A Gay Mom's Love Letter to Basketball
- Megan Neff
- Mar 18
- 4 min read
Updated: Jul 25
How a movie, a driveway, and a basketball taught me who I was before I could name it.
A Kid in the Driveway
I was a basketball kid. Not a great one…I want to be clear, so I don't oversell the origin story. But I was a genuine one. The kind who spent hours alone in the driveway, dribbling until the light disappeared.
I loved the squeak of high-tops on a gym floor. Allen Iverson. A clean pass. The way an easy layup felt like solving a complicated math problem. Whoopi Goldberg coaching the New York Knicks in Eddie. The NBA on NBC theme song. A perfect three, nothing but net…the only math that ever made sense to me.
The Feeling with No Name Yet
There’s a movie called Love & Basketball. You might know it. If you’re a millennial woman of a certain disposition, you almost certainly know it. It came out in 2000. I watched it forty-seven times before I turned eighteen. I told myself it was because I loved basketball. I wasn’t wrong. I just wasn’t telling myself the whole story.
For many millennial gays, it wasn't only about basketball. Or it was about the basketball and something else that didn't have a name yet... or had one, but we definitely weren't using it. Monica Wright, in a jersey, playing the game and loving someone with her whole furious heart. I watched as a kid who played basketball and felt things loudly but said nothing.
She wanted things out loud. And I did too.
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I played through elementary and middle school, on travel teams, and into the early years of high school, when it was still mostly fun, and the stakes were mostly imaginary.
Then the girls got serious.
There was a shift. The ball started arriving with intent. Someone would throw a chest pass, and you could feel it in your sternum a week later. Screens felt personal. This was no longer a casual exchange between friends. This wasn’t just something we did anymore. It was something we were or weren’t.
I wasn’t.
It wasn’t really about the game itself. Not for me. It was about having somewhere for all of it to go…
Whatever it was. You could take every big, unnamed thing and just run it into the pavement until dark. No explanation required. No labels needed. The driveway didn't ask questions.
That worked for a long time.
I'm a mom now. I have a wife and a kid, and I know exactly who I am, which is a thing I could not have told you at thirteen in that driveway. That version of me was working some stuff out and didn't know it. Watched a lot of Monica Wright. Felt a lot of things. Called it basketball.
The Driveway I Built for Someone Else
I put up a basketball hoop a year after my son was born. I bought a house with the most beautifully flat driveway I could afford.
He might not grow up out here the way I did, alone in the driveway, sorting through feelings he can’t name yet, finding rhythm before language. Maybe his thing won’t be a ball and a hoop. Maybe it’ll be a stage, a kitchen, a canvas, a field, a keyboard. Some place where the noise quiets and the body just knows what to do. Some place where you can be in it without having to explain it yet.
I’ll recognize it when I see it. Because I still remember what it felt like… the driveway, the ball, the dark coming in slowly, my mom’s voice calling me in for the night, and me calling back, “five more minutes!” …always five more minutes.
Still in the Driveway
Turns out I still need it. Not for the same reasons, or maybe exactly the same reasons, just with different things I can't name yet. Parenting does that. It digs up stuff you thought you'd already run into the pavement. Old questions wearing new clothes. The particular exhaustion of loving someone so much it reorganizes everything you thought you knew about yourself.
The driveway still doesn't ask questions. The ball still doesn't care. You just go out there after bedtime, and you work through it the only way that ever made sense. Movement. Repetition. Routine. Some things you don't grow out of.
The Prodigal Fan
Here's the thing about loving a sport as a kid, and leaving it: you never lose the muscle memory of caring. The rules are still in there. The instincts stay. You just stop showing up. The feelings stay in your body like an old address you remember by heart, even though you haven't lived there in years.
I'm not a stranger to this game. I'm a prodigal fan, and every March I come home. Three weeks of unrelenting energy that turns otherwise reasonable people into believers in momentum and destiny. Like running into an ex at a party. Familiar, electric. You suddenly remember why you liked them before the thing that made you leave.
I am one of those people.
And when March ends, I won’t disappear entirely. I’ll go back to where I've always gone.
The driveway. Missing free throws until dark.
Ball me.
JOIN GAY MOMS CLUB
Gay Moms Club is a welcoming online community for LGBTQ+ moms who want real connection, honest conversations, and friendships that fit into real life.
You shouldn’t have to explain your family before you can make a friend.
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