Hello Friend

beekeepersclub:

Needed some color on here. - Nick C. Carlson

I promise I won’t reblog everything Ryan posts — it’s just that this photo was effing awesome.

While we’re on the topic of idyllic basketball images, here’s one of my favorite paragraphs from Barack Obama’s Dreams From My Father, where he talks about the egalitarian nature of the pickup basketball game:

[…] That respect came from what you did and not who your daddy was. That you could talk stuff to rattle an opponent, but that you should shut the hell up if you couldn’t back it up. That you didn’t let anyone sneak up behind to see emotions — like hurt or fear — you didn’t want them to see.

And something else, too, something nobody talked about: a way of being together when the game was tight and the sweat broke and the best players stopped worrying about their points and the worst players got swept up in the moment and the score only mattered because that’s how you sustained the trance. In the middle of which you might make a move or a pass that surprised even you, so that even the guy guarding you had to smile, as if to say “Damn …”