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Go Yago! and the Cultures of Basketball Course Diary have moved

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 21:28:00 +0000

The Cultures of Basketball Course Diary has moved! Go here to read it! And if you are interested in my other musings on hoops and culture check out "Between the Lines" (the reincarnation of Go Yago!).

They Were Friends (Hoops Culture v 2.0, Day 6)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:48:00 +0000

I made one slight change in the reading schedule for Cultures of Basketball. Last semester students read the sections from FreeDarko Presents the Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History about the Celtics' dynasty and Bill Russell on the same day. This semester, I had them read about the Celtics' dynasty for Tuesday and then had them read the section on Bill Russell ("Pride of the Celtics: Bill Russell and the Price of Winning) together with the section on Wilt Chamberlain ("The Nuclear Option: Wilt Chamberlain, the Man Who Went Too Far") for Thursday.

I think both arrangements make good sense, but they make different kinds of sense. Last semester’s schedule recognized that Russ and the Celtics, while not identical to one another, were inseparable. It also set Wilt apart, alone, which in a sense is appropriate to the way he presented and the way he is treated in the book.

This semester’s arrangement treated the Celtics as a team phenomenon and kept the focus on Red Auerbach. Meanwhile, it emphasized the relationship and rivalry between Russ and Wilt. Because it is almost impossible to find any substantial story of either man that doesn’t include reference to the other and to the way in which they – depending on the sophistication of the source material – either really were or were perceived to be polar opposites of one another, the arrangement I chose also provided a valuable opportunity to think with students about binary thinking – its inevitability, its value, its limitations, and alternatives to it.

Educational philosopher and innovator Kieran Egan, writes in The Educated Mind of the role of binary thinking in the child development and so in early childhood education, “the educational point is not to teach binary concepts, nor to teach that the world is structured in binary terms, but always to lead toward mediation, elaboration, and conscious recognition of the initial structuring concepts.” (Egan, by the way, is a truly valuable thinker on matters of pedagogy, psychological development, and culture. Check out his group’s website for more information. I've written on him elsewhere.)

The fact that I’m teaching college students doesn’t render Egan’s point any less vital. Even if binary thinking is an especially striking feature of early childhood, it is also an inevitable consequence of using language and very obviously not a feature of our thinking that simply vanishes as we grow older. What can happen is that binary thinking can come to operate in a different cognitive environment. We acquire other cognitive tools that allow us to engage the world (and the other tools – such as binary thinking – that we use to grasp it) in different, more subtle and nuanced ways.

Sometimes, I find, students can best identify, deconstruct, and reflect on the purpose of dichotomous thinking when they first produce it themselves. In other words, if I first walk them through the construction of binary oppositions they seem to get a more concrete sense of such oppositions as constructed as well as a better feel for the emotional and intellectual purposes such oppositions might serve.

The students certainly cooperated, readily serving up the standards set of oppositional terms in response to my asking them two different questions after showing them extended video clips focusing on each player: 1) How would you describe Bill Russell? 2) How would you describe Wilt Chamberlain? In FreeDarko’s Undisputed Guide Bethlehem Shoals described the Russell/Wilt binaries as “staples of NBA discourse” and helpfully enumerates them. I’ll present them here as a table, much as I did on the chalkboard in class, along with one more pair – catalyst/finisher – that one student came up with.

Bill Russell	Wilt Chamberlain
Positive	Negative
Team	Individual
Unselfish	Selfish
Defense	Offense
Effort	Natural talent
Devotion to the game	Wavering interest
Results	Stats
Winner	Loser
Catalyst	Finisher

Once we had these two neat columns, we could begin to work on blurring the vertical line that separate Wilt and Russ and all the terms we had listed beneath their names. The table, as a visual means of organizing information, is obviously useful and obviously limited, just like the binary thinking that informs it. Showing this visually on the chalkboard allows us to begin change that thinking, initially by just making changes to the visual representation: for example, erase the vertical line. From there, we might do other things draw lines between terms to represent different kinds of connection, redistribute the whole array of terms and the two men’s names differently on the space of the chalkboard, or use circles and blocks to create different (possibly overlapping) groups of terms. Whatever the actual physical operation, the idea is 1) to connect binary thinking to the creation of a two column table; 2) to change the visual representation; 3) to make the connection between the changed visual representation and the kind of critical thought it expresses (including its complication or the original binary structure).

In all this, we were certainly aided by the treatment the two men receive in Shoals texts, which take an appropriate critical distance from the dichotomies and in fact side-step them neatly by looking at each player with an alternative set of lenses. But, for readers to whose minds that binary schema still tenaciously clings, Shoals ends the Wilt section with the moving words that Bill Russell spoke at Chamberlain’s funeral: “Today, I am unspeakably injured.”

Those words started the process of scrambling our neat table. So did hearing Russell in one of the video clips speaking of just how much winning someone who is losing game 7 of a finals series has already done. The list of the NBA’s all time leaders in win shares per 48 minutes (1.Jordan, 2.David Robinson, 3.Wilt Chamberlain . . . 24. Bill Russell) also helped. Observing first hand Russell’s ball handling and scoring abilities confused things further.

At this point, given how obviously inadequate the binary schema is for actually understanding the two individuals as players or human beings, the question arises of why we reproduce it and cling to it and what, if anything, it is good for? A basketball game results in an outcome in which one team scores more points than another. According to the rules of the game the team that scores more points is the winner. The rules don’t tell us what to call the team that has scored fewer points. But everything in athletic culture tells us to call them the losers. And so it can seem natural, certainly understandable and legitimate, to view a basketball contest through the lens of winning and losing.

It’s a bit harder to understand how winner and loser become tags for individual players in a team sport, how individual players get assigned those tags exclusively on the basis of the number of championship teams of which the individual was a part. And from there much harder to understand how a series of subjective, all-or-nothing moral judgments (such as of an individual’s selfishness or unselfishness) get adduced after the fact as though they were before-the-fact causes of the winner-ness or loser-ness of the individual.

I want the students in my class to scrutinize that kind of thinking, not only to understand basketball history in a more nuanced and complete fashion, and not only to become better thinkers, but also because the kind of thinking that reduces the complexity of Russ and Wilt to a two-column table of mutually exclusive, dichotomous traits can also contribute to similar reductions with respect to human beings and their interrelationships in other spheres (e.g. “with us” vs. “with the terrorists”, “good” vs. “evil”, “gay” vs. “straight,” “man” vs. “woman,” “native” vs. “foreign,” “black” vs. “white.”).

Binary structuring helps us get an initial grasp on a complex situation: e.g. Q. “What happened in the game last night?" A. “The Celtics won (or the Lakers lost)”. That’s a good start and it’s easy to imagine the conversation continuing in a way that complicates that initial binary rendering of the complexity of the game. By the end of such a conversation, the fact of who won or who lost may not even be the most important fact. For some, the most interesting part of sports and its discourse is not who won or lost, but everything else (which may include how someone won or lost).

But in the case of Russell and Chamberlain, we see a discourse that not only remains arrested in the initial binary assessment, but actually further retrenches itself in such assessment by adding a further series of binary terms to the initial set as if they were causally related. E.g. Q: “What happened in the game last night?” A: “The Celtics won because Russ was unselfish, team oriented, defensive minded, absolutely devoted to winning, and a tirelessly hard worker (or The Lakers lost because Wilt was selfish, individually oriented, offensive minded, didn’t care about winning, and was lazy.)”

To understand why this thinking might be so tenacious we need to recognize that sports serves a vicarious function for many fans and commentators. Sport may be the cultural site in which any number of range of feelings too uncomfortable to acknowledge frankly can run free and be aired, authorized by the martial drama of the athletic contest to run rampant over our rational cognitive faculties.

Thus, as Shoals explains, deep and powerful anxieties about annihilation raised by the invention and utilization of nuclear weapons might be channeled into (among other things) fears of Wilt Chamberlain annihilating the game of basketball. Metaphor, after all, doesn’t only serve useful cognitive functions in a learning environment. It also allows us to treat an excellent basketball player as though he were a nuclear weapon. Indeed, metaphor is at work when we speak of a basketball game as a battle, doubly so when we speak of it as a moral battle between good and evil.

In the case of Russell and Chamberlain, the binary discourse that made Russell the incarnation of good and Chamberlain of evil was doing some racial heavy lifting. It

allowed white fans – anxious in an era of rising agitation for civil rights among African-Americans – to sublimate guilt and fear through a fantasy of an epic contest between the bad black man and the good negro in which the latter emerges victorious. The black man in that fantasy is desire incarnate and uncontrolled, veering wildly toward violence and destruction.

Russ, the schema could say, had harnessed his individual desire in the interests of the team (and to the degree that he could not – as say in his political activism – he would not be accepted). Wilt, the schema could say, refused to do so. Indeed, aggressively asserted his individuality and appetite. But, Wilt lost and Bill won and in that way the final outcome of a sporting event is made to do the work of a final quod erat demonstratum in an illogical argument set within a hysterical hateful fantasy fueled by fear and guilt and abetted by willful ignorance.

There’s much to be lamented in this, much that is tragic in fact for our society. In class, mostly, we focused on how frustrating it must have been for both Russell and Chamberlain to find themselves continually cast into confining roles they’d never consented to play, forced time and again to check the full range – good and bad and indifferent – of their humanity at the door all because they were both large African-American men, both played basketball, both played center, both were superb players, and played against each other a whole lot. Oh, and Russell’s teams won more championships.

Whatever hold we legitimately gain on the complexity of their situation by seeing them through the dichotomous lens I cannot see it as worth the limiting damage that we thereby do to them, and to ourselves, our powers of thought, and our humanity.

Soylent Green is People! (Hoops Culture v 2.0, Day 5)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:33:00 +0000

I wrote a lot about metaphor and its many important functions in my last post. Tuesday’s class (on the Celtics’ teams of the late 50s and 60s) provided our class with an opportunity to experience first hand the rich power of strong simple metaphors to provoke us to exercise our powers of creative thought and to complicate our received ideas about things. As usual, the point of departure was a chapter in FreeDarko Presents the Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History.

For those unfamiliar with the text (and if you are a fan of basketball and interested in cultural history, you really ought not remain unfamiliar with this wonderful book), it is divided into seven chapters (numbered “0” through “6”) and all but one of these chapters is further subdivided into anywhere from three to six sections. Each of the seven chapters is dedicated to a different period of professional basketball history. Thus, “Chapter Zero: Up from the Waters” takes on the period from 1891 to 1946, “Chapter One: A More Perfect Union” from 1947-1956, and so on, roughly by decades thereafter. So Chapter Two covers the period from 1957 to 1969. Entitled “They Walked This Earth”, the chapter includes six sections within it. For Tuesday’s class we read the first of these, called “Green and Black and Red All Over.”

1 Gods and Dinosaurs

Because we’d be working with this chapter for the next four class periods, I wanted to create a sense of the metaphorical backdrop for the work we’d be doing over the next two weeks. Like every chapter in the book, the title of this one is a metaphor: “They Walked This Earth”. So in order to evoke the backdrop, we began class with a short discussion of that metaphor. The question I posed was a simple one: “What does the metaphor ‘they walked this earth’ evoke for you as a reader?”

Like the students in last semester’s edition of Cultures of Basketball, they quickly struck the most productive metaphorical veins: gods and dinosaurs. This time, rather than dictate to them the importance of these metaphors, I let them run a bit, asking them to tell me what qualities they associated with gods, first, and then dinosaurs. They came up with a range of qualities. For gods: immortality, domination, superhuman powers, interaction with humans; for dinosaurs: domination, great size, evolutionarily superseded (i.e. extinct). And for both: subject to legend and myth. Of course, dinosaurs are also the subject of archaeology and natural history, but for most of us dinosaurs are the subjects of anthropomorphized narratives that entertained us as children.

So the metaphorical title “They Walked This Earth” encourages us to consider the ways in which the figures to be treated throughout the course of Chapter Two were like gods or dinosaurs. Some of these ways may pertain to the figures themselves. For example, the Celtics really did dominate professional basketball in that era, just as the dinosaurs dominated the earth during their era. Likewise, when we get to him, we might easily see that Wilt Chamberlain brought attributes of size, strength, athletic ability, and skill to the game that no other individual player had ever before exhibited and, in that sense, was to other players of his time as a god might be to human beings.

