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The pandemic has apparently ended my athletic career.
Even at my age, it hurts.
43-year-old star Vince Carter, remembers making the last shot of his covid19-shortened basketball career — a three-pointer from one of the greatest dunk artists — right before the NBA shut down in March.
Every athlete, whether a multimillionaire superstar or a weekend warrior (or mid-week warrior in my case), wants to go out on her own terms. I’m no different.
I don’t remember anything specific about my last game except that we — responsible middle-aged women including an ESL teacher and a pathologist — washed our hands with soap in the girl’s bathroom at the end of the game, at the middle school gym where we’d been playing basketball three Tuesdays a month for more than a decade.
It was March 10, 2020, the night of what was likely my last game.
Technically, I started playing basketball the summer before my freshman year, in our unfinished basement, practicing dribbling around the poles. Tired of being the butt of fat jokes in junior high school, I lost, I guesstimate, 40+ pounds, determined both to prove my sister wrong and to play sports.
My sister, 7 years my senior and Miss Popularity, told me that no matter how much weight I lost, I’d never get down to her size 3.
