KEREKES: Days gone by — the pickup games in my neighborhood

Published 4:38 pm Monday, December 7, 2020

If I were to mention the city Fargo, most would think of the excellent 1996 film by the Coen Brothers. I’m not sure how many people are aware that there’s a TV series by the same name that takes place in the same fictional universe as the movie.

Created by writer Noah Hawley and produced by the Coen Brothers, Fargo’s first season aired in 2014 and has also produced three subsequent seasons, being told in an anthology format, though characters from one season have popped up in other seasons depending on the story. The first and third seasons are set in 2006 and 2010, respectively, while the second season takes place in 1979. It’s most recent season, which finished airing last month after being delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic, is set in Kansas City during 1950 and features, among its large cast, the 10-year-old version of a prominent character from season two.

Mike Milligan is a hitman who works for Kansas City’s Italian mafia in the second season, and his character was such a hit with audiences (he’s my personal favorite in the series) and such a curiosity that Hawley chose to spend some of the fourth season explaining his background.

Spoiler warning for those who might want to avoid them: Milligan was born as Michael “Satchel” Cannon and ended up taking the last name of a man named Rabbi Milligan who acted as his guardian during the fourth season. The final scene of the season shows Milligan as an adult, played by actor Bokeem Woodbine, riding in the backseat of a car along what I interpret to be the same stretch of road he was forced to walk as a child to get back to his home after Rabbi Milligan died protecting him.

Backing out of my mother’s driveway following a recent visit, I recalled this scene and wondered what it was over which I would brood when driving down a familiar road, and almost immediately I thought of those countless afternoons as a child in that very neighborhood playing pickup with my friends. This was, after all, the house in which I lived from ages 8-22 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, such formative years for me. I’ve shared before I never played organized sports beyond the Little League level, so those pickup games were my only sports outlet outside of watching college or professional games on TV.

To this day I could drive around my mother’s neighborhood and identify not only the streets, but also the houses at which we played. Our sport of choice was whichever was in season, meaning football in the fall, basketball in the winter, baseball in the spring and summer. If hide and seek could be considered a sport, we sometimes did that neighborhood-wide, which was obviously a daunting task and why the seeker never found the rest of us before we reached base. 

Little moments, such as when a friend of mine hit a ball that broke another friend’s window during backyard baseball, or one of the rare times we were able to get every single kid we knew in the neighborhood together to play baseball — only for me to not be able to participate due to having either a stomach bug or the flu — still live stored away in my memories. As I was pulling out of the neighborhood that day, it was perhaps poetic I recalled something I had read, can’t remember where, a long time ago that went something like this: There was a gathering where we all played a sport together for the last time, and none of us knew it while it was happening.

Once you reach middle school, people with serious interest in sports start playing for their schools, and the competitiveness of local youth leagues only keeps growing. That turns to high school and travel/select athletics, and those of us who did neither begin participating in other extracurriculars or simply started developing our social lives. We outgrow the need for neighborhood pickup games.

I’ve sometimes thought about days from my childhood I would have liked to re-live, which would usually have me hypothetically re-living moments with the benefit of hindsight. As I kept driving, though, I thought about how nice it would be to re-live a summer day from my elementary school years, when all of us had nothing but time and would spend it grabbing a bunch of bats and a tennis ball (which didn’t require a glove to catch) and swinging for the fences every time we came to bat. 

Of course, that’s impossible. In the real world, all we can do is reminisce and appreciate that we got to experience something we took for granted at the time. Neighbor pickup games are by no means exclusively Southern, but I do find it curious I never gathered with neighborhood friends to play a sport the first eight years of my life, when I lived in New Jersey. It wasn’t until I moved to Alabama that I found a group of kids who enjoyed just getting together and throwing a football, shooting a basketball or hitting a baseball.

I hear people constantly lament that “kids these days” are too caught up in their phones and video games. I don’t really buy into that hype. We didn’t have smart phones when I was a child, but we certainly had a countless catalogue of video games that we played together, yet this never took away from us wanting to be outside. Maybe I’ll start panicking about electronics ruining our youth if I ever have children, but one thing I know for sure is I hope they get to experience what I did in that middle-sized Tuscaloosa neighborhood in the 1990s if I am fortunate enough to be a father one day.

In the meantime, I’ll keep looking back every now and then on a childhood that, thankfully, was far happier than the one of Fargo’s Mike Milligan. 

Drew Kerekes is the sports editor of The Meridian Star. He can be reached at dkerekes@themeridianstar.com.