Gunner

When you’re a gunner and shot the ball 75% of the time when you get your hands on it sometimes you have a hard time getting the ball.  This is especially the case if you have other gunners on your 3 on 3 pickup team.  But sometimes if I didn’t have gunners on my team or we were down and ballneeded to get ahead, I would get the ball.  Since however I did not make plays for myself I was dependent on the other guys on the team and had to train them in the course of a game, if we had not previously played together.

To get my hands on the ball, I would run the baseline, cutting constantly behind the guy who was guarding me, and then I would stand there with my hands out, jumping up and down to indicate I was open.  After I did this a while, somebody would throw it to me, sometimes close to the basket.  Then I would use my back-to-the basket game and do a turn around on them.  Or I would just run out along the base line till where it nearly ended and stand there.  And when they passed it, the guy guarding me would either not be anywhere around or he would dare me to shot it which, being a gunner, I would.

That was part A of my two part game; the other part, part B, was to go to the top of the key and shot from there.  Sometimes I would shot a turnaround from there; and if I had trained my guys properly one of them would set a pick and I would get off the shot.  As you may have noted I had no drive to the basket game at all.  

The game of the varsity team was built around the play of our guards as I have said.  With our full court press and constant fast breaking are game was mostly controlled mayhem.  But when we got stuck and had to go up against a set defense, our offense was incredibly stodgy.  We ran patterns.  One involved me cutting to the basket and trying to brush off my guy on the center who had posted low; then I would cut directly for the free-throw line and put out my hands to get the ball which I almost never did since actually I was just a decoy and I would then go set a pick for one of our guards.

I did on one rare occasion get to display parts of my game during what is called “garbage time.”  In this particular game, garbage time started somewhere in the second quarter.  The final score for this game was 120 for us and 77 for the other guys; that’s a hundred and 97 points scored in a 36 minute high school game.  I don’t know what the fuck we were doing.

 But in the third quarter, the coach put me in at one guard and my old catcher from little league at the other.  He was a pretty good ball handler and I would run down and he would pass me the ball and I made five shots in a row—the other guys were completely discombobulated.  That was my all time high scoring game.  22 points in about ten minutes.  I could hit ok when there was no chance we were going to lose and I could play my game which was to shot it 75% of the time that I got my hands on the ball.

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