Practice was tough. You had to wake up before five in the morning and run for an hour or so. I guess our teachers focused more on stamina and endurance, and of course you needed to be able to shoot some hoops as well. Just running around the court wasn't going to get your team any points.
We didn't have much TV channel options then except NTV. Dolly Gurung was probably the one and only model in the country with her Wai Wai advertisement on TV. Everybody knew Dolly. Sukmit Gurung's son 'O Mero Priyatam' was the biggest thing on TV. The only stuff we knew about the NBA was from the Sports Illustrated magazine in the school library. We only knew two people, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. This was before Michael Jordan or later Shaq and Kobe came along. Nowadays, I don't even know who's ruling the NBA.
When you run for an hour a day for six months then you are more than likely to have the stamina of a long-distance runner. We never got tired playing basketball for twenty minutes straight. We won the tournament that year because we managed to outrun the other teams and of course managed to score a point or two more than our opponents. If we weren't fit and did not have the stamina to last the full time at the court then we could have lost those games.
In high school, I quit basketball because I failed to grow much. I was only 5'7 in the ninth grade and I stopped growing after that. I was already playing football by then and liked to play the goalkeeper because I was inspired by this Colombian goalkeeper who spent half the time in the center of the field instead of guarding his post. I guess I wanted to be a clown in the football field. Then one day, while playing the other team in school, I broke my hand and my football career was over.
Six months later, I was asked to play basketball for the 'B' team. The only reason I was included in the team was because the basketball coach had heard that I was a great player when I was in the sixth grade. By then, I was not running much and had begun to experiment with what nicotine could do to your lungs. I showed up for the game and the other school did not have enough players in their 'B' team. So our coach and the other coach decided that we would be playing against two boys and three girls.
I guess in the history of Nepali basketball or even the world, this was the first time that a co-ed team was playing against an all-boys basketball team. We started the match really well and were ahead by a dozen points in the first half. Then we got distracted. After all, it was an all-boys school. All the boys were cheering for the girls instead for their own team and we joined in as well.
Although even today, we tell our friends that we let the girls win but the truth was that our team just got tired in the second half and the girls outran us and scored more points to win the game by a mere point. Thank God, we didn't have mobile phones or YouTube then or else our team would probably be immortal on the Internet.
I then began running cross-country and became quite a good long-distance runner. It wasn't just that one day I woke up and wanted to be a long-distance runner and run like Forrest Gump. All those runs during the basketball game probably helped me pick up the love for running in the final years of my high school.
And of course, I had to thank my running coach who used to show the team, 'Chariots of Fire' before every competition. I guess the movie just pumped us all up and we ran for our lives and won every school and inter-school competition that year. But of course, the coach was also our English teacher and we had to watch 'Dead Poets Society' over and over again and that made us all seize the day and suck the marrow of life. Today, many years later we are still left figuring out what we want to do with our lives.
A few months ago, I participated in a 5K run in the city. Instead of running, it became a walkathon for me and I finally managed to cross the finish line with a bunch of ten-year olds. My New Year resolution for the coming year will be to start running again and participate in a marathon in a year or two.
My wife tells me that I should do yoga. I don't want to be like Ramdev and be a stomach-curling expert. I think I will just tag along with my sister who runs a few miles every day and ask my wife to join me as well. But my wife tells me she will go for Zumba classes instead. To each his own, I guess, as long as you're not finishing a marathon with ten year olds.
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