My Basketball Diaries
The Friday High 5
I’m cribbing the title of this from the 1995 Leonardo DiCaprio film The Basketball Diaries. If you know the movie, you might be thinking, “Waitaminute—is Eric is about to cop to selling his body in a bathroom stall for money to get high?”
No.
The Basketball Diaries is a cautionary tale about kids and drugs, a recurrent theme for most of my young life. What began as a PSA involving an egg and a skillet ends in a dirty bathroom stall. I don’t know if that’s the natural progression of these things, but The Basketball Diaries terrified me far more than an authoritative father-figure scowling in disapproval while making breakfast. Please, bro—I saw that every day.
In a case study of one person—me—The Basketball Diaries was effective propaganda. Turns out you can be scared straight. However, as a basketball movie, it’s a complete letdown. This may sound shallow but whatever, I was 17 at the time—I only watched it because basketball was in the title. Picture young-me settling in, thinking I’m about to see an artful take on White Men Can’t Jump and instead discovering it’s about an emaciated Leo seriously feening for drugs.
At the time, I devoured anything to do with basketball.
When you’re taller than everyone else, the default assumption is you play. So I did. But I didn’t get serious until high school. After we moved to a remote area of Northern Michigan—picture the Antarctica settlement from The Thing but with more lederhosen—my brother and I lived at the community center. It was only a couple of blocks from our house, and there was literally nothing else to do.