Before leading the 1989 Canadiens to the Cup final, Pat Burns (1952-2010) was a police officer in Gatineau. One day, when a good citizen of that community picked up the phone to complain about the kids playing hockey on his street, he was the one assigned to intervene. The citizen soon had to call back to the station. We just sent you an officer, he was told. Yeah, but the problem is, your officer has a hockey stick in his hands right now…
Almost too good to be true, the anecdote is probably apocryphal. It nevertheless offers a welcome moral counterweight to these stories of municipal officials stupid enough to demand, from a group of kids, bureaucratic formalities worthy of a caricature of a communist regime, and of an outdoor basketball court closed because young people having fun outside is so noisy. Much more than the highway a few meters from which all these neighborhoods of small houses are built where it is good to isolate yourself on your phone or tablet.
The street where my father-in-law lives still bears the name of a henchman of the British Empire who was also a precursor of bacteriological warfare, but it was not to commemorate General Amherst that, on this beautiful Saturday in June, its few hundred meters were closed to automobile traffic by orange barriers installed at both ends. It was rather to celebrate the community nature of a public road where the “hommilists” (thank you Réjean Ducharme), the name given to cars that own their driver rather than the other way around, usually see a way to get from point A to point B, while for the inhabitants of the banks of this little asphalt river, it is their living environment. Once again this year, a citizen initiative was at the origin of this festive and good-natured occupation of an urban space, this peaceful, popular territorial sharing: our street party.
Between these few residences in the Old North of Sherbrooke, a playful spirit had taken over the roadway. Not far from where I stood, a basketball hoop stood guard at the edge of the sidewalk. A few meters further, two goals with nets awaited the local Bobrovskys of street hockey, or the shots on target from any emulator of Kylian Mbappé. Even further, two badminton nets shared the street and I could see a ping-pong table in the background. Not to mention the swings that appeared on a lawn and the inflatable games for toddlers.
Footballs, soccer balls and basketballs and an armful of hockey sticks were among the equipment left lying around along the sidewalks, ready for use. To organized sport, we could oppose a concept that I want to call improvised sport. Any ball becomes an opportunity to move.
In a gesture that has become almost natural over time, I picked up the football and quickly positioned my fingers along the seam before making a short pass to my big guy standing with his arms dangling not far away. He returned the courtesy and off we went.
Later, we moved on to hockey, then ping-pong. With a little imagination, anyone could do their own version of a pentathlon on this stretch of street. At one point, I even saw my JP and his cousin playing a sport I was seeing for the first time: a variation of lacrosse played with a large plastic ball.
During a moment of relaxation, while the plate of hot dogs kindly provided by the neighboring neighborhood grocery store was already heating up, I positioned myself at the imaginary free throw line, basketball in hand. To my own amazement, my first three shots found the back of the basket, played a little lower, let’s be honest, than the NBA regulation 3.05 m. Still, it was a good omen…
I was counting on a certain ripple effect, on this contagion of pleasure which makes basketball produce on me the same sort of effect as street hockey on Pat Burns, aka the “Big Police”: just seeing the graceful arc described by the ball between the relaxed wrists of the thrower and the metal ring, one experiences tingles of excitement at the fingertips. And it didn’t fail: Son and Nephew came back together for a two against one of the families, followed by a game of 21.
Easy as pie, 21. Even I, a self-confessed slacker, understood their explanation. A rebound is worth one point, and the chance to line up for a series of free throws worth two points each; if you miss, the ball goes to the rebounder. The winner’s score must be exact: whoever exceeds 21 points starts over.
The Nephew plays basketball at school and it shows: he scores swishes —those perfect shots that sink into the basket without touching the hoop or the backboard, producing the pretty eponymous onomatopoeia—with a confounding art that smacks of daily practice.
But now Uncle, once again, succeeds in his first three shots from the free throw line and finds himself in the lead with eight points and the dizziness of the summits as a bonus. But Neveu is really good, maybe not too good, but so good that, forced to miss his shot after reaching the mark of 20, he misses his missed shot, puts the ball in the ring and falls to zero! Thus paving the way for the Son who, as in several other areas, only had to catch up and quietly overtake his father…
A few days later, we dragged our net to the side of the street, it was morning, it was 28 degrees Celsius with a feeling of 38 and he, with his synthetic Sherwood made in China and paid the skin of the buttocks at Canadian Shoot, he was bombarding me with a small orange plastic ball. It smelled of sweat and vacations.