Reading · Aging Against My Will

I am about to say something you are not supposed to say in America:

Maybe the children have enough.

I arrived at this dangerous conclusion, as many great moral philosophers do, after being told I was not allowed to go out and play.

More specifically, after being told our senior basketball group could not use the basketball court for the next three months because the court had been given to a kids’ summer camp.

Our group plays several times a week. Most of us are in our sixties and seventies, with a few guys in their eighties, which makes every game a geriatric stress test Medicare cannot deny. Some people respond to aging by buying a recliner. Others by trying to box out a man with an artificial hip and a cardiologist on speed dial.

It is sometimes ridiculous, other times hilarious. And it is the highlight of my week.

We show up with more enthusiasm than cartilage. Playing ball is also, if I may briefly consult the official Old Guy guide to aging, exactly what we’re supposed to be doing. Stay active. Keep moving. See people. Hold on to your balance and mobility, and try not to become one of those guys who considers reaching for the remote to be upper-body exercise.

Not that we play because anyone told us to. This group has been around for decades, and we play because we love basketball. The aging guide just happens to agree with us. For a couple of hours, we are not patients, retirees, or orthopedic case studies. We are simply a bunch of guys playing basketball just competently enough to still believe we are playing basketball.

Don’t get the wrong idea: this is real basketball, just played in very slow motion. There are jump shots in which the jump is generally treated as optional, rebounds mostly grabbed by whoever happens to be closest, and a remarkable number of screens, once we discovered that standing around could be reclassified as strategy. There are also the usual foul calls of questionable legal standing. Most days, there’s a guy who has shot nothing but air balls insisting they were all passes to someone underneath the basket.

And every now and then, there is a moment when someone’s brain briefly remembers what his body used to be able to do, just before the rest of him files an objection and he crumples to the court. On a good day, he gets right up and continues playing.

Then summer arrives, and the court becomes off-limits to us because it’s given to the kids.

Kids’ camp, summer programs, youth activities, seasonal enrichment. Whatever the glossy brochure calls it, the result is the same: the Old Guys are out, the children are in, and nobody involved in the decision appears to have suffered even a momentary flicker of doubt.

Because children come first.

That is the rule nobody has to defend because nobody is supposed to question it.

And usually, I suppose, children being put first sounds noble. Who wants to argue with that? Only a monster. Or an Old Guy holding a gym bag and a grudge. In this case, me.

So let me be clear before the juice-box lobby turns this into an anti-child manifesto: I am not against children being protected, fed, housed, educated, rescued from wells, or prevented from licking electrical outlets. Let the record show I remain broadly pro-child-survival.

None of which changes the decision: the children get the court. Not because anyone stopped to consider what was actually at stake for each group: twenty-five older men trying to keep their bodies moving versus another horde of children being delivered to one more supervised enrichment opportunity. And certainly not because anyone asked whether there might be room for both.

It’s simple: the children get the court because the children get the court.

Once the campers are let loose on the court, they do what children do. Run around, shriek, drop things, lose water bottles, accuse one another of cheating at games with no visible rules, and spontaneously combust into tears for reasons no adult can reconstruct.

But can’t they do all this somewhere else?

Mostly, the basketball court has been converted into an air-conditioned holding pen. Sometimes they are moved from place to place in snaking little lines behind a teenage camp counselor doing her best Pied Piper impression, each child carrying a tiny backpack filled with stuff they will leave behind, and an AirTag their mother checks every seven minutes.

A basketball court is taken away from people playing basketball so children can perform the ancient summer-camp ritual of being somewhere other than home.

I know how this sounds—like an Old Guy whining because the children took his toy. Which is partly true, except the toy in question is cardiovascular health, social connection, balance, mobility, competitive delusion, and the last remaining proof that our bodies have not been fully left in the trash heap.

And all of that is what gets dismissed whenever someone says, “It’s just for the summer.”

For kids, this is one summer among many still to come, another supervised block of childhood arranged by adults who call babysitting “enrichment” so they can feel they are expanding the child’s horizons rather than handing him to someone else for eight hours while they get on with their day.

For us, the calendar is less forgiving.

At our age, a few months is not nothing, and September is not guaranteed. When you are young, September is just another month. For us, returning to play ball in September is a prediction wrapped in hope and held together with crossed fingers.

A summer off for an Old Guy can become a permanent retirement without anyone holding a ceremony. One injury, one diagnosis, one warning from a doctor that “you really shouldn’t be playing basketball at your age,” and suddenly the best couple of hours of your week move from the shrinking list of things you still do to the growing list of things you used to do.

A ten-year-old has more summers than he knows what to do with. That is practically the definition of being ten. For some of the guys in our group, this may be the last summer they are still able to play basketball. Not the last one they want—the last one they get. Nobody knows which guys, which is exactly why nobody says it out loud.

The kids have their whole lives in front of them. We have whatever is left of ours.

The same thing happens at the pool. The lap lanes disappear, and in their place is Camp Shrieking Otter. The pool is the same pecking order, only wetter.

You can see the whole hierarchy in the program brochure. Children get robotics camp, Mandarin immersion, elite soccer development, theater intensive, coding academy, leadership lab, creative movement, nature explorers, junior entrepreneurship, and something called “Future Innovators,” which I assume is Legos with venture-capital backing.

Older adults get Chair Yoga, Beginner Ceramics, and Coffee with a Cop who tells us how to avoid being scammed.

That is the whole worldview in pamphlet form. Children are offered programs designed to expand their lives; older people are offered help keeping what remains of theirs from getting any smaller. Their programs point toward possibility; ours toward slowing the rate at which we become a problem.

The justification is four words long: It’s for the kids.

Which sounds like a reason, but is really a veto. You are no longer debating the use of a basketball court; you are arguing against children, and good luck with that, Satan.

Somewhere, a decision got made, with nary a word of discussion or dissent, that the basketball court doesn’t go to the men actually using it to play ball, but to the camp, where the hoops are largely decorative and the walls do most of the work.

We were doing the thing everyone tells older people to do. Then summer arrived, and the same institutions that speak fluent wellness decided they needed the space for children who are not even playing basketball.

Nobody says it out loud, because it would sound too ugly. But the message comes through clearly: good for you for staying active.

Now please go away.

I am not saying we should get the court whenever we want it simply because we are old and many of us are running on replacement valves and gaskets.

I am asking for something more basic and apparently more radical: that someone stop and ask whether giving the court to the kids justifies taking it away from us.

Maybe they should. Maybe the camp genuinely needs that exact room at that exact time. Fine. But say it out loud and make the case. Admit there is a tradeoff. Do not pretend the only thing being displaced is a group of Old Guys killing time until lunch.

We are not killing time. We are fighting for it, one ugly jump shot at a time.

*****

Your turn: Been put out to pasture lately? What are you still fighting to keep doing?

No Court for Old Men

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