Pity on the Court

I was not what one would call a “star” ball player in high school. On the other hand, I never made up lame excuses to get out of gym class either. I did have a jump-shot that I could sink from pretty much any spot on the floor provided nobody was guarding me. Let’s put it this way, I was enough of an athlete to feel justified in refusing “pity time.”

For those of you who a) never played sports or b) went All-State four years in a row, pity time is given during the final seconds of a game when your team is either way ahead or way behind. The coach figures no matter how incompetent you are, there is no way your presence on the court could possibly affect the outcome of the game, so he points a finger your way and yells, “Get in there!” You drag your feet onto the court, wondering which looks less pathetic; putting up six seconds of meaningless effort, or standing completely still as the ball drives past you. Personally I was always an advocate of setting a new record for fouling out.

Pity time is about the cruelest thing a coach can do to an already insecure kid. At least if a kid sits the bench the entire game, everyone will just kind of forget he’s there. But sending him in for no other reason than to say, “Hey, at least you got to play,” is like hanging a big neon YOU SUCK sign over his head.

Our JV coach began every season with the idealistic declaration, “Everybody on my team will play.” He apparently forgot that at a school of three hundred kids, only about thirty guys tried out for the team. The top fifteen went varsity, meaning it was pretty much, what-you-see-is-what-you-get for the JV squad. The coach quickly realized that putting some of these kids in for longer than six consecutive seconds would mean certain team suicide. So, to avoid being a hypocrite, he’d wait for an inconsequential moment, then say, “Go be aggressive!”

We had a teammate, Donnie Hubbard who, I kid you not, was still coming to grips with the concept of dribbling. It took over half the season to convince him that he could not run the ball like a quarterback. Donnie was just happy that people were finally allowing him to handle blunt objects in a group setting. So whenever the coach sent Donnie in for his pity time, you better believe he jumped right up and sprinted onto the court just in time to turn around and sprint right back. A banner effort, even if it was only three seconds. “Hey, at least he got to play.”

But, as I said, I felt competent enough to refuse the pity. So when I first heard, “Hodges, get in there!” during a 70–15 game, I had the backbone to say, “Screw you and your pity time too!”

To be completely honest, my backbone was of a far more soft and squishy material than all that. The conversation probably went more like:

“Hodges, get in there!”

“Um… now?”

“Yeah, and make sure you box out number twelve on the rebounds.”

“Um… I’d really rather not… if that’s okay with you.”

I seem to remember running a lot of extra laps that next practice. And still my coach tried to pity me. By about my tenth pitiful call to arms (we got slaughtered a lot that year), all that running had weakened my will to resist and I finally shuffled onto the court, tail between my legs, determined to make the best of it. Unfortunately, the blind-as-a-bat referee was looking the other way when I fouled number twelve right through the parquet floor.

That next season, in the interest of anger management, I decided it was probably best to hang up my high-tops, join the school newspaper and write scathing articles about my former coach.