A Family
I’m the baby of the family — by a large margin.
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Janet is 40. Vinnie is 37. TJ is 34. Mike is 33. James is 29. And growing up, I wanted to be just like them.
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When I was eight years old, I asked my dad to buy me a soccer jersey — not Ronaldinho’s, not Thierry Henry’s, not Wayne Rooney’s. No, I wanted a Rockville Centre Nitro jersey. That was James’ travel team. And when my dad asked me what number I wanted on the back, I told him 23. That was James’ number.
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Two years later, when I made my own travel team, it came time to pick my own number. I wasn’t allowed to choose anything below 25, so I chose 31. Janet wore 13. I wanted to play like her.
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And two years after that, I started playing basketball.
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Mike decided I needed to learn how to shoot a proper jumpshot. So he took me out in the backyard one day and forced me to copy his jumper over and over and over again.
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Our hoop hung above our garage. I hit that garage more than I hit the rim. I went inside whining about how it was too hard, and then I copied his jumper every day after — or at least tried to. I was better at rebounding than shooting, to put it lightly.
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Even that skill, inadvertently, was the product of my siblings’ creation.
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About a year after trying to emulate that jumper, my mom woke me up for school. I showered, put on my St. Agnes uniform and went downstairs, only to see that the clock was 20 minutes ahead of my normal routine.
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My mom walked into the living room and told me to grab a basketball, put on my coat and come outside. I met my mom on the pavement, and she told me to shoot.
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As soon as the ball left my fingers, my mom was crouched down, backing me further and further away from the rim. I asked her what she was doing, and she told me she was sick of seeing me get outrebounded in rec league even though I was taller than all of my siblings.
Then she took the ball, and told me we weren’t going to school until I boxed her out like TJ used to.
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As for Vin, well, baseball was his sport. I have no shame in admitting I might have set a record for Little League strikeouts. But one day he walked in the door and asked me how I was. I told him I was good, end of sentence. Then came the sarcasm that I’ve gotten used to — “I’m doing good too, thanks for asking.”
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I was nine. I haven’t failed to ask someone how they’re doing since.
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I tell you all of this so that you can understand why my plan was never to end up in Ann Arbor.
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As I grew older, the admiration for my siblings materialized in different ways. As a junior in high school, it just so happened to manifest itself in my college application process.
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Vinnie and TJ had gone to Cornell, so I wanted to go there too. I told my guidance counselor I was applying there early decision. That wasn’t good enough for him, so he rattled off a list of colleges I should also plan on applying to.
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Eventually, he told me to consider Michigan.
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I was incredulous. Michigan was a “sports school,” I told him. Then he showed me the average SAT score of admitted students, and I realized how wrong I was.