The friendship on the bench is sturdier than medals

On the high school team Da Li and I were brothers in misfortune. Twelve players on the squad, and only the two of us were benchwarmers. Three years, and we barely played a real game.

The starters flew around the court. We sat. The coach told us to stay warm, to be ready to go in at any moment — and in three years I played eleven minutes and Da Li played eight. One year, in the city league semifinal, we were up by a wide margin and the coach finally put us both in to get some run. Those three minutes were the high point of each of our high school careers.

Most people assume the friendship of benchwarmers comes out of shared misery. Ours did not. Ours was built by watching.

Three years on the bench, we watched several hundred games. We watched how the starters played, how the coach adjusted, how a game got turned around or closed out in the last two minutes. We became the two people on the team who understood basketball best, because we played so little that we saw all of it. We fell into a habit: after every game we broke down the tape on the bench. Who wasted two possessions in the third quarter. Whose zone defence lost the corner. Our breakdowns were more detailed than the coach's. At first the starters thought we were just talking big. Later they would come over before a game and ask, "What's their inside game like tonight?" Because they knew we had done the work.

What was harder was the mentality. The worst part of being a benchwarmer is not sitting out. It is the grind of being ready at every moment and never being called. For three years we were each other's massage therapist. When I wanted to quit, he said, "Nothing we have practised is wasted." When his father was in hospital and he came apart, I sat with him in the gym every day while he shot. "When your hands are busy, your head has somewhere to land."

The last game of our final year was pure garbage time. Up by twenty, four minutes left, the coach waved his hand: "Bench, all of you." When Da Li and I stood up at the same moment, our classmates in the stand were chanting our names. In those four minutes I assisted his three-pointer, and he grabbed an offensive rebound and put it back. The only points of our high school careers, in the same game, and we set each other up for them.

When the ball went in, the starters came off the bench as if it had been a buzzer-beater. The captain told me afterwards, "We always knew. In practice you two gave us the worst time of anyone. All that hatred went into being our sparring partners."

What the bench teaches lasts longer than what the court does: how to stay ready inside wanting, how not to waste yourself in years when nobody is looking, and how to build the hardest alliance you will ever have with someone in the same position.

After graduation I became a PE teacher and Da Li went into the sports bureau and later coached grassroots basketball. When our teams meet, the players glare at each other and the two of us talk happily at courtside. A player asked, baffled, "Coach, that's the enemy." We said, in unison, "He's our—" and then each gestured for the other to finish. In the end we dug out the old evidence: two yellowing photographs, two skinny boys on a high school bench, sitting up straight, with light in their eyes.

Da Li wrote a line on the flyleaf of his coaching notebook. I have seen it, and I will copy it here to close. "Not everyone gets to play. But everyone who has sat on a bench knows this: being ready is meaningful in itself. And don't feel sorry for the benchwarmer beside you. Make a friend of him. He is what the heavens give to people who wait."