Page 1 of The Rival

The Rival

On a Saturday nightthat should have been like any other, my basketball rival became more than just a player on the opposing team. He became my match, onandoff the court.

Every weekend during the season, the Alameda County men’s basketball league hosted a game. Each city had its own team, with the league split into two brackets. Those of us who stayed local after college had a home in the league. We could still play competitively even if we weren't destined to play professionally.

People around here took basketball seriously at every playable level. Competition started early, with parents enrolling their kids in youth basketball as soon as they were old enough. Alameda County produced more than a handful of NBA prospects, motivating every bright-eyed basketball hopeful to play their hearts out. Compared to the stakes of the NBA and the NCAA, the county league’s games should have been friendly, but city pride was on the line every Saturday night until the season ended. Each team wanted the trophy proudly displayed in their town’s city hall. Add in a couple corporate sponsors pledging to donate to the winning team’s charity of choice, and you had a potent brew of feisty players and fans determined to come out on top.

Tonight’s game matched the two best teams in the league against one another: the Eastvale Eagles versus the Westvale Wildcats.I led the Westvale Wildcats, and we were on a winning streak, unstoppable in our half of the county bracket. Everyone on my team knew we’d end up facing Eastvale in the finals. We were chomping at the bit to retake our rightful place as the best in the overall league after last year’s heartbreaking loss.

Eastvale, our sister city, had always been our rival. The two cities were founded by a pair of gold-mining brothers in the 1800s who bickered over stakes and land claims. The feud carried past their deaths, spanning generation after generation, feeding into anything remotely competitive, from education to construction contracts to sports.

Over in Eastvale, rich families lived in gated communities with their homeowner’s associations. People ate at their bougie-ass restaurants and played golf on the weekends at the local country club. They were snobs, all born with silver spoons already in their mouths.

People from Westvale were normal, the kind of folks who lived within their means and were happy despite hardships. Born and raised in Westvale, my parents taught me as a child to never take anything for granted. Every day we worked hard, and we never minded a little dirt under our nails or sweat on our brow. For some of my peers, they couldn’t wait to graduate from the constant struggle and make it big elsewhere. Me? My hometown was my pride and joy, a part of my lifeblood, and I had no intention of ever leaving.

So like every other generation of Westvale boys before me, I gave the Eastvale-Westvale rivalry the gravity it deserved. Basketball was more than just a hobby to me. The moment my sneakers touched the court, all my everyday worries, my doubts, and my struggles seemed to just fade away. Basketball was my life, andthe county league gave me the opportunity every year to marry my love of the sport with defending my hometown’s honor.

With the way Eastvale’s players cruised around their city with their fancy cars and stylish clothes, you would think they would be pushovers. Yet on the court, they played aggressively. Most guys after college struggled with balancing exercise with a busy work schedule, but Eastvale must’ve given their residents a free gym membership with how fit their players were, taking their workouts to the next level. No other team in the league made us work as hard for a win as Eastvale.

The most competitive Eastvale player was their team captain Jason Alvarez. He was the pinnacle of smug snobbery: perfect hair, an even tan, and a job he clearly loved. He had confidence in spades, making him a magnet for attention on and off the court. Somehow people could overlook his arrogance, mistaking it for charisma.

I hated guys like him, and I made sure he knew I wasn’t a fan every time we played against one another. In my mind, Jason and I were the poster boys for the longstanding Eastvale-Westvale beef.

My team had worked hard in the offseason to ensure there wouldn’t be a repeat of last year’s mistakes. Eastvale wasn’t making tonight’s final game easy. They set strong screens, and their players drove hard into the paint, fighting for every point. Every rebound was a battle, every loose ball a scuffle.

As with all Eastvale-Westvale games, there were more than a handful of fouls. Somehow the ref’s never saw when Eastvale set an illegal screen, but when me and one of my guys moved an inch, the whistle blew. Whenever I protested a call, I was reminded that the league’s stakes were “for charity, for the kidswho needed positive male role models” and that I needed to “calm down.”

The game was close, a constant back and forth. In the fourth period, with five minutes to go, I had earned four fouls, so I had to play conservatively. Thankfully, Jason was in the same hot water as me with four fouls too. We gave each other a bigger buffer than we usually did, not wanting to foul out of the game and be forced to watch the final minutes in disgrace from the bench.

We played out of our minds, and in the end, when the final buzzer blared, the better team came out on top.

Westvale 74 to Eastvale’s 73.

Winning the tournament alone would have been enough to make my night, but winning the tournament by defeating Eastvale in the final game, intheir ownhome arena no less, was perfection. Raising the gold trophy overmyhead instead of watching Jason Alvarez hoist it over his own was the kind of petty victory that would sustain me for months.

After the game, the rest of the guys on my team wanted to celebrate at the big sports bar just down the road and raise some hell. Nothing like a good old-fashioned victory parade through the heart of your rival city’s downtown to keep the adrenaline high going.

As much as I intended to join my friends, I wasn’t about to go out in public smelling so rank. Maybe they didn’t care about stinking up Eastvale, but I sure as hell did, rival city or otherwise.

“Come on, Matt,” Cameron, our team’s center, said while draping his arm over my shoulder, “we can’t party without you!”

I caught a potent whiff of his body odor and was immediately reminded why I wanted to hit the showers in the first place. A clean t-shirt and a swipe of deodorant wasn’t enough to mask the smell of a well-fought basketball game.

“I’ll catch up in a bit,” I reassured. “I want to clean up first.”

Further illustrating my point, when Cameron untangled himself from his hold on me, his arm and my shoulder had fused together in a sticky, sweaty mess.

“Just don’t linger too long!” Kyle, our shooting guard, teased. “I bet there’ll be some ladies out tonight who’ll want a piece of the winning team’s captain.”

I rolled my eyes. My friends were always trying to get me laid after a game, as if our small time status as local celebrities carried any real weight. At best, Kyle was looking at a handful of single moms enjoying a night off parenting. Not exactly my scene.

“Not sure they’ll wanna be near any of you with the way you stink,” I shot back with a sly smile.

“Are you kidding?” Kyle nudged me in the ribs. “Everyone knows a little sweat’s a chick magnet. Pheromones, animal instinct, yadda yadda.”

“I’m not so sure that’s how it works…”

“Hey, you want to clean up, be my guest. More babes for us.”

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