There were no organized youth leagues for basketball where I grew up. You learned the game on the park playground and the parking lots of churches.

I suppose there were churches that had indoor courts, but we did not belong to one that did.

In the apartment complex where I lived, there was an eclectic mix of culture. There were white kids, black kids, Korean kids and even Canadians who would meet at the court that was at the complex called Pinehaven. It was Mississippi and there were pine trees all around.

I moved into the complex at the start of eighth grade and it was a shock to the system. Two lessons were learned quickly — don’t tell the toughest kid that he ain’t so tough and that playing sports other than soccer was fun.

Quick story about the first lesson.

There was a group of kids in a field that was between some of the buildings in the complex. All the kids would meet there nearly every day during football season, divide up players and play two-hand touch football.

A short time after moving into the complex I wandered onto the field to see if I could play with them. I remember one of the older boys counting and then he said yes because they needed one more to make the teams even. You can guess how the picking process went. It came down to me and another pale, skinny kid. I was the penultimate pick because one of the team captains threw me the ball and I caught it.

There was this kid on the other team, the middle child of the Washer boys. During the football game he tackled me and was being your basic bully throughout the game. I finally was fed up and told him, “You’re not so tough.” He showed me otherwise when he picked me up and threw me against a tree.

The picking process for the daily football games was the same for the rest of the season. I was next to last each time.

I wasn’t unathletic at the time, but I had not played, even in pickup games, any sport other than soccer. That was also the year soccer was dropped because there wasn’t a league for kids age 14 and up. The high school did not start a team until my senior year. By then there were other things to do.

We played sports by the season. The fall was football season. The winter was basketball season and the spring was time for baseball.

Slowly, baseball fell off the to-do list of sports. Around the time of my sophomore year in high school, a group of us decided that we were good enough at hoops to walk a few blocks down the road to the “natatorium” court.

It got its name from being next to the pool at the University of Southern Mississippi. There was one full court and the competition was tough. On any given Saturday or Sunday afternoon, there were 40 people waiting to play. The people did not come just from the west side of Hattiesburg where we lived, but from downtown, or Rawls Springs, or other neighboring towns.

There were lessons to be learned and not just about basketball.

The first time we went to the court there were two white kids, two Korean kids and a black kid. We got our downs, waited for a very long time as the old guys bickered about calls, then got on the court and promptly got whopped.