I, genuinely, loved the game from the beginning so when I got to highschool it was the main sport I wanted to participate in as well as athletics. I was interested in soccer but didn't see it as something I wanted to play at the time. So in 2002 up to 2003, I was loitering around basketball practice with the older guys who soon went to the first team & I was told to recruit some U16 team players because I was the only one. I got three guys & we were joined by a further four guys a short while later, we had the U16 team. At first, I could barely do handles or a layup at 13 years along with some of the other guys that were joining the team. I practiced alone until my handling got good enough for me to play point guard. It's easier when there's a basketball court at home away from school facilities where you can practice whenever you feel like.
The problem was the incredible pressure & anxiety I often got when I played some home games & one or two away games. Literally, 40% my energy & ability somehow was drained out of my body. I don't know how, because at 13 or 14 years, I was too young to know how mind tricks worked anyway. It got a lot better when I went to play in lesser known places & away from Port Shepstone High. When I mention the incredible pressure & anxiety when I went to play, it was almost as if someone was making me playing a game a matter of life or death. And to many playing a game may seem like a matter of life or death in professional ranks but not in obscure towns & townships among teenagers. It really felt crazy & unnecessarily awkward a lot of times.
It got to a point where I was just playing for the sake of playing & not because I wanted to play. To this day, I don't know what zapped all the energy from me at random times. I could barely open my school books to do homework at times, it got that bad. It only got better at boarding school because you're mostly surrounded by upfront people most times & it's easier to get things done in that environment.
I can't even speculate why I got tired & unwilling to do something I'd been planning hours to do in my teens but that phenomenon subsided a bit in varsity. I even suffered from several suffocating lucid dreams until I fought through them during my late highschool & varsity times. I hear you can from lucid dreams & luckily I didn't. It was a crazy time. It, genuinely, felt like the eyes of the world were on me until I grew up & realised no one has the time to be obsessing over some nobody from an unknown place. At the time, it feels like a genuine f***ing jungle... like all these random eyes are watching you for some silly reason. But, you walk out of it, because logically why would random people you don't know have their eyes on you? It's nonsense.
I could do a few dunks & got to be MVP of a Durban tournament. If I continued playing without hinderance, I don't know how far I could've gone. But seeing my progress, I could've made it to the Basketball National League of South Africa. From then on, who knows how far...
Here are a few videos of me joking around a basketball court:
• Hoops
N. B. : Dunk video is so heavily pixelated because it was shot in 2007 on a Samsung E250.