Bounce Back Basketball Quotes

So,” Will begins, “do you play ball as well as you run?” I laugh a little. I can’t help it. He’s sweet and disarming and my nerves are racing. “Not even close.” The conversation goes no further as we move up in our lines. Catherine looks over her shoulder at me, her wide sea eyes assessing. Like she can’t quite figure me out. My smile fades and I look away. She can never figure me out. I can never let her. Never let anyone here. She faces me with her arms crossed. “You make friends fast. Since freshman year, I’ve spoken to like . . .” She paused and looks upward as though mentally counting. “Three, no—four people. And you’re number four.” I shrug. “He’s just a guy.” Catherine squares up at the free-throw line, dribbles a few times, and shoots. The ball swished cleanly through the net. She catches it and tosses it back to me. I try copying her moves, but my ball flies low, glides beneath the backboard. I head to the end of the line again. Will’s already waiting it half-court, letting others go before him. My face warms at his obvious stall. “You weren’t kidding,” he teases over the thunder of basketballs. “Did you make it?” I ask, wishing I had looked while he shot. “Yeah.” “Of course,” I mock. He lets another kid go before him. I do the same. Catherine is several ahead of me now. His gaze scans me, sweeping over my face and hair with deep intensity, like he’s memorizing my features. “Yeah, well. I can’t run like you.” I move up in line, but when I sneak a look behind me, he’s looking back, too. “Wow,” Catherine murmurs in her smoky low voice as she falls into line beside me. “I never knew it happened like that.” I snap my gaze to her. “What?” “You know. Romeo and Juliet stuff. Love at first sight and all that.” “It’s not like that,” I say quickly. “You could have fooled me.” We’re up again. Catherine takes her shot. It swishes cleanly through the hoop. When I shoot, the ball bounces hard off the backboard and flies wildly through the air, knocking the coach in the head. I slap a hand over my mouth. The coach barely catches herself from falling. Several students laugh. She glares at me and readjusts her cap. With a small wave of apology, I head back to the end of the line. Will’s there, fighting laughter. “Nice,” he says. “Glad I’m downcourt of you.” I cross my arms and resist smiling, resist letting myself feel good around him. But he makes it hard. I want to smile. I want to like him, to be around him, to know him. “Happy to amuse you.” His smile slips then, and he’s looking at me with that strange intensity again. Only I understand. I know why. He must remember . . . must recognize me on some level even though he can’t understand it. “You want to go out?” he asks suddenly. I blink. “As in a date?” “Yes. That’s what a guy usually means when he asks that question.

The court is my escape and my paradise. I love basketball. I love the way you can be exhausted and sweaty and running with nine other guys, and yet, at the risk of sounding overly Zen, you are still so wonderfully alone. On the court, nothing bothers me. I see things a few seconds before they actually happen. I love anticipating a teammate’s cut and then throwing a bounce pass between two defenders. I love the rebound, boxing out, figuring angles and positioning myself, willing the ball into my hands. I love dribbling without looking down, the feel, the sense of trust, of control, almost as though the ball were on a leash. I love catching the pass, locking my eyes on the front rim, sliding my fingers into the grooves, raising the ball above my head, cocking my wrist as I begin to leap. I love the feel as I release the shot at the apex of the jump, the way my fingertips stay on the leather until the last possible moment, the way I slowly come back to the ground, the way the ball moves in an arc toward the rim, the way the bottom of the net dances when the ball goes swish. I

The game within the game is the game that only the players see. They experience it in relation to one another on the floor at a particular time and in the middle of the action. It is one of the nuances of the game of basketball. As Knick teammates during those years, we knew what a teammate was going to do almost before he did it. We helped one another on defense and shared the ball on offense. We made room for each of us to be his best within the context of the team. For example, I often would see Clyde come down the floor with the ball. I'd catch his eye. I knew he wanted to go down my side of the floor. In order to give him a little more room to move, I would clear out. That way I didn't clog up his space. Or, when I had the ball on the side and he was at the top of the key, waiting to go backdoor, our center knew he had to move to the other side of the floor to create the room for the backdoor bounce pass from me to Clyde who was moving down the lane toward the basket. That was the game within the game. On one level, the game within the game was a matter of mechanics but is also operated on a psychological level in that we truly were all for one and one for all. We challenged one another in practice to become better. We helped one another come back from defeat. We inspired one another to reach our peak team performance. None of us felt we could be as good alone as all of us could be together. Our unity came sometimes with laughs, sometimes with conflicts, sometimes with moments of collective insight, but it was that spirit of camaraderie which brought us together in a way that allowed the fans to see something very special.

I can’t hear you, people! Make some noise if you want a good show. How about death? Do you wanna see lots and lots of death tonight?” I took in the applause, the hollering, the hammering feet, basking in it. Then my arm shot up, pointing one finger to the ceiling. The guard-tower window exploded. A man plummeted from the tower, slamming on the concrete floor behind me with a splat like someone stomping on a tomato. He’d been torn open from throat to groin, his chest a ragged ruin of splintered, wrenched-back ribs and mangled organs. His dead eyes were still open, jaw wrenched wide in terror. Then came the rain. The second sniper, one piece at a time. Hands. Feet. Arms, wrenched off at the elbows. His severed head bounced like a basketball as it hit the concrete, rolling across the floor and coming to a stop next to Warden Lancaster’s Italian leather shoe. A horrified silence fell across the room. The guards looked at one another, uncertain, hands on their guns but not sure if they should draw. Lancaster stared down at the severed head, frozen like a deer in the headlights. “Well,” I said, “you’re about to get everything you asked for. What do you think, Warden? Is this good and messy enough for you? Wouldn’t want you to think I ‘pussied out’ again.” His gaze snapped toward me. He took a halting step back, away from the carnage. “How? How did you—” A third body dove from the shattered window. Not in a guard’s uniform, but a billowing white leather coat. She landed as graceful as a raptor, absorbing the impact with one knee and the outstretched fingers of a single hand, and slowly rose to her full willowy height. Her eyes blazed like molten copper, as radiant as her twist of scarlet hair. “If anyone in this room believes themselves to be a righteous soul,” Caitlin said, “I suggest you kneel down and pray. If nobody answers…then you belong to me.