Touching story.
What Moms are all about: 
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The Ultimate Home-Court Advantage
On Mother’s Day, a thankful son remembers a very important fan. by Hugh O'Neill
The father-son bond gets lots of ink. That male web of angers and affections is the stuff of legends, from the Bible to Star Wars. But somehow Moms, the stalwarts who did the real work of raising us, get short shrift in the story department. While Dads play their mind games, which sometimes inspire and sometimes diminish their sons, Moms actually notice when their boys are blue. And yet somehow, the epics rarely feature mother and son. Granted, “Luke, I am your mother” just doesn’t work, but I do have a particular memory of my mother that is emblematic of her powerful influence. It doesn’t describe a maternal skill, but a common and precious Mom failure, for which millions of now fully grown boys are grateful.
A few years back, I was the smallest 14-year-old boy in America when a miracle occurred. I made the John F. Kennedy High freshman basketball team. Make no mistake. I wasn’t one of those compact, quick ball-handlers. I had the slow to go with the small. No, I made the team for one reason only—I was the most enthusiastic person to ever put on sneakers. Coach Farrell couldn’t bring himself to cut Jiminy Cricket. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know this. I thought I was a player.
Mom was my entourage. She ferried me from practice every day. She sewed my jerseys so that the lower half of my number wasn’t swallowed by my trunks. I remember peering around high-school parking lots—my hair wet in the cold—to find my mother standing by her Country Squire station wagon, waving “here I am.”
To be blunt, I was a loser on a championship team. I usually got less than a minute of garbage time at the end of blowouts. Still, I loved being part of the team. I loved the lay-up drills, the chatter. I loved tightening my laces. I loved the cheerleaders …
In the interest of sharing the workload, each cheerleader was assigned two players—one who scored often and another who was, let’s say, more careful about shot selection. A goddess named Ann was the designated cheerleader for our leading scorer and me. At our last game, I still longed to hear Ann bounce the name “O’Neill” off the gym walls, but I had had exactly zero baskets thus far. The closest I had come was a rebound that bounced off my head into the underside of the rim.
In the final minute of that last game, everything went according to form. I had played my bench jockey role to perfection. We had dispatched another opponent. The score stood at 63-31, when coach went to O’Neill down the stretch.
After committing my first turnover, I quietly camped out alone under our basket while my guys played four against five on defense. Just as coach shouted, “O’Neill, get back on D,” the ball came floating toward me out of the chaos. I grabbed it, took four or five steps without dribbling (no whistle) and shot. Just as I did, the opposing team’s No. 50, the largest freshman in the country, body-checked me into the wall under the basket.
My only shot of the year wasn’t one of those hackneyed, little caroms off the backboard into the hole. No. This was a lay-up for the ages. As I picked myself up, the ball reached its arched zenith, rested there for a minute, then started downward, a slow-motion orange globe, “Spalding” clearly legible on its spinless surface.
When it hit the rim, it seemed to stick and hang there, uncertain of whether it wanted to be dissected into a scoring average. But then, as if in surrender, the ball blooped softly through the net.
There was a moment of stunned silence.
Then, the gymnasium exploded.
A roaring standing ovation rocked the bleachers. God was in his heaven and I was Jerry West. I glanced over by the gym door and saw Mom, then about 40, bouncing on her toes, clapping like a cheerleader. And as I trotted back on defense, I looked over toward the cheerleaders and the dreamy Ann. When one of her colleagues nudged her as she zoned out on the end of the bench, she jumped up, tore off a cartwheel and yelled, “Dennis, Dennis, he’s our man, if he can’t do it, no one can.” Dennis was her boyfriend and our leading scorer. He was in her muscle memory. I was, well … not.
Then I suddenly understood the cruel truth behind the spectators’ explosion. These cheers weren’t plain-old basketball exultations. No, this was a first in the history of organized basketball—a standing ovation for a basket that made the score 65-31. The crowd wasn’t cheering an athlete, but the fact that an elf had scored. They were celebrating that the world had room for the preposterous. This was an ironic round of applause.
I got out of the locker room in record time. Mom waited in the parking lot. “O’Neill, O’Neill, he’s our man,” she yelled through the icy air, “if he can’t do it, no one can.” She, bless my mom, had taken the crowd at its word. Mom wasn’t well-versed in derision. In her eyes, I had earned my cheers. In her eyes, I was a good player.
I slammed my way into the car.
“What’s wrong, Hugh?” she said, still beaming, but now confused.
“I’m never playing basketball again,” I said, as though she had no right to be so naive. “They were making fun of me, Mom.”
Looking back, I regret telling her the truth. I should have let her live in a world where people didn’t mock her child with insincere cheers. But I was 14 and didn’t know much about kindness.
My mother and millions of women like her had plenty of boy-building skills. But more important than all the things she did was one thing she didn’t—see her son clearly. She actually didn’t see that I was slow and clumsy. Dad could be depended on to notice all your shortcomings. But not Mom. She was all for you. It is impossible to describe how much that blindness means to a boy.
My mother still sees me and her other kids through home-court eyes. Not long ago, our gang traded tales from the Camelot childhood she had concocted for us, when somebody referred to the fact that I was a minuscule teenager.
“Why does everybody say that?” Mom said. “You weren’t small.” My brothers and sisters laughed. I got up, walked over to Mom and stood—now a towering 5 feet 11—behind her, put my arms around her and said, as though talking to a patient whose medication needed adjustment, “Mom, I was a munchkin.”
She spanked me on the arm. My brothers and sisters laughed, secure in the knowledge that they too could depend on her to be far less ruthless than the world. On behalf of every boy who ever needed a champion, to every mother who only saw the titan inside, Happy Mother’s Day
i just got back from taking my mom out today. i love my mom. 
