John Mulaney at UCB: Basketball and Hooks for Hands

uh I'm really excited about uh I'll also talk about the

basketball

game. I'm really excited about this and I'm a little high on dayquil, so if I'm rambling, please forgive me, but it's funny at the time this. It came up now because we just got over March Madness, which I hate, because I'm always like tied to a pool, you know, and I don't understand what's going on, it's like those big bottles of water that you're supposed to give to the homeless. like I don't know where the money goes but I want to look cool so I put some on and then people hand me this bracket and I'm supposed to know what that means that's basically when I like the ncaa thing .

It happens that people basically say: hey, do you want to be confused for a month? And I'm like, yeah, can I pretend to be a man? That sounds good with that Gonzaga. It's a strange name. I will choose them. I have become one of. Those people hate sports and I have become one. I wasn't always and I don't like that, but I have a problem with sports because it's supposed to be a leisure activity, but now there are post-game shows and a lot of money. bureaucracy and it's like someone took something you're supposed to use to blow off some steam and said hey, let's add some steam, but I didn't always like it.

I liked sports when I was younger. I loved

basketball

when I was very little, I grew up in Chicago, late 80's early 90's, basketball was a big thing back then and I loved it and then I was terrible at it and living in Chicago back then and being bad at basketball it would be like living in baltimore now and being bad with heroin like I was but often I have to understand it build I started playing when I was nine years old build until I was nine years old I was a big Chicago Bulls fan my dad uh I would get tickets A We often went to the games, my brother, my dad and I would sit on the first balcony and next to these three guys that we called fat, fat and skinny, one was fat and another was fat and the other.

They were skinny and they were exactly like the super fans, they all had mustaches and they drank and chain smoked during the game and every time we played the cleveland cavaliers they just chanted lamb beer sucks, lamb beer sucks the entire game. It was wonderful and we would go to the hot dog concession and there was a guy who worked at the concession at the stadium in Chicago and he had hooked

hands

, he had

hooks

for

hands

and my dad always used it to put life in perspective um. he didn't have uh when I say

hooks

he didn't have hooks like captain hook hooks that are sharp these were like two bent paper clips that he could use to grab things in this case hot dogs and we would walk over there and we would get our order, we would place the order and we would go and have them and then my dad would walk with us away from the dealership and it got to a point where we could time it like we were walking away and my brother would do three two one and my dad would say boy that makes you think, huh, You can bet he's got hook hands, you've got two proper hands, which bothered me because like that guy's whole life wasn't hook, you know, he had other things about him it wasn't like he woke up every morning it was like hooks instead of hands why sometimes he probably runs in a movie and made it look like we had a basketball hoop in my backyard one night and when I was really little I thought I knew how to play it I think I would just shoot it and bounce the ball on the wall and I would have fun with it and most of the time I would just take pictures of myself in front of the hoop holding the grass like that and my brother My brother and I have disposable cameras and we take pictures of ourselves holding the ball and then like I wanted look like a professional basketball player, I would go into the kitchen and wet the sides of my hair and try to sweat like an adult like I would pour a glass of water on my shirt to make it sweat like a v so it would look like I had been playing basketball , so there are all these photos of me when I was five and six years old. years standing there with a basketball sweating like an old divorced man and then when I was nine years old I went to Saint Clement Elementary School in Chicago and everyone played basketball and I had to play and I and I were excited to play because I thought it was going to be good and that's the problem.

It's like in my head I'm good at sports like my brain is good at sports. You know, my brain understands how a guy can dribble on a basketball court and then make a good layup, but. so my brain had to outsource the work to my weird female member and I ended up face down with a bloody leg and I walked in there for the first few practices and the people were good and I didn't know how they got good because I wasn't They're still not good, but suddenly they were good and I thought it was going to be good from the beginning, don't you understand I always had a big ego, even when I was a baby, I thought, oh, I'm very soft and I thought I was cool, you know, so I always thought very good on myself, so it was kind of like what's going on.

I'm not good at this and it developed to a point where I slowly realized that in fifth and sixth grade he was just like me. I'm a benchwarmer like I'm a benchwarmer, yeah, it's sad, I mean, I don't know if you can understand the humiliation of every Saturday morning putting on a pair of separable pants and never having a reason to take them off, so they' It's just pants, so I had to uh, I had to do other things, I mean, I still like it, I followed the game, I watched closely like I still remember all the plays, the 2-1-2 defense, the 2- defense 3, the movement of the offensive, the diamond press that was. when you press is when you play defense on the half court line, it's like that, yes, yes, and we have a game annually where we play against the girls and we have this little Japanese referee who worked in the English group at our school, no She is a best friend.

