When to give up

I have decided to resume blogging and the best place to start again is to honor the honorable god of cricket, Sachin Tendulkar, who is retiring from cricket at the age of 40. I am sure he must have faults but he really impresses me with his gentlemanly attitude in the age of self glorification in the sight of money and fame. There are very few famous people I have any interest in meeting but this 5' 5" legend would definitely be near the top of my list. When professional athletes world wide are turning into tattooed, self indulgent, ego maniacs, I am so happy to finally see a person worthy of the title of hero and role model. Maybe one day in my visits to India I will get to meet him.

This all reminds me when I was 40 and retired from playing basketball publicly. I still remember the Christmas I turned 7 when I received the wonderful gift of an orange basketball rim. I can picture my dad putting up a square piece of solid plywood above the garage, painting a black square on it and then mounting my shiny new goal on it. I played basketball on that driveway for hours daily for years. Sometimes I would long for people to stop by to play with me no matter how much older they were than me. Hours on end I would dribble around the edge of our long driveway and shoot endless numbers of free throws. My life and dream for many years was to be a professional basketball player. Then I hit high school and I failed to keep growing so was just too short for the basketball team. I switched to cross country running but still loved to play basketball every chance I got. My first year of college I suddenly grew 6" and suddenly I was a reasonable height again for the hardwoods. What made it interesting is that I was always a guard when I was young as I had great ball handling skills from the hours and days of practice and was very fast. Now that I was taller, I was automatically playing forward which I had never done before. All of that self inflicted training paid off.

Well into my late 30's, I typically played basketball a couple of hours every other day. Since I never had any serious injuries related to my knees I made a huge decision to quit at age 40. I had some bad basketball related accidents. While playing in Saudi Arabia, I got hit in the mouth and lost 1/4 of one of my back teeth. In Houston, I was playing with old worn out shoes and the whole side of the shoe blew out when I tried to stop quickly,  which resulted in a horrible 6 months of pain and surgery for plantar fasciitis, followed by 5 years of wearing hard orthotics. The best thing to come out of that time was that I now have real arches as up to that time my foot was totally flat. The scariest injury was when a clumsy fellow who played nasty ran up to me from the side and bumped into my knee at full speed. That resulted in 6 months of daily swimming to rehabilitate my knee so I could play basketball again. I always seem to get injured and my wife would comment on how injury prone I was since I had to go all-out, full steam when playing. Still for me I did not have any ACL or major injury so I played basketball for the last time publicly for my 40th birthday. The only times I have played since it to teach my youngest son that someone twice his age can beat him any time I want!