Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 10:13:11 -0500
From: Jeff Allen <jeff_allen15@hotmail.com>
Subject: "Love on the Court" Chapter 1

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.

        #######################################

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)