Girls, no, plastic girls, I got to seventh and eighth grade and this was like I remember even hearing my mom talk about it, she's like you know fifth and sixth graders, you know it's funny, but For the seventh and eighth grade we expect the kids to win and me. It was like holy shit, I got to seventh and eighth grade and the coaches were these two guys that I loved, Coach Kane, who was the head coach and then, uh, Mr. Tui, it wasn't because of coach, it was because of Mr. Tui, that he was an old man. ex-Marine and freelance journalist from Chicago who I think was just a drinking buddy of Coach Kings and then we started bringing him to practice and one day he said, "By the way, everyone knows the assistant coach here, Mr.

Two, we don't even know." . They were like hello Mr. Dewey and Mr. Tui, they smelled like cough syrup and it wasn't until I was in a rehab myself and this doctor said, and you know, a lot of alcoholics mask their drinking with coffee and I was like : Holy Lord Dewitt. and they were wonderful and me and ibk and I loved the team and I loved being a part of it and I took on outside responsibilities like

john

in addition to playing so I would keep track of the uniforms that were one of mine and so when I started seventh degree.

I like Michael Jordan. He wanted to be number 23. So I wore number 25 and then they told me in front of the whole team that I couldn't be number 23 because you were the worst player on the team. It was supposed to go to the best player on the team, but what I argued was why don't you give it to me? So they'll think I'm the best player on the team, but this doesn't really add up because it's not like you're saying oh hey, you know they're down 20 and they still haven't put their secret weapons on most of the time.

I mean, I never played in the games. Really, though I would play in practice. and what I do is if I make a mistake when I throw the air when I get fouled horribly, I would just like to act like a mental patient, you know, if I throw the air or something it would be Yeah, yeah, so they would be like, "Oh, "This guy's not bad at basketball, he's just playing like crazy, you have to keep an eye on him." I was also the scorer and this led to one of my favorite moments in basketball. Well, like I said, we were going to a Catholic school and then we would play other Catholic schools, those were the divisions we were in, however, as a kind of expand your horizons type program, we were going to play three Jewish schools each year, the first Jewish school.

I ever played, uh, we didn't meet Jewish kids at our elementary school, it was like it was diverse as far as blacks and Hispanics and stuff, but there were no Jewish people, so this was the first time I met Jewish people in my life. i was playing solomon schechter now let me say this i love julie my best friends are jewish i seriously love jews i'm a jewish studies student in college i love jews and i fetishize jewish women but and this is just about solomon schechter this It's the first jews we met and this is just about solomon schechter, they were thieves who shaved spots, so halfway through the second quarter my coach walks back and forth like you know, like in the coach's house, like addicts to the coke, you know, he's walking back and forth and he's looking. at school and he says wait a minute we have four more points on that and they say no you don't have four more points than that and he says malani get up in their face and tell them what's what so I take. my log book and I get up and he was really mad at him and I get up in this grown man's face this first Jewish man I ever met I'm going to say you're a liar you're cheating on us We went back up those points and they didn't and we lost by about four points, so there was some animosity towards that school and only that school and then the next practice my coach took us aside and said we're not going to play alone. and I checked the river again I wrote him a letter and I told him to stick it in and I would like to imagine that letter being just a single piece of paper that says like oh, like a gift from God or something like that when I was in In seventh grade, this guy He transferred to our school named Mikhail Lombropolis, that was his name and things didn't get better from there.

He joined the basketball team because, like almost all kids, they had to play basketball. Well, I was terrible at basketball. He was horrible. He was horrible, he was the worst basketball player I've ever seen in my life, when he threw an aerial ball I was going after him like literally, he was also color blind, he was color blind, I couldn't take geography classes because they would say what country is this here? in blue. and he didn't know anything, he didn't know what he was doing and since his mother was dropping him off at school riding his bike, we decided that she was a lesbian, so this guy had a lot of attacks against him, suddenly I was. off the hook, but like any kid who transfers with a weird name who's colorblind, his mom is a lesbian, he transferred very quickly and I was the worst player on the basketball team again and then seventh grade went to eighth grade and then to the seventh.

