Well, this afternoon, in a search for exercise, I asked Charlie if he wanted to play some HORSE. After all, Duke was crushing Baylor, so I figured I wouldn’t miss anything.

When we were done with our games, he said, “So am I going to make it into blog for beating you badly.” And I said, only if we tell everything that happened. Apparently getting into the blog is more important, so he agreed.

Anyways, I started off strong, getting Charlie all the way to H-O-R-S. But Charlie fought back, and got four straight letters on me to tie the game. Finally, I hit a shot that he couldn’t, and I won the first game of HORSE. Normally, this is where things fall apart for me.

But, I managed to keep things going. In another close game where we were both hitting some pretty deep three-pointers and both were at S, Charlie says lets try something close – lets try a reverse layup. So, he starts from the right side of the basket, jumps under the basket, and the rim gets in the way for a miss. I told him he did it on the wrong side, he should have started from the left so that he could still go up with his right hand.

So, I said, lets try it. I start from the left (slowly since I am old), but my body somehow remembered how to jump to the right side and hit the layup. Charlie sadly missed both tries and I stole another victory of HORSE.

He said, “Oh no! That can’t be! And I said, do you want to play a game that you can beat me at – lets do 1v1.” He reluctantly agreed – he is a good kid and didn’t want to see me hurt myself. I even jumped out to an early lead – I hit a layup that he tipped that surprised him. He asked how did you hit that. I told him that when you are 5’7″, you learn creative ways of hitting fadeaway shots.

Towards the end, Charlie finally started to use his height to his advantage. And then, with it tied at 10, Charlie took the ball out to the top of the key and drained a pretty shot to win. While the score was 11-10, it was clear that Charlie could have won at any time, but he didn’t want to drive into me and hurt me.

So, we proved three things.

• I still can surprisingly shoot the ball well when no one is guarding me.
• I am old, out-of-shape, and lose my shot quickly when actually running around or having someone try to guard me.
• Charlie is clearly better than his dad at playing basketball.

And it was a better way to spend the afternoon than watching Duke win by 23 points.