But already with the example of Wilt, we can see that one of the ways in which the figures of Chapter Two are like gods or dinosaurs is that, perhaps in part because they played prior to the living memory of many fans (and all of the students in the class) and in part because they played in a less media rich time, their qualities and exploits are subject to legendary or mythological recounting. Roughly 19,000 were in the building to witness first hand Kobe Bryant scoring 81 points against the Raptors a few years ago. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions more, saw it live on television. And probably millions more have since seen the game on video, at least clips of it. But only 4,124 saw Wilt score 100 in 1962. Period. Nobody saw it on television, live or otherwise, because there were no television cameras there. No video cameras either. There were two photographers at the game. One left in the first quarter and the other took just a handful of pictures. That’s it. Anything from the past that we cannot witness first hand can become the stuff of history. Anything from the past that we cannot witness first hand and that is surpassing in its greatness or horror becomes the stuff of legend and myth. This much, more and less, I covered in class and in my post on this last semester. From here, on though, class went in a very different direction.

2 Machines and Men

All this, remember, is just to set the backdrop for Chapter Two. It prepares us as readers, as it were, for what we are going to read when we turn the page. But for now, we’ve only read the title so far. When we turned the page, with these things in mind, we begin to read about the Celtics’ teams of the 50s and 60s. So rich with metaphorical potential are these teams, so richly realized is that potential in FreeDarko section on those teams, that it is easy to overlook the work that metaphor is doing.

As a means to draw attention to that work, I asked them first to simply state the facts as they had been able to glean them from the reading. The facts: 1) the Boston Celtics basketball club won 11 of the 13 NBA Championships awarded between 1957 and 1969, including a stretch of 8 consecutive championships from 1959-1967; 2) no other team has ever done this or, really, come close; 3) Arnold “Red” Auerbach was the general manager throughout the run and coach through the 1967 title year; 4) the teams were, throughout the run, racially integrated. Two additional facts already begin to shade into interpretation: 1) that Auerbach’s Celtics were the first NBA team to turn the specialization of basketball tasks into an organizing principle and 2) that Auerbach’s Celtics were the first team to conceive of the fast break as a central strategy employed to both offensive and defensive purpose.

And, really, that’s about it as far as facts go. The rest, for the most part, is interpretation; interpretation, metaphor, and storytelling. So once we’d enumerated those facts, we began to look at a few of the central metaphors organizing the chapter. The central metaphor of the chapter, in fact, is not given in words but rather through Jacob Weinstein’s striking two page print of a large green machine. Distributed evenly upon the machine, operating various buttons, levers, pulleys, and pedals are seven players (recognizable to those familiar with the Celtics of the period as Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, Bill Sharman, K.C. Jones, Sam Jones, John Havlicek, and Tommy Heinsohn). Each player is portrayed in a posture that evokes (sometimes only loosely) the basketball task for which they would be best known. On a bench in the lower right, smoking a lit cigar, sits the figure of Red Auerbach, watching with a smug smile as a parade of shiny gold trophies passes by him on a conveyer belt: the output of this green machine.

The Celtics were a machine for producing titles. That’s the metaphor. And so in class, as we did with dinosaurs and gods, we came up with some qualities of machines: impersonal, efficient, productive. Again, we might have come up with more (for example, greater than the sum of their parts), but this gave us a good start to a discussion about the ways in which the Celtics were like a machine and so, in that way, a handle on some of the distinctive features of that team. They were efficient, they were productive, and each individual part did connect to and complement the other individual parts. Putting it together with the metaphor of legends of gods and giant prehistoric beasts, we might characterize what we’ve constructed as something like “The Myth of the Green Machine.” So far so good. And what fan wouldn’t want their team to be an efficient machine for winning championships?

But in the text of the chapter also opens by casting at least a potential shadow over that thrilling vision. “Usually,” Bethlehem Shoals tells us, “when we confront this kind of sustained, bone-pulping dominance, there’s cause for uneasiness.” Perhaps the machine does more than make trophies. Perhaps it grinds up the very men that make it up, or that are fed into it (see, for example, the grisly wood-chipping scene in Fargo). Shoals goes on: “At some point along the path to perpetual victory, souls are sold, man becomes machine. This is the banner of the twentieth century.” Not only, in other words, does the super machine possibly feed off the bones of men, but perhaps it feeds off their very souls. All well and good to have your team efficiently churning out titles, but, we are encouraged to ask what is the price? If we pay for our titles with bones and souls, is that too high a cost? Ethical questions aside, can we, as fans, even root for a machine?

Fortunately, we are quickly reassured, the Celtics teams “never forfeited their humanity. They reveled in it in fact.” Bones and souls are metaphors for the human being. And so, in class, accordingly, we riffed a bit on the human: individuality, freedom of will, and personality. All of these, Shoals tells us, the Celtics maintained, even as they grew into the Great Green Machine. In a way, it might be fair to read the chapter as emphasizing and celebrating the idea that the Celtics were at once men and parts of an unstoppable machine. Or, from another point of view, it is a chapter about the harmonious mixing of metaphors: cogs and parts, wheels and engines, bones and souls – they may be fruitfully combined and how comforting and important a story that is on the heels of a century so often characterized by the unhappy collision between human beings and their machines.

The question, of course, is how the Celtics managed this. While this section of Chapter two offers a succinct, engaging and, so far as it intends to, factually accurate account of the process, it abstracts from this no generalizable formula, no blueprint. Instead, it concludes by recasting the entire enterprise as a undeniable but still mystifying “nonanswer” to a mythical query: “the spinxlike riddle of basketball: How do individual and team coexist in a way that makes the most of both? Auerbach’s intermingling of player and tema identity is perhaps his greatest insight. And at the same time, it’s a nonanswer. That might explain why, to this day, no team has managed to replicate either Red’s methods or the run of success they yielded.” Indeed it might, but it might not.

Here is where, as we combed the chapter for metaphors, we encountered another one. A metaphor, in fact, for Red’s method. It comes near the beginning of the chapter when we are told that “Auerbach put his players in chains so that they might really be free, limiting their roles so they might truly flourish.” Whoa! Auerbach didn’t literally put his players in chains, but what a productive metaphor! What other kinds of figures put human beings in chains, we wondered? Slave owners and prison wardens. Red’s not looking so benign now, not so much a figure to emulate. But, we continued, metaphorically there are other figures that restrict your freedom ostensibly for your own good. We came up with parents, teachers, clergy and – students now making up their own metaphors – engineers.

3 Chains Chains Chains

The metaphor of Red chaining his players for their own sake, so that they might flourish not only as a team but as individuals seems to me, for lack of a better word, an aggressive one in that it reintroduces the shadow of an unhappy collision of machine and man even in the paragraph that would have us reassured that the Celtics paid no such price for the assembly of the Great Green Machine. It can lead (and it led us, in our discussion) simultaneously 1) to problematize the legend of a magical, artful synthesis of individual and team identity on the Celtics 2) to complicate the simple opposition between individual and team and 3) to think more broadly not just about the Celtics but about the ways in which great teams become great and about the psychodynamics of the individuals composing those teams.

Maybe, Shoals, concluded, nobody has managed to replicate Red’s methods or the Celtics’ success because there is in fact no answer to the riddle of basketball, the tension between individual and team identities or aspirations. But if Red metaphorically chained his players so that they might be free it may also be the case that nobody has replicated the methods or success because our culture (at more than a half-century’s remove from the Celtics dynasty and in the wake of the civil rights movements at home and decolonization abroad) no longer accepts so readily the idea of chaining individuals for the sake of their greater freedom. Or maybe (or maybe also) because – at least where athletics is concerned – the greater number of options available to individual players makes it harder to put chains on them. There was no free agency when Red assembled those Celtics teams and not many options for would-be pro basketball players (especially African American ones) outside of whatever the Celtics offered them.

I'm reminded of a question Baruch Spinoza set out to address in his political philosophy: why do human beings cling to their slavery as dearly as if it were there freedom? Maybe the Celtics offer an answer. Or maybe Spinoza's question offers a rhetorical redescription of what the Celtics mystique was really all about.

Of course, my hypothesis of a cultural shift away from the idea that it might be good for one’s freedom to submit to chains need not only be seen as a positive thing. It is that, I believe. But if we stretch the metaphor a bit that perhaps we feel that it would be better if, as a culture, we were more able, at the very last, to constrain ourselves with a long view. A range of issues from the environment to finance to individual health to civil discourse might look different if we were more willing to constrain ourselves with an eye toward a greater good, both for the individual and the collective of which he or she is a part. We might see this not so much as submitting to another’s chains as voluntarily channeling our desires and our powers in a more focused direction. I certainly don't want to go on record as saying that self-discipline is an undesirable quality in human beings. But to go from self-discipline to submitting to the chains of another we traverse a broad gray area marked by such varied socio-psychological forms as social contracts, populism, fascism, ideology, and hegemony.

Like all things worthy of discussion in a humanities class, I don’t believe there is a single correct answer or position on the questions that these strong metaphors elicited in our class. How to reconcile individual desire, well-being, and identity with the desires, well-being and identities of the multiple groups and collectives in which we as individuals participate is a question, properly, for the ages. The responses to that question that we come up with, whether theoretical or practical, should always be scrutinized and revisited and, of course, adjusted when they are found wanting.

What I find particularly thrilling about the experience of this class, when it is at its best, is that the study of a moment in basketball history, including the study of literary writing about that moment, can lead us from the analysis of a Celtics fastbreak to a discussion of the psychological dynamics and the moral and political implications of different ways of thinking about the individual and the collective. And back.

Other things we mentioned but didn’t really get back to and so I leave them, as I do in class, for further discussion.

- If the Celtics were a machine, however efficient, there must have been some byproduct or waste. What was it?

- To what degree did Red’s methods work because, well, they worked? If the team is successful because its members subordinate their individual aspirations for the good of the team and individual team members are willing to subordinate their individual aspirations for the good of the team because it is successful, then…?

- How much of the Celtics success depended upon the continuity, stability, and viability of the rhetoric of franchise identity? Or, to put it in other terms, consider the Celtics’ model in the light of an era in which our professional sports teams play musical chairs with our cities (and our hearts), in which player mobility is so vastly enhanced, in which even college programs (at least in basketball) more and more often recruit players to play for only a single season. Given all that, could it ever happen again? Would we want it to if it could?

Carrying the Ball and Other Things (Hoops Culture v 2.0, Day 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 17:57:00 +0000

In many ways, last year’s course diary was a reading: a reading of texts, a reading of classroom dynamics, a reading of myself. If so, then this semester I’m rereading: literally rereading FreeDarko’s textbook, but also rereading the experience of the class and rereading myself in a new context. And as with any “text,” rereading “Cultures of Basketball” will sometimes yield fresh perspectives and insights and sometimes simply resurvey familiar ground. I’m not committed to a regular course diary. It will depend on whether the different context within which I’m doing this “rereading” allows me to say something I haven’t already said (also on how much time I actually have). That said, Day 2 felt fresh and different to me than Day 2 last semester. Things came up that didn't come last semester: about literary readings, plot structures, and metaphors, all, of course, wrapped up in the amazing story of the invention of basketball.

Last year on Day 2, after spending a fair bit of time in class making me feel calmer, we briefly discussed the work of origin stories, compared the “Down by Law” chapter in FreeDarko’s history to the James Naismith chapter “The Origin of Basketball”, and then launched somewhat spastically into a lively discussion of basketball as religion. I had imagined doing something more or less like that this time around, and until I reread the texts for the day and was struck by how, well, literary, they were.

