During my fourth grade year I did two significant things, I played on my first basketball team (St. Bernard) and I got a best friend – Adam.
Adam and I had the same home room that year and while I had known him for the first three years of school I didn’t really know him that well. We soon struck up a friendship over basketball, and we did so probably out of dislike for the other’s favorite team. Adam was a UofL fan and I was a UK fan. And to make things even better, we didn’t even like the same pro basketball teams. That year I had adopted the Philadelphia 76ers as my favorite team, because I loved the way Dr. J played, while Adam liked the Los Angeles Lakers. Still we got along great. Adam was the first friend whose house I ever spent the night at, and vice versa. We would stay up late watching music videos (what was that new thing, MTV?) and talking, mostly about basketball and how bad UK would beat UofL or vice versa. Well, we finally got our wish that year, but unfortunately for me, UofL beat UK 80-68 in the “Dream Game” on its way to the Final Four. (But my 76ers beat his Lakers in the NBA Finals a couple of months later).
Well that summer Adam asked me to go to overnight basketball camp with him at UofL. While I didn’t like Louisville at all, I still agreed to go to its basketball camp because my love of basketball was stronger than my hate for UofL. Plus, I thought, how fun would it be to spend a week playing basketball with my best friend?
As I packed to get ready for camp, so I prepared like any kid my age would, I packed up everything I had. But it was going to be just like going off to college for a week, we even had our own dorm room, so I made like a college student and took my TV too. It was my first extended time away from home, but I had spent plenty of nights at Adam’s house, so I wasn’t really worried about being away from home. I did, however, have to give my mom 100 kisses before I left to make up for the 20 that I usually gave her each night before I went to sleep.
We checked into camp the first day and it was just like spending the night at Adam’s house, we stayed up late talking basketball and watching TV. We watched the first USFL championship game in our room that night, as the Michigan Panthers beat my beloved Philadelphia Stars (since I picked up the 76ers I decided to pick up every pro team from Philadelphia as my favorite that year and it worked out well too, considering the Phillies made it to the World Series before losing to the Baltimore Orioles-sorry about your baseball card Rick Dempsey). But sadly Kelvin Bryant, Chuck Fusina and Jim Mora couldn't beat Bobby Hebert and Anthony Carter.
We basically ate, slept and drank basketball.
In the mornings we’d have breakfast, then go to daily stations before breaking for lunch, then coming back for games and speakers in the afternoons. After that we’d have dinner, then we had night league games before wrapping up around 8 or 9. It didn’t leave time for much else, except maybe the occasional video game or two. The camp did a good job of keeping us on-the-go pretty much all of the time. The only real downtime we had was at night.
A couple nights later, though, before going to bed, we had some down time and I started to get sad. I was homesick. I missed my mom and dad and I must have been bored. I became a little upset and started to cry. “You’re homesick,” Adam told me.
I didn’t know what to do so I said I was going to go down the hall and call them from the payphone. “Hurry up, I think I’m getting homesick too,” Adam said as I walked out the door.
I went down the hall and called home. My mom answered the phone and I almost instantly burst into tears, I told her I wanted to come home and I wanted to come home tonight.
She tried to talk me out of it, my dad got on the phone too, but by that time I was crying pretty good. I was in new surroundings and didn’t know many people and was probably kind of scared too. I was still talking to my mom when I noticed someone came up behind me. It was the floor counselor, everyone called him "Mad Dog."
He asked me what was wrong and I told him. He asked if he could talk to my parents and I said yes. ”Hang on mom, Mad Dog wants to talk to you," I was able to push out.
"Who?" she asked, sounding both concerned and startled.
He got on the phone and talked to my mom and dad and told them that he would look after me and make sure I was okay. He was a really nice guy, who was kind of chubby, but I never knew why they called him Mad Dog because he was being really nice to me.
He invited me into his room and I asked if I could go get Adam too, so I did and Adam brought his video basketball game and I started playing it. After a few minutes there was a knock on the door and in walked Lancaster Gordon, a starting guard for UofL and a future first-round NBA draft pick. He and Mad Dog were friends and Mad Dog introduced Adam and I, so then I started playing the basketball game again and this time I started using the names of UK and UofL players and announcing the game as I played it. I was actually letting Louisville do pretty well, especially Lancaster Gordon, he made plenty of shots that night. Even though I was a UK fan I still knew Lancaster Gordon was a good basketball player and I knew that it was cool to be in the same room with him, so it was pretty exciting for me and for Adam too, who was a big UofL fan. (Darrell Griffith also came to speak to us at camp too).
I stayed in Mad Dog’s room for probably an hour, maybe a little less, until I was tired, then Adam and I went back to our room and went to sleep.
The next day, though, the homesickness came back. My dad dropped by during our early morning stations to see how I was doing and the second I saw him I started to get upset. He took me out into a hallway outside the gym where I told him I wanted to go home. I begged him to take me to Granny’s house. I started crying so hard in fact that my nose began to bleed. Dad took me to the bathroom and eventually my nose stopped bleeding, but he wouldn’t let me go home. I had planned with Adam to stay the whole week, so I was going to stay, he said.
On our floor at the dorm I became known as the homesick kid. It seemed that people were nicer to me. Adam’s mom and sister came over one night for a visit and his sister, Amy, who was three or four years younger than us, said to me: “I heard you were homesick.”
Other things didn't help. One afternoon I was playing a video game on the ground floor of the dorm and I was doing well, then a group of kids came along and messed with me and my game, ending it. It was things like that that every kid goes through in life and are forced to deal with on their own that just added to the troubles I was having.
Friday, the final day of camp, couldn’t come soon enough for me, but by then I was feeling better anyway, even though it probably was because I knew I was going home that day. Since it was the final day of camp we had individual competitions during our stations and I actually didn’t do too bad. In one shooting competition, where you had to alternate shooting behind chairs at the free throw line I started making lots of shots in a row and after I got done shooting I had the best score (somebody would come after me and beat it though). Afterwards one of the kids came up to me, surprised by how well I had shot, and asked me who I thought I was.
"Dr. J," I responded like any kid would quickly come up with the name of their idol.
"No, I know who I am, I was asking who you were," he retorted quickly.
When camp ended later that day I got some ribbons, a new T-shirt that read, “Scooter, Rodney and Me, Albuquerque 1983" and a good sense of what it was like to be on my own and not have my parents around to protect me all the time. I learned more in that week than I probably had throughout most of my life up to that point, you know what, I’ve still got that T-shirt too.
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