A Family
I’m the baby of the family — by a large margin.
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.
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.
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.
And two years after that, I started playing basketball.
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.
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.
Even that skill, inadvertently, was the product of my siblings’ creation.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
I was nine. I haven’t failed to ask someone how they’re doing since.
I tell you all of this so that you can understand why my plan was never to end up in Ann Arbor.
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.
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.
Eventually, he told me to consider Michigan.
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.