I Fell in Love with Basketball in Grandma’s Basement

An essay about basketball but really about Grandma

Grandma showed me superheroes—which is to say my love affair with basketball began in Grandma’s basement.

At a table often covered in newspapers, scattered with steamed blue crabs and splotches of Old Bay, we would sit for hours in front of Grandma’s TV as I’d watch names once unfamiliar grow lights right in front of my eyes.

Allen Iverson. They called him “The Answer.”

Vince Carter. “Half Man, Half Amazing.”

And of course MJ.

Grandma had a crush on That Bald Man with the Gold Earring. I lived for the mischievous smile that would creep across her face when Michael Jordan appeared on her TV—at that point he was donning a blue and gold Washington Wizards jersey. But all the red and black Chicago Bulls memorabilia Grandma had tucked away in the back of her basement told me she never forgot where MJ came from.

Grandma wasn’t shy about her basketball crushes. She also had one on Chris Webber, the former Washington Bullet that I first witnessed as a power forward on the Sacramento Kings.

I had a crush on the entire Kings team.

This is mostly because Grandma taught me to always root against the Lakers, and, from where I sat, it felt like the Lakers’ 82-game schedule only consisted of Kobe and Shaq playing the Kings and Allen Iverson’s Philadelphia 76ers.

So naturally I spent hours, as a kid, drawing pictures of A.I. and absorbing the names of every player on the Kings. In addition to Webber, they had Mike Bibby, Peja Stojaković, Doug Christie, Hedo Türkoğlu, Vlade Divac, the sixth man Bobby Jackson, and for some reason I also remember Scot Pollard.

It felt like the Kings always fell short in their games against the Lakers, but Grandma and I loved them. Mostly because I think we loved the drama. Although it seemed like David vs. Goliath, the Kings still felt larger than life—and it felt like they always wanted the smoke.

I vividly remember Grandma and I watching the 2002 Kings-Lakers preseason game where Rick Fox elbowed Doug Christie in the face, which led to a fight that ended up going all the way off the court into the hallway of the arena. I had never seen anything like that before and still to this day it’s one of the greatest moments I’ve ever seen in sports.

Those games were so fun. I totally get why Shea Serrano wrote in his book, Basketball (and Other Things), “You can get fucked if you think I want to live in any branch of reality that doesn’t include the 2002 Kings.”

Grandma opened up my world—and my heart—down in that basement.

When my dad took me to NBA All-Star Weekend in Philly in 2002, it was like seeing the TV in Grandma’s basement come to life. Getting to see A.I., Kobe, Chris Webber. I even got my first-ever NBA jersey that weekend—a blue Michael Jordan Wizards jersey—that I never wanted to take off.

I went from watching my favorite basketball players to wanting to be my favorite basketball players—and by my favorite basketball players, I mean Grandma’s favorite basketball players who had no choice but to become mine.

In Basketball (and Other Things), Shea Serrano writes about some of his favorite basketball players as “memory heroes,” which he describes as “someone who you remember as being way better than he or she actually was.” He goes on to say, “Most times, the talent inflation happens because the memories were formed when you were a child or young person.”

These memory heroes that still remain with me, inflated in my mind, are because of Grandma. I don’t think she probably knew it at the time, but she was shaping me. Sometimes I feel like a physical amalgamation of Scholastic basketball books and drawings of Vince Carter dunking.

It’s been 10 years since Grandma died—and I find myself often trying to scrounge up old memories, trying to remember if she was as good as I remember her. Or if maybe she was just a memory hero.

As the fuzzy memories become more common with every passing year, I cling tighter to the ones that feel most clear. In Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, he writes, “Memory is a funny thing”—and Grandma was definitely funny. I remember her yelling at students and grandchildren alike, “I will roll your head down Route 99.”

When Grandma and I would roll down Route 99, we would listen to Heaven 600, Baltimore’s gospel station, and sometimes we’d stop at Subway or Burger King before school. I can’t remember what we’d talk about in the car, if anything, but there’s nothing I want more than to be back in the car with her—the car she wished was a black Jaguar with black leather seats.

Or in Grandma’s classroom where I’d sit on the computer as she marked papers and google pictures of Allen Iverson. I remember seeing those pictures of A.I. with his mom, the shared love and joy between them, and it felt like home. It felt familiar because of Grandma.

Or in that basement—Grandma’s basement with the book with the MJ poster—where I fell in love with basketball until I got older and couldn’t think of anything more fun than trying out WWE finishers on whichever cousin I could get my hands on. That’s until they started getting bigger than me.

Regardless of how I remember Grandma, whether that’s as better than she actually was or not, what feels most true is I loved and got to be loved by a grandmother who knew good basketball and wasn’t afraid to give you a mouthful for the things she believed in and have love for Black men.

Even more than any shot Peja Stojaković took from beyond the arc, or Doug Christie uppercutting Rick Fox, what’s most true is Grandma is my hero.