The Sensational Seven

With March Madness fully upon us, it only feels natural to share with the world the greatest basketball tale ever told.  It has nothing to do with ESPN's Fab Five documentary.  I mean, sure those guys were pretty good and all, but they couldn't hold a candle to the Sensational Seven, the greatest conglomerate of basketball talent since the 1992 Dream Team.  Our tale begins in rural South Dakota  (cue Wayne's World dream sequence, doodly doo, doodly doo, doodly doo):

I grew up in an environment that could make any kid an NBA standout.  I had a coach for a dad that had me playing on teams since I was barely big enough to hold the ball.  To put it into perspective, we were still young enough for it to be acceptable to wear snow boots to games.  Throughout my childhood basketball was always present, whether it was spending days in the gym coloring and reading while my dad coached high school teams, watching the neighborhood kids come over to play in our driveway in Tea, or laying on the carpet crying along with Michael Jordan as he hugged his first championship trophy (wow, those were all exceptionally passive involvements). When I moved to Hartford, I was quickly introduced to a culture where sports were king.  I began playing on intramural and Tri-State teams in the 4th grade, attending yearly summer basketball camps, and going to every open gym we could get into.  By the time we reached junior high, I had a group of friends who lived and breathed basketball.  Our rooms were all decorated with our favorite teams (mine was the Bulls, and I got lucky enough that my parents bought a house with red carpet in one of the bedrooms to complete my total worship) and our driveways had lines painted where the free throw and three point lines were.  Almost every summer day was spent playing together, learning each other's games, and making videos of us dunking on 6 foot rims (which, as a 5 foot tall, 185 lb 5th grader, I still find to be pretty impressive).  We really had a lot going for us.

Since our group was so tight knit, we figured for sure that we had basketball greatness ahead of us.  Through junior high and into our freshman year, we eagerly anticipated the growth spurts that would make our bodies finally catch up to how great we knew our skills were.  Around our freshman/sophomore years we all shot up to 5'10"-5'11".  I remember thinking, "Next stop, 6'5"!"  Unfortunately, that train to Tallsville never pulled into the station and suddenly our All-Star basketball team was just seven guys that were all roughly the same boring, average height.  We also had a class of super athletes above and below us.  Future, thy name is mediocrity.

Still, even with our height disadvantages, we had a fairly successful year and came within one errant pass of winning our conference our freshman year.  What we lacked in athleticism we made up for with chemistry.  We carried that momentum into our sophomore year, where we knew we'd be competing for spots on the JV with the loaded freshman class below us.  The first practice was harsh, but most of us were relieved to see our names had made the list to come back to the second one.  That afternoon practice was even more brutal, and at the end of it my friends and I were all called into the office for a little sit down chat with the coach.  "Boys, I just want to be up front with all of you.  We won't be cutting you, but you need to know that you're probably never going to see playing time in a game.  We'd like you guys to come to practice, work hard, and serve as support players to the rest of the guys, and maybe after a couple of years we can squeeze you into a game."  That was super reassuring.

We all left that practice feeling disheartened knowing that our basketball futures were now being relegated to being tackling dummies for everyone else and that we could easily be replaced with a folding chair with a broom stuck in it.  The "brave" move probably would have been to show up, work hard, and hope for a Rudy like story where we were allowed to come in during the last minute of a blow out so that our names could be etched in history, but we were players, dammit, and we needed to play.  That's when the magic happened...

We found out that there was a league in Sioux Falls at the local YMCA that was fairly competitive.  My best take on it was that it featured some of the best athletes in South Dakota's biggest city and surround areas that could never keep their grades up or stay out of trouble.  That's probably not a fair assessment, but judging by the number of times someone on our team got punched or someone on the other team smelled like they just came from the bar, I can't help but feel like it was at least a little accurate.  Still, we had our hearts set on proving people wrong, so we loaded up our warm-up jerseys and lay-up drills and brought them to the big city.  I can't even fathom how impressive we must have looked in our matching uniforms with two real high school coaches roaming the sidelines. All of the other teams had to wear whatever sweat covered jerseys the YMCA dug out of a box somewhere and answer to some poor schlub who got stuck driving his kid brother to the Y.  And had the other teams showed up more than two minutes before tip-off, they would have seen some of the best warm-up drills this side of the Big Sioux.  Okay, so maybe we overdid it a bit, but we had one goal in mind: championship!

Here's a quick glimpse at the Sensational Seven:

Travis "Rip" Grace - Our only true point guard, Travis had a way of putting his head down and getting to the lane not seen since Isiah Thomas.

Dan "Schmidty" Schmidt - Our leanest team member, Dan was also our fastest and best jumper.  To watch Schmidty glide through the lane and towards the rim was like watching Brian Boitano glide across the ice.  The kid was smooth.

