My basketball skills, such as they were, may have peaked in 1978. Then in my mid-20s, I was a resident of Durham, North Carolina and spent numerous sweaty hours playing at an outdoor court in the black part of town. Sometimes, however, I found a game inside a gym. In this case, it was on the Duke University campus. During a typical 3-on-3 half-court contest, I took a shot near the key and came down on the defensive player’s foot. The pain in my left ankle was immediate and intense, and I had to drag myself off the court. I went to see a doctor the next day. He said that I had torn some ligaments, wrote a prescription for painkillers and told me where I might find a cheap pair of crutches on which to walk for the next month or so.
Shortly thereafter I was in Chapel Hill, less than ten miles from Durham. Home to the University of North Carolina, it is a beautiful, leafy college town. I parked my car and began walking down Franklin Street, the central thoroughfare in Chapel Hill. I had played hoops at UNC a few times in the summer of ’78, now that I think of it. Anyway, I saw a store selling some Tar Heels paraphernalia and decided to go in. Unfortunately, the store was on the second floor and there was just one way to get there—up about 25 stairs.
Discretion is occasionally the better part of valor, and this was one such time. Only later, however, did I realize it. I began going up the stairs. There were rails on both sides, but they did me no good since I had to grip my crutches with both hands. So I was laboring up the stairs on one foot and two crutches. It was a difficult balancing act in which I had to tilt forward ever so slightly; any kind of backward movement would be disastrous. As I got closer to my goal—the store—I realized that I was tiring. Each stair was tougher to mount than the last.
Then, with maybe three stairs to go, the unthinkable happened. I slowly tilted back and could do nothing to prevent myself from falling. I was unable to grab onto the rails because of the crutches under my arms. Down I went, gaining speed along the way. The crutches bounced off the stairs and walls. My ungainly descent only stopped when I fell out onto the sidewalk. I suppose I made an awful racket because two or three employees of the aforementioned UNC store came rushing to see what in the world was wrong. I will never forget them asking, “Are you all right?” “Are you OK?” “What happened?”
They picked up my crutches and helped me stand as I explained just how and why I had fallen down those stairs. I am sure that their concern was genuine, although—given the litigious nature of American society—they may have feared me filing some kind of personal injury lawsuit. When I indicated that I still wished to visit their store, they took me, one on each side, back up the stairs.
I must have picked up a few bruises during that long tumble but nothing too serious. And the injury to my left ankle was, surprisingly, not aggravated. I certainly had to have a memento of the event, so I bought a white T-shirt with “Carolina” in blue letters on the front. I wore that shirt for three years until it was so tattered I had to throw it out.
Falling down the stairs and onto the Franklin Street sidewalk was the second most embarrassing thing that has ever happened to me. Don't even ask about No. 1.
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