A moment that changed me: I played professional basketball, until I broke my eye socket – and came to my senses

I was chasing Johnny around a screen – a blocking position – on the left nail, a throwing point. Yao had set it. He was maybe my only friend on the team – from Ivory Coast, he had been adopted by Germans and raised in Munich, about an hour’s drive away. (One night, we caught the train into the city and he took me around.) Yao was guarded by a 6ft 9in centre, whose elbow caught me in the delicate patch of skull just under the eye socket.

It was like somebody had unplugged my cheek. For the rest of practice, I sat with my back against the wall, wondering how I had ended up here.

As a kid I used to play basketball in the back yard of my parents’ house in Austin, Texas, but it never occurred to me that I might one day turn pro. I sat on the bench for my high school team and then quit. At university, I used to play in the “captain’s practices” with the first team before the season started, but other than that I was just an English major. Then senior year came around and I had to figure out what to do next.

Most of my friends spent that year applying to graduate school or for jobs. At some point, I had the bright idea of playing basketball. My mother is German, that’s what gave me hope. There are quotas on foreign players on German teams, but the bar is lower for native Germans. So I worked on my jump-shot, went jogging, lifted weights and got my roommate to film me shooting hoops in an empty gym. I sent the video to various agents, and one of them landed me the try-out in Landshut, Germany. My real ambition, however, was just to put off adulthood for as long as possible.

The club paid me 1,800 deutschmarks a month and gave me a one-bedroom flat to live in. Plenty of money for a recent graduate working his first “proper” job