TheWRITEaddiction.com

Thump, thump, thump, thump.

Racing down the floor he shifted the ball around his waist and gently off his fingertips with a move not unlike many of his idols, and the ball passed through the net while barely touching it.

While not under the bright lights of the stadium today, he is holding a nerf ball, and inside a tiny trailer home in the country where his sanctuary is a sport called basketball.  With no siblings around and parents busy doing parent stuff, which seemed to be lots of fighting and yelling back then, he would drown out the noise of his thoughts by laying on his back and practicing shots for hours.  Hours and hours and hours and hours.

Was this dedication to a sport he showed great promise in, or an outlet to not be part of what was going on around him?

Something never felt right in this lost boy’s life, an unsettled feeling of not belonging or not being in the right place…it’s hard to say for sure,  although for all practical reasons he showed no signs, none, of an unhappy childhood that would lead to the terrible events in his distant future.

Winning came easy for him.  There wasn’t a sport, or a subject, or a competition that he didn’t win if he set his mind to it.  By the time he reached 8th grade he was the Scholar Athlete of his school, a good long jumper, a decent runner in track, a good football player for the county team (several smaller schools combine in this rural area in some sports) and a gifted basketball player.  The kind of boy I guess all mom’s hoped their daughter’s would find.

He would spend hundreds, if not thousands of hours practicing after school at home alone until the sun went down. There was something methodical, almost like meditation, practicing repetitive ball handling moves or free throws.  He would never go into the house before hitting ten in a row, the same as the coach wanted at practice, and it wasn’t work – it was a gift to himself.

Three years later this young prodigy would be driving back from a girl’s basketball game with some friends.  It was just another typical high school night when the boy’s team’s were not playing, and the kids often were trying to find something to do in the rural Midwest darkened nights.  No drinking was involved, not that night, not yet…..but as they sped up coming off the rural dirt road onto pavement a massive creature was in a flash – dead center in the road ….. screeching tires and a massive impact.  Trying to veer hard to the left,  saved everyone’s life in hindsight.

The creature was a loose horse in the road, and the impact that totaled the car was just a side swipe versus a head on collision where likely the animal and 2 young men in the front would have perished.

The lost boy was catching his first glimpse of  shattered glass and failed vision for the first time, and with fear in his heart he took his friend home after looking for the horse.  No signs.

He did the right thing by telling his parents and calling the police, who led an investigation and later found all horses accounted for.  While it be around ten years, this is the first of many incidents this young man would have with shattered glass, police, and derailed dreams.

This incident may have seemed like  bad luck, or something isolated and in many ways it was. Up until then.

From this point forward, things start to become messier fast and the roadmap that leads most with his potential to fast success would be mired by a combination of poor choices, an absent father,  repressed emotions, and an inability to cope in the world he was living in.

Part 2 Begins His Last Year of High School.