Patty Hits the Court

by Patty (Patrick) Mills

  We were split into teams of five players. Josie and I were teamed up with Adam, Nathan and Ben. We gathered in the centre for the jump ball.

  I felt stupid. I didn’t know where to stand, didn’t know the positions like I did in AFL and NRL, and Tyson told me, ‘When you get the ball, just run to the end of the court and make a try like you do in rugby league. But you better run as fast as you can, cos I’m going to catch you.’

  Nathan went in for the jump ball. He sometimes played ruck with Boris at footy, so I was prepared for him to tap it down to me.

  When he did, I started running with the ball as fast as I could towards the basket. Coach Clarke blew his whistle and called out, ‘Travel’, and made a signal with his hands, rolling one over the other.

  Everyone was laughing at me, even Coach Clarke. I had no idea what was wrong until Coach explained, ‘You have to bounce the ball, Patty. You can’t run with it unless you’re bouncing it.’

  Tyson ripped the ball out of my hands. ‘Let me take care of that for you,’ he said false-sweetly. He passed it to Tiago and they were off.

  When Coach Clarke blew the whistle at the end of the session, Tyson threw his arm around my shoulder and said, ‘Looks like I don’t have to worry about you being better than me at basketball!’

  I scowled at him but couldn’t think of a comeback. The truth was, he was right. Tyson was a star at basketball, and I was hopeless.

  ‘You did well, Patty,’ Coach Clarke said. ‘So did Josie.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking. I sucked.’

  ‘I’m not and you didn’t suck. There’s training again on Wednesday, I hope to see you back.’

  ‘Thanks but no thanks,’ I told him, keen to get to dance practice in the evening and start feeling good about myself again.

  I SLUMPED ONTO THE COUCH to watch television as Mum and Dad prepared dinner. Mum must have known something was wrong because she asked if I wanted a banana milkshake.

  I’d been crazy about banana milkshakes since I had my first at Uncle Frankie’s Café on Thursday Island in the Torres Strait. There’s a sign at Uncle Frankie’s that says, ‘The Best Shakes in the Straits’, but Mum’s shakes come close.

  ‘Patty, did you hear me? Would you like a milkshake?’ she asked again.

  ‘No thanks, Mum.’ I’d just come from Torres Strait Islander dance practice, which usually made me feel energised and positive, but I was still thinking about my basketball tryout.

  Mum sat down next to me. ‘Okay, tell me what’s wrong.’

  I shook my head and kept staring at the television.

  ‘Why have you been moping around all afternoon?’ Mum said, placing her hand on my shoulder.

  ‘It’s nothing, really.’

  ‘I know when something’s wrong, Patty,’

  I sighed. ‘I tried out for basketball today, but I could hardly do anything.’

  Mum laughed, but it wasn’t funny to me. ‘So, you want to be a basketballer like your Uncle Danny?’

  ‘I thought I might be good at it. I wanted to get on the team and help my friends win their third grand final in a row.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, and shot me the serious look she gives me when she wants me to think long and hard about something.

  ‘I was hopeless.’

  ‘You couldn’t bounce the ball? You couldn’t pass it? You kept tripping over your feet?’ Mum asked.

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘You couldn’t catch the ball like you do in football and cricket and rugby league?’ Mum asked.

  I started to think Mum was making fun of me. ‘Of course I could. But I couldn’t shoot the ball, and when we played a scratch match I didn’t even know where to stand on the court.’

  Mum walked over to the bookshelf and took down the photo of Uncle Danny in his Australian basketball team uniform. She placed it in front of me on the coffee table. ‘Do you think Uncle Danny was good at basketball when he first started playing?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but at least he would’ve been tall.’

  ‘All giants were growing boys like you at one time, Patty,’ Mum said. ‘And I’ll let you in on a secret.’ She leaned in close to me. ‘Uncle Danny was dropped from his primary school basketball team.’

  ‘You’re joking!’ I said.

