The woman who would later become my wife was there, and she hugged me, but that’s not the one I mean.
I do, however, remember the words we spoke to one another as we embraced under the basket at the visitor's end of the court. "God," she said, looking up at the scoreboard, "I never wanted anything so bad in all my life."
And I remember my response. "And I spent my life never wanting any other thing."
We let go of each other and I headed toward the locker room, sweaty and wrung out. I thought I loved her, but I didn't know a damn thing about love and it would take me years to figure it out. But that’s another story. The most meaningful hug I ever had was still a few minutes away.
I walked in to where the rest of my team was stretched out on the concrete floor or sitting folded and collapsed like card tables put back in the basement after Thanksgiving. Almost everybody in that room was in some sort of conflict with his tears, how men cry, fighting it, but losing it a little in each long hard breath. A few couldn’t hold back and were sobbing like little kids. Even my best friend Doyle, team manager, short and way too stocky to play basketball, had been crying like a baby across the room.
As I moved from the door of the room to the locker where my clothes hung, I chose not to share in the emotion of my teammates. I would not cry over losing that game. We were the number two ranked basketball team in the State of Michigan, and five minutes earlier the number three team had beaten us in four overtimes in the championship of the regional tournament. They were moving on to the quarterfinals and we were not. My basketball season and career was over and the careers of my best friends were over. Done. Lost. Gone. Forever.
We had utterly and completely lost that game, but I wasn’t going to cry about it. I didn’t want my last emotion in a high school basketball locker room to be anything other than pride in all that’d been accomplished, so I began to change back into my clothes quietly, out of respect for my best friends in various stages of buttoning up their clothes and their emotions. And as I pulled my slacks back into place around my waist and threaded the belt through the loops, I became aware of the reverence and silence around me. Not one person was speaking in that locker room. Not one. It was as quiet as the shock of the first stages of grief, or the funeral of someone taken from this world too soon.
After some moments I became aware of motion and muttering behind me. Our coach, Bud Magrane, was moving around the locker room, player by player, hugging and saying something personal and private to each one of us. After a few moments he came to my side, and I turned and hugged him.
I hugged him out of respect for what he’d lost: his son, my dear friend, was a senior, too, and his kid was now irrevocably lost to him (it was two and a half months until graduation and adulthood soon after). I hugged him out of respect and gratitude for how hard he’d pushed us to achieve what we’d achieved: forty-five wins, four losses, two straight years rated in the top ten in the state as one of the smallest schools in Class A, the largest, most competitive category of schools in Michigan. It was an honor to be a part of that team. Finally, I hugged him for how much he meant to me personally. He was my good friend’s father and that meant for years he had welcomed me in his house, his pool, at his table. He truly cared for me, and a few years later I came to know how much when he reached out to me, knowing about my dad's losing struggle with alcohol, to tell me that I could call on him whenever I needed the advice a father gives his son and couldn’t count on my own dad to be there for me. I never took him up on that, but when I hugged him in that locker room, the roots of that bond were there and I felt something very much like the love a son feels for his father.
But that’s not the most meaningful hug either. That comes next.
I do, however, remember the words we spoke to one another as we embraced under the basket at the visitor's end of the court. "God," she said, looking up at the scoreboard, "I never wanted anything so bad in all my life."
And I remember my response. "And I spent my life never wanting any other thing."
We let go of each other and I headed toward the locker room, sweaty and wrung out. I thought I loved her, but I didn't know a damn thing about love and it would take me years to figure it out. But that’s another story. The most meaningful hug I ever had was still a few minutes away.
I walked in to where the rest of my team was stretched out on the concrete floor or sitting folded and collapsed like card tables put back in the basement after Thanksgiving. Almost everybody in that room was in some sort of conflict with his tears, how men cry, fighting it, but losing it a little in each long hard breath. A few couldn’t hold back and were sobbing like little kids. Even my best friend Doyle, team manager, short and way too stocky to play basketball, had been crying like a baby across the room.
