All Over the Place: A Need to Only Play Basketball

From My Teaching Book

By Michael H. Brownstein

After school in the After School All Stars, the boys tell the gym teacher and me that they want to play basketball.
    Not an option, I explain. We play all kinds of sports. Not just basketball. When you signed up for the gym program, you knew this.
    But we’re black. Basketball is what black people play.
    Sorry, I answer. That’s not true. Soccer is what is played all over the world. Not basketball. Soccer. And it’s played in every country in Africa and in every country in the Caribbean.
    The students don’t like this response. So I ask them to sit on the stage.
    Basketball. We want basketball. We never play—
    We have a situation. The gym teacher has the volleyball net set up. He wants to teach volleyball—which is a fairly fun game if given a chance—but, no, they want basketball.
    They don’t get basketball. They didn’t get a lot of other things either. I’m the coordinator of the program. In the gym, they finally play volleyball. And they like it.
    Next week?
    Next week we’ll be in the classrooms doing academic enrichment and community service projects. No basketball. Sorry. It’s time to learn sports from other countries. Football, for example, is called soccer throughout the world and it’s the world’s most popular game. And basketball, well basketball is basketball.
    Cricket anyone?

Copyright © 2022 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.