46 - Long Afternoons of Sports

Even those holidays passed relatively carefree, without many unhappy episodes for an adolescent along his turbulent route to adulthood. Early in the afternoons, as usual, I would take the main road by bike and my Slazenger basketball under my arm to the courts, before anyone dared emerge from their tents or caravans or bungalows into the suffocating heat of the afternoon and face the brutality of the midsummer sun. Oh, the sun! who inevitably dispatched two or three afternoons into my holidays to the first-aid centre of the resort with severe burns on my neck and shoulders and back -as sometimes I foolishly played bare-skinned and most of the time without sunscreen protection.

Yet, in the middle of the scorching by the heat concrete surface of the courts, one could see a white-red skinned, bony, sweaty body, with himself as both teammate and opponent, practicing his basketball -throws, bounces and dribbles. After a while, one by one, my basketball mates from the world of camping youth appeared. Takis was a distant cousin, taller than Billy, but with relatively ‘low intelligence’, as Mother used to say mentioning his drooping lips – evidence, according to her, of dumbness. Then there was this lad from Athens with an admirably muscular physique for his age, who, he once told me, was attributed to a daily diet of many eggs. His sharp vision and, because of this, his excellent shooting accuracy, on the other hand was due to the many carrots he ate. A plump guy from Larissa, with pleasant manners and soft-spoken, despite his provincial accent from his Thessalian plain heritage (an accents normally associated with vulgar manners), was another regular of the basketball and tennis courts until later in our vacation he befriended Billy and his focus shifted from sports to courting girls. In the chaos of the courts exclusively by males, as the sun was setting, Father would sometimes surprisingly turn up -after the obligatory afternoon kip, for one or two shots of the ball. But the place was eventually dominated by the Yugoslav youth, whose technique and athleticism were built on traditions of socialist countries in popular sports. That was pretty much the family of basketball aficionados in which I belonged to, made up of boys who took their sport seriously.

Billy did not participate in those team games. He had flat feet, I recall, and did not show a good perception of a ball’s (any ball’s) movement, as Father had once pointed out, and, as a result, his handling or kicking of the ball was clumsy, dare say throwing or kicking a ball like a girl. Tennis, however, was the one elitist -in my view- game that he fervently wanted to play, with me or the guy from Larissa, with the expensive racket he brought. Being an individual rather than team sport, tennis did not particularly inspire me, but I faced him as an opponent, once under the gaze of his beautiful friend Tina. Despite my lack of experience with the sport and a cheaper, heavier and inferior racket, I easily prevailed in those games, without however capturing Tina’s heart. Father summarized it quite well, after all: not all men have the brain and body to cut it in ball games.