This is a fictional story dealing with love and consensual sexual activities between males. If you are not of legal age, reside in an area where viewing such material is illegal, or are offended by homosexuality and/or homosexual themes, leave this site now.
The author retains all rights to this story. No reproductions or links to other sites are allowed without the permission of the author.
Note: I owe a special thanks to Robb for doing the final proofreading and catching all those silly little errors that I missed.
LOVE ON THE COURT
CHAPTER 1
I grabbed the morning newspaper off the front porch and walked through the house back to the kitchen. I removed the sports section before handing the rest of the paper to my grandfather who had just poured cups of coffee for both of us. My eyes scanned the sports section for the article I knew should be there that morning. There it was! I started reading, but instead of feeling pride my reading brought forth a curse.
"Shit!"
"Joseph! Such language in the morning." My grandfather smiled across the table at me. "What's the matter? Did they spell your name wrong?"
"Worse."
I read the article again.
"ALBERTS COLLEGE SIGNS LOCAL PREP STARS Coach John Melton is facing a big job rebuilding his championship basketball team next year after the departure of five starting seniors from his squad. He started that task yesterday with announcements that two local prep stars have signed on to the team for next year. Joe Ronkowski the all-state ball handler from St. Stephen's and DeWitt Sadler the all-state ball handler from Stamper Academy accepted scholarships and signed letters of intent yesterday to play for the Alberts College Panthers next year."
Shit! DeWitt Sadler and I had been rivals in the City League since junior high ball. Every time our teams played one another, it was a rough game with Sadler and me going head to head the whole way. Now we were going to be on the same team competing for the same starting position. Damn! I'd figured a rich kid like him from a fancy prep school like Stamper Academy would get out of this city. He must have had offers from other colleges like I'd had, but I needed to stay in the city to take care of Grandpa. Why would he want to stay?
I pushed the paper across the table to my grandfather. He adjusted his bifocals and looked at the article. "So now you and that Sadler boy will be on the same team instead of trying to fight with one another on the court."
"He started it, Grandpa."
"You say. It always looked like both of you started it. Now you need to be a teammate."
"Grandpa, we'll be competing for the same position."
"So be better than him."
"I'll try, Grandpa. I'll try."
Okay, you need some background here. My name is Joseph Stanislaw James Ronkowski. I'm just plain Joe to everyone except my grandfather who calls me Joseph. It was just my grandpa and me. All the rest of the family was gone.
My grandfather, Witold Ronkowski, was born in Cracow, Poland. He was 19 years old when the German Army invaded his country in 1939. He joined the Polish resistence movement and managed to survive a war in which his family and most of his friends died. In 1945 with the Russian Army replacing the Germans as the occupying force in Poland, he and another partisan, Margareta Schokovska, made their way through the Russian lines to Austria and then to the United States where they married, learned English, got jobs, became American citizens, and had a child, Stanislaw Witold Ronkowski. Being good Polish Catholics they wanted more children, but something had gone wrong during the birth of my father, and Grandma couldn't have any more children.
My father grew up and became a cop in the city. One night at church he met Anna Bukowska, a recent immigrant from Poland. One year later, they were married. They settled into married life and tried to start a family, but a series of miscarriages convinced them they would never have children. It was a bit of a surprise for them when I came along.
I remember things about those early years before mom got sick. I remember the smell of her perfume as she read to me at night in her heavily accented English. I remember trips to the zoo, picnics in the park on summer weekends, and Sunday and holiday dinners after Mass at Grandpa's and Grandma's.
Cancer took my mother from us when I was ten. A year later dad was on routine patrol when he and his partner responded to a call. Some guy was beating his wife, and a neighbor called in a complaint. Dad and his partner arrived at the apartment, subdued the husband, and were leading him out to the patrol car when the wife came out the door with a gun and tried to shoot her husband. She missed. My dad took the bullet.
