“AMAK” is what we used to call those with an insatiable appetite for playing basketball, those who gorge on more than three helpings of hoops every day: basketball in the morning, after lunch, late in the afternoon, and up until the homeowners association’s basketball curfew in the evening; they have to, or else they won’t get to sleep at night with the sound of a rubber ball bouncing from the concrete to the wooden board to the steel rim mixed with the screams of young boys calling a foul every time someone drives to the basket.
I know because I used to be like that.
But a lot of things happened somewhere along the way, and the passion – and time – for basketball declined. Now, I am most of today’s mid-40s men who grew up playing basketball: family time and tatay duties, long work hours and difficult work schedules never conducive for weekend recreational activities with friends; multiplying social commitments, new hobbies like biking, unhealthy habits like binge drinking on the weekend, visceral fat, and gouty arthritis, to name a few.
That’s the situation for many mid-40s men, the frayed connection to basketball sustained precariously by the occasional NBA 2K on Playstation or watching basketball games on TV or online.
Barely-there has become our brand of basketball.
And then all of a sudden, an awakening, a resurgence.
It’s like many mid-40s men collectively decided to wake up from slumber and torpidity and return to playing basketball again. They even have a name for it:
Balik laro.
Don’t mistake it for Sunday Club — a gathering of the elite few who never stopped playing basketball long after their speed, steady knees, and a thick head of hair have abandoned them. This is Division A basketball for older men, who never went pro.
Balik laro, on the other hand, is a reintegration program. It is the shallow water you wade into; if you ever want to rediscover your sea legs, this is where you will find it, if it is still inside you.
But why do we — the mid-40s men — go back to playing basketball?
This is a sport that demands skills many of us no longer have, and we’re better off playing darts, billiards, or badminton.
Try to jump higher and you’ll hurt your back. Try to run faster and I guarantee you, you will feel it in your knees and ankles when you go to bed that night, the pain undeterred by your cold compress, your heat pack, or your post-game massage, even if you spent half a bottle of Omega.
We weren’t very good at our peak, and now in our mid-40s, we didn’t get any better; we are not even good at not having it our way – half the time spent on the court is arguing with the refs, and all that frustrated jawing is actually what got us tired, not the running back on the defense many of us – if not all of us – participated very poorly in.
So why do we still play basketball? It has become much harder to play, now that our lateral movement is snail-paced and our verticals feel like our feet hardly left the floor. It is torture, and we look like sweaty masochistic middle-aged men because we pay for this abuse with our own hard-earned money.
Yes, we are no longer those shameless young boys who knock on neighbors’ doors with solicitation letters in hand, guilting them with the idea that supporting sports activities will keep us away from drugs when in truth we just want to get free basketball uniforms.
Now, the mid-40s men spend thousands of pesos on basketball shoes named after NBA players we’ll never be able to imitate, but we’ll still convince ourselves we always hit nylon like Kevin Durant or dribble like Kyrie Irving or do a graceful fall-away jumper like Michael Jordan.
We also buy apparel and accessories – sleeves, knee support, shoulder support, headband, leg compression, and ankle support; we used to wear these before for porma only, but now, it is a necessity. And none of us mid-40s men will go to all the trouble of suiting up just so our near-pristine, kept-in-the-box basketball shoes can get scratched and dirtied playing on a kalye court with cracked, uneven pavement carpeted with dust or dried mud, depending on the time of the year. No sir — we pay an hourly rent to use basketball courts, and we cannot participate in a balik laro tournament without paying an entrance fee.
And despite the cost of playing basketball on our body and bank account, we look at the stands and the best we can hope for is seeing our wife/girlfriend/significant other and our children cheering us on the very rare occasion that we made a shot, and that is enough to make us happy.
That’s it, I think.
We call it balik laro, but we know deep inside we are not just going back to playing a game we’ve played a thousand times before.
We go back to a happy place.
Despite, who we’ve become as professionals, we mid-40s men remain simple creatures.
