Footprints

Images like these make me downright mushy. They're a common sight at basketball courts all over the Philippines. The grassy area around the perimeter of a cement court becomes a graveyard for sneakers' soles. People use a pair until the rubber bottom peels off. Then it gets kicked to the side of the court and lingers there, partly as a memento of all the hard fouls and fast breaks it survived, and partly as a send-off into oblivion where the grass slowly grows over the remains. If you were a basketball shoe, isn't this how you'd want to live and die -- on the feet of someone who treasured you so much that he wore you until you literally fell to pieces, then finding eternal rest with front row seats to the game that was your raison d'être?

I try not to get carried away like this often. It's pretty likely my rhapsodic basketball musing is all fantasy. People wear their shoes until the point of near-disintegration because they're expensive. They leave them behind at the court because no one in their right mind goes around picking up old rubber soles (or taking pictures of them). But for an outsider, one who doesn't understand everything Filipino but who shares Filipinos' love for basketball, images like this -- the footprints, the homemade backboard nailed to a coconut tree, the dust cloud that follows every dribble on a dirt court -- are some of the most beautiful sights in the country.