An End to Innocence, or How I Learned to Shoot a Jump Shot

Even now, some 30 years later, Yago Colás remembers the jump-shot fundamentals he learned back in eighth grade.

Photo credit: iStock

By Yago Colás

Tony, my oldest sibling, is nine years older than I. As a boy, I idolized him completely. It wasn’t one thing in particular about him that I idolized, it was just his way of being in the world: energetic, confident, attractive, imaginative, and spectacular in both success and failure. There’s a lot that I didn’t know about Tony’s life when I was young, a lot about his struggles that I didn’t really discover, let alone understand, until much later.

Tony was a naturally gifted athlete with a special gift for basketball. He played ball as he lived: with an intensity that veered into recklessness, with intelligence, and with grace. He was also played out of position. An even six-feet tall, with great quickness, strength and leaping ability, not to mention a fine jump shot and good ball-handling skills, he ought to have played guard. But on his high school team, he played center. He excelled and maybe enjoyed himself. I don’t know. But I’ve often imagined that playing center confined the expression of his skill and athleticism, which somehow stands for other hard-luck constraints he would face in life…