This is back when I had skillz
I don’t have the best handles anymore, but I used to. When I was 7 years old, I’m telling you, none of the kids I encountered could match my crossover. You can say this is mostly because I was in Melbourne, Australia, where there just weren’t a lot of kids into basketball, but I’d like to think that I practiced enough to hold my own anywhere. If I left the house, the ball was coming with me. If I was watching TV, the volume would be turned up to drown out my dribbling. You’d think this obsession might be detrimental to other parts of my life, but that wasn’t the case. My mom could never get me to sit down and do math or read, so she started quizzing me while I worked on my handle. I soon began to excel at school.
That last bit is important, as before I picked up a basketball there were not a lot of areas where I excelled. This is the complete list: running in circles, yelling, smiling, breaking things, and disrupting my parents’ sleep. With anything involving concentration, I lagged behind the other kids. With anything involving hand-eye coordination, I lagged way behind the other kids.  Coloring inside the lines? Couldn’t do it. Playing a musical instrument? Couldn’t do it. Swimming? Couldn’t do it, and dreaded being forced to try. I was born prematurely and although most of my earliest memories revolve around the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I am aware that I spent lots of time in a variety of doctors’ offices where I was diagnosed with developmental disorders ranging from ADD to Asperger’s to Tourette’s.
For some kids on the autism spectrum in their developmental years, not much progress can be made. For others, treatment can enormously improve quality of life. If you’re really lucky, treatment can eventually eliminate any signs of being different. I was absurdly lucky that my absolute hero of a mom dedicated every second of her time to helping me. Basketball ended up being a huge part of it. She exposed me to Magic, Michael, and Larry through NBA home videos and something clicked with me. I internalized the stories of how hard they worked and wanted to be one of them. Preferably Magic. So I practiced dribbling. Over and over, every day, even though I was terrible for the first couple of years. I kept at it, exhibiting a sort of discipline I’d previously never shown in any capacity. It was the extreme focus that I would have needed to become a good swimmer or violinist or whatever, but I didn’t care about those things. I loved to dribble a basketball.
“Man, you put the ball in my hand and I’m in another world,” [Magic Johnson] once said. “All my problems are gone as soon as I step out onto the floor and get that feel of the leather in my palm.
“Boom! Boom! Boom! Bounce that ball. Feel it come back up. Just caress it. And I know I can do anything with it. Me and that ball, we belong together. I’m in my own world and it’s the greatest feeling in the world.”
Via Magic all about sheer joy of playing, striving, competing, 8/29/11
Eventually, I was awesome at basketball for my age. And I became a damn good student, too, as my mom found out I was a sponge as long as I had a basketball in my hands. My other problems? Well, my hand-eye coordination got worlds better in general. My tics went away when I was dribbling a basketball… and since I was dribbling a basketball almost all of the time, at a certain point they were gone for good. Also, and this might shock you, people want to be friends with you when you’re good at a sport. I ended up teaching the kids who played more popular sports how to play mine. Basketball completely turned my social world upside down and re-wired my brain at a young age and I have those tapes of creative ballhandlers to thank for it.
It’s impossible for me to jump into my 4-year-old head and pinpoint why I became singularly obsessed with this leather ball, but I think the above Magic quote gets to the heart of it: creativity. I loved the sound of the ball bouncing and, when I played, it felt like I was making my own sort of music. When the ball truly is an extension of your hand, the possibilities on a possession seem endless. If you’ve got handles, you welcome the defender applying pressure. You think less and think differently, allowing your mental energy to go toward surveying the floor and determining your options. Then you just get to play. This is what made basketball fun for me.
Part of the beauty of this game is that if someone like me can be a good ballhandler, ANYONE can. You don’t have to be tall or athletic. You don’t have to have fantastic coaches (or be one). You just have to have the desire to get better every day. If you’re inspired by a Magic, an Iverson, a Professor, a Chris Paul, spend a few hours trying to do the things they do. Fail at it miserably, then keep trying.
[...] Paroxysm’s James Herbert discusses how dribbling a basketball changed his life and helped him deal with Asperger’s, ADD and [...]