The court behind the community centre has lights on a timer, and the timer does not negotiate. Nine o'clock, click, darkness. Everyone who plays there knows this, so the evening has a built-in structure: casual games until 8:30, and then the last twenty minutes, which are something else.
By 8:40 the families have gone home. What is left is a specific population: two or three people, usually alone, usually not talking, each running their own private drill. One ball bouncing sounds different than five. It echoes off the school wall like a clock.
I played on this court through high school and I play on it whenever I am back. The hoop has been replaced twice. The double rim is gone, which the fifteen-year-old version of me would consider the single greatest infrastructure improvement in city history.
A basketball court is one of the only public places where a grown man can be visibly, unapologetically practicing something. Everywhere else we are supposed to already be good.
That is the part I keep coming back to. The last-twenty-minutes crowd is not there for the game. They are there for the repetitions — the same move, again, again, slightly better, alone but in public. It is closer to prayer than to sport. You would never do this in an office. You would never rehearse a conversation forty times in a park. But a court licenses it.
Building a company has more in common with the 8:40 court than with anything in a business book. Mostly you are alone, running the same drill, missing in the dark, listening to your own bounce. Occasionally somebody on the next hoop nods at you. That nod carries you surprisingly far.
At nine the lights clicked off, as advertised. I shot three more in the dark. Made one. Heard it, didn't see it. Some of the best makes are like that.