When I was a little kid, there was only one thing I wanted to do more than be a professional basketball player—and that was be a professional basketball player on a team made up of nothing but my friends. It’s what I was doing every winter season anyway, and it was a lot of fun, so I figured, why not keep going with it? I would spend hours in the driveway every day after school putting up jumpers, counting down an imaginary game clock and drawing up nonexistent plays that almost always ended with a championship-winning bucket. I didn’t know exactly how it was going to happen, but I could see the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. My friends and I were going to stick together, keep practicing and eventually travel the country and play basketball together for the rest of our lives. More