The graders joined our team we played with the 8th graders now the 7th graders join us and there were 7th graders playing in front of me now there was a boy who joined named billy who was worse than me and he was a little annoying and the coach called him tank, but he had an excuse for being bad, he had asthma, so it was like tank was the worst player on the team, but he has asthma, so mullany is the worst player, by the way , it was talked about now like, oh yeah, you're that comedian like people used to be oh yeah, you're horrible at basketball, you're the worst player on the basketball team, I hated most of all playing in front of my brother, my brother was two years older than me and was pretty good like him. he wasn't in the starting five, he got the sixth man award every year and he was respected, he was like a guy that liked him, he wasn't in the mafia, but he was friendly with the mafia, so the mafia respected him, but It was a basketball team and I hated playing in front of him or having him come to games and see me not playing, it was very mortifying and one time when I was in eighth grade my brother came to a game and he was sitting in the stands and The water ran out like the water bottles ran out and I knew they were going to tell me to go get more water in front of my older brother, so I saw the coach was like this and then he came down, he came like he was watching.

It's like a clock. People like to see it through to the end. They also put us at the end of the bench. What's that? So they were passing the water bottle down and not saying if it was just like giving it to him. He gives it to him, he gives it to him, he gives it to him and it gets to me and I absolutely like it in a movie. He had the water bottles. I look at my brother, he looks at me and then I go to fill the tank. These former students came back and put me into internships, put me back in.

I found this out like my coach's son and other kids who had already graduated would come back to practice and they would want to go to practice with me so they could refill me because I was very easy to refill, so that was like a hobby, by the way. , this is a tangent. I haven't really figured it out, but I would go to Northwest basketball camp during the summer and it was good.in basketball and I don't know, I was better, I wasn't good, I was better than terrible and I don't know what that was, I think maybe it would be like being out of people's eyes, I would feel a little more comfortable playing better. and then he would come back and be terrible again and in eighth grade, halfway through the season, my coach's son, Coach Kane, told them that he was a real hero to everyone, his son who sometimes came and trained with our team. uh he was murdered, he was getting out of a car and he was His car was stolen and he was killed and it was like a horrible tragedy throughout our neighborhood, even in the city, it was big news that this had happened and uh my parents were very good friends of the canes uh, they were people from the community and stuff and my mother went. was there and as she tells me the story, he had been this was the day after the shooting and he had been upset all day obviously but completely inconsolable and not talking and my mother came over to talk to him and she said, Jim, that It was his name Jim, is there anything we can do for you? and apparently, according to my mom, she said yeah, see if John can learn to do a jump shot, which is amazing and really touching, but that's how bad he was at basketball, no, it's good, it's a nice memory, but still, you know, he hadn't spoken, you know, and it was one sentence, so the first game back, the first game back, his first game back, training, we all had like black belts and stuff on our uniforms and it was a very sad game and we were very happy to have him back but I was still very excited so the team was kicking out the other team we were up like 20 or something and I should mention that the bench warmers were going to play in the last 30 seconds if we won it, it was like towards the end of the civil war, when it was like the union army was like crazy old men and kids who wish they had light. shooting and raping and like they weren't trained soldiers, you know what I mean, it was like Sherman's march was some kind of party that I always hated because part of my reasoning for what the people in the stands thought was that maybe Maybe they were thinking like, oh, maybe that kid is injured, so he can't play now when I come into the game, they're like, oh, John's not injured, John sucks, I got out of the game, his first game came back, the last 30 seconds, I had half a minute to not do anything wrong, I go out on the court and I take the ball and I don't know what it was arrogance I decided to try a shot, you know and they foul me immediately, they throw me to the ground and This referee runs to helps me up and says hey, hey, hey, don't worry son, we'll give you some free throws that won't be necessary if you're looking to make it up to me.

May I suggest a gift certificate? because I was about to shoot, it was a technical foul, so they cleared the court and said yeah, you're going out on your own, you really explore the space with how horrible you are at this game, so from the stands you could watch. I shoot free throws and you can watch like my team's bench watch me shoot princess, you know what I mean and at that moment they looked like a weird painting from the last supper, you know, it's just people like, oh, he's not going to shoot free throws, right? oh this is a really bad idea and my coach in the middle is like one.

I got to the foul line and threw to the first one, but not the second one because I don't know if you know this, but after you. airball the goal is no longer to make a basket, it's just to hit something to show the people in the stands that you have a general sense of the game, so I hit the back of the backboard a little bit and that was my last year of basketball and in the In the end, this was one, two, three, four full years of playing basketball. At the end of the four years, we had this big sports awards ceremony where all the teams got together and did it every May, and the woman who was in charge of everything. athletics got up to give a speech, a very important speech that I will never forget, she stood there and said: you know programs like men's basketball are very important because the alternative for young men could be to use drugs or alcohol, and that It was the first time I heard there was an alternative.