As I moved from the door of the room to the locker where my clothes hung, I chose not to share in the emotion of my teammates. I would not cry over losing that game. We were the number two ranked basketball team in the State of Michigan, and five minutes earlier the number three team had beaten us in four overtimes in the championship of the regional tournament. They were moving on to the quarterfinals and we were not. My basketball season and career was over and the careers of my best friends were over. Done. Lost. Gone. Forever.
We had utterly and completely lost that game, but I wasn’t going to cry about it. I didn’t want my last emotion in a high school basketball locker room to be anything other than pride in all that’d been accomplished, so I began to change back into my clothes quietly, out of respect for my best friends in various stages of buttoning up their clothes and their emotions. And as I pulled my slacks back into place around my waist and threaded the belt through the loops, I became aware of the reverence and silence around me. Not one person was speaking in that locker room. Not one. It was as quiet as the shock of the first stages of grief, or the funeral of someone taken from this world too soon.
After some moments I became aware of motion and muttering behind me. Our coach, Bud Magrane, was moving around the locker room, player by player, hugging and saying something personal and private to each one of us. After a few moments he came to my side, and I turned and hugged him.
I hugged him out of respect for what he’d lost: his son, my dear friend, was a senior, too, and his kid was now irrevocably lost to him (it was two and a half months until graduation and adulthood soon after). I hugged him out of respect and gratitude for how hard he’d pushed us to achieve what we’d achieved: forty-five wins, four losses, two straight years rated in the top ten in the state as one of the smallest schools in Class A, the largest, most competitive category of schools in Michigan. It was an honor to be a part of that team. Finally, I hugged him for how much he meant to me personally. He was my good friend’s father and that meant for years he had welcomed me in his house, his pool, at his table. He truly cared for me, and a few years later I came to know how much when he reached out to me, knowing about my dad's losing struggle with alcohol, to tell me that I could call on him whenever I needed the advice a father gives his son and couldn’t count on my own dad to be there for me. I never took him up on that, but when I hugged him in that locker room, the roots of that bond were there and I felt something very much like the love a son feels for his father.
But that’s not the most meaningful hug either. That comes next.
When Coach Magrane moved away from me to go on to the next person, I gathered my bag and moved by myself through the door that separated the back part of the locker room from the exit to the main gymnasium. I was surprised by a figure standing off to the side of the narrow hallway in a white jean jacket. My older brother Skip had made his way from the stands to wait there for me. He held out his arms and I dropped my bag and hugged him and finally began to sob.
Only he in the whole world really knew what I’d lost, what basketball meant. Only he knew of untold hours in the driveway at home in Niles, practicing, practicing, playing, drilling, shooting, shooting and shooting until the skin on our hands was cracked and bleeding from the cold and the pounding, and our heads throbbed and steamed under the winter glow of the street light that sat in the shooter’s corner of the pavement. Only he knew.
A year before, a night hauntingly like this one, he had been on our high school team, and I sat on the bench in the second overtime of a regional game and watched him swat at a shot thirty feet away from the basket that somehow got over his fingertips and found the net as the buzzer sounded and ended his high school playing career. That night he’d almost single-handedly rescued our team and season in the last minutes of that game, like how he’d rescued my sense of self that year from a bad relationship and showed me how and why a Harbaugh boy can find true love in the game of basketball. He knew all these things as he held me. And I remember he waited until I was still enough to hear him and said, simply, "it’s over."
That was the most meaningful hug I ever had. I walked away from him and out into the gym and through it to where our bus waited. I walked away from the most meaningful hug I’d ever had, completely understood and changed forever. Much of the boy in me was sloughed off in my brothers strong arms, and before I stepped on that bus to head for home, I looked up. Through a hole in the sky I could see a deep blue tomorrow behind small points of light littered around a slice of winter moon. The gray-brown clouds were tossed across the sky that night, old and withered, like pieces of shed skin. Shivering and raw, I adjusted the strap of my gym bag, and stepped up into the tremulous darkness of the bus.
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