Readers familiar with FreeDarko’s book will not be surprised by this impression. In fact, you may, rather, be surprised that the literary quality of the writing made an impression at all since it is so evident. But what I mean is that, as often happens when one rereads a literary text, I was far more tuned into the details of its literary operation, to the how it is producing the effect it is producing. Whereas last year I was content (ecstatic, in fact) to use the text’s religious references to have a general discussion about basketball, this year I was drawn more deeply into the rich, metaphorical fabric of the text. As for Naismith, last year I described Naismith’s narrative as a dry, logical monologue, a kind of desert of affect punctuated by the oasis of discovery. So I was very surprised as I began to read the chapter again this year to find myself in the presence of a riveting quest narrative comparable to The Odyssey, Lord of the Rings, His Dark Materials, Star Wars, or The Matrix.

Combined, I realized, I had two exemplary texts, perfect for teaching (at least some of) the basics of literary reading: plot, character, and style. And, I realized, that is what I wanted to teach, or to convey to the class: that it was not just a class about basketball, but a class about the cultures of basketball, the categories and stories through which we participate and consume the game and then, from there, go on to invent our own narratives of the games and, from there, to go on and exercise more agency in inventing the narratives of our lives. I loved my class last year, and I believe some of them, at least, to their credit, were able to extract that from the chaos that was my teaching. But this time around, I hope, more might get it and not despite but rather because of my teaching.

We started with Naismith. For those who haven’t read the book, when Chapter III (“The Origin of Basketball”) begins, we have already read of Naismith’s early childhood, his theological studies, his hearing the call of athletics and subsequent employment by the Springfield Y.M.C.A. We’ve heard, then (in Chapter II), in more detail, about the specific mission that Naismith with which Naismith is tasked: to devise an indoor game to occupy the attention of a particularly unruly class of students.

Chapter III opens thusly: “Two weeks had almost passed since I had taken over the troublesome class. The time was almost gone; in a day or two I would have to report to the faculty the success or failure of my attempts. So far the had all been failures, and it seemed to me that I had exhausted my resources. The prospect before me was, to say the least, discouraging.” And, just a bit further down: “I had nothing new to try and no idea of what I was going to do” … “I saw the end of all my ambitions and hopes.” “With weary footsteps,” Naismith tells us he “mounted the flight of narrow stairs” to his office. “I slumped down in my chair, my head in my hands and my elbows on the desk. I was a thoroughly disheartened and discouraged young instructor.”

How had I missed this gloom last year?! Like Frodo and Sam wandering in weary circles in the Emyn Muil, lost and hopelessly searching for the Dead Marshes; like Luke whining bitterly next to the swamp on Dagobah; like Neo, Trinity, and Tank facing certain doom while Morpheus is interrogated and sentinels swarm the Nebudchadnezzar; like these heroes, Naismith opens the chapter in the grip of despair, in his own private abyss. The setting may not be spectacular or fantastic, but Naismith is a questing hero stuck in an underworld, bereft of both resources and hope.

What follows in the chapter hews fairly closely to the components of the quest monomyth: Naismith summons his courage, begins tentatively to explore his options, identifies what turns out to be a passage or light in the darkness (there shall be no carrying the ball), and the proceeds down the uncertain, but smoother, path to his promised land (he deduces the remaining rules of the game). Upon his arrival, he is no longer the same James Naismith. Now, he is the inventor of a game, who has succeeded on his impossible quest. The final words of the chapter: “When the first game had ended, I felt that I could now go to Doctor Gulick and tell him that I had accomplished the two seemingly impossible tasks that he had assigned to me: namely to interest the class in physical exercise and to invent a new game.”

I wanted students first of all to be able to step back from the “information gathering” mode of reading and to see how writers structure their texts, to see that writers structure their texts into narratives and that as diverse as those narratives may be in terms of specific details they also tend to conform to certain basic types that are used time and again because of the way they affect readers.

And I wanted them to understand the quest narrative specifically not only because it’s the one that Naismith uses, but because it is one that is so commonly mobilized in athletic contexts. The fortunes of teams and of individual players, the arc of games, seasons, careers and dynasties are often narrated in terms drawn from quest narratives in which we are implicitly invited to identify with a heroic protagonist and to pull for him or her to succeed in their quest. Understanding this can help to empower the reader to engage the text not only for information, not only for pleasure, but critically as well. Who, you can ask, is being situated as the hero of this quest? Do I really want to identify with this hero and with his goals? What am I being sold along with the story of, say, Dirk Nowitzki’s quest for a championship ring?

Of course, going back to Naismith, he is not literally on a quest because he doesn’t actually go anywhere. He is on a mental quest, which means, in a sense that the quest narrative structure he uses (consciously or not) to plot his own tale is a metaphor. It’s an extended structural metaphor, but it’s a metaphor nonetheless, just as it is a metaphor when FreeDarko opens its tale of the history of pro basketball by saying “In 1891, basketball was born; it then took more than fifty years to mature.” “Born” and “mature” are terms used metaphorically because they are qualities of living things and basketball is not a living thing. But those qualities are being transferred or carried across (the word metaphor comes from the Greek to carry across and, by the way, I think there’s something nice about that etymology and the fact that Naismith’s eureka moment – the Greek meaning “I’ve got it!” – was the prohibition on carrying the ball) from one domain to another. So what’s a metaphor good for? Why use metaphors? The standard first response is that metaphors make the experience of reading more interesting. But why, what is more interesting? How is reading a metaphor more interesting?

In the first place, metaphors (which the philosopher and literary critic Paul Ricoeur called “deviant naming”) serve a cognitive function. Aristotle noted that “ordinary words convey only what we know already; it is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh.” We might cleverly deconstruct the opposition between “ordinary words” and “metaphor”, but there’s plenty to gain, especially for beginners, by accept the distinction. We can see then that with metaphors not only is new light shed on a familiar subject, but our intellectual faculties are engaged and we are forced to do the work of discovering (or constructing) new relationships and connections among previously unrelated things. To say “basketball was born” is, implicitly, to require a reader to investigate the question: “in what ways is the game of basketball like a living thing?”

There’s no single answer to that question. But in the course of investigating it (even very rapidly as we assimilate the metaphor unconsciously) we are discovering qualities of the game (and of living things) that we might not have considered previously. In his book on child development and education, noted educational philosopher Kieran Egan makes the metaphorical use of language and metaphorical thinking the cornerstone of the earliest stage of post-linguistic child development, which he calls “mythic understanding,” and emphasizes its key role in developing not only language competence but our ability to learn, even later in life.

The other reason I believe we find metaphor interesting derives from its emotional force. We might say, rationally, that basketball is not a living thing (and so could not literally be born or mature). But it’s probably also true for many of us that the game feels like a living thing, just as Naismith’s struggles to solve the problems set to him felt like a quest journey. In this sense, the cognitive work metaphor requires us to do enables us to understand something not only about the world outside of us (basketball and living things; or Naismith’s experience and arduous missions), but about the world inside of us, about ourselves, and also about the relationship between the two. Because in coming up with the ways in which basketball is like a living thing we are coming up with at least some of the reasons why we feel about it that it is a living thing.

Part of the fun of the kind of literary reading that we can do when we pay attention to even simple textual devices like narrative structures and metaphor is the way we are activated as it were, empowered to enter into a more active relationships with a text and its author. Rather than passively gathering information which we will then spit back as though we were recording devices (note the mixed metaphors in that sentence), we become cocreators, participating in a conversation with the author, even if, like Naismith, he is long dead. We elaborate upon the author's words, tell our own stories, experience new feelings, have new thoughts.

Naismith’s story, as students pointed out, structured as it is, denaturalizes the existence of basketball. It makes us see something that we take for granted as fresh and new and contingent (it might not have been at all, and it certainly might not have been the way that it was). Perhaps that makes us appreciate it more. Perhaps it provokes wonder. Perhaps, more broadly, it makes us appreciate human imagination and creativity.

As for FD’s chapter on Naismith, it runs through a metaphorical recapitulation of several thousand years of human history. In class, we identified a succession of five governing metaphors (in order of appearance): 1. The Mosaic metaphor; 2. The Lutheran metaphor; 3. The Enlightenment metaphor; 4. The Romantic metaphor; 5. The Constitutional metaphor. These metaphors allowed us to begin to discover and play with qualities of the game and its invention. It is mythic, awe-inspiring, transcendent and foundational (like Moses and the ten commandments); historical, concrete, corrective, and consequential (like Luther and his 95 theses). It is systematic, logical and pragmatic (like the 18th century scientist or engineer) and it is imaginative, fevered, and inspired (like the Romantic poet). Finally, it is constitutive and flexible, like the American constitution.

To explore how the invention of basketball is like all of these world historical icons and instances is to explore the tremendously rich cultural possibilities in the game and its history. And to explore that is also to explore the various emotional modalities of our fascination with the game. But reading in this way, I hope, not only shed light – as it did last year – on the many different ways we can and do feel and think about basketball. I hope also that it helped the students to recognize the force of their own creative powers as readers and storytellers.

It may be just fine to go back and forth in an argument about whether Kobe or Lebron is the better player. But, as I told the students, we are built to do so much more.

If Shaq Had Been Perfect

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 20:29:00 +0000

Much has been written in the wake of Shaquille O’Neal’s retirement from professional basketball this past week. Shaq retires as one of the most beloved and well-known basketball players of all time. He was, of course, also one of the most dominant, as any number of statistical measures attest. Among other things, Shaq was part of 4 NBA Championship teams, won 3 NBA Finals MVP, was named to the All-NBA First Team 14 times, and ended his career 5th on the NBA All-Time Career Scoring list. Shaq had a truly great career, deserving of respect and commemoration alongside those of the Hall of Fame centers he admired: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Russell, and Wilt Chamberlain.

I share in this general feeling of admiration for Shaq’s accomplishments, both on and off the court, and for the sense of humor and genuine humanity with which he carried himself in the brightest of spotlights for so many years. It’s this very humanity of Shaq, despite his larger than life physical stature, accomplishments, and persona, that struck me as I listened to his 22 minute press conference. In particular, I was struck by the fact that Shaq is “very very upset with himself” and has regrets for not living up to his potential.

These regrets surfaced at several different points during the press conference always in relation to his free throw shooting. Despite the tongue in cheek quality of some of the comments, it’s clear that Shaq believes he could have been a better free throw shooter and regrets not having put forward his best effort in this area. During the press conference, Shaq mentioned his poor free throw shooting several times in relation to his disappointment at not having reached 30,000 career points, not having surpassed Wilt Chamberlain (who is above Shaq on the list with 31,419, about 3,000 more than Shaq), and not having reached the 2nd spot on the list, just behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

I was touched by these regrets. I think too much about my own brief basketball career and what I could’ve done differently, what I would’ve done differently given what I know now. And beyond this, I think about my own life at large and how retrospect furnishes me with a critical understanding of past decisions that I’d now make differently if I had them to do over again. So I was moved by the scene of this giant of a man -- beloved by millions, with great accomplishments in his field behind him, retiring from his profession a success, and poised to enjoy still a long life with many opportunities in front of him – nonetheless emphasizing, with perhaps a self-protective touch of self-deprecating humor, his regrets, his failure to live up to his potential.

I am no statistical whiz, but Shaq’s moving “what if’s” concerning his free throw shooting woes led me to crunch some numbers. My question was simple, what if Shaq had been a better free throw shooter, all other things being equal? What if he had made half the shots he’d missed? But also, what if he shot free throws as well as the scorers ahead of him on the list Kareem, Karl Malone, and Michael Jordan (Shaq’s career free throw percentage is better than Wilt’s)? What if Shaq had just shot as well as the NBA average? What if he shot for his career as well as he did in his best free throw shooting season? What would percentage would it have taken him to surpass 30,000 points? To surpass those ahead of him on the all time points list? And, just for fun, what if Shaq were the best free throw shooter of all time?
What if?

