More than restaurants that put ice in your water, breakfasts consisting of more than bread and jam, and Halloween decorations, what I began to miss most about the United States was playing basketball. At Georgetown, on any given day of the week, Yates is full of pickup basketball games in full swing. In Lyon, aside from a few unused outdoor courts, basketball is seemingly nowhere. To make matters worse, even the earliest NBA games start at 1:00 a.m. or 2:00 a.m. Central European Time. I felt totally cut off from one of my favorite pastimes, stuck reading box scores from games the night before.
Then, a couple weeks into the semester, I heard rumblings that my school, Sciences Po, had a basketball team. I searched for a website to no avail. Several inquiries later, I got the name of the team’s Facebook page: Harlem Gones Trotters. The name is an amalgamation of the famous Harlem Globetrotters and gones, a Lyonnais slang word for guys. When I messaged the Facebook page, it gave me the name of a girl to contact, who then gave me the name of the team’s captain, Thomas. He was extremely helpful and welcoming, but he informed me I needed one more piece of paperwork in order to play. Needing an additional form of paperwork is hardly a novelty in France, where every activity from opening a bank account to obtaining a transit card requires a myriad of steps. If one document is slightly off, you are forced to begin the process anew. In this case, all I needed was a note from a doctor ascertaining my good health.
After a call to his office, during which I could barely make out what he was saying (French and flip phone static are a tricky combo), I had an appointment. When I got to the doctor’s office, he asked a few cursory questions before having me strip down. As I stood there awkwardly in my boxers, the doctor had me do a series of squats and pushups, followed by a rest, to measure my heart rate after exertion. Several times I had to remind myself how much I loved basketball in order to resist the urge to leave. The total bill for the checkup was 20 euros before my French student health insurance reimbursement, a shockingly low price when compared to America.
The following Monday was the long-awaited first practice. I took a tram 30 minutes into an eastern suburb of Lyon called Bron and wandered around a dark campus for 15 minutes, wondering if I was in the right place, as the empty glass buildings loomed overhead. Shivering in my basketball shorts, I finally saw a big domed building edged in light.
As I walked through the door, I immediately knew I was in the right place; from the din of basketballs to the sour odor of dried sweat, everything confirmed it. All of my teammates were immediately welcoming and excited. Once I started playing, muscle memory kicked in, which was fortunate, because I realized how rudimentary my basketball lexicon was when I tried to translate it into French. While my verbal communication left much to be desired, body language helped pick up the slack. Fortunately, basketball, being an American game, takes much of its vocabulary from English, with dribble becoming dribler, a shot becoming une chute, and a rebound becoming un rebond.
By the end of the practice, I was huffing but also grinning from ear to ear. What is the reason for my childlike excitement? While everything from the food to the language to clothing changes when you travel, the feeling after a good game of basketball remains exactly the same wherever you are, and that's something to grin about.
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