After that I lived with Grandpa and Grandma. They continued to send me to Catholic school at St. Stephen's halfway across the city. Each morning Grandpa would drive me to the school before going to his job as a city bus driver. I took the city buses back home in the afternoon. After he retired, I rode the bus both ways. I never made a lot of friends at school. If I wasn't at some sports practice, my grandparents wanted me to be home, and I didn't feel like I had a lot in common with the other kids at the school. Most of them came from wealthier families, and they let me know it. Fortunately, I was good at sports, especially basketball. I hit my growth spurt early, and stood six foot four inches tall at sixteen. Grandpa put up a backboard and net at the end of our driveway, and I practiced every day.
He encouraged me. "You practice good, Joseph. You play good, you get a scholarship to college. You finish college and be whatever you want to be. Go to college so you don't have to be a bus driver like me."
At the start of my senior year in high school, an aneurism took my grandmother. One minute she was fixing breakfast for us. The next minute she was gone.
I was devastated. I came home from the funeral, went into my room, and stayed there for a day crying and feeling guilty. Why guilty? Because I thought it was my fault she was dead. God was punishing me for being the way I was. Why couldn't I be "normal"? Why couldn't I control my feelings? Why was I turned on by guys instead of girls? Was I gay...a queer...a faggot? NO! I couldn't be! The priests said it was wrong. The priests said that God would punish all evildoers. I knew I was being punished for my thoughts. I'd caused Grandma's death!
Finally Grandpa came in to my room. With tears in his eyes, he told me to get on with life. "Joseph, all my life it seems like God has taken the people I love. He took my parents and sisters in Poland. He took your mother and father.
Now he's taken my Margareta. But think, Joseph. He gave us those same people to love. We just didn't have them as long as we wanted. Would your father want you to stop living because he died? Would your grandmother want you to stop living because she died? No! We have to honor them and live like they would want us to live."
He hugged me and added, "You need to practice your 'hoops', Joseph. Get that scholarship for your grandmother and your father."
I went out in the driveway and shot baskets until I was too exhausted to hold the ball or consider the guilt.
That year St. Stephen's won the City League championship. We were awesome! The two toughest games were the times we played against Stamper Academy, and I had to go up against that damn DeWitt Sadler. We won one of the games and they won the other...but only by two points in overtime.
The scholarship offers started coming in right after the season was over. I was relieved when an offer came from Alberts College in the city. I didn't want to go away and leave Grandpa alone because he was having trouble getting around due to arthritis. At Alberts, I'd be able to live at home and use the extra scholarship money for books and expenses instead of room and board.
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WITT'S PERSPECTIVE:
My dad folded the sports section of the newspaper and passed it across the table to me. "Here's the article. Not much of an announcement." He chuckled as he looked at me over the tops of his reading glasses.
I took the paper and scanned through the short article. My mother and sister came around and read the article over my shoulder.
Mom's slender caramel colored hand pointed out a few words in the article. "Look, it says that Ronkowski fella from St. Stephen's is going to be on the team also."
"Yeah." I thought of Joe Ronkowski, my opposite number on his team. Great player and ball handler. Dynamite shot from the outside, and the hardest person I'd ever had to guard on the court. In my opinion, he was also the best looking. We were evenly matched as far as height and weight, both of us came in at six foot four inches and around 200 pounds. I thought of his black hair, pale blue eyes that showed the intensity of his game, the straight thin nose, naturally red lips that never smiled, and strong chin. He was one of the whitest white boys I'd ever seen. His dark beard showed through the light skin of his face giving him the constant five o'clock shadow appearence. I'd noticed the abundant long black hairs in his armpits every time he went up for a shot. His strong thighs and calves, pale in color like his arms and face, had a moderate amount of black hair. In my book he was one sexy hunk.
