My favorite sport to play is basketball.  I don't exactly fit the mold of a stereotypical basketball player (i.e. I'm short and white ... oops, was that racist?), but I still like to play.  The reason I like it is pretty simple:  It's pretty much the only sport you can play by yourself.  With baseball, you need someone to pitch to you.  With football, you need someone to catch your passes.  With soccer, you need someone to defend the goal.  With tennis, you need someone on the other side of the net.  Sure, there are ways around this, such as using a pitching machine or one of those tennis ball shooters, but it's not quite the same.  Basketball requires only one person.  Though you can't play 1-on-1 with only one person, you can do pretty much everything else. 

Basketball is therapeutic for me.  I like to play to relieve stress and unwind.  I also use it as a way to exercise.  I can only run and/or bike around my neighborhood so many times.  I need something different, and basketball is great for that.  So basically, basketball is a very selfish thing.  It's my thing.  My time.  It's all about me. 

The problem with this is that other people don't agree with me.  Almost every time I play basketball in a public place, people ask me if I want to join their game.  It's weird having to figure out a way to say no.  "No thanks" tends to work, but it causes an awkward moment:  A bunch of guys see me playing by myself, and they need another guy to even out the teams, so they invite me.  A "no thanks" doesn't make any sense to them.  Why wouldn't I want to play with them?  It's not like I don't know how to play.  It's not that I'm incapable of playing.  So there's usually an awkward pause as I turn back around and continue playing by myself.  Sometimes I'll give in just because they're persuasive.  "C'mon, just a few minutes."  That's usually a lie and I know it. 

But sometimes it's good to play with other people.  That's when I realize how incredibly basketball-socially-awkward I am.  It's similar to a person living in a locked cell for an extended period of time.  When they get out, they have some social problems because they're not used to interacting with other humans.  When I play basketball by myself all the time, it's difficult to join a game because I don't know how to interact and I'm not used to someone trying to take the ball from me.  So I usually just flip out and knife people.  Actually, I just lose every skill I had previously learned and I revert back to how I played when I was 8.  It's ugly. #sports