Brent "Cosmo" Kramer - If God ever sent an angel to kiss the shooting hand of someone, it was Kramer.  He always lurked just outside the three point line, waiting for the kick out to break the other team's back and heart.

Jeff "Big Red" "Red Rocket" "Lumberjack" "Pete" Peterson - How does someone with absolutely no jumping ability succeed in basketball?  By perfecting the backwards jump shot!  Pete was a scrapper who led the team in punches received by the other team.

John "Guido" Fortney - Fortney was the illegitimate child of Wolverine and the Incredible Hulk.  Driven by anger and a need to win, he was able to keep himself reined in and was our Swiss Army Knife, possessing all the tools needed to succeed inside or out.

Josh "Yoshi" Siemonsma - I often wonder if Yoshi has a time machine stashed somewhere that he used to go back and teach Kareem and Wilt how to shoot the hook shot.  Yoshi was our tallest guy (he'd have to verify, but probably right around 6'), so by default he was our center.  He was also the only one who didn't get the tackling dummy speech, so he made some sacrifices to jump over to the Y-League to chase glory.

Jeffrey "Poolman" Pool - While not the most athletic/talented/skilled player on the floor, he often played the smartest.  Pool usually benefited from being in the right place at the right time (which was never a coincidence) and was always more happy grabbing a rebound or dishing out to Kramer than scoring.  He was just like Dennis Rodman without all the political incorrectness.

Our first year in the league was pretty rough.  It took some time to realize that we probably needed to carry a shiv in our sock in order to be successful.  By year two, we were pulling it together.  Since we had all played on the same team since we were 4th graders, we benefited from always knowing where the other guys were going to be at all times.  We were almost always outsized, but it didn't matter because we had enough scrappers and box out fundamentals to make sure that we controlled all areas of the court.  While we fell just short of our championship goals, word was starting to get out.

By year three, we were impressing people both on the court and off.  We had a full cheering section that filled both the upstairs and downstairs bleachers.  We toiled through a rough season, avenged losses from previous years, and found ourselves standing at the top of the proverbial mountain.  There were no super stars or egos, just five friends who trusted in each other enough to take our grounded game to new heights.  Now, to some, winning a YMCA intramural championship might not seem like that big of a deal, but to me, it was the world.  It was a culmination of years of practice, and really the culmination of years of friendship.  We knew we'd never get a banner hung in the gym at our high school, but we did get a free T-shirt, and by God, that meant something.  We also received miniature trophies that featured a shoe and a basketball, and I have had that trophy prominently displayed on every desk I've ever had (as I typed that, I just looked around my current desk and realized it isn't sitting there and that it is on top of my refrigerator at home.  I could have just deleted that last sentence, but I needed you to feel my shame.  You'd better believe that the trophy will be here tomorrow).

I continued playing basketball in intramurals through college, and I was lucky enough to find another great group of friends that immediately gelled on the court, but we never quite reached the level of the Sensational Seven.  Since then, I've maybe laced up the sneakers once or twice, but I've more or less settled on being a spectator.  I was satisfied with my career even if it ended with the NBA never calling and, as of this writing, no documentarians have contacted me requesting the rights to our story.  But the dream still lives.

What did this whole story have to do with me bettering my life?  Well, the main point is that I finally realized that it might not ever get better than when I was an 18-year old with a free t-shirt and a trophy with a shoe on it.  Just kidding!  I have some newly found friends at work that play basketball daily over lunch.  They've started to invite me to play with them, and while trading food time for exercise time has never been high on my priorities, I've decided to take them up on their offer.  I tried playing last Friday for the first time, and I quickly remembered why we spent the first three days of every season conditioning.  I made it about 12 minutes before I went wheezing into the locker room.  I also tried busting out a couple of my sweet moves, but while the brain still remembers how to get to the rim, the body has all but forgotten.  In one particularly sad display, I juked right, crossed-over left, drove to the hole, and had every intention of jump stopping, ball faking, and scoring two.  Instead my knees decided that making 270 lbs come to a complete stop wasn't in the cards, and they decided to let me just keep going until I fell out of bounds.

So, with March Madness fully pulsing through me, I'm going to rededicate myself to achieving my life's goal of basketball success.  The first step is finding the right shoes, and I can't help but think that with all of the Air Jordans I've ever owned there has to be a pair laying around somewhere with a little magic left in them.  Tonight I plan on laying on my back in the middle of the living room as I try to perfect the goose neck jump shot.  Hell, I might even set up a folding chair with a broom in it and dribble around it a little. With a little hard work and dedication, another free T-shirt is never out of the question.

Chasing my hoop dreams and that XL T-shirt,

Poolman
Go UNC!