In Which The Orphanage Hoops It Up

I wanted to take some time these next couple of days and let all of you know what became of our basketball team. Many people have asked me how it is going and have wanted to hear how our team did. I will tell you, but I want to portray it like a sports movie. And since I don’t have enough time to make a movie (thought about it though) I ‘ll just tell you.

The problem with doing this though is that sports movies are super unrealistic. Like, really super-duper unrealistic. Lets look at a few examples, shall we?

The first example of a sports movie comes from the 80’s classic “Karate Kid”. In this movie, Ralph Macchio gets beats up by the Aryan kid from the Kobra Kai dojo. Suddenly, we have our underdog hero. He runs into Arnold from “Happy Days”, washes his car and paints his fence during a musical montage, and is suddenly a 19^th degree black-belt or something. Ralph Macchio then beats up the Aryan kid who, mind you, had literally been practicing karate since he was in utero.

In at least the first 5 “Rocky” movies the title character (that would be Rocky) is a poor lower class worker that is too [fill in whatever underdog adjective you’d like] to get a job. He ends up earning himself a match against Carl Weathers and then starts training during a musical montage that shows him chopping wood, punching frozen meet, and running up stairs. He then survives against Carl Weathers. in a victory so pyrrhic that they considered renaming the expression ‘pyrrhic victory’ to ‘pulling a Rocky’. Pyrrhic because the real life inspiration for the movie refused to go down in the fight and suffered something like 50+ stitches to the face.

In the football must-see movie “Remember the Titans” we find ourselves cheering for a high school that has just been racially integrated. We root for the team as they overcome incredible odds to not only become friends but go on to win a lot of football games all set to a montage of awesome ‘60s music. Somehow, after being so thrilled that they happened to win a state title we seem to forget that, other than the whole 1960’s race thing, a big source of tension in the beginning of the movie was concern that the current team and coach had already won so many state titles that the new kids and coach were going to upset their system..

“Rookie of the Year” is a lovable baseball movie where this kid has a freak medical accident and, in a shocking turn of events, doesn’t sue the hospital but decides to become a pitcher for the Chicago Cubs. The kid, Henry RosenBagger GardenHoser Rudabager Roengardner eventually loses his 98mph fastball but not before he goes through a series of fun musical montages and learns all about life and love and friendship and, since he plays for the Cubs, losing.

“Little Big League” is a movie where the Minnesota Twins decide to let a 6^th grader manage their baseball team because, hey, why not?! We got nothing better to do in Minnesota until hockey season rolls around and we’re inbetween filming “The Mighty Ducks” sequels. This movie is full of musical montages where the team somehow gets good and wins a whole bunch of games. But the movie is ultimately stupid become for some unconceivable reason Ken Griffey Jr. is the villain. Seriously? Yes, seriously. This movie just lost all credibility.

In “Air Bud” this kid who has no idea what a basketball is teaches his dog to play the game. Their team ends up winning because the other team is scared of the dog, the kid gets sagely advice from an old janitor (who for the longest time I though was Bill Russell until I learned what Bill Russell actually looks like) and most importantly, repeat after me, it has a musical montage. Its good to note that I’m only talking about the first Air Bud film because the other 14 are just too far-fetched to even consider.

Our story plays out a little more like “Bad News Bears” where the team is full of all the rag-tag misfits and I have the starring role where I get to play a (slightly) less hung-over version of Walter Mathau’s character. That’s about where the similarities stop.

Anyways, our story had all the beginnings of a great sports movie. We combined with two other orphanages into a basketball tournament, we had two teams of 10-12 year old boys and girls that had never seen basketball played before, and we had only 6 weeks to prepare. Instant box-office gold in the making.

Then practice started… Since I’ve coached baseball before I was counting on that experience to get me through. The first practice went great. We arrived early one Saturday at one of the two basketball courts in the city (a city of 500k people) that has backboards and rims and taught the kids to dribble and pass the ball and to not run away when they are being guarded. It was a great success.

Then the next week, nay, the next three weeks, were nothing but disasters. One week we showed up to the court and there was a roller hockey tournament (apparently they found the only roller skates in town and each team just took turns using them). The next week our truck was stuck out of gas and we didn’t want to walk 10km to the court. The third week practice got cancelled because it was raining cats and dogs. It wasn’t really raining cats and dogs, that’s just an expression. I know you know it’s only an expression, I just don’t want people to think that raining cats and dogs is an actual thing here.

We were sitting now with only two weeks to practice before the tournament and only one practice under our belts for a group of kids who have never ever played the game before. If we weren’t underdogs before, we sure as heck were now.

Then, with two weeks to go we turned in the official rosters for the tourney. We were met with more than a couple problems as all the boys (that came from one of the other orphanages) were too old to play in a tournament. Remember from my first basketball post a long time ago where I had a picture with my super-tall secret weapons affectionately dubbed Hakim and Akeem Olajuwon?

They were definitely both 15 years old. Their new nicknames are Danny Almonte and Miguel Tejada.

With two weeks to go we managed to get in two practices, albeit with a squad of 8 new boys and 4 new girls. The last session was a blur of rules and tactics and strategies for how to defend without punching and how kicking the ball to control it and pass it up the court is not legal (that one took a lot of repeating).

The day before the tournament started we received our uniforms and the kids spent the whole night trying them on and talking about how they were going to wipe the floor with the other teams tomorrow and then they would win a trip to Maputo (the capital). I’m still not sure why they though they were going to win a trip to Maputo. People assume that everything here with a prize is a trip to Maputo. For example, I have a contest right now to take kids that memorize their multiplication tables out to lunch. People were kind of ho-hum about it until somebody wondered out loud if it was lunch in Maputo and then they all started jumping and screaming with anticipation.

Part 2 is coming tomorrow, and we’ll find out how much floor got wiped and who did the wiping. This shouldn’t be that hard to figure out, especially if you understand my love of sports movies.