  ‘Ask him yourself,’ Mum said, chuckling.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It’s true, Patty,’ Mum said. ‘He wasn’t very good at basketball when he first played – he was better at athletics. You’re already great at all of the other sports you play, imagine how good you might be at basketball if you practise.’

  I wasn’t convinced. Perhaps basketball was going to be the one sport I wasn’t good at.

  But Mum wasn’t finished. ‘You have to have the confidence to push through the early stages, while you’re learning. Don’t expect to set the court on fire straight away! But if you keep trying, you’ll get there. Just like you have with your other sports. Just like with your Torres Strait dancing.’

  As I tried to sleep that night I thought about what it felt like when I introduced our Torres Strait Islander dance group Gerib Sik to an audience. I stood straight and tall, and my voice boomed out. Then, when we danced, I moved smoothly across the floor like a shark gliding through the ocean. It hadn’t always been that way; it had taken a while to learn the steps. But I had got there. And now it was the best feeling in the world.

  ‘YOU WANT TO HAVE another go at basketball training today?’ I asked Josie when the bell went for lunch.

  ‘I was going to have a go whether you wanted to or not,’ Josie said. ‘I’ve been using my netball as a basketball and practising at home.’

  We scoffed our sandwiches and shot straight over to the gym.

  I watched Tyson dribbling the ball around the court. He looked really relaxed. I remembered what Mum said: I wasn’t good at basketball yet but I could be, if I tried. I just had to have the confidence to ignore Tyson.

  He wasn’t going to make it easy, though. He shot over a comment as he jogged past. ‘Patty, you’re still as short as last time you came to practice.’

  ‘Eres un estúpido, Tyson,’ Manu said.

  Tiago started giggling and Tyson asked, ‘What?’

  Manu replied, ‘Patty is tall enough.’ But I knew he’d said Tyson was stupid in Spanish. I squashed down a smile.

  We all ran a few laps dribbling before Coach Clarke called us to the end of the court. ‘Okay, let’s see your layups now.’

  When it came to my turn I dribbled the ball, then pushed it up towards the corner of the backboard square, making sure to balance it with my free hand.

  The ball dropped through the hoop and I punched the air, so glad that I’d got it. When I walked back up the line Josie gave me a high five.

  I was pumped when it came to playing a scratch match. ‘Can you tell us some of the rules again before we start?’ I asked Coach Clarke.

  Tyson rolled his eyes but I let Mum’s words calm the anger that rose up in me. If you keep trying, you’ll get there. Someday soon I’d be blocking Tyson when he tried to take a shot.

  ‘Okay, how about we all take a few minutes to teach our new teammates the rules?’ Coach Clarke said. Josie smiled at me when he said ‘new teammates’.

  Nathan explained some of the rules to us, including that a free throw was worth one point and that you could score three points by getting a basket from outside the three-point line.

  I looked at how far the basket was from the line and imagined one day being able to shoot a three-pointer.

  Manu and Nathan stood toe-to-toe for the jump ball. Nathan won it and tapped the ball down to me. I started dribbling towards our team’s end and Tyson ran in and defended. Certain that he was going to slap the ball out of my hands, I stepped backwards. Josie and Nathan were calling out to me and waving their arms around, but I decided to take Tyson on. I ran around him as fast as I could and the ball was bouncing up around my head. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get to the bas
ket.

  Charlie tried to stop me but I dodged him, and when I felt the ball was going to slip out of my hand I took a shot.

  The ball dropped through the hoop. ‘Yes!’ I yelled, and punched the air. But when I looked around at my teammates, Nathan was shaking his head.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’ve got to pass it,’ he said.

  ‘Why? I scored,’ I told him.

  Tyson scowled at me as he ran past but that didn’t make me any less happy about scoring my first basket in a game, even if it was just a scratch match.

  Tyson turned and said, ‘It was just a fluke, Patty.’ So the next time I got the ball I did the same thing. I sped towards the basket, dodging Tyson and Ben, but when I shot the ball, it missed altogether.

  ‘Argh!’ I said to myself in frustration. I had to prove my shot wasn’t a fluke.

