me silent high fives. I think it was around shot number eleven when I heard the penetrating voice of Mr. Lyles behind me.
“Mr. Blunder,” he said, “Please go to the hall immediately.”
Moments later, Mr. Lyles, really God in the form of a math teacher, rounded the corner, and from about an inch away, told me I could look forward to getting a “U’ on my report card, the worst discipline mark one could get, and one that would surely get me grounded at home.
Looking back as I practiced my famed shot in math class, I am certain that when UConn made that last second shot from half court to win the game against Duke, my childhood came rushing back and something inside my brain must have snapped. I’m told my eyes were twitching and my left arm rose up off the couch as if I was subconsciously trying to make an undefendable hook shot, but I don’t think that is true.
I just know that as I turned out the lights and began to doze off to sleep that night, my wife says I was mumbling something about how to figure out the area of a sphere, one about the size of a basketball and how its area equals four times pi times the radius squared, and if you took the parabola of the arc and divided it by the number of math teachers you’ve ever had, you would come up with a figure that was close, not exactly but close (fading voice into slumber...)