I have probably spent a larger percentage of my life trying to become adept at things I wasn’t born to do than anyone else I have met. The things that perhaps I was born to do came really easily and I derived no joy from them.
I spent at least ten years trying not to be the worst basketball player on the court. I would argue that I was better than a ton of people who had no desire to be on the court, but I was nevertheless almost always the worst on whatever court I was on. I was especially the worst player on the court the days I played with and against the first Asian-American NBA player, Rex Walters, at the “The Dellora A. and Lester J. Norris Aquatics Center.” I was there a lot while attending Northwestern University and after I graduated. I was there when it first opened in 1987 until 1989, when I was briefly banned from Chicago and exiled to San Francisco.
I think Rex was actually the first NBA player of any Asian descent, but I’m not positive.
Rex was very cocky (which you need to be to make the NBA) and would often seem to be saying after warm-up dunks, “I’m leading the Big Ten in scoring. Why doesn’t anyone here care?” At least once I said to him, “Umm… Rex, you do understand what college you play for don’t you?”
If he didn’t at the time, he eventually did because he pretty much immediately transferred to The University of Kansas, where they indeed had an almost infinitely greater passion for college basketball than his first stop.
I didn’t even know that he was Asian-American. Not in 1988 or in 1992, when I watched him play in a pickup game at Kezar Pavillion with high school senior Jason Kidd, Golden State Warrior Tim Hardaway (who tried to dunk and failed), and Brian Shaw. I was sort of brought up ethnically clueless in a lot of ways, which I think was a good thing, but the truth is he just didn’t look Asian to me at all, and it never once crossed my mind.
Still, I’ve read that he is very proud of his heritage, as he should be. Aside from not really gleaning how little his first college stop cared about sports he seemed like a great guy.
When the football team started to try winning they had to put up a sign saying, “The throwing of marshmallows is expressly prohibited,” and there was actually a valid reason for that sign being there!
There weren’t very many people at Kezar that day even though Kidd was drawing more fans to the arena in Oakland for his high school games than the Warriors were at the time. So I did consider reminding Rex that maybe I was part of the reason he had played in the NCAA National Championship game the previous year, but like many times in my life during that period, I lacked the courage to amiably do so.
I probably also considered lining up with the kids for Kidd’s autograph, but didn’t.
Basketball was cheap and I never really had or paid for legitimate coaching. I spent an insane amount of money trying to learn how to play guitar and/or even grasp an understanding of music. Even with many great and amazing, talented teachers, I failed completely.
I took both group and private lessons trying to learn to dance East Coast swing on the West Coast. Maybe for the better, I was so completely out of my league that I was able to move on when I left San Francisco, but I did try.
I failed at them all when I could have perhaps been dominating at things I had no passion for, but I don’t think I would change any of it.
That book came out in 1998. There was a big swing revival going on both in San Francisco where I lived and Los Angeles where I would soon move.
From 1990- to 1999, I lived in San Francisco and still could not sleep, which was a hassle because my job was making option markets on the San Francisco Stock Exchange, which rather absurdly and inconveniently for an insomniac, night person like myself took place from 5:30 A.M until 1:10 P.M.
In 1996, the movie “Swingers,” starring Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau came out.
Favreau plays a brokenhearted wannabe comedian (who somehow never said anything funny even when he was stealing great jokes by Steven Wright) who can’t get over his past love to the point of stalkerish lunacy until he is saved one night by his ability to swing dance.
Before I saw that movie, at that exact same time, although I said a lot of funny things, I was that exact same guy. I was always up all night and often wound up at a club called “Hi-Ball” at 473 Broadway, which was about halfway between my apartment and my office.
I already knew and loved all the music even though technically I knew it wasn’t really swing. It was more Louis Jordan rhythm and blues, which I preferred. They had great bands playing it every night and great dancers to watch, who dressed up like peacocks. I didn’t dress up, I didn’t drink, but I watched and enjoyed both the bands and the dancers. There were many beautiful girls and being able to dance seemed an incredibly effective way to meet them.
Even without that, the dancing had seemed cool to me ever since the very beginning of Malcolm’s story, and I wanted to learn how to do it for both reasons.
The Hi-Ball offered free lessons; other clubs offered free lessons; I even paid for lessons both private and group.
Sadly, never really an athlete, I had no rhythm much less “swing.” Even without that handicap, I soon learned the sad lesson of what I will call
The Brad Laidman: Laws of Swing Dancing.
The Brad Laidman Laws of Swing Dancing are these:
One: It takes a lot of practice to become a good swing dancer. For men, this usually needs to happen when they are young.
Two: Men will dance with any pretty woman whether she can dance or not because they have ulterior reasons to do so.
Three: Women who can swing dance well will predominantly only dance with men who can also dance well. They are usually there to dance and get better at dancing.
Four: Men who can’t swing dance well are usually not going to ever dance in a club until they somehow learn to do so through some other route.
So hilariously, I mostly just watched and admired the dancers, and when the band and or dancers took a break, I’d smoke outside and talk to the bouncer/doorman about movies he liked foreign films I had never seen.
At some point, I would go to my office and worry obsessively about whether it looked like I would lose large sums of money on the open at 6:30 A.M. I would watch futures that rarely moved for the rest of the night, and if they moved it didn’t really matter. Usually, but sadly not always, I did not lose a fortune at 6:30 A.M and often was home asleep by 8:00 A.M. This went on for at least four years, at which point I left my job and sought out different music in Los Angeles for a couple of years.
Once, a very pretty woman actually asked me to dance, and sadly I had to admit that I was so bad at it that even attempting to try no matter how much I would have, made it a bad option for her.