  Next time I charged to the hoop and tried throwing the ball up when I was as close as I could get to the basket.

  The ball bounced off the hoop and I slapped my leg, totally annoyed with myself. Tyson caught the rebound, dribbled it back to his end of the court and scored.

  I told myself that when I next got hold of the ball I needed to concentrate harder. But I missed on my next attempt, too, and I heard Josie and

  Nathan groan.

  Coach Clarke blew the whistle. When everyone was at the drink fountains he came to me and said, ‘Patty, you have to work with your teammates. Basketball is a team game.’

  My face went hot. I didn’t know what Coach Clarke was talking about. I knew basketball was a team game, but like most sports I thought you won the game by scoring points, not by passing the ball around.

  I thought that Coach Clarke was just being tough on the new kid, but then my friends started giving me a hard time too.

  ‘Didn’t you see me calling out to you, Patty?’ Josie asked. She hardly ever got annoyed with anyone, especially me, but there was a deep frown on her face.

  ‘You could have dressed like a bullfighter waving a red flag and Patty wouldn’t have seen you,’ Tiago said.

  THERE ARE A LOT OF THINGS I like about school – seeing my friends, doing PE, learning about geography. I’m good at remembering facts. Sometimes I’m okay at maths and English and other times they’re really difficult. I have to concentrate so hard to get it right.

  If it’s a rainy day at school we have to play board games in the library at lunchtime. On days like that, when I don’t get to run around, it’s even harder for me to concentrate.

  Sometimes, when it’s freezing cold in Canberra, I sit in class dreaming about being on Thursday Island, where my grandparents and lots of my family live. We go there for holidays. It’s always sunny on Thursday Island and I spend the days hanging out with my cousins.

  We can walk or ride bikes wherever we want on the island and we walk around barefoot in shorts and singlets. It’s so much better than being in a classroom wearing school shoes and having the collar of my shirt rubbing against my neck.

  We swim and play on the beach and a lot of the time we dive. There’s reef everywhere in the Torres Strait and I always dream about diving.

  The water is crystal clear and the sun shines through it, lighting up the reef. Everything is silent under the water as I glide along, sometimes following a school of mullet, a stingray, or if I’m really lucky, a turtle or a small reef shark or two.

  Sitting in my English class that afternoon, my mind drifted away from what the teacher was saying. I started thinking about what Coach Clarke had said about basketball being a team game. Sure, I had scored a basket, but Tyson was right – it had been a fluke. When I was playing football and rugby and knew I couldn’t score I’d pass the ball to someone in a better position, knowing that there were times that I couldn’t possibly break through the defence by myself. I guessed that was what Coach Clarke wanted me to do.

  I didn’t know how I was going to pass the ball to Tyson though, once we were playing a real game. Even if our team was losing it would be hard.

  And then my teacher, Ms Kelly, placed her hand on my desk. ‘Patty, I haven’t seen you do any work for the last five minutes,’ she said, ‘and the results of this test prove that you need to work much harder. I’m going to have to speak with your parents.’

  ‘Sorry, Miss,’ I said, looking at the result of my spelling test. My score was seven out of twenty. Mum and Dad were going to freak.

  I looked back down at the page with the comprehension exercises and spelling words that I was supposed to be practising and started to stress out.

  Josie caught my attention and mouthed the words, ‘What’s wrong?’

  I held up the paper just long enough for her to see the mark and she held her head in her hands. We all dreaded not getting at least fourteen out of twenty in a test. It meant that I’d be kept in to study in the classroom instead of playing Friday afternoon sport.

  I WALKED HOME from school every day. I was supposed to do chores like emptying the dishwasher and tidying my bedroom, though I didn’t always remember. That night I definitely remembered. I even threw some clothes in the washing machine and fed our cat, Cupid, before Mum and Dad got home and took me out for our regular pizza night.

  I sat at the restaurant with my mouth watering, cutting a slice of Hawaiian pizza with the stretchiest cheese and juiciest pineapple when Dad asked, ‘Did you have another try at basketball, Patty?’

  ‘I went to training at lunchtime today,’ I said.

