I started shooting at the crate the winter my father left because I couldn't stand being in the apartment with the television on and my mother not watching it. I had one ball, a rubber Voit from the Woolworth's on River Street, and I would stand in the alley under the yellow bulb over the laundromat's back door and shoot until my hands cracked. I was terrible. I was twelve and small and I couldn't get the ball up ten feet half the time. And when I missed, which was nearly always, the ball went somewhere, and I had to go and get it, because nobody else was going to.
That was the whole origin of it. Nobody else was going to get the ball.
At first I chased. Then, after a few weeks, I started to notice that I was chasing the same misses to the same places. A shot that clipped the bowed left side went right, toward the dumpster, every time. A shot that rattled the low front lip popped straight back at me, as if the crate were handing it over. A shot that sailed over everything hit the wall, and then the question was which brick. I began to stand where the ball was going to go rather than run after it once it went. And then, because I am my mother's son and my mother can tell you how many minutes are left on every dryer in the Suds-O-Rama just by the sound of the drum, I began to count.
I kept a spiral notebook. I'm not proud of this, but I'm not ashamed either. I drew the crate from the front and from the side, and I drew the wall in a grid, and I made marks. Over four years I filled six notebooks. Petey Gaffney, who was good at math in the way some people are good at piano, found the third one once and looked at it for a long time and said, "Teddy, this is a vector field," and I said, "It's a crate," and he said, "Those aren't different things."
By the time I was sixteen I could hear a miss. The sound of the ball on the plastic told me most of it: a high flat tock off the back rail meant long and right, a buzzing rattle on the cracked corner