"Team game... do you know team game?!?"

I went to Saitama this past Saturday evening to play basketball with my co-worker's team. To my pleasure, they didn't mess around in the traditional 1 hour team synchronized warm ups consisting of a variety of stretches and lay up drills. A quick shoot around only lasted about 10 minutes then they quickly picked teams and started the full court game.

Their playing style was the same as last time, all run and gun and not much defense. Since this was my second stint playing with these people, I wanted to make more of an impact and play aggressively, like I usually do in the States. As I was the visitor, I did lots of passing even though I was open during my first several possessions. However, most of the passes went in vain as the recipient would pass to another teammate who was double teamed or they ended up throwing it away out of bounds. I didn't mind too much, and continued playing hard especially on defense. I stole the ball a couple of times and started the fast break and noticed that the leader of the team kept shouting to me to pass the ball up court, which I did but did not need vocal instructions to do it. The late 30 year old leader who still dresses like a member of Johnny's Entertainment with a Yankee (Japanese wanna-be gangster) attitude, was on my case the whole night. The guy had an arrogance about him that I could not stand. He on Japanese standards, was a ball hog. He would shoot the ball when he was double teamed and would take ill advised three point shots. He even tried to make passes a bit more fancy which caused him to completely miss the open player. During the second half, our team was losing, and I decided to kick it up a notch. I was going to start taking over the offense. I took the ball up court and tried to set up some sort of plays. However, no one on my team was cutting to the basket and they were all just watching me play. I decided that I would start shooting more if I was open, but at the same time, I made a conscious effort not to shoot more times than the leader. Well, I did that and what comes as a result of that? The leader, comes up to me with a pissed off face and a voice that just sparks an altercation and barks "Team game... do you know team game?!?" This was the first time he ever spoke to me in an English sentence. I was quickly enraged with fire. There were about 6 players on both sides of the court who had a shoot first mentality on the court, and he was the biggest one, yet he calls ME out on it. However, I knew I was in HIS territory playing with HIS team. So I swallowed my animosity towards him and answered back "Yeah, I know team game". That shattered my motivation to play any longer as I found myself passing the ball just to anybody as long as the ball was not in my hands where I would receive more criticism.

I quickly took myself out of the game in disgust to what just happened and observed the rest of the night on the sideline. While watching the last hour, I became more frustrated seeing the leader shoot with no hesitation, and him laughing and comforting other team members that shot the ball recklessly even though they had a few open players. I found myself for the first time questioning whether my deep frustration and newly found hatred for the guy was caused because I was a foreigner and not part of the original team. Maybe I was actually being a selfish player, or the guy was just a prick.

Later that night, I was told that a possible reason might be because that the players just wanted to have fun and that they played just to exercise. I could understand that, but my understanding of "Sport" is not only to play and have fun, which I find is the most important, but the best thing about sport is the competitiveness aspect to allow a player to dig deep inside oneself to win. I saw that attribute on a number of players that night, which set the tone on how I played. After all that I finally came to the conclusion that I was never going to play there again.