Buzzer Beater
Here I am, standing with my hands on my knees, hunched over, gasping for air. Coach Carroll is scribbling lines on a whiteboard, emphasizing the back cut. With less than six seconds on the clock, there was no margin for error. Still bent over at the waist, watching the sweat roll off my nose and hitting the ground below me, I feel a slight nudge on my right arm. Jerome, one of my teammates and arguably the best player on the court, is trying to get my attention while nodding his head towards the coach.
“Shawn, the inbound pass is coming towards you, Jerome is setting the screen and rolling to the basket, set him up and pass him the ball.” The coach said while waving his marker in front of the whiteboard like it was a magic wand, as I nodded in agreement with every direction.
The sound in the gymnasium started from a low rumble to an outright roar as we entered back onto the court. I positioned myself at the top of the box, waiting for my cue to head behind the three-point arch into the open backcourt. With the sound of the whistle, I counted one, two, then shook left, then slid right, under a predetermined screen set by my Center. I darted to the backcourt, received the pass right as Jerome planted his feet to set the pick. Swinging around towards Jerome, waiting for his release, I noticed a double team coming from the weak side. As soon as Jerome rolled out from the pick, I heard the other team yelling.
“Switch!” a player yells from behind the screen Jerome just set.
In a matter of seconds, our entire plan had disintegrated into a jumbled mess of bodies and blown positions. With no time for a reset, I put the ball to the ground, dribbled towards the basket, and in what felt like slow motion, I saw an opening just between two players. Gathering the ball and taking my final step, I made sure to position my foot in such a way that I can pivot enough to turn my body to shield the ball from the defender. As I lifted off the ground, a guttural sound came from within; I held my breath and flew through the air, rising towards the basket in a way that I have never done before. At this moment, I was now looking directly at the rim just a few inches above my head. I swung my arms around and put the ball through the basket with an intentional force.
The crowd, my teammates, and even the opposing team froze in place as the ball went through the hoop for the last time. The surreal moment of my first slam dunk just set in as I was on my way down as the clock read zeros. The cheers from the crowd became overwhelming, but something was wrong. My feet were now being pushed out of position, and now I was falling uncontrollably to the ground, backward headfirst.
I don’t quite remember the instances that occurred after this moment as when I landed; I hit the back of my head on the ground. But only for a split second, or to me at least is what it felt like, I was back to my feet, walking towards my team’s bench, being escorted by my teammates on either side of me.
Looking up to Jerome, I asked, “What’s wrong?” as I noticed this grim look on his face.
Jerome looked back at me and pointed to my arm without saying anything. As Looked down at my arm, I noticed something was very off; something wasn’t straight, something started to hurt bad! Something that shouldn’t have happened. Something that I couldn’t believe until I saw it for myself. My arm, the one I just used to slam dunk the ball, the one I just used to win the game, was now broken at the wrist. An immediate swelling and the purplish-yellow bulge that was my skin was a dead giveaway to a break somewhere. What was my greatest physical accomplishment to date had now become my biggest weakness in a matter of seconds.
It is hard to believe that was nearly eighteen years ago and how vivid it all still seems to me. While this may not be the most significant time in my life, I learned something from this incident that has shaped my life further. Once a powerful athlete, I am now suffering from a rare genetic disorder that hinders my ability to walk, lift, sit for long periods, and fatigue. Although I am in my mid-thirties, I now have the physical abilities as an aging senior.
Not very long ago, I had a career, a house where I live with my wife and three kids, a nice luxury sports sedan, and the freedom to not worry about money. But much like the glory of my former slam dunk in that gymnasium on that fateful Saturday, nothing lasts forever. Much like breaking my wrist, my disease came instantly but took me a while to recognize. I had been sick for many years before, but it wasn’t until my third child was on the way that I hit rock bottom. Working more hours a week, with a newborn baby in the house, and the ever-growing stresses that come with life, I got to a point where I could no longer continue working and took a short term medical leave.
With more and more medical bills piling up, I ended up going back to work sooner than expected, only to be met with the same problems as before. At this point, I was a mere shell of myself, working, sleeping, then back to work, it seemed, day-after-day. My only waking hours were at work, due to the extreme fatigue I had by the time I had gone home. Under careful consideration and direction from my wife, we decided it was time to leave work once and for all.
By this point in time, we had lost the luxuries we had in life, our house, our cars, and our disposable income. We were at rock bottom, but I felt as if I was living under the rocks. Diving deeper into depression while trying to diagnose the issues, I had, on many occasions, wondered what my life has become and what I was going to do now. How could I rebuild my career? How am I going to rebuild myself?
Being a prime athlete in my younger days, the sequence from that basketball game taught me an important lesson, as I would often replay it in my head. Even though I was the hero, the one who won the game on a spectacular play, there could always be something around the corner you did not account for. In this case, it was an opponent player under my legs on the way down from a slam dunk, or in more recent times, being diagnosed with EDS, POTS, and MCAS. A trifecta of syndromes that has made me disabled and had struck my hands from being able to create works using a mouse or even a pen.
Although I had a talent and the physical attributes to continue my expedition into sports, I had given up my position on the team the following year. The broken wrist, which took about two months to heal, kept me off the court long enough to understand that I needed a backup plan. Not being able to practice, I turned to computers, more specifically the graphic arts, in which I used my time away from the game to develop my skills in design. I had developed a newfound interest in everything computers and set out to pave a new career.
Nearly fifteen years of work and development, I now had the result of becoming the lead designer for a multi-billion-dollar company where my work is seen by millions of viewers each week. I had now built my career to the pinnacle of my field, but similar to that one incident in that basketball game, my legs were cut out from underneath me at my highest elevation.
So how does one know if he or she is truly a master of themselves? By working, climbing, scratching, and jumping their way to the top of a field, then having it all crumble down around them. It is in the moments of the freefall in which we are blind to our ultimate destiny. The moment I landed, I could not understand the impact of my life until I saw it from another perspective. Again much like the fall, it took two years and a diagnosis of a rare disease to see my new perspective.
Many people look at me and ask if I feel like I have been dealt a lousy hand in life, but I look at these moments as a continuous game that is ever-changing. Understanding that talents come and go, fade into obscurity, or taken from you in a freak way, the real power we have is in how we use the events to progress our lives. There are many strategic ways to play the game of life.
I may not be able to dunk a basketball, or even be able to hit a layup, get back to where I was in my graphic design career, or live a typical average life, but I have high expectations and a belief in myself to make the best of it. I intend to pursue my career in writing in hopefully what is my third act in life. With a liking to storytelling and minimal ability to get words down on paper, albeit from some useful tools on my computers, I am looking forward to becoming a writer and building my skills even further. It is not how one person falls, but what they do when they get up. Life has a way of demanding the most from us, where sometimes we get a slam dunk, while in other ways, we fall helplessly to the floor.
We all face buzzer-beaters in our life at one point or another. Sometimes we hit the shot; sometimes we don’t. I have learned that it is the following few seconds afterward that may determine the outcome of the rest of your life. So for those hanging in trying to hit that buzzer-beater, understand that there will always be another game to play.
