Baptized in Basketball
And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God.”
Summer 1998. The game was on. And the bowl-cut haircut pair of brothers were merged to the screen and to the GOAT; that guy with the tongue and the shoes and the dunks and the so-bad-it’s-so-good cartoon movie. Malone was on the block and Malone was a chump. Mike picked his pocket, handing the #1 turnover leader in NBA history yet another blunder. The good guys were down 1. I was 6 but my heart was on the line and in the front row seats. My feet were crossed zen style on the blue, scratchy carpet, otherwise I’d bob up and down in enthused bliss and worry, blocking my whole family from seeing His Airness get air because I never left it. Bryon was tasked to slow him down. He’d given him trouble all series, to be fair. I was little and knee-deep in lightsabers and power rangers and craving a Nintendo 64 for Mario Kart and Smash Bros (and Zack wanted NBA Courtside), but I learned sporty things quickly. Zack loved Charles Barkley a lot but MJ just a little bit more. I don’t know where I stood on the matter. But I knew for sure that I really loved Zack. And so I grabbed the orange ball, clumsily dribbled it on the grey pavement, and took a few shots. And made a few shots. And was taught a lot by God all in the midst of it.
I’ve watched every single NBA finals since. 22 years and counting. This year would’ve been the Lakers in 6 against the Bucks (Lakers in 7 against the Clippers in the WCF).
I really want it to come back already. Damn you COVID-19.
I hate jocks. Eh, jock culture. I’m sorry, just coming clean and keeping it real. The swagginess gets to me. The tearing each other down, the insulting, the trash talking, the posturing, the incessant mentioning of penis lengths. It stresses me out like no other. And it’s so central to sports. Tell me I’m wrong when I’m 80% sure I’m right.
The early stages of my basketball career were thankfully fraught with few “jockey” encounters. One game, we cherry picked almost every possession because the other team’s coach’s son kept taking shots and kept missing even though he was athletic and good looking. Yet he never ran back to deny the fast break. 5 on 4, and we had always had an easy look under the basket. We were lords and kings amidst a team of pawns.
No lie, my favorite component of basketball in particular is the actual act of taking a shot. Though it requires athletic ability, it is more mechanical than physical. And also, deeply emotional and spiritual too. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Grade school Caleb’s game was much like 28 year old Caleb’s game. Run and run and run and run until I’m open for a catch and shoot. I like to think I’m Ray Allen but I’m more Kyle Korver. But hopefully more Allen-y on the other end.
But then I got older. And that gremlin called puberty hit. Girls were… interesting now? I liked the nerds more than the jocks though, thanks a lot to the fact that during the freedom periods they called recess the jocks played football and football was corrupt and annoying and way too dependent on the quarterback. Basketball was, sadly, always empty with a lonely net and barren three point line. Besides, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King just dropped. Ain’t nobody got time to shoot hoops by his lonesome while Uruk-Hai were out and about. They weren’t going to hunt themselves, and I always had a fellowship around to safely travel through adolescence with.
Yet when I got home, when online gaming wasn’t yet a thing, when my nerdy friends were gone and I could maybe hang out one on one with a cool jock because his other jock friends weren't going to see us together, we’d run plays. Screens and hand-offs and outside shots. We were white kids after all, and unathletic at that. It was all about raining those 3s and doing our best Steve Kerr impersonations.
Years pressed by and the middle-school team had tryouts. The horror. I can’t remember a few hour span of time I disliked more, save for maybe some particularly intense fights with ex-girlfriends. He had the “tear them down to build them up” mentality. More drill-sergeant, less player coach vibes.
And as the sensitive, poetry writing kid who played Kingdom Hearts, spoke a total of ten words to all the girls I knew, and was so, deeply, terribly insecure, getting shouted at by a middle-aged bully didn’t sound like much fun to me.
I put my jersey away and retired. From the spotlight anyway.
But the other coach subbed in. The one who no one could see and who watched all of my bricks and all of my swishes. Yet I didn’t know he was watching me at this time. I’ve probably taken more shots under His watchful eye than any other person I’ll ever know. He’s a player-coach, after all.
They say organized sports develop life skills in kids. About commitment, about trying your best, about being a team player. On paper? Hell yes, all of these things are great and definitely worth pursuing.
Yet as a little kid, right on that threshold in the 11-13 year old range, sports didn’t feel this way. Maybe burgeoning sexuality in adolescent boys lends truth to the “boys will be boys” adage, but I hated the interplay between my fellow dudes. It was all fronting, all vying to be the best, all built on something that didn’t seem teamwork-y to me at all. Insulting was the norm, coaches were so clearly biased toward certain players, and the “oh let’s give him something to do out of pity” was worse than openly being mocked for not having skill.
