A game of feel

By Ed Piper

Basketball is a game of feel.

When you crisscross the ball between your legs, front-to-back, back-to-front, then around the sides, both hands, you get a feel.

Of course, as a younger player, you can't dribble the ball well enough to do all this. That's why you carry your ball with you everywhere, dribble everywhere. Especially your offhand. You can't end up a one-hand cripple who can only dribble with your strong hand.

Pete Maravich's dad, Press, the coach at LSU, drove the family car at low speeds while his son dribbled the ball on the street with his arm reaching out the passenger window.

The more natural the mechanics of handling the ball are, the better you're released to make magic moving the ball, passing it, shooting it, grabbing it off the backboard.

Some days your body isn't moving the way you would like. Early day games can be tough, because you feel lethargic from the lack of warmth and lack of movement, so you try to break through that torpid state by warming up, getting your knees high, stretching, running in place, anything that will help jack up the energy and limberness level.

Some games, you feel good in warm-ups but once the game starts, everything is off. Of course, as an athlete in a team game, you can't control everything. The other team may take it to you immediately, and you and your mates find yourselves running backwards defensively, just trying to catch up.

Other games, things come easily and the feel matches the effectiveness.

Younger, the goal is just to keep the lows from having the bottom fall out--like when you face an opponent, and you are nowhere to be seen, neither in the box score nor on the floor. As you work on consistency, you have fewer of these days, but they still happen.

The only way to counteract the dropouts is to work fundamentally on what your coach instructs you as a team, concentrating on the team system both offensively and defensively, playing your role, increasing your skills to the benefit, not just to you in your game personally, but to the benefit of the team.

Basketball is a game of flow.

Like I alluded to, sometimes the current is flowing the other team's way and you get swept off your feet.

Other times, you can feel a smoothness. Basketball is artistic; it is a ballet, as poetic writers say. Just look at any photo of guard dribbling and defender mirroring the same, exact posture. A tandem ballet. Now, that is beauty. Nothing like it. And it can feel just as beautiful out on the floor.

Basketball is kinesthetic.

It feels good. You wend the ball back-and-forth between your legs, you run layups, you slap the bottom of the backboard after releasing the ball on a layup. There is sound, rhythm, connection. The synapses of the brain must be hearing a symphony, because mind, body, soul fall into a unity that can't be achieved any other way.