Swish
You wouldn’t know it now, but I was a reasonably good athlete as a kid. My favorite sport, and arguably my best, was basketball.
I loved basketball.
My father, a terrific athlete in his day, was always my coach, which had its advantages: I spent a few years on an AAU national travel team that I was almost certainly not qualified for. But hey, the coach’s son gets to play.
(Or at least, I got to play for the last five minutes when we were winning by 40 points, or losing by as many).
Warming up before an away game we were all struggling to put shots in the hoop.
This gym’s rims were extra springy, as if they’d been overtightened. Every shot, no matter how perfect the backspin, ricocheted off. Nobody got a “shooter’s bounce.”
"Hey Coach!" yelled John, a star player. "These rims are too hard!"
My father, standing two paces behind the three point line, put his hands out in the universal "toss me the ball" pose.
John passed him the ball. Dad caught it and, with one smooth motion, let it go in a perfect arc that went straight through the hoop, hitting nothing but net.
Swish.
He turned to us, a group of 11-year-old show-offs with jaws on the gym floor, and with a smirk that I'll never forget said,
"Then don't hit the rim."
Sometimes the solution is built into problem, and our job is to simply to be present enough to recognize it, and good enough to execute.
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