Reflecting on this, I’m not even sure what would have helped me enjoy the sport I love so very much when it only ever made me distraught. It’s strange, even, to hate so much of something that you love a lot. It caused me to bury my affection for the game, underground, back to Roberts Road and none of the lights and all of the open shots. The holiness returned when shooting privately, the surging feeling I had during Star Wars and Spider-man centered me again when I could take “the game winning” shot, get the pass from Michael for the open jumper, envision the fantasy of success without fearing the reality of failure.
I’m very competitive, but indirectly. The camaraderie I was robbed from through organized sports I got through e-sports. I got very good at 2k and Gears of War and Halo and Call of Duty but was always mediocre at Madden.
Something about the anonymousness of a controller and thousands of miles of distance connected well with a deep desire to destroy that noob on the other screen and also spill my guts to a random teenager in California who didn’t know any of my friends and so wouldn’t rat me out for being as honest and raw as I always wanted to be.
Yet senior year rolled around, and I was the vice president of the school body thanks to politically maneuvering and everyone else’s senioritis. Friends and me, friends who almost all played football, and Brad, who ran cross country, and me, the extracurricular-less guy cheering all these guys who couldn’t shoot as well as I could. All dressed in silly costumes doing silly cheers to cheer on these silly chumps who couldn’t shoot above 20% from deep when I knew I could probably hit at least a third of mine.
Cocky I know, but what I mean is that I believe I can hit any shot I take. It doesn’t mean I know I will make it, but I’m not afraid of the shot itself. Shots can’t be made if you don’t shoot them because you keep missing. But it was not the mechanics of shooting that derailed me.
Part Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh and part Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit, I was either too frightened to pull the jersey out of the closet or too ashamed that all the hours spent shooting shots for the holy audience of one would account for nothing with the worldly audience of a several hundred.
With trash talk, I know many thrive. Hearing the outer dissent only increases the inward ascent. Jordan himself took the personal grievance of being slighted in the newspapers of an opposing team to cook them, always, with 50+ points. Look up many famous athletes, and they all lean into verbal sparring to help with the athletic sparring.
But it killed me. And it kills me.
Life moved on. I graduated. I went to a college group after my spiritual retirement at 18, convinced these Christians would holy “trash talk” in the same way my basketball teammates and coaches did only years earlier. They didn’t. Thank the literal heavens.
One guy, Eric, noted I started talking about Iverson to another member of the group who wasn’t into basketball. We struck up a conversation about that crossover, that step over Lue, those corn rows, that pound for pound “best player by far” six foot legend. He recommended we play ball with the group. I was nervous. We were on the same team. The opponent checked up. And… didn’t know how to play defense. And also didn’t know that it isn’t proper to shoot immediately after a check-up.
But I swished it. And got a bunch of head nods from men I respected. And then the game continued…
I’ve made every mistake in the books when it comes to love, but the one I haven’t done is involve a love interest into my deep interests. Some things are so sacred, so romantic even, that I need steady commitment before opening that part of my heart which opens up an entirely separate can of worms called my soul. Therefore, I’ve never dribbled a basketball around a lovely lady who I was “flirting with” but not “with with.”
Except the first time.
I was 19, holy hell insecure and angsty, and somehow… attractive to a high school friend of my high school friend. Don’t call the authorities on me.
I met her at an elementary school. The basketball court was dingey, the cracks in the pavement were throughout, and the sky was a brief skirmish between a proud sun and a dismissive band of clouds.
My ball handling has always been trash. But she didn’t care. She was smiling the whole time. Even in spite of the two liter gallon of sweat all over. But hey, the guys in high school had girls on their arm post game so why couldn’t I have my turn? She said she liked a particular kind of Snapple arbitrarily over a text, so naturally I bought her one and saved it in my car. I remember her smiling even bigger about that. We walked back to her house, and I didn’t even go for a proper peck. I kissed her on the forehead, like a proper gentleman and knight in shining honor. Too bad the fling lasted only a week.
What’s crazy is how I can vividly recall shooting an orange ball into a rusted rim yet dozens of sermons I can’t remember a single word that was taught. I consume Brennan Manning and John Mark Comer and Richard Rohr, but I remember game winning shots better than entire paragraphs of books. I find this weird because I’m more nerd than jock, more excited about a Star Wars premiere than a Blazers playoff game.
Except that that’s not true at all.
But I’m so quick to label myself and label others. I’m a “nice guy,” he’s a “bad boy.” She’s a “manic pixie dream girl” and she’s “way out of my league.” He’s a “teacher” and she’s a “preacher.” He’s definitely an 8 because he’s always mad at press conferences and she’s totally a 2 because she’s a teacher and is always helping someone even when she is asleep. I cling to these so tightly because it helps me make sense of others better. Supposedly. But I think I do this because I’m so afraid others won’t make sense of me.
