While I'm Here: Some Words About Basketball
While I'm Here, I'll say a few things about my basketball life from October 1943 to January 2011.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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BASKETBALL
All my days until I was 23 were spent in the built-up region of the Golden Horseshoe which extends from Niagara Falls at the eastern end of the Niagara Peninsula, wrapped around Lake Ontario west to Hamilton, anchored by Toronto on the northwest shore of Lake Ontario and continues to the east of Oshawa. The wider region of the Golden Horseshoe spreads inland in all directions away from the Lake Ontario shoreline, southwest to Brantford, where I worked in 1967 before I got married and went to live on Baffin Island. It also spreads west to the Kitchener-Waterloo area where I used to attend Baha'i firesides, and north to Barrie where I used to go with my parents for summer holidays in the 1950s--and northeast to Peterborough where I went to a Baha'i summer camp in 1961 and 1962. It was here in the Golden Horseshoe that basketball came into my life.
Basketball made its formal entry into my life in the first year of high school as part of physical education classes in 1958. I was never good at dribbling; I never learned to dribble and keep my eye on where I was going at the same time. I also found it exhausting running all the time. Perhaps this was due to pneumonia which I had contracted twice before I was five years old. Pneumonia is an inflammation of the lungs caused by bacteria, viruses or chemical irritants. It is a serious infection or inflammation in which the air sacs fill with pus and other liquid. Small children who develop pneumonia and survive are at also at risk for developing lung problems in adulthood. I smoked a pack of cigarettes every day from the age of 20 to 50 and now, at the age of 65, I have a mild emphysema. Many patients experience long-term problems like shortness of breath and fatigue. I was one such patient. Playing sports like basketball and soccer, Australian rules and ice-hockey required a long-wind and this I never developed and have not done so to this day.
Still, basketball in its many forms continued after those first gym classes in 1958 in grade 9. Basketball courts are found in all schools and I spent 50 years in schools as a student and/or a teacher. Small courts are also found in people’s drive-ways, in suburbs in all the towns in lived in and I lived in some two dozen towns in Canada and Australia and have visited over 100 towns in my 67 years of living. Basketball nets are set up here and there in endless venues in the part of the planet where I have lived and had my being.
I came across what seems like 100s of individuals who had basketballs and wanted to play, to engage me in a little fun. And so it is that more than 50 years later, now in 2011, I have a long history of playing basketball. I have always tried to keep my participation to a minimum. Perhaps the most concentrated basketball-playing I have done has been with my son Daniel in the 1980s and 1990s as he was growing-up. This form of b-ball, as it often came to be called, was mostly just shooting at the net and my son was usually the winner. At the age of 66 I think the last time I held a basketball in my hand was in 2008, fifty years after that grade 9 gym class. I have no plans to pick up a basketball again in the evening of my life, in these middle years(65-75) of late adulthood as some developmental psychologists call the years form 60 to 80—and old age(80++), if I last that long.
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married for 42 years, a teacher for 35 and a Baha'i for 50 
Last edited by RonPrice : 01-20-2011 at 09:16 PM.
Reason: to add some words
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While I'm Here: Some Words About Basketball