Right. I'm gay, but there's no problem with that. I came out to my parents when I was fourteen and figured out why I was more interested in seeing the guys naked in the showers at school than in trying to find out what was hidden by the tight skirts and blouses that some of the girls wore to school. My parents and I always had a good relationship. Both are medical doctors. My Dad, Anderson DeWitt Sadler Sr., is an internist and my mom, Shelia Williams-Sadler, is a psychiatrist. They didn't even blink an eye when I told them. They just told me they loved me. Mom was concerned that I'd have a problem with the whole macho black man routine. She had several patients who were gay, and she said her black male patients seemed to have the hardest time accepting their sexuality.
My sister, Rhonda, wasn't too keen on the idea of having a gay brother for a while, but she soon came around. In fact, later one of our favorite things to do was to compare notes on which of the teachers and guys in the schools we thought were "hot" and why.
Because my folks made good money as doctors, we lived in one of the pricier neighborhoods in the city. Rhonda and I went to Stamper Academy, an expensive college prep school. There weren't a whole lot of other black kids at the school or in our neighborhood so most of our friends were white or asian. We've been called "oreos". You know, black on the outside but white on the inside. We never worried too much about that.
Rhonda was two years older than me and was a pre-med major at a posh private college upstate. I also wanted to go to medical school like my parents, but I wanted to play basketball in college too. Out of all the schools that had offered scholarships, Alberts College right in our city was the one with the best combination of basketball competition and reputation for getting kids into medical schools so that was the offer I accepted.
As my parents and sister turned away from the article in the paper and back to breakfast, my mind went back to Joe Ronkowski. What a stud! If we were going to be playing on the same team, I was going to have to watch myself. We'd been basketball rivals since ninth grade. Each time we played against each other, we were always right in the other's face. Sometimes it had been hard for me to concentrate on my game when the object of a lot of my jack off fantasies was touching me and brushing up against me. 'Hey,' I thought, 'I'll finally see what the guy has underneath his uniform!'
Mom and Dad helped me move into the dorm and then left me alone...thankfully. My new roommate's parents on the other hand stuck around forever before leaving. I think they were having separation anxiety.
My roommate was Robert Maxwell. He told me right off that he didn't want to be called 'Bob'. He was a lean guy about six feet tall who ran cross country for the College. We talked a lot that first night in the room together. I liked him a lot. He was going to major in chemistry. I was in biology. His dad was a physician from down state, and his mother taught elementary school.
Robert was cute enough, but I didn't find him sexually attractive. He had sandy brown hair, kind of greenish blue eyes, an up turned nose, and zero body fat combined with zero body hair except for the patch around the base of his cock that I glimpsed when he pulled on a fresh pair of boxers after coming back from the shower.
Robert and I hung around together the next day doing all those freshman things like getting lost on our way to advising, getting our schedules, buying books, getting our I.D. pictures, complaining about the food in the cafeteria, meeting the other guys on the floor in the dorm, and finally going to the freshman mixer that night.
Robert was bound and determined to loose his virginity as soon as possible. He spent the evening trying to hit on one girl after another. I spent the evening checking out the other freshman guys and looking for one guy in particular, but I never saw Joe Ronkowski.
The next day, Robert and I grabbed my Jeep Grand Cherokee Limited, a graduation present from my parents, and I showed him around the city a little. We went by my old school Stamper Academy, hit one of the malls close to campus, checked out some coffee shops, and ate at one of the little places near campus.
We got back to campus just in time to head off to our respective team meetings. Both of us were a little nervous about meeting all the guys on our teams for the first time. I was nervous for another reason; it would be my first time meeting Joe Ronkowski as a teammate.
I walked into the room for the meeting, nodded to a couple of the guys, and spotted Joe already in one of the chairs. I sat down in an empty chair next to him and stuck out my hand.
"Hi, Joe. I'm glad we're going to be playing together instead of against each other."
After a slight hesitation he briefly shook my hand but didn't say anything, and his pale blue eyes were icy cold. He turned back to the front of the room as the coach walked in. I felt my face grow hot in embarrassment and thought, 'Whoa, this dude carries a big attitude off the court too.'
(To be continued)