I was so shattered that my great shooting at practice and passivity in game made no sense to my teammates. Or rather, that the way they made sense of it was to believe I wasn’t a good shooter.
But at Solid, at the college group, at the kinda post-evangelical but still definitely orthodox motley crue of misfit twenty-somethings, I could be the bundle of paradoxes. I could be “on fire” for God or in a basketball game or I could be “shooting bricks” at the net or at God. Depending on the day. And it was expected, anticipated, even embraced.
It was wholehearted, it was what felt like true faith. Riddled with holes on the road, injuries that needed a few days of rest, and other days of dead sprints and “suicides” and great progress on the path of “righteousness.”
That came to an end as do so many (if not all) great things. My road led to the Bridge City. The fun, hedonistic city filled with milk and honey.
Rip City.
Lillard’s rookie season was the first year I moved to Portland. Prime time for Dame Time. I remember hearing, whether it be urban legend or hearsay, that he got his number zero for the following three reasons: because he moved to play in Oregon, he grew up in Oakland, and because one of his high school coaches told him he would amount to nothing.
0.
Even writing this gives me chills. So many great basketball players have similar stories to this. Overcoming the most adverse of experiences, poverty and racism and discrimination and drugs and the media and the hype, to arrive in the NBA. To play in front of all of the lights, all of the pressure, all of the inner and outer demons, to perform at the highest level.
He hit a game-winner on my birthday. My 21st birthday. That left an indelible mark on my heart for this guy. Up to that point, I didn’t necessarily get down with being a hyper fan of any athlete. They were the jocks I hated, the ones who tore me down and confirmed the inner demon within that I wasn’t manly, wasn’t athletic, wasn’t skilled at anything, let alone something as silly as putting an orange ball through a white net.
But even his interviews were different. He was entirely assured of himself and yet never tore others down. Even the cheesy “believe in nice” ads felt genuine from the breakout star.
My excitement for MJ’s game 6 winner when I was 6 was huge, especially because I had the untainted and unfiltered glee of adolescence backing it. But in 2014, against the super bad guys we call the Houston Rockets, and after several terrible calls in the evil team’s favor, Dame received the ball for a play not set up for him. Fade away, deep 3, nothing but freaking net. I think my roommates would attest I have a promising career as a front man for a metal band after all my yelling and shouting.
He hit the shot. We hit the shot. It’s silly, I know. I don’t know him. I’ve never met him. But I felt I made the shot with him. I felt like I was the guy who wasn’t designed to get the game winning shot but who took it anyway and made it anyway.
And, in an amateur way, I did.
I took to Laurelhurst Park. My homecourt which is always an advantage. The concrete with a Nike swoosh and a very sketch left corner and leaning branches that interfere with threes on the right corner.
Twas in the midst of a tumultuous, stressful, soul-wrenching relationship with a similarly broken person. We had little to no boundaries, but I managed to find solace and open space with basketball.
Which was absurd. This realm of life brought anguish, confirmed insecurity rather than promoted confidence, and never gave me camaraderie.
Even though I never found the camaraderie I wanted, I discovered the cockiness I never knew was so needed. I was still Korver-y; running, sprinting, shoving (lightly), always around that half circle line of comfort and excitement and risk.
The first few games weren’t too hot but weren’t too cold. Some snide comments from “bad” jocks, but a few swishes after the snide comments about never swishing and always bricking and they shut up. Sometimes.
And I kept coming back to escape the scary love. And my scary love for the scary game returned. I was doing… Steph Curry things? Dancing around screens, shooting at least five feet behind the three line.
I didn’t hit them all. I hit enough though. Enough to have plenty of the same jocks I wanted respect from but never respected to respect my game by saying “I got the shooter.”
The jocks are just as insecure as I am. And as I was.
This basketball has taught me. But not through shooting hoops but rather from the God giving me consistent rebounds in life after all my bricks.
So too, can they be just as nice as this apparent and supposed “nice guy.”
A few years after the aftermath of relational Armageddon, my whole world was dystopian. All of my friends were divided in the divorce. Family all had a kind, if frustrating, “we told you so” disposition. Church… what was that? I hit the bottom, hard, rocky, broken, so many illusions and delusions falling and reemerging as something else.
But basketball made sense. I knew my role. My “label” as a shooter was something I could do, and usually do well. Twas a spring day, prime outside ball time, and there were dozens of men present jockeying to be the best jock. I got squaded with a guy I knew was good who knew he was good and wasn’t convinced I was good. The same guy who made the snide comments from before. He was 6’ 3,” had a decent fadeaway jumper, rebounded easily, quick to snap at teammates for blunders but who, to his credit, took the blame for his own mistakes too. But I had two other teammates. One was in late thirties, fully circular in the belly, yet very well bearded. Probably good in the block, and decent on rebounds.
