Secret to Youth Is a Little Y Ball at Noon

I take off along the baseline under the basket, and a teammate named Frank--a young guy, very tattooed, a guy I do not know--gets me the ball at precisely the right instant.

I leave my feet without dribbling, and twist and fall backward, lofting the ball just over the spread fingers of my defender. The net devours it like a chocolate truffle.

Sweet, sweet, sweet.

“Nice shot, buddy,” says a tall guy named Tom, also a teammate. As we lope downcourt to play defense, he holds his hand out wanting to graze palms. I oblige. “Way to shoot it, buddy,” he says.

Neither Frank nor Tom knows my name; I know theirs only because I’ve heard others invoke them. Of the nine players on the floor with me at the Glendale YMCA this noon, and of the five waiting to play the winners (which, you had better believe, are going to be us), I know exactly none.

And yet I know them like the back of my shooting hand. I knew them like my mother’s face, before I even put my Nikes to these creaky floorboards.

These are the same guys who at midday local time, Monday through Friday, play pickup basketball in a thousand YMCAs across the United States.

During my 25-year association with noontime Y ball, I have played in gyms in a dozen cities and towns. I can testify that at every venue the sights are the same (five shirts, five skins, dim lights, scuffed floors), the sounds are the same (squealing soles, protesting throats) and the smell is the same (vinegar, ammonia, unaired air, smoldering determination to win).

Show up at noon at a Y in almost any town, and chances are you will find a game, as I have at the Glendale branch, where I’ve never set foot before.

My unknown teammates and I, we click. We are a blend of youthful ballistics (three of the guys are in their 20s) and mature savvy (I’m 51; Tom, it turns out, is 58). It does not take us long to pick up on how each of us speaks the wordless language of run and pivot; screen, cut and pass; leap and shoot. In five games of full-court, we win four. At 1:30, we leave the court in a fine, mild delirium of triumph.

*

I drape a towel around my neck and wonder how many other people at how many other Ys in the Pacific Time Zone are feeling exactly the same way at exactly this moment.

No one really knows how the tradition of noon ball at the Y started. Dick Jones, the Columbus, Ohio-based associate director for sports of the YMCA of the USA, says it dates from at least the 1950s. It is a fixture, he estimates, at more than half of the Y’s 2,227 local branches.

“I don’t think anybody created the idea. It’s just something that happened over the years,” he says. “I really think guys do it more for the camaraderie than to work on their fitness. It’s all about bragging rights in the locker room. They have a good time doing it, and there’s a lot of good-natured kidding of one another.”

Not that this equates with a lackadaisical attitude toward the games themselves. Noontime Y ball is notoriously fierce, probably because there’s so little at stake.

Jones, who is 56, was a regular noontime participant during the early 1970s when he was physical director at the Y in Middletown, Ohio, hometown of former New York Knicks great Jerry Lucas.

“But I quit when I broke my ankle,” he says. “It was during a noontime game, and they carried me off to the side of the court, put in another player, and went on playing. It was, ‘Hey, find your way to the doctor, Dick.’ ”

Over the years, I have found myself on the court at noon with players from an amazing array of backgrounds. I can think of a game at the downtown Y in Akron, Ohio, in which the other players consisted of a cop, a drug dealer, a university professor, a piano player, a lawyer, a rubber worker, a dermatologist, and two ministers of the Lord.

But, really, you leave your curriculum vitae in the locker room with your loafers. At noontime Y ball, your worth has nothing to do with your education or investments. Your jump shot says everything about you anyone needs to know.

Noon ball is an abusable substance that intoxicates by dint of identity displacement. It requires--delinquently, in the middle of the workday--absorption of mind and the squandering of physical resources. It lifts you right out of your life, which is particularly welcome to those whose existences have become cluttered with the accrual of years.

*

I have known businessmen and professionals (never journalists, of course) to cancel appointments and jeopardize work projects in order to make it to the Y by 11:45, or, preferably, 11:30, so they could be among the first 10 to play. I have known players (again, never journalists) to sulk the rest of the day after occupational or familial exigency has forced them to miss ball.

“I don’t care how busy you are, you put noon ball in your schedule and work everything else around it,” says Tom Katsis, my 58-year-old teammate, as he does 60-pound wrist curls in the weight room after our games.

“If you don’t make it a priority, you will fall away from it,” agrees 51-year-old Gerry Peters, a deadly outside shooter built like a Roman gladiator from an old Italian movie. “Then you’ll miss that thrill that you get.”

“Like that thrill you got,” says Tom, “when I grabbed that one rebound today, and put it back up with that light, feathery touch.”

“Yeah, we were really thrilled by that, Tom,” smirks Gerry.

*

Katsis, who lives in Monrovia, started playing noon ball at the Y in Sioux City, Iowa, 23 years ago. Four years ago, with his two children raised, he gave up a career as an insurance broker and moved to the L.A. area to become an actor. While awaiting his big break, he makes it to noon ball at Glendale three times a week.

Gerry, a Glendale resident who’s worked as a systems manager for entertainment companies, is a dedicated weight lifter, hiker and mountain biker. He plays midday basketball four times a week. “I’d be down here every day, except for this bad knee I’ve got,” he says. “It’s the thing I do everything else to do.”

Between them, Tom and Gerry are grandfathers six times. Noontimes at the Y, they are measured against younger men, sometimes prevail, always feel the unleashing of the special transportive memory that abides only in the muscles and joints.

“What I like is that I can still cut and run the floor and battle the young guys under the boards,” says Tom. He lays a finger on his chest, in the middle of the damp spot on his T-shirt. “It makes me feel young here, inside.”