  ‘And how was it?’

  ‘I dribbled past everyone and made a layup.’

  ‘That’s great,’ Mum said. But even though Mum and Dad were pleased and I had bitten into the best pizza in the world, I still felt sick thinking about my spelling test result. I knew I had to come out with it.

  ‘Mum and Dad, I didn’t pass the spelling test this week.’

  ‘What’s going on, Patty?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Are there certain words you’re finding difficult?’

  ‘Not all of them, just some,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe you need to pull back on some of the extra things you’re doing outside of school,’ Mum said.

  ‘There’s no way I’m missing dance rehearsals,’ I told them, shaking my head.

  ‘Well, you’ll have to miss out on football this

  week, Patty,’ Mum said.

  I looked to Dad and said, ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘You know the rule, Patty, if you’re behind on schoolwork you can’t play sport on Friday afternoon.’

  ‘But I don’t want to miss out on playing football! Can’t you just speak to Ms Kelly? I promise I’ll work harder at my spelling,’ I begged. I knew that Coach Clarke would put Tyson straight onto the ball if I wasn’t playing and I’d end up in the back pocket for our last game.

  ‘Patty, improving your spelling is more important than football at the moment,’ Dad said.

  I bit into my pizza, which didn’t taste as good as it had a few minutes ago. Dad went on to ask, ‘What can we do about it?’

  ‘How about you speak to Ms Kelly, tell her I can play football and I’ll practise spelling with you all weekend.’

  Dad chuckled and said, ‘Patty, you’re not playing football on Friday. You’ll have to do revision with Ms Kelly instead.’

  ‘But Dad!’ I couldn’t believe they were being so hard on me.

  And Mum said, ‘Patty, I don’t want you to spend all of your weekend practising your spelling. It’s about doing a little bit of practice each day and concentrating more in class.’

  ‘Yeah, but I won’t be able to play football, will I? And I bet I won’t be able to play basketball, even if Coach Clarke selects me for the team.’ I felt like my world was falling apart.

  ‘Patty, you could be on top of your schoolwork in no time. How about you try thinking about what your education means to your future rather than trying to get a good enough result to play sport? An education will provide you with the greatest range of options to do whatever you want with your life. I k
now there are other things you dream of doing, Patty. Like managing a Torres Strait dance group one day.’

  I thought about what Dad was saying as I bit into my pizza.

  ‘And if you get on top of your schoolwork, of course you’ll be able to play basketball,’ Mum said.

  ‘HAVE FUN, PATTY,’ Tyson said as he and my friends went to play sport. I was stuck sitting in the classroom. I just hoped that Tyson didn’t kick a bag of goals.

  After a while I looked down at my new word list and realised there were too many words on the page that I didn’t know how to spell.

  Although I really wanted to get on top of my schoolwork to play football and basketball, I thought about what Dad had said about my future.

  When I grew up, I wanted to manage a Torres Strait Islander dance group. You need to know a lot of things when you manage a dance group. I remember the last time Dad and my Uncle Noel took our group on a tour. First they needed to book the performances in different towns and cities. They needed to know how much we were being paid for each performance, hire a bus for our travel, book our accommodation and make sure that we were all fed. To be a manager, you need to know how to plan and be organised, negotiate and communicate, and those are all skills that education helps to build.

  I realised I needed to switch on in class to give myself a chance at being the best I could be.

  Ms Kelly came and sat next to me. ‘Patty, read the word first and then spell it out.’

  She told me to cover the word with a ruler and write it down in my book, then uncover it to see if I’d spelled it correctly.

  The first word I tried was ‘privilege’. It had me stumped. I spelled it out as P-R-I-V-I-L-E-G-E, but for some reason when I wrote it down, I kept putting a ‘D’ before the ‘G’.

  I lay down my pen and took a breath. Ms Kelly asked, ‘Is there anything that can help you remember how to spell the word?’

  It wasn’t as easy as just telling myself not to add a D. I knew how to spell ‘edge’ and kept getting it confused with ‘privilege’.