The last guy? A washed up Russell Westbrook, somewhat Magic Johnson if Magic had Greek Freak tendencies.
Oh God, I thought. I am not sure what will happen here.
It’s interesting playing rec ball as a white guy because in Portland it’s either a court with only white guys or with a lot and plenty of racial diversity. With other white guys, I’ll do Steph things, Dame things, heck I might even try to drive for a change.
But, to be completely honest, I get worried I’ll be that chump white guy who does awkward layups and gets his ankles broken by black (and many white) guys who can dribble better than I can in their sleep.
Yet this crew of four was doing playmaking Rockets and Bucks things before the Rockets and Bucks did. The washed up but brimming with old man strength point forward was surrounded by shooters. The 6’ 3” “good” jock, the stocky close to middle-aged bearded fellow, and the lanky, insecure “bad” nerd. All able to shoot the lights out.
We played for four hours. We won 12 games in a row. I kid you not. I didn’t make all of the game winners but I made plenty. After one swished shot (which was preceded by two other makes), our fearless leader pointed to me and said “all day, all day, all day.”
A good player thought I was good. To be fair, I was good so long as I was connected to someone good, but his good play of driving inside and drawing doubles was only as good as the capacity to shoot from those around him. But he passed with confidence. Even though I said I made plenty, I missed plenty too. But so did the confirmed other good player who made snide comments from before. So did the surprisingly hot shooting dad-bod guy.
I learned that day, and am learning every time I walk onto a basketball court, and every time I walk into a grad school or job interview, and every single first, second, and seventh date, that I have to keep “shooting.”
It’s my role. It’s what I know I can do. It doesn’t matter whether it’s made or missed, all that matters is that it’s taken.
The past few years I’ve taken dozens of shots on love. For now, I am retired, sidelined with a broken heart for about ten months but I don’t regret all of the shots I took and missed. One day I will make it.
I’ve also taken a lot of shots on friends. I’ve made most of them. I’m on “fire” with getting more quality brothers and sisters. In vocation I took a deep 3 and it was nothing but net. Grad school, here I come.
I take these shots because I know God has got the board. He’s unselfish like that. He’s not chasing stats like I am. He isn’t concerned whether I can cross the demon guarding me, or how well I screen a brother or sister past their demon so they can get the open shot. All he wants is for his kids to take shots because He’s got the rebound.
Life is one long offensive possession. With a God who will do all the dirty work, make all the plays that don’t make the highlight reel, give all the pep talks or play audibles or putbacks, and who just wants His high fives, chest bumps, and tearful trophy hugs from His teammates so that we both know we are on the same team and that He is the captain.
Strolling on one of my many old man walks lately (again, damn you COVID-19), I thought about leaders. About how good leaders understand how invaluable their presence is to the team but how they also make themselves appropriately small or large for the sake of that team. In other words, they know their team is nothing without them, but they also understand they don’t compose everything about their team either.
I don’t know how this works theologically, but I think God leads us in a similar way. He is the playmaker, the one who got this whole team together and knows how great all of us are in our given role.
But he doesn’t need to make the game winning shot. He doesn’t even need to give the flashy assist either. He just wants us to know he drafted us, chose us before the foundation of the world, before the creation of basketball, to roll to that corner and to hit those 3s. To miss those 3s too.
We need not listen to the lies of the opposing Rockets, to the enemy team led by the Enemy, convincing us we can’t hit a 3 and can’t find a wife and contribute nothing to the court and nothing to the world.
God is gonna box that punk out of the paint, get the board, probably even get an and-1 putback dunk on that jerk. The first thing He will do after the play, before turning to the crowd of angels praising Him for the glory of His dunk and His goodness?
Look for that insecure shooter, incompetent slasher, that single mom struggling to make rent, that pastor struggling with porn addiction, that millenial busting her ass to prove to her parents that she’s worth something, and give them the biggest bear hug, hardest high five, highest chest bump.
We have a great God who gets it completely. If there’s anything I am learning so deep into this pain of not thinking I am good enough, it’s that God gets why I feel this way. But He also refuses to let me stay in this feeling so long as I keep taking shots. He always passes me the ball, even when I’m not open. And He always expects to shoot because somehow I always get open.
Good news is that over time my shooting percentage is going up. Thanks mostly to the fact that I know and love and cherish and cling to the Guy who always gets the rebound. All of the misses and then the rebounds and then the makes end up making the misses somehow sweeter.
MJ, the GOAT (who absolutely was the jock I don’t like but somehow still love), puts it like this:
I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.