Marker	FT %	FTM	Additional pts from FTs	Total Points	Career Scoring Rank
Shaq’s Actual Career	52.7	5935	0	28596	5
Shaq’s single season best	62.2	6999	1064	29660	5
Required for Shaq to reach 30,000 points	65.2	7339	1404	30000	5
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Career FT %	72.1	8113	2178	30774	5
Karl Malone’s Career FT %	74.2	8349	2414	31010	5
2011 NBA Average FT %	76.3	8585	2650	31246	5
If Shaq had made half the FT’s he missed	76.4	8593	2658	31254	5
Required for Shaq to pass Wilt Chamberlain for 4^th on All Time Scoring List	77.8	8759	2824	31420	4
Michael Jordan Career FT %	83.5	9395	3460	32056	4
Required for Shaq to pass Michael Jordan for 3^rd on All Time Scoring list	85.6	9632	3697	32293	3
If Shaq were the best FT shooter of all time	90.4	10172	4237	32832	3
If Shaq were perfect	100.0	11252	5317	33913	3
Required for Shaq to pass Karl Malone for 2^nd on All Time Scoring List	126.8	14268	8333	36929	2
Required for Shaq to pass Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for 1^st on All Time Scoring List	140.0	15727	9792	38388	1

I don’t want to just restate these findings in narrative form. But I’d like to share what’s most striking to me. Look first at the bottom of the table. Perhaps the most striking figure of all for me: If Shaq had been a perfect free throw shooter, hitting every one of his 11, 252 attempts, he would still only be third on the all time scoring list. In fact, he would still be over 3,000 points behind Karl Malone and 4,400 points behind Kareem. As the bottom two rows show, Shaq would have had to hit an implausible 127 % of his free throws to surpass Malone’s career scoring mark and an even more daunting 140 % of his free throws to have ended his career as the NBA’s all time leading scorer. That’s a tall order, even for Superman.

Toward the other end of the spectrum, I’m struck by how little an impact seemingly significant changes in his free throw percentage make to Shaq’s overall point totals and so to his standing on the all time scoring list and, in relation to that, to his assessment history is likely to make of his career. A 10 % spike in his career percentage (which would about match what he shot in his best season) would only net him an additional 1000 points or so and would still leave him short of the 30,000 mark. Shaq was right that if he’d made half of his misses, he’d have hit the 30,000 mark (and more), but he still would have been short of passing Wilt on the scoring list. Shaq would have had to improve his percentage by 25 % (which is to say by around half of what it was) just to pass Wilt Chamberlain by 1 point for 4th place on the list. Anything short of that, and Shaq stays in 5th place.

Shaq’s free throw shooting certainly always seemed a shame; a disappointment to his teams’ fans no doubt and a source of schadenfreude for fans of his opponents. To me, for whom free throw shooting was always the easiest part of the game, it seemed like an incomprehensible waste. After all, other big men have been good or at least decent free throw shooters. And judging from his retirement presser it seems to be something that bothers Shaq, at least to the degree that anything bothers him.

But looking at the numbers I wind up feeling a little differently about it. I feel like it doesn’t make much difference, that each free throw he missed wasn’t as consequential and significant as it seemed to me when he missed it. After all, if he’d shot a bit better it wouldn’t make much difference from the vantage point of all time scoring lists or how future fans might evaluate him. And, in order to really have achieved the sort of dominance that would set him completely apart even from the other all time greats, Shaq would have had to be perfect, or better.

And so perhaps there are lessons here for myself. First, my mistakes may not seem so consequential down the road, from a more expansive point of view, as they did when I was closer to having just made them. Second, it would have been impossible to really fulfill my own expectations because this would have required perfection or beyond. And third, that really only examining these regrets, sizing them up, weighing them in the balance sheet of various hypothetical alternatives in a clear way can release those first two lessons. Perhaps entertaining my regrets with good humor I can coexist with them in such a way that I don’t spend my future trying to dodge the awareness that I am imperfect. Maybe, like with Shaq's free throws, I can acknowledge that I haven't done some things I wish I had, that I have done some things I wish I hadn't, and that this is neither nothing, nor catastrophic, but rather just part of my being human, like Superman, like everyone. And perhaps I can bear this perspective going forward, like Shaq, with a joke or an easy laugh. Sometimes I can.

Viveza Criolla: Manu Ginobili, Race, Globalization, and the Essence of the Game

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 21:08:00 +0000

On September 4, 2002 a watershed event in the history of basketball took place. After 58 consecutive wins, a United States team composed entirely of professional stars lost a game for the first time. The score was 87-80. Their victorious opponent was Argentina. And the star of that Argentine national team was Manu Ginobili. In one symbolically significant play, Ginobili, a 6’-6” guard sped down the court with the ball. 6’-11” American defender Jermaine O’Neal angled toward the basket, aiming to cut off Ginobili’s path. Ginobili came at the basket from the left side, as though oblivious to O’Neal’s approach. As Manu elevated toward the hoop, O’Neal, seemingly in perfect defensive position, rose with him anticipating an easy block. But then, Ginobili switched the ball to his right hand, hanging in the air as O’Neal flew by, and then floated under the basket to score on a reverse layup.

Since that time, Manu has won three NBA championships, one Olympic Gold Medal, and the NBA 6th Man of the Year award for the best reserve player. He has made the NBA All-Star team twice (including this year, where he is widely acknowledged as the most important player on one of the NBA’s best teams, the San Antonio Spurs) and he has earned close to 70 million dollars in salary in his 8 year NBA career. But in September 2002, he had yet to play an NBA game. In fact, the Spurs picked 2nd to last of the 58 players selected in the 1999 NBA draft. Though he was well-known in Argentina and among fans of European professional basketball, in some real and important senses, Manu debuted on September 4, 2002.

In his 2005 book Crashing the Borders, Harvey Araton, a New York Times sportswriter, interpreted the significance of that 2002 US-Argentina game and, specifically, of Manu’s spectacular basket over Jermaine O’Neal. Araton writes “From that moment on, the prototypical foreign player was no longer a mobility-challenged white boy in a crew cut. The story was no longer Hoosiers with subtitles.” Araton succinctly identifies a cultural context important for understanding the way meaning gets constructed in basketball: namely, the racialization of different facets of the game and different styles of individual and team play.

With the phrase “mobility challenged white boy in a crew cut,” Araton evokes a stereotypical basketball image – as in a black and white still photograph: the rural, probably Midwestern, probably Indiana, white farm boy. Maybe it is dusk. Maybe, having just finished chores, he is in dungarees and a flannel shirt. Maybe he is frozen in mid-jump shot, the ball paused in its inevitable arc toward the makeshift basket nailed to the side of the barn.

In the racialized cultural discourse of basketball this stereotypical image might be set into the motion of narrative (and thus associated further with other qualities, not specific to basketball): thus, the white hero overcomes his lack of “natural” athletic ability through some combination of the following: 1) the tireless, orthodox repetition of the game’s fundamental skills, 2) humility and subordination of his ego to the collective identity of the team (as represented by the sternly benevolent figure of the Coach), 3) persistent effort and desire, and, of course, 4) intelligence.

The other of this figure and narrative trope is the stereotyped African-American player: he is blessed with “natural” athletic abilities – speed, strength, leaping ability -- perfectly suited to the game of basketball; and though often untutored, he develops on his urban playground an unorthodox skill set that he uses – with a creativity viewed as instinctive, flamboyant, and selfish -- to assert his individuality.

Never mind for the moment the myriad problems, some disturbing, that attend what I’ve just sketched out. This binary racialized discourse has framed the history of basketball in the United States, as it has drawn from and contributed to racial discourse in the country beyond the basketball court. Though the intention is not always explicitly to malign or even to limit, and whether the player being discussed is black or white, in most gyms and playgrounds in America today you might well overhear a conversation in which the phrases “white game” or “black game” are earnestly and apparently meaningfully invoked to describe a player’s style of play. Of course, in most of the game’s history, this racialization has not been innocent but rather has informed and supported harmful, sometimes even violent, expressions of hatred and resentment toward African-Americans.

This discourse, in turn, exists alongside a racially segregated institutional structure whereby today’s NBA consists mostly of African-American athletes playing mostly under the direction of white coaches, for franchises owned mostly by white businessmen, before a mostly white paying public, and covered by a mostly white media. The tensions – to put it mildly – created by this structure have been described, analyzed, and critiqued in detail by a number of authors. Here I want only to identify only one effect: the stimulation of white American fans’ desire for the “Great White Hope.”

The Great White Hope is the Caucasian player who will be able to rival his African-American counterparts on the hardwood, redeem whiteness and the attributes putatively associated with it, and, for that white fan, exorcise the complex emotional demons of racial injustice. Since the early 1960s, when the game at its highest level was definitively dominated by African-American superstars (and politically outspoken ones at that), every few years white fans and the media have identified a new, promising, white collegiate talent and anointed him the new messiah: Bill Bradley for the 60s, Pete Maravich for the 70s, Larry Bird for the 80s. While among the most talented and effective players ever, these players all received an outsized portion of media attention and white fan adulation on account of their whiteness.

Over the course of the 1990s, more and more white European players entered the ranks of an NBA more and more powerfully marked by the hip-hop culture of inner-city African-American youth. And white fans came to cast these players all the more desperately as Great White Hopes. In the process, fans stripped the European players’ games of their specificity and ignored their geographical and social origins. Many of these players had come to basketball from impoverished surroundings in war-torn Eastern European ghettos much more like American inner-cities than Indiana farm town. Not for nothing did Detroit Pistons veteran Rasheed Wallace refer to his rookie teammate Darko Milicic as a “Serbian Gangster.” It is then precisely the racist and reductive view of the white European player as incarnation of the stereotypical American white game that Araton, to his credit, attempts to nullify by declaring that, after Manu’s basket on Jermaine O’Neal, “The story was no longer Hoosiers with subtitles.”

Fair enough. But if that is no longer the story, what then is the story? In Araton’s book, the story seems to be that players like Manu Ginobili embody a kind of dialectical synthesis of the racialized stylistic antithesis between white and black. Like the stereotypical white player, they are heady, skilled, and work hard. Like the stereotypical black player, they are athletic, creative, and exciting. It certainly is the case that Manu combines a highly developed set of fundamental skills with athletic ability. But this doesn’t set him apart from a number of other NBA players. One thing that does set him apart from that particular group of players is that he is white.

And this fact leads me to feel that Araton’s interpretation runs unfortunately close to the grooves of a logic I doubt he intended. First the American game is divided into a white game and a black game and these set against each other as incomplete halves of a whole. Then the American game is opposed to the International game -- represented by Manu. This international game at one and the same time heals the ills of basketball and the racial conflicts of American society. But it does so via incarnation in the white body of Manu Ginobili. And in this way, Manu becomes (secretly) the Greatest of the Great White Hopes because he is the Great White Hope who ends once and for all the need for a Great White Hope because he transcends the very antagonism – white game vs black game -- that historically provoked White feelings of inferiority and engendered the desire for a Great White Hope in the first place.

There are, as you can imagine, a number of problems with the story. I’m here most interested in what the story seems to leave out about Manu’s game, and about what that game – read closely -- might say about class, the global economy, and politics. Let’s begin with his game. Watching even a short clip of Manu will leave you with the impression that, perhaps even more than the skill and the athletic ability, what makes Manu remarkable and exciting is his deceptive, improvisational creativity: his ability to make a play where there doesn’t appear to be one.

As you watch the following clip (Manu is number 20 in white or black) look for some of the following: the way he appears to throw himself headlong into a crowd of defenders; his use of deceptive dribbling and passing techniques such as moving the ball behind his back or between his legs (or the legs of the defense); his use of awkward-seeming footwork to present defenders with unfamiliar shapes and possibilities, and his use of his body and the basket to protect the ball. Lastly, try to form an overall feel for the way his body moves on the court: its relationship to congestion and freedom, the variations of fluidity and punctuation, finesse and awkwardness, speed and power.

(By the way, as you watch the video you might notice that this particular curator has set Manu to the sounds of the hip hop song Back-Up by the Miami-based, Cuban-American rapper Pit Bull. Melodically, and especially rhythmically, with its syncopation, the hook of this song evokes the tango and in turn mimics the footwork for which Manu is best known: the Euro-Step which involves two quick steps and one long lateral slide. Rhythm and melody, in other words, might be ways to watch basketball as well.)

