Imaginary Defender
Life is full of challenges, but some are all in our heads.
Practice, practice, practice. That is the key to succeeding in sports. I play basketball every Thursday morning with people from my work. I would defend Brian (name changed), one of the best players. He had a certain pump fake that would trick me every time, and he would score on it. I vowed to learn the move. It involved pivoting left and pump faking, then spinning away from the airborne defender to shoot it on the other side. There is a basketball hoop in my complex, so I spent hours working on that same move that he would do. Practicing alone with my imaginary defender, I would see him jumping in the air as I spun the other way to make the shot just as I had done many times in the game situation as a real defender. Again and again, I got better and better, making the shot with more frequency and spinning with more speed.
All the practice climaxed one Thursday morning when I received a pass on the low post, the exact position that I wanted to be in to execute the move. Elation surged through me as I felt how natural it was. The hours of practice were about to pay off in this one play. Feeling just like Brian, I pivoted left, pump faked, and spun to my right. I knew I had the defender tricked. A visual on him was not necessary to know that he was flying through the air, swinging at nothing just as I had always done. Coming around from the spin, I raised up for the shot one hundred percent confident that I would make it, and out of nowhere my defender swatted me and raced down the court with the basketball.
Stunned and defeated, I had to think for a while about what had just happened. How did he swat me? I knew that he had jumped the other way. This was not a moment where I kicked myself afterwards saying “I knew I shouldn’t have shot that”, it was a “Where on earth did he come from?” kind of feeling. However, as I thought about it, I realized that I had not actually seen him jump on the pump fake. I just knew that he had because… why? Now I did not know.
Once the game was over, I walked over to him and said, “Hey good block. I totally thought I had you there. I’ve been practicing that move, but I guess my imaginary defender always does what I want him to, so I was not expecting that”. It then hit me how significant that statement was. “I guess my imaginary defender always does what I want him to.”
My defender then solidified my new idea by saying, “Oh, you would’ve had anyone else on that move, but I am old and lazy. When you first pivoted, I did not follow you, and I thought that you had me on the move. Although I was slow, you spun right back to me, and I was able to swat you.”
My new idea was that I had practiced that move so many times with my imaginary defender doing the same thing every time, that I had cemented in my brain that the defender would not do anything else. When I first pivoted and pump faked, my mind played a trick on me and put an image of the defender jumping through the air, so I spun back not realizing that my defender had not moved from his original position. It was a good move, but because of the nature of my defender (being old and lazy) it did not work.
This story did not become significant until I was floating in the lazy river with one of my best friends talking with her about her boyfriend. She was describing some of the typical relationship challenges that she has with him. I have never had a girlfriend before, so while she talked, I thought about what challenges I would have with my girlfriend. I could not think of any. Why not? I am not perfect, why wouldn’t there be problems with my relationship? I then thought back to when she first started dating him. He was her first boyfriend, and she was having a really hard time about it saying, “I just didn’t think it would be like this! It’s harder than it should be!”.
That cemented the object lesson for me. Both my friend and I had been practicing our dating lives with an “imaginary defender”. He or she had always been doing what we thought they would. When she finally got a boyfriend, he did not act how she had always imagined he would just as my defender had not defended as I thought he would. I was likely to run into the same problem when I got a girlfriend because I had never factored problems into my imagination of what dating would be like. However, now that I realize this object lesson, I hope to change the way I imagine her.
So why was she flustered with her boyfriend? She had imagined the relationship differently. Why was I stunned to get swatted in the basketball game? Because I had imagined my defender differently. Life will rarely behave as one imagines it. That is not a bad thing. The key is to not quit just because it is not how you thought it would be. My friend is still dating that boyfriend, and I am still trying that move in basketball games, now equipped with an additional imaginary situation that my defender could possibly not bite on the pump fake.
To conclude, let us work through problems that we did not think would be there. Let us apply practices to game situations, or real-life situations to learn what we never could have learned had we only practiced. Practice does not quite make perfect. Applying practice in games and learning from mistakes brings us closer to perfection. Let us not be afraid to confront hard situations so that we may learn from them. Above all, let us realize that when things aren’t going how we thought they would, let us consider if it is a legitimate problem, or if it was the result of how we conformed our then future to how we thought it should be.