6/7 Tuesday Milligan

Nowadays, when I talk about my basketball career, I talk about how I peaked in the 5th grade and it's been a decline since then...

At church, I played basketball with kids 3 or 4 years older than me, which is more impressive if you consider that they had already had their growth spurts.  Even though I won't claim that I could beat them, I held my own because I was a deadly 3-point shooter from the right corner.  Even though I was really tiny and had no real arm strength, I managed to master a two-hand push shot from my chest that arc'd really high in the air...reached it's apex at roughly 2/3 of the distance between myself and the hoop and managed to go through the hoop at a pretty high percentage! (I even got the 2nd highest score in a shooting contest held in my city that year!)  Out of fear that my shot would be blocked by my numerous taller opponents, I put so much arc on my shot that I hit the roof of the old Chinatown YMCA Bubble at least twice during the regular season.  The reality was I couldn't really offer our Saints team very much as a 5th grader except by exciting the crowd with the possibility that this tiny pudgy kid might make a 3-point shot in a game against high-schoolers.  I am very grateful to my teammates and our token coaches for always putting me in for the last few seconds of every half and drawing up a play to get me a shot.  More often than not, I got blocked or missed badly...but I was so grateful for being able to play 1 minute per game (even though most kids today would complain with the lack of fairness in dividing up playing time...I was just happy to be there.)

Now all of this sounds great.  Is this just a humblebrag?  Why is this story a milligan?

Because once I developed enough strength to shoot the ball with one arm...I abandoned my push shot for a conventional shooting motion...and was never the same again.  I continued to shoot tons of 3-pointers...but probably missed 80% of them.  Sure, I rarely got blocked now...but man I traded my most valuable skill to just be like everybody else.

Moral of the story: When someone tries to teach you to shoot, you should just go on and give 'em the boot.