Geezerball played such a prominent role in writing Black and White Like You and Me. So I’m sure you’re wondering …. what’s going on with geezerball?
I’m happy to report that geezerball is alive and well and currently residing in Farmington Hills at the Dietz/Trott gymnasium. Please don’t call a geezer between noon and 2:00 on Saturdays. He will not answer.
The ranks of the geezers continue to grow as there is a healthy ebb and flow of players with fresh blood arriving each year. Unfortunately, some of the geezers occasionally must take some time off due to wear and tear of an older body, but thankfully, the injuries at geezerball have been minor and few. Heck, how can you get a twisted ankle when you can only jump high enough to get a credit card under your feet?
We used to have three doctors participating in our afternoon basketball, but now they rarely come. I don’t want to read too much into this, but now we have an ordained minister in our group – perhaps we are beyond healing and now may need the last rites?
For 35 years we never distinguished teams by color of shirts or by going shirts and skins, and certainly not by going blacks vs. whites. Truly, no one would want to be a skin with the middle/old age gut and flabby skin showing. The geezers were able to identify each other by just knowing who was on their team. Sometimes a geezer would get confused and pass the ball to a member of the other team. Realizing that this confusion was starting to be more prevalent, a younger geezer took it upon himself to order reversible jerseys so that confusion will now be eliminated. We are now styling in our geezerball shirts. Surprisingly, many past geezers joined the ranks as owners of these iconic jerseys. There certainly is pride in being a geezer, past or present.
The gender barrier for geezerball has yet to be broken although years ago Mary Carney, an eventual Hall of Famer at Wayne State University, and Pernille Dahlgaard, a former captain of the Michigan State basketball team, played with us but not on the geezerball afternoons. Perhaps when the gender bias is broken, we can throw away the geezerball jerseys and just go skins and shirts?
