I´ve settled into a comfortable routine in Barcelona, and the time is starting to fly by. I got to class from (roughly) 9:30 to 4:30, hit the gym afterwards till around 6 or so, and then head home to study, watch odd Spanish Sports programming (horses racing on a beach, anyone? anyone?).
The gym here is light years better than the place I was going in Sevilla. In Sevilla, the A/C units were decorative at best, and noisy heat generators at worst. The cardio equipmemt was stored in a room without windows and the one ab ball was actually an old inner tube filled with broken glass.
In Barcelona, I stumbled upon a gym with strong A/C, decent machine selection and, believe it or not, A POOL. The other spectacular feature I discovered last week was an indoor basketball court. I somehow convinced my moping French roommate to join the gym with me, and his eyes lit up when he saw the bball court. You could actually see his inner Pau Gasol (or Tony Parker) flicker for a moment. The gym loaned us a 1980´s era purple and gold rubber ball and off we went.
Its pretty obvious that Frenchie hasn´t played to much bball in his day, and so i took it upon myself to teach him the ways of the turnover and the elbow to the groin. In spite of his inexperience, he still plays like your stereotypical european: disdains the paint, ignores rebounds and smokes during time outs.
It was kind of fun teaching Frenchie the fundamentals of basketball. In my head, I was the down on his luck Scout, banished to Europe to watch scrubs play pick up games in the weird trapaziodal shaped key. When, all of the sudden, I stumbled upon a diamond in the rough. An urban legend, who with enough cajoling and dedication could change his life, and the world of basketball.
Of course, NONE of that was going to happen if Frenchie couldn´t hit a layup to save his life.
Teaching was required here, not merely discovery. So, I proceeded to walk Frenchie thru a life time´s of acquired basketball acumen. This took, in all, about 20 minutes. I lived the sports movie cliche. I went from atheletic prodigy, to 4 yr starter, to reluctant mentor, to begrudging friend, to avid supporter, to player-agent, to footnote to the legacy of a legend....in the same amount of time as a Spanish TV commercial break.
But that whole first day on the court was a blast. We were shooting (and missing) from everywhere and just basically running around with our arms flailing. The unexpected rush of adrenaline and sheer novelty reminded me of my first day of fencing class.
Now, as a freshman in college, I took fencing. As I recall my thinking at the time, my reason for taking the class was ¨holy crap, I CAN TAKE FENCING!¨
Fencing was taught in the football stadium at UT, deep in its bowels. On the first day, we met our fiercely serious teacher, learned the names of everything and even got to see a little fencing demonstration. With the hour almost over, and with barely enough time to change out of our ¨white¨ fencing gear and to hang up our mesh helmets, the teacher surveyed the 20 odd students sitting indian style on the floor and said ¨alright kids, you´ve got 5 minutes, go nuts¨
FINALLY!
We´d sat there wide eyed all hour, nodding our heads and thinking ¨ok, so that´s what that is called; ok, so that´s how you score a point...¨ while our hearts were screaming ¨just let us play with the SWORDS already!¨
Class was never as fun as those last five minutes of the first day: when nobody knew the rules, nobody thought about form, and blissful in our ignorance, we just tried to kill each other with all of our might. (Am I getting sentimental in my old age?)
Now if only I could convince Frenchie to let me teach him how to fence....
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