Manu seems almost to look for trouble only to always get out of it. He breaks many of the time-honored tenets of sound (read: safe) basketball on the court: throwing one-handed passes, leaving his feet without having a clear path to shoot or pass, exposing the ball to the defender while dribbling, shooting without facing the basket. But he gets to the basket and finishes (or makes the right pass) with such maddening effectiveness that you begin to realize that perhaps it only looked like trouble to us; that he knew all along what he was going to do, or at least what it was possible for him to do, and perhaps even that the appearing to be in trouble was an integral part of the success. That is part of why one NBA observer has singled him out as among the five most deceptive players in the league. Manu transforms what appears as inevitable constraint in the world around him – an opponent’s dunk on a breakaway or a blocked path on offense – into the viral unstoppability of his own invention.

When I asked followers on Twitter to talk about Manu’s significance, inviting them specifically to comment on whether or not his game had a “race,” one replied with the following, illuminating remark: “I always thought his game had a class more than a race. Scrambly, improvisational but w/ a very limited lexicon.” Intrigued, I pressed him to specify the class. He responded: “I have in mind ‘street, the ‘common man’ of de Certeau...urban, not (necessarily) underclass.” He then agreed with me that “lumpenproletariat” would work as the classical formulation.

Classical, that is, as in “Classical Marxism.” Marx had some famously unflattering words for the lumpenproletariat. In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx referred to them as the “refuse of all classes”, including “swindlers, confidence tricksters, brothel keepers, rag-and-bone merchants, and beggars.” Unlike the virtuous, hard-working and productive members of the industrial working class, the cast-off rags of the lumpenproletariat were shifty and unproductive, lazy, trying to get something for nothing, politically unreliable and deceitful.

My Twitter friend’s comment in turn reminded me of a description that serves as well as any to describe, quite concretely, Manu Ginobili’s work on the basketball court: “it operates in the ‘cramped quarters’ and ‘impossible positions’ of the ‘small peoples’ and ‘minorities’ who lack or refuse coherent identity.” These are the terms used by Deleuze and Guattari to describe what they call “minor politics.” I invoke them directly here for two reasons. First to suggest how a basketball maneuver – when read in close detail – may be seen as an artistic performance and a philosophical proposition. But second, because I think Deleuze and Guattari’s words describe the kind of political activity that was especially important in Argentina around the time of Manu’s debut.

Let me emphasize the where and when of that debut: first, the FIBA championships in Indianapolis, Indiana – the symbolic heartland of white American basketball and second, the NBA, athletic emblem of untrammeled American corporate globalization at the dawn of 21st century. And then, the when: 2002, just months after the most devastating economic crisis in Argentina’s history and in the midst of the massive, subsequent political upheaval it provoked. That crisis, of course, was partly precipitated by the Argentine government’s complicity with neo-liberal economic policies originating in the United States; policies that, ironically, had facilitated the globalization of basketball and the NBA brand, leading, in turn, to the development of the game abroad. In a very real way, the late 2001 crisis converted vast numbers of middle and working class Argentines into a contemporary lumpenproletariat.

At the same time, many of these individuals spontaneously organized themselves, not only to protest and not only to disrupt attempts to carry on business as usual, but also to form communities and networks of communities charged with providing education, health care, food, clothing, and social services. If the upstanding Marx missed the political potential of the lumpenproletariat, Bakunin did not: he saw them as the “flower of the proletariat” and believed, like Deleuze and Guattari after him, that those who were most alienated from the structures and values of power were in the best position to embody an alternative to the status quo; in much the same way that Manu relies upon the appearance of trouble to elude his defender, the way he uses the apparent inevitability of his own failure as a condition for his success.

There’s a tradition of this in Argentina. A tradition, I mean, of radical, horizontal, self-organizing that eludes wherever possible and by whatever means the apparatus of the state and I mean the supposedly benevolent paternalist state as much as the nakedly repressive authoritarian state. But there’s a tradition, also, I mean to point out, of crafty creativity in cramped spaces, of making something out of what seems like nothing. Hearing me talk about Manu’s game, Claire connected it to “viveza criolla.” Jason Wilson in his Buenos Aires: A Cultural and Literary History speaks of it in terms of “artful lying and cheating” and of the “vivo,” its practitioner, as “the improviser, the quick-fixer, the street-wise survivor.” Sometimes, these two traditions – the anarchist self-organizer and the crafty vivo -- seem, as in the fiction of Roberto Arlt, to wind together. Even what fans who don’t like Manu don’t like about his game – his “flopping”, where he falls to ground as if he’s been fouled in order to deceive the referee into calling a foul on his opponent – expresses this quality of his game.

In light of all this, Manu’s game might best be read as Argentine and, more specifically, Argentine in the spirit of radical, improvisational, immigrant anarchism, viveza criolla, and unbeautifully styled inventions of Roberto Arlt. If so, it is disappointing at best, telling at worst, that the specificity of Manu’s game is drained from even the most intelligent mainstream US commentary on his emergence. In part, this may simply involve ignorance of the local traditions embedded in Manu’s style. But it may also express, I am arguing, the persistent force of the desire on the part of the American white fan to somehow, finally and for once and for all, overcome the inevitable, overpowering blackness of basketball.

I believe all that. But lest I appear to be dribbling foolishly into the troublesome traffic of triumphant Argentine nationalism, let me emulate the subject of my talk and slip out of it by pointing out that if the essence of Manu’s game is deception, and though that deception in some way derives from Argentine culture and even from the Argentine political response to the crisis, then in the view of one respected philosopher of the basketball, Manu’s game is also nothing more and nothing less than the essence of basketball itself.

I’m referring to Leonard Koppett, who in 1974 published a volume of meditations on the game entitled The Essence of the Game is Deception. Koppett acknowledges that the theoretical goal of the game is to throw the ball in the hoop, but goes on to argue that “on the real world, physical level, you must ‘deceive’ your opponent in order to get a decent shot, and so basketball is a game in which various types of fakes and feints, with head, hands, body, legs, eyes, are proportionately more important than in other games.” The game, he argues, “boils down to getting good shots, and getting good shots boils down to deceiving the defense.”
Koppett then goes on to introduce the implications of his insight. The first of these is that the game is likely to attract, at its highest levels, a psychologically “devious” type; or, to put it in less dramatic terms, individuals who enjoy deception, who are, as Koppett puts it, “poker” rather than “bridge minded.” Of course, he’s not arguing that this sums up the totality of every basketball player’s psyche. He’s just drawing out the point that just as certain physical gifts draw on to and are in turn reinforced by the particularities of a given sport, so that is also true of psychological propensities. In the case of basketball, it is a kind of delighted and delightful deception, a delight in deception – a “viveza criolla” -- that basketball cultivates, attracts, and rewards.

The second implication of his hypothesis that the essence of the game is deception is that “style attracts more attention in basketball than in other games.” Because, Koppett, argues, a basket is always worth the same amount, and because there are so many in the course of a game, “The peaks and valleys of spectator delight, therefore are reached as easily by awesome maneuver as by the mere fact of scoring: the dunk or ‘stuff,’ the high speed fast break, the blocked shot, a sequence of passes, fancy dribbling – all transcend sheer efficiency.” That is why, as he puts it, “Any knowledgeable crowd will cheer louder for a fancy pass, behind the back, or through the legs, that doesn’t lead to a score than it will for a routine basket. And an acrobatic shot that goes in is best of all.” While Koppett acknowledges that ultimately winning matters, he also argues that it matters to a proportionally smaller degree than in other serious team games. Because, as he puts it, “in basketball, flair and style are less separable from result, and closer to the essence of the action, and the underlying logic of this attitude folds back over the subject of deception: style is deception, made visible.”
Manu doesn’t have to pass the ball behind his back or through an opponent’s legs every time he does it. He does that because doing that makes visible, in Koppett’s words, or draws attention to what he is more subtly doing all the time: deceiving his opponents. In this sense, the functionally unnecessary flourish on the deceptive play announces itself as deception. And what could be a more joyful, exuberant declaration of resilient unstoppability than to deceive someone while announcing to them that you are deceiving them? That is basketball and that is Manu’s game.

With his title – The Essence of the Game is Deception -- Koppett makes me think of Nietzsche’s subtle view of essence, appearance, and truth and his – dare I say deceptive – style to match. For Nietzsche the supposition that there is some hidden essence veiled by a deceptive appearance and accessible only to philosophical reason was a harmful proposition that expresses nothing so much as an aversion to the ever-shifting reality of existence, a hatred for life. Accordingly, Nietzsche harshly criticized philosophies that maintained that view and tried to develop in his own, highly poetic and suggestive style of writing, a philosophy that would emphasize the life-affirming joy of appearance. And nowhere did Nietzsche see this affirmed more strongly than in art, which he saw, in the words of one contemporary commentator, as “the highest power of falsehood” and the “sanctification of the lie,” and as endowed with the power to invent new possibilities of life.” It is the art of viveza criolla; the art of rhetoric, the art of turning the inevitability of sadness and death into the unstoppability of joy and life. It is the art of Manu and it is the art of basketball.

The Art of the Art of Basketball

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 21:52:00 +0000

I have no course diary post this week. 1) My flight from St. Louis to Detroit on Monday was delayed 6 hours so that I arrived in Ann Arbor at about 3 am on Tuesday morning; 2) Bethlehem Shoals was already in town, waiting for me in his own room at the Red Roof, in pajamas, watching a horror movie; when I arrived 3) the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual exhaustion of coordinating Shoals' remarkable visit and lecture left me, through no fault of his, entirely surpassed; 4) the Fab Five documentary and aftermath dominated our class discussion on Tuesday and left me with too many feelings and thoughts to be able to put together coherently, maybe later; 5) the start of March Madness, St. Patrick's Day, and Spring Weather made Thursday's class into let's-watch-the-games-on-the-big-screen SlackFest.

Ergo, no post. I'll be back on schedule for the course diary next week. So stay tuned. I do, however, have the following reflections, aired earlier today on Voice on the Floor on the occasion of reading Leonard Koppett's classic 1974 book The Essence of the Game is Deception: Thinking About Basketball, wherein I explain why Koppett shows me that basketball is not only the most beautiful, but also the most Nietzschean and vital game of all.

Those of you who have been following my course diary know that I like to use basketball – players, fans, writing about the game, technical elements, fundamentals, and tactics – as a way to think through issues that at first glance seem far removed from the game. Sometimes these are social issues, sometimes cultural issues, and sometimes, like today, philosophical issues.

I don’t claim to be a philosopher or even to have a thorough or accurate understanding of the philosophy I have studied or read on my own. But I have read a lot of philosophy, I’ve taught a bit of philosophy as part of my day job at Michigan, and I think I have an adequate grasp of some of the basic questions that at least some strands of philosophy have wrestled with.

So I was delighted to discover, when preparing for my course on hoops culture, a book published in 1974 by Leonard Koppett called The Essence of the Game is Deception: Thinking About Basketball. I can’t recommend this book highly enough for its style, wit, clarity, insight, and surprising relevance today. And before I get into riffing on what I make of it, I want to pay its author the respect of talking a little about its success on its own terms.
The book includes a short Introduction, followed by twenty three chapters divided into three sections: “The Game,” “The People,” and “Things to Think About.” The very first of these parts, “The Game,” opens with a chapter entitled, and describing, “The Main Idea” of the book as a whole.

This first chapter itself gives a superb taste of the style of the whole: informal in tone, and ironic, but deeply informed, rigorous, and illuminating. Koppett acknowledges that the theoretical goal of the game is to throw the ball in the hoop, but goes on to argue that “on the real world, physical level, you must ‘deceive’ your opponent in order to get a decent shot, and so basketball is a game in which various types of fakes and feints, with head, hands, body, legs, eyes, are proportionately more important than in other games.” The game, he argues, “boils down to getting good shots, and getting good shots boils down to deceiving the defense.”

Koppett then goes on to introduce the implications of his insight. The first of these is that the game is likely to attract, at its highest levels, a psychologically “devious” type; or, to put it in less dramatic terms, individuals who enjoy deception, who are, as Koppett puts it, “poker” rather than “bridge minded.” Of course, he’s not arguing that this sums up the totality of every basketball player’s psyche. He’s just drawing out the point that just as certain physical gifts draw on to and are in turn reinforced by the particularities of a given sport, so that is also true of psychological propensities. In the case of basketball, it is a kind of delighted and delightful deception, a delight in deception that basketball cultivates, attracts, and rewards.

Koppett doesn’t force all the raw material of the game through the mill of his main idea about deception. Rather he holds the idea lightly throughout his treatment of shooting, dribbling, passing, teamwork, and defense, and likewise when he discusses, in Part Two, the various agents involved in the game such as coaches, players, officials, fans, and the media. He seems to know that to assert that the essence of the game is deception is not the same as saying that the most illuminating way to analyze absolutely every aspect of everything that happens on the basketball floor is in terms of deception.

Koppett’s method, in this sense, is more a kind of empiricism than anything else. He has clearly carefully observed what happens on the floor and he is trying to reverse engineer the game: to look at what actually happens and in a sense imagine what sort of problems it solves, what sort of purpose it serves. In this, reading Koppett was interestingly like reading James Naismith’s account of his invention of the game, but in reverse. Naismith built the game up in his mind by beginning with certain principles and aims and then imagining what sort of play would follow from those and what sorts of rules would be necessary. Koppett takes the ever evolving game as it is in real life and works backward to see what principles and aims must be at work for it to exist the way that it does. In this sense, while deception is for him the essence of the game, it is a kind of immanent presence that expresses itself through myriad particular modes, subordinate aims, and complexly interrelated elements and forces that might play a much stronger role at any given moment than deception itself per se.

All of this combined for me to make reading Koppett a curiously absorbing experience. I say curiously because it was not so much that it was a riveting page turner as that it was mesmerizing. A few weeks ago someone asked me how I watched games, what that was like for me. The best answer I could come up with came relatively instinctively. I said I watched them the way that I watch a fire burn, a river flow, or the ocean break against the shore. All of those things mesmerize me and put me into a frame of mind in which I am somehow simultaneously focused and distracted. Or, in other words, in which I am somehow absorbing the whole while my attention shifts from one evolving particular detail to another. That’s how Koppett books worked for me as I read it.

Reading his Introduction, which I did only after I’d read the whole book, that effect made me happy because it turns out that he was hoping to make the book like a game. He writes:

we will run and shoot and jump and lunge from subject to subject, story to story, thought to thought, and, if we’re fortunate, emerge with some sort of unified network of impressions that constitute, when completed, a successful performance. It won’t be orderly, but basketball isn’t orderly. It may not even be coherent, but basketball often isn’t coherent. But it will try to be, as basketball usually is, fun. And fast. And imperfect.

In this the book is Ray Allen’s perfect three-ball or Kareem’s timeless, unstoppable sky hook dropping in again, and again and again; but also Jordan’s improvisational inventions in traffic or Lebron’s powerful locomotive assaults on the basket or Manú’s slithering serpentine deceptions (on the last of which see Beckley Mason's analysis of his All-Deceptive Team).

All of which brings me to the other point that Koppett identifies as an immediate consequence of his assertion that the essence of the game is deception: namely, that “style attracts more attention in basketball than in other games.” He’s worth quoting at length on this point:

Football and baseball spectators are almost entirely result-oriented: how many yards gained on a play, how many bases or outs made. The means is quite secondary, and the universal tendency is to sneer at ‘showboating,’ defined as any extraneous movement. Flourish and flair do occur in those games, but they are not quite respectable and certainly not the main business of the day. A pop fly down the foul line that just reaches the stands for a bases full homer is accepted as far more thrilling than a 450 foot drive that is caught – even though in his heart of hearts, every baseball fan knows he gets a bigger flash of excitement from the latter He just doesn’t want to admit it. (And yet, when a Willie Mays comes along to combine super-efficiency with colorful style, the fans respond.)

In basketball, though, manner is very important to the spectators. Any knowledgeable crowd will cheer louder for a fancy pass, behind the back, or through the legs, that doesn’t lead to a score than it will for a routine basket. And an acrobatic shot that goes in is best of all. And why not? In other games, there can be many degrees of success: obviously a 15 yard gain means more than a 2 yard gain, and abases loaded triple means more than a bases empty double. But a basket is a 2 points no matter how you make it (except for the American Basketball Association’s 3 pointer, an exception that proves the rule), and there will be 50 to 80 of them in a normal game. The peaks and valleys of spectator delight, therefore are reached as easily by awesome maneuver as by the mere fact of scoring: the dunk or ‘stuff,’ the high speed fast break, the blocked shot, a sequence of passes, fancy dribbling – all transcend sheer efficiency.

While Koppett acknowledges that ultimately winning matters, he also argues that it matters to a proportionally smaller degree than in other serious team games. Because, as he puts it, “in basketball, flair and style are less separable from result, and closer to the essence of the action, and the underlying logic of this attitude folds back over the subject of deception: style is deception, made visible.”

It’s here, as well as in the terms of the very title of the book -- essence, game, deception, thinking, and basketball – that Koppett opens the doors for me on a wondrous philosophical playground. You see, a venerable and popular philosophical view sees the essence of something as the opposite of its appearance. In this view, the way something appears or presents itself to us is deceiving, hiding the true core or essence of the thing as it really, truly is. For such a view, the aim of serious thought is to penetrate that deceptive veil and identify the stable, unchanging core essence of a thing. Only then do you know the truth of that thing.
But philosophers have also thought about that issue in other ways, perhaps none more remarkably than Friedrich Nietzsche, the 19th century German philosopher whose complex work is too often reduced to a few “might-makes-right” clichés that lend themselves either to Tony Robbins style self-help slogans or Nazi propaganda. But the Niezsche that Koppett makes me think of is a Nietzsche with a subtle view of essence, appearance, and truth and a – dare I say deceptive – style to match.

For Nietzsche the supposition that there is some hidden essence veiled by a deceptive appearance and accessible only to philosophical reason was a harmful proposition that expresses nothing so much as an aversion to the ever-shifting reality of existence, a hatred for life. Accordingly, Nietzsche harshly criticized philosophies that maintained that view and tried to develop in his own, highly poetic and suggestive style of writing, a philosophy that would emphasize the life-affirming joy of appearance. And nowhere did Nietzsche see this affirmed more strongly than in art, which he saw, in the words of one astute commentator, as “the highest power of falsehood” and the “sanctification of the lie,” and as endowed with the power to invent new possibilities of life.

You may now perhaps begin to see why Koppett’s provocative thesis – that the essence of the game is deception – so excites me. It is Nietzschean though and through in its celebration of the game as an artful contest of subtle deceits. And in embracing the paradox entailed by describing something (the game of basketball) as having deception (or appearance) as its essence, Koppett in my opinion thrusts the game into the realm of art in the most profound and moving sense of the word. But in addition to this, by holding his own thesis lightly and emphasizing instead the fluid, swirling dynamic of the game as it is actually played, even at the cost of a certain systematic order, Koppett makes his own book a work of art as well, a work worthy of Nietzsche, of basketball, and of life.

Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: The Serpent’s Tale (Day 14)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:18:00 +0000

This also appeared earlier today on the FreeDarko website. But I'm keeping it here for the sake of consistency and for those few readers of mine who come here first

This is a hallowed day. They asked me to play. They actually asked me to play. Okay, well it wasn’t exactly that they asked me to play, but pretty much. Walking across campus to class from my previous class, the fantasy image flashed into the slide projector of my mind: an intra-class pickup game. The still image sprang into motion: all of us going up and down the court at Crisler Arena. I tried to push it aside, tried to stop it. No way I’m going to propose this in class and have the players break into uncontrollable sneering laughter. But then, I walk into class and I’ve barely put my stuff down on the desk when one of the players, having very courteously asked me how my broken hand was doing, said, “We should have a class game.” Moments later, another player walked into class and said the same thing.

I feel I shall burst with joy and excitement. If God himself, donning sweats, had parted the gray Ann Arbor skies, and entered the class on a Golden Litter, born by Clyde, the Hawk, Dr. J, and Wilt, and said, “you know what, that tree of knowledge thing, I was j/k!”, I could have been no happier. A weight of decades has been lifted from my shoulders. It was an auspicious way to begin the home stretch of Cultures of Basketball, after a two week hiatus, and leading in to the much-anticipated visit of none other than Bethlehem Shoals himself to our Ivory Tower next week.

We all began to babble excitedly about the match-up. “Players against the rest of us!” someone shouted. Oh no, I thought to myself, I didn’t wait nearly thirty years to play Division I ball in order to get clowned by a bunch of college kids. If you wanna go players and teacher against the rest of the class, I’m down, but otherwise we’re splitting the players up. Buoyed by my sudden surge of popularity among the players, and the riotous atmosphere of the room, I took a wild risk. I explained that I’d just been thinking the same thing on the way over to class and added, “But in my fantasy of this game, we’re playing at Crisler. So I want to give the players a special group assignment: make that happen.” I’m thinking that’s an impossibility, but that just saying it will curry even more favor. But lo, another player speaks up and says he thinks that shouldn’t be a problem. What! Verily, yea, I will tread the same hardwood as my forefathers CWebb and Jalen, and their forefather, Cazzie, did before them.

An evening of feverish tweeting and e-mailing ensued in which yet another player and I worked out the details of 1) a class lottery, presided over by David Stern, in which the eight players would draw names to round out the rosters for each of their teams and 2) the field of eight three-player teams would be seeded and compete in an April-Madness extravaganza culminating in the crowning of the first ever Cultures of Basketball national champion. My fiancée then tops it all off by suggesting we have the game on a weekend so that she can come up from St. Louis to witness, testify, and oversee the national media hordes that will certainly converge on Ann Arbor for the Blessed Event. So y’all can just get in touch with her about securing your media passes. I’m pretty sure that Ernie and the TNT gang already have their hotel reservations, Dicky V. called to make sure he wouldn’t be excluded, and the Goodyear Blimp, flown by Captain Jon Conrad and crew, has already secured airspace.

Talking to a student later during office hours, he shook his head with dread: “Maybe the players just wanted to play us so they could destroy us.” “Who cares?,” I said to him, “I just wanna play. It’s like when you’re little,” I explained, “you just want your big brother to play with you, you don’t care that he’s gonna beat your ass. It’s just about the attention.” My student smiled and said, “I was the big brother.” Well, okay, but you get the idea. I know I’ll actually be shitting myself on the day of the game, and I’ll probably dribble off my foot, shoot a couple of air balls, and – horror of horrors – be single-handedly responsible for decimating the ranks of next year’s Michigan basketball team by somehow injuring each and every one of the eight players through some clumsy display of aged overreaching. But really, who cares? It’s the sort of moment when it all comes together and several lifetimes’ worth of minor slights and trivial but embittering disappointments are swept away by a deluge that leaves your soul as brand spanking new and clean and naked as Adam and Eve in the Garden.

Speaking of paradise, today’s class was devoted to the section of FreeDarko’s history on Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, the first segment of Chapter 4: “The Gold Standard: 1980-1990.” But before we got to Magic and Larry Legend, and after we’d settled down, we had one more bit of topical business to address: the controversy over the Heat “allegedly” crying in the locker room after their 1 point loss to the Bulls the other day, at the time their fourth straight loss. I asked them what they thought and they told me, but then I realized that I didn’t so much want to know what they thought as tell them what I thought they should think, or at least what I thought they should bear in mind as they formed their own judgments of the event.

So we briefly discussed the possible meanings of tears and of emotions in general, the role that emotion plays in sport and in human life more generally, and the way that culture and upbringing, especially as coded by gender, shape the way we judge – and that we feel entitled to judge – public displays of emotion by other human beings.

One of the more interesting points was raised by a student, who pointed out that the gender double-standard also works against female athletes who show anger or swag in the course of competition. In both cases, culturally set parameters of appropriately “masculine” or “feminine” relationships to particular expressions of emotion wind up underwriting thoughtless critical judgments of particular athletes for crossing the boundaries of emotional expression.

It’s sad, really, that young men and women, athletes or not, should be subject to such constraints. And sadder, still, perhaps, that other young men and women should participate in limiting the scope of what it is possible to be and to feel and to show you feel as a young man or young woman. Nothing was resolved, of course, but I think that students by the end of our little conversation were equipped to do more than just accept the terms of the discussion as provided by ESPN or the guy next to them at Buffalo Wild Wings.

Having completed my pontification on the topic of emotion, gender, and athletics, we rode the FD time machine back to Bliss, the Gold Standard, the Paradise of the NBA in the 1980s. The religious, specifically Edenic, lexicon that I’ve been trying to weave into this post is neither accidental, nor really of my own invention. The illustration that fronts the Magic Bird chapter shows the two players, in iconic poses, emerging from a garden lush with sunflowers, ferns, daffodils and tropical foliage.

An unpaid student query about the significance of the image gave me the opportunity to say a few words about the myth of Eden and the kind of cultural work it can do in Judeo-Christian societies. I don’t want to go biblical on your ass, or be too dweebishly unsubtle about it (especially, in view of the compact subtlety of Jacob Weinstein’s visual argument), but it’s worth acknowledging, at least, the force and pervasiveness of that myth in the way that we lace often overly simplistic judgements of good and evil into narratives of memory and history. It’s not that Eden is always invoked explicitly, but rather that it doesn’t have to be because by now it is almost second nature (a distinctly un-Edenic concept, or maybe it is Edenic). Everytime you hear someone talk about the good old days, nostalgia, you know the routine, once upon a time – always, there Eden is at work.

In the case of Magic, and Bird, and the 1980s, it’s certainly understandable, and close to my own heart’s experience, that the myth of Eden should appeal. As FD writes in the brief Introduction to the chapter, the decade saw a truly awesome influx of talent into the game: not just Magic and Larry, but Isiah, Worthy, Jordan, Barkley, Akeem, Stockton, Malone, Ewing and others entered the league in the period. Moreover, unlike, say, in the 1960s, that talent was properly showcased by the rise of ESPN and other forms of media exposure and endorsement deals, all carefully overseen by the – whatever else you want to say about him – far-sighted and shrewd PR vision of Commissioner David Stern. The play on the floor was brilliant and more people than ever were getting to see it. FANtastic was born.

But there’s more to it than that. In Magic and Bird, of course, you had two players with a ready-made rivalry established in the 1979 NCAA title game (itself a watershed moment in most accounts of the college game), and a rivalry amped up by the storied history of the Lakers and Celtics, the franchises they joined. Moreover, as we discussed in class after watching clips of the two players, Magic and Larry truly showcased a remarkably complete (and remarkably similar – a fact I think that is often undernoticed) set of basketball skills.

Though neither was an exceptional athlete by NBA standards, each had the intelligence and put in the work to maximize the gifts they did have and so to turn themselves into astonishingly creative passers and effective rebounders, ball handlers and shooters (more Magic than Larry for the handle, more Larry than Magic for the shot). Both were capable of scoring from unpromising angles and traffic situations, both capable of unselfishly raising the game of their teammates, both clutch and both winners, and both driven to lead by example in squeezing every last drop out of seemingly every play on the floor.

In their styles of play, both players, as Brown Recluse, Esq. (BRE) notes, embodied the happy marriage of ABA creativity with NBA stability. BRE even concludes by correctly observing that Magic and Larry left us as a legacy the freedom that would evolve into positional revolution with oversize point guards, and bigs who can hurt you inside or step out and hit the three. And finally, of course, one was black and one was white. Put it all together and that’s hard to top if you’re looking for Paradise in the history of the NBA.

The myth of the Garden of Eden, though, is more than just an emblem of unadulterated bliss. It describes a tricky pseudo-contract in which submissive ignorance is the price exacted for that bliss. Moreover, it tells us that pain, labor, and sexuality are punishments for the violation of that contract. You remember, right? Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, aspiring in the process to have their blind eyes opened and to see as God sees and, as a result, are cast out of the Garden. Ultimately, the narrative carries for me a dark side by which we are commanded to remain in a childish state -- lacking knowledge, desire, experience, and agency -- if we are to be happy.

I’m not the first to point this out, of course. John Milton in Paradise Lost (perhaps in spite of himself) and William Blake (very much not in spite of himself) long ago suggested or argued outright that it’s not so clear who might be the good guys and the bad guys in the story of our “Fall.” More recently, the British author Philip Pullman rewrote the whole story in his remarkable trilogy His Dark Materials. There Pullman conceives that our “Fall” was really a kind of elevation, a growing-up of the species if you will, prompted by angels rebelling against a God who was really just the first angel, but had usurped authority, styling himself the Creator of the rest, and establishing a tyrannical Kingdom of Heaven in place of the immanent Republic of Heaven.

In Pullman’s reading, the rebel angels did us a favor and every time we think for ourselves, enjoy our existence as beings with minds and bodies, and make independent decisions, every time we assert the right to determine the course of our own futures, we are embodying the empowering legacy that the Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall would have us lament and repent for unto eternity.

Offering this counter-vision doesn’t mean that I think the myth of a fall from grace, or innocence, is useless or bad. Just that it’s a more complicated tool for organizing our understanding of ourselves than might appear at first glance. In my own case, the bliss ushered in by Magic and Bird’s appearance in the NBA (which was indeed a paradise for me: my room was plastered with Magic posters, and I still have a scrapbook I started keeping in 1979 with Magic clippings from the local papers and Sports Illustrated) coincided with my exit from the innocence of childhood via a number of doors simultaneously: I learned to shoot a jump shot, my parents separated, and I entered puberty.

So it was a complicated Eden for me, that: one that sends my mind and my emotional memories snapping back and forth wildly like a standard in a strong wind. But I wouldn’t trade that complicated and painful time – and all that grew from it – for the relatively less complicated, ignorant bliss of pretending to be Clyde in the driveway at age 7.

By now you might be imagining that I am of the Devil’s party, as Blake once said of Milton. Maybe that’s true in some sense. It is certainly true that the serpent is for me the most interesting character in the story. And, in relation to this Golden Era of NBA history, I certainly wonder where (or who or what) the serpent is.

About fifteen years ago, in a first futile stab at doing this kind of writing, during a leave year in which I received tenure at the University, I became fascinated with Dennis Rodman. Around this time Terry Pluto published a book called Falling from Grace (1995). Its subtitle was “Can the NBA Be Saved?” In it, if I remember correctly, Pluto characterized the then-current crop of young players as brawling, trash-talking thugs whose basketball fundamentals were decidedly underwhelming. I’m pretty sure Dennis was singled out in that book, along with a few other players as symptomatic of all that had gone wrong with the game.

At the time, I wrote an essay – now long lost – on the joy of being Dennis Rodman. I wasn’t interested so much in defending Dennis’ style choices (or behavior), so much as pointing out that in his play on the court (tenacious defense, hard-nosed intelligent rebounding, good passing), Rodman embodied many of the values that Pluto himself was nostalgically associating with a different, now bygone era (not to mention race, I remember feeling upon reading the book).

I’m not sure what I’d think of Pluto’s book or of my own argument now. Maybe I wouldn’t stand by it any longer. But I definitely do stand by the impulse I acted on to complicate simple notions of human history that characterize it as either a steady progress toward something good or a steady (or precipitious) fall from something good. That much, perhaps, is the serpent in me.

In fact, maybe the serpent isn’t so much a character in the story, or not only a character in the story, but a role we all step into whenever we question the story and read it against the grain; whenever we take the childish dichotomies we are offered – and which, make no mistake, can be quite useful in limited cases – and begin to poke at the boundaries separating them.

So when I think of the NBA since Magic and Bird’s time, back, when, as they recently wrote, “the game was ours,” I think as much of Bird’s legendary trash-talking, I think of the image of Magic posterizing some chump with a tomahawk jam and then pointing to him as he lay splayed on the floor along the baseline. He wasn’t beaming. Sure I think of and marvel at their amazing array of skills and their run of titles. And I’m genuinely moved by the way their rivalry evolved into friendship and love. But I also think of their personal lives, seriously troubled at times like those of any human being. I think as well, as Brown Recluse, Esq. advises, of the marvelous players that have come after them in a more or less continuous stream since that time, patterning their unusual combination of skills and size and styles of play on some permutation of Magic and Bird.

And when I think that way, the gate at the Eastern end of the Garden of Eden, the one guarded by the angel with the flaming sword, the one that Adam and Eve left through, and that supposedly clearly marks the line between paradise and our own sorry existence starts to blur and fade.

I like that moment because the alternative offered by subscribing to the Eden story is to spend all of existence trying to make up for something I didn’t do and that I don’t think was wrong in the first place. It is to hate actual existence in the name of a time that has long since ceased to exist and that I don’t think ever existed in the first place.

So when the gates swing open, and I can acknowledge the splendor of Magic and Larry Legend in all its complex shadings, then the present and the future open back up and I am once again in a position, as one of Phillip Pullman’s characters urges: “to build the Republic of Heaven right here, because for us there is nowhere else” and to appreciate those in the game and the world today who are laboring to build it too.

go back to read my account of Walton and Jabbar and the politics of the late 70s NBA

or

Go on to read about our discussion of the Young Michael Jordan here

Clyde the Glide's Guide for the Perplexed

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 04 Mar 2011 04:22:00 +0000

These thoughts on Walt Frazier's Rockin' Steady first appeared on the audio blog Voice on the Floor. I'm posting here as well for those who wanted to read that more slowly and without my actual voice ringing in their ears.

When people ask me what I do for a living I say I’m a professor. Almost inevitably, there’s a follow-up question: “Oh. That’s cool, what do you teach?” For twenty years, my answer has been some variation on “I teach literature.” If the person was also an academic in the humanities I might be more specific: “I teach Latin American literature” or “Comparative Literature.” But most people aren’t academic humanists, so I’d just say plain “literature.”

I’ve always found it embarrassing and disheartening to see the initial spark of interest sputter and fade when I answered. At best, it seems, literature is escape. For most, I know, literature is boring, pretentious, intimidating, even hateful; and all the more so because it is useless. I love literature. But I’m not proud of the sour taste that the study of literature has left in many people’s mouths. I know it’s not only the fault of literature professors, but certainly some of the blame lies there and, while I do my best to buck that trend, I’m still part of that system.

Lately, I’ve noticed that when that follow-up question comes I involuntarily pause because now I can say something else. I mean: I’ve always taught literature, my PhD is in literature, and my official title at the university is associate professor of comparative literature. But now I am teaching “Cultures of Basketball.” I imagine that will preserve interest. So I say it.
I can tell from the response whether they even heard the word “Cultures” at the beginning of my answer. If they look away glazed, then they heard it alright and I am stuffed back into the irrelevant egghead category – or maybe even worse now because I’ve sullied something as awesome as hoops with my wienerly eggheadery. But if I say it quickly enough – “cultures of BASKETBALL” – then they might miss it. Then I might get all I’ve ever really expected from these brief encounters: A raised eyebrow, a smile, a nod. “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for. You can go about your business. Move along.”

But the real truth is that in my own mind, for better and for worse, they really aren’t different things: literature and cultures of basketball. Because what fascinate me most in either case are the stories we are provoked to tell. It doesn’t make much difference to me whether the provocation comes from a novel, a full-court lob pass, or a good book about the game. I’m fascinated by the relationship that springs up between a reader and a book, a player and the game, or a fan and a play – a relationship that I believe exceeds each of its terms, is more than the sum of its part; a relationship that often gets expressed in the form of a story.

If I thought it would make any sense to the people who ask, I’d want to say I teach stories as a form of feeling, thinking, and acting in relation to the world. I’d borrow the words of the late Joseph Campbell, who spent a lifetime studying, classifying, and writing about the myths of the world, and concluded “we tell stories to try to come to terms with the world, to harmonize our lives with reality.” But who ever heard of that major?

When you spend as much time with stories as I do sometimes they can start to run together. Their uniqueness can fade from view and the different stories begin to appear as examples of a few types of story: for example, the love story, requited or unrequited, comic or tragic. This is how we classify, of course, and while we no doubt temporarily lose something precious and particular when we classify, we also gain (or we create, or we gain by creating) a vision of what is shared and held in common. This sort of vision was the basis for Campbell’s work on world mythology and it led him to some profound insights about the empowering roles that such common elements can play in our individual and collective spiritual and material lives.

I’ve noticed that books on basketball lend themselves to being sorted into a few basic categories. There is, of course, the autobiography and biography. There is the story of a season. There is the playground chronicle. There are historical surveys of the game (either general or emphasizing race, geography, gender, or institutional level or venue). There are the reports of the event that changed the game forever. There are books, often in coffee table format, on a single franchise or college program. Probably there are a few others. In describing these stock categories I don’t mean to disparage the world of basketball literature. Within each of the categories I just named are books that I would count among the most moving and thought provoking I have read.

And I find it interesting to identify the common patterns in the world of basketball mythology and try to understand why those patterns recur and what value they have. The underdog story, the best-there-never-was story, the selfish-individual-learns-team-values story, and so on. From there one might even try restore the specificity of the particular instance and try to understand how – for example – the underdog myth works differently depending on the class and race of the underdog in question. That’s part of the work that I’m trying to do in my course and in my own writing about basketball.

But I also feel drawn by the kind of book that stubbornly resists classification or paraphrase, or that invites multiple, even conflicting classifications. As I was preparing reading lists for my class back in early January, I discovered that the University of Michigan library had shelved the book Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball and Cool, by former Knicks star Walt Clyde Frazier and then New York Times reporter Ira Berkow, in the Children’s literature section. The particular classification certainly surprised me, but in another way, it didn’t. Clyde’s book is one of those that resists easy classification. You might even say that it resists sense entirely. And you might think therefore that Clyde’s book is useless, especially as a self-proclaimed guide. But I think nothing could be further from the truth. And that may be why the best place for Rockin’ Steady is the Children’s Literature.

For those unfamiliar with the work – and here already the book begins to resist me as I try to give you a mental picture of it – Rockin’ Steady was originally published in 1974 and was recently republished last Fall. Then as now it’s very format was unusual, large, square, fairly slim (at 144 pages), and richly decorated with photos and illustrations. In addition to the Preface by Berkow, a Foreword by Bill Russell and an Afterword by Clyde, the book has six chapters. 1. Cool; 2. Defense; 3. Offense; 4. Statistics; 5. Rockin’ Steady: Game Day Preparation; 6. A General Guide to Looking Good, and Other Matters. Just the list of chapters begins to give a sense of the book’s unruliness: the way that it seems to defy not only the classificatory schemas we might impose on it from outside, but also its own internal categories. Never mind that the “chapter” on Statistics is two pages long and includes only Frazier’s career stats and his four favorite box scores. In what sense of the word, it is fair to ask, is that a chapter? And even it is a chapter, then in what way does it relate to the chapters that come before and after it?

Once you ignore this and just get into the book things can get even more confusing. For example, the chapter on game day preparation naturally enough includes a description of how Clyde’s driver takes him to the arena. But it also includes a long digression on Clyde’s first car. It’s also hard to know exactly how the discussion of catching flies fits into the “General Guide to Looking Good and Other Matters” that comprises Chapter 6. I mean, obviously it’s part of “other matters,” right? Or is it part of “looking good”? How does it connect to the other topics in that chapter like proper sleep, weight lifting, money, and drying off with a towel after a shower? Even a more conventional chapter like “Offense” (conventionally titled I mean), includes the following within a list of moves and how to execute them: “Hook Shot: I never could shoot a hook shot.” In the “Defense” chapter a numbered list entitled “Fundamentals” promises simplicity and order until it grows like a virus to include 24 items, some subdivided and a few several paragraphs long. Fundamentals?

The book, at the same time, is tremendously absorbing, often moving, and has a quasi cult status. Even President Obama remembers buying it at the age of 12. His age reminds me that at Michigan we’ll find this book in the children’s literature section of the library. And that, after all, it is meant to be a guide. So all this raises for me the question of how to put these two sides of the equation together. A book that defies ready classification, that is internally incoherent, filled with digressions and useless instructions and even non-instructions is also simultaneously a guide revered by none other than the President of the United States for its value at a key formative moment in his life. What sort of guide is this? What sort of guidance does it offer? What is Clyde trying to teach me?

One of my strategies when we in class are stuck facing what appears to us to be a contradiction along the lines of “how can this be ‘x’ when it is also ‘y’?” is to investigate whether “this might be ‘x’ because it is also ‘y.’ What if Rockin’ Steady is a guide not despite but because of the way its excessive, digressive, and useless – but nonetheless absorbing – contents spill beyond all categories, even its own illogical ones? What might something like that be a guide to?

The word that springs to mind is “life.” I don’t mean though that Clyde’s book provides a blueprint for how to live your life, of the sort you might find in the self-help section of the book store. I mean that the experience of reading it is something like a laboratory exercise in life itself. Think about it: cool, offense, defense, statistics, game day, and looking good: isn’t that all of life? Let me translate, a general disposition (“cool”), how to make things happen you want to happen (offense), how to stop things from happening that you don’t want to happen (defense), how to relate to bureaucratic, quantitative forms of measurement (statistics), how to relate to particular events (game day), how to relate to qualitative forms of measurement (looking good). Now, doesn’t that kind of resemble the structure of life?

But of course as I’ve already said the book only looks like a how-to manual. If you really expect to come away from it with the instructions necessary to stop, say, Pete Maravich, then I don’t know what to tell you except that the joke is on you. For one thing, Clyde’s strategy involves getting Pete in a position where he’ll be distracted by the hair flopping into his eyes. Really? Then, even so, you’d still have to adapt Clyde’s instructions for stopping Pete Maravich to your own skill set because, well, you’re not Clyde, and neither am I. Except when I am. But wouldn’t it always be the case with any kind of guide to something as volatile and varied as life that you’d have to adapt it?

And wouldn’t it also have to be ironic, like these instructions that are not instructions. A great Argentinean writer, Julio Cortazar, once published a book that included instructions for doing everyday things: How to Cry, How to Climb a Staircase, How to Wind a Watch. Among the effects of such instructions is that we begin not only to look more closely at these everyday activities but also to wonder about our readiness to receive instructions for completing any but the simplest mechanical tasks.

If we step back, along with Clyde, and can laugh not only at him, as he does, but at our own frantic efforts to master this guide, to tie the whole thing up into a neat package that we can summarize and send on its way to the proper shelf then we can begin to see how it delivers an object lesson in dealing with at least those aspects of life that call for self-ironizing humor.
So I’m suggesting that one way to read Rockin Steady is as a kind of tutorial experience in life: confusing, promising, disappointing, edifying, amusing, moving, instructive, frustrating and, above all, meaningless apart from the effort you make to craft a meaning, a story if you will, from the elements it provides.

It might be that in this Clyde’s book is like other books that break molds and don’t fit neatly into the standard schemas by which we organize common patterns. Maybe what those books share is that they drive us to have – and not just hear about -- an experience in the course of reading them, and, thus, in the course of reading them, to gain practice for the lives we will live after we close them.

Those books might not be useful in our usual sense of the word. I’m reminded of the late novelist Italo Calvino who concluded a long article called “Why Read the Classics” with the following equivalent of a shoulder shrug: “it is better than not to read the classics.” I think Calvino was saying it’s not what the classics tell you that make them important, it’s what they do to you while you read them that’s important. In that respect, Rockin’ Steady is, for me, a classic.

And, if I think of classics as texts with which we help form our young, then what better place for Rockin’ Steady than the children’s section?

There Is No Spoon: Towards a Microphenomenal Hoops Criticism

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:47:00 +0000

It’s Spring Break, I’m home in St. Louis, and while my students are busy doing their hoops homework on the sunny soft beaches of Florida, Texas, and Mexico, the bi-weekly imperative of the course diary is temporarily relaxed. So in addition to finally putting together my reflections on Rockin Steady and why it’s in the Children’s Section of the library for the upcoming edition of Voice on the Floor, I’m also taking this time to try to explore more deeply some basic questions arising from my particular adventures in basketball fandom.

As I understand the history behind the notion of “liberated fandom,” Bethlehem Shoals and the crew at FreeDarko introduced it a few years ago in order to create a space in which basketball discussion could be more than just 1) crowing or moping about our favorite teams or 2) dissecting the personnel decisions of management because we had no control over them. One effect of the idea (if not its intention) seems to me to have been to allow us, even as we still held our team rooting interests, to become attached to individual players regardless of their team affiliation. In that sense, the notion entailed displacing the “team” in order to accommodate appreciation of the individual, regardless of whether he was on your “home” team or a rival, on a good or bad team.

Around the time FreeDarko was founded and the idea first floated, I was in the heart of Pistons territory. I’d been whole heartedly rooting for them since they came back from down 3-1 to beat TMac’s Magic in the first round of the 2003 NBA playoffs. In the draft that year, given what the Pistons already had and what I’d read about him, the now-notorious Darko draft pick (whereby he was made the number 2 pick after LeBron James but ahead of Carmelo Anthony, Dywane Wade and Chris Bosh) made sense to me and I was excited to see him integrated into this intriguing and improving team of under-the-radar flyers.

As Darko’s long long stint on Coach Larry Brown’s bench unfolded into a saga, I must confess that, though somewhat torn, I placidly toed the franchise line. At the time, I was participating regularly on pistonsforum.com (a fine fan site distinguished by the intelligence and courteousness of its core posters). There were a few vocal dissenters on the site who felt for a variety of reasons that Darko should be getting more run (this is before FreeDarko, remember). But I wasn’t one of them. I wouldn’t have minded. I wasn’t anti-Darko or anything. But like the solid coach on the floor point guard I was raised to be, I assumed that Larry Brown had his reasons and that they were good. After all, Larry was the Hall of Fame coach and, most of all, it was hard to argue with the results. The Pistons won the 2004 title and pushed the 2005 finals to Game 7 before dropping a series they could have won. And that was what was important to me.

The next season, Brown was replaced as coach by Flip Saunders and Darko was traded mid-season to the Orlando Magic. They won a bunch of regular season games and would make the Eastern Conference Finals that season and the next two. But they wouldn’t get back to the Finals before the excruciating process of breaking up an aging core and trying to rebuild around younger players began. At some point during those last two seasons I started to feel both bored and uneasy as a Pistons fan.

I felt bored because I knew they’d peaked and I knew they weren’t going to make the finals anymore. It wasn’t even their failure to do so that was bothering me, though. It was that their failure was predictable. But I was uneasy because I felt disloyal compared to my fellow forumites, many of whom were lifelong residents of Detroit and fiercely loyal to the franchise.

I remember one thread from late April 2006 that someone started about other teams and players that fans were having “affairs” with. I was interested in the thread, and so were a few other stalwart Pistons fans. We spent a few days confessing secret love for Kobe, DWade, Nash and others. It was thrilling, but perhaps expressible, even tolerable, only because it was tethered to the solid familiarity of our unwavering loyalty to the Pistons. Little did I know, at that time, that the feelings we were tentatively airing in our little corner of the basketball world had already been named and promoted as the birthright of all fans by the writers over at FreeDarko.

But not without resistance, naturally. For what could strike more to the soft beating heart of the Basketball Fan than the assertion that one might prefer an individual to a team? Isn’t what makes our game the Game the way that individuals sublimate their individual ego-interests for the sake of the W and the eternal glory of the team? We might have incensed a few solid Pistons fans because we were straying from that particular team during the spring of 2006. But imagine the reaction if we had gone further and asserted that we didn’t really care that much about teams period, let alone whether they win or lose.

In hoops, of course, it is still considered that the team wins games (at least least until we start compiling won loss records for franchise players like they do for pitchers in baseball, which may be where we are headed). All the marketing of individual stars, all the talk about the greatest individual players being great because of the rings they’ve won – all of that exists within a context in which, I think, everyone still believes that overall and in the broader scheme of things it is the team that wins the games.

I’m pointing this out in order to draw attention to the maybe obvious fact that “liberated fandom’s” displacement of the centrality of the team also opened the question of what criteria – if not winning, since only teams do that – might be used for judging individual players. Or, in other words, if we love teams either because they are our “home” teams or because they win, then why do we love (or hate) individual players?

The truth is, I think, that this displacement as applied to individual players also reverberated, at least as far as FreeDarko-thinkers were concerned, and so wound up expanding also the scope of reasons for choosing which teams to follow. So “liberated fandom” comes to rest in my mind as asserting the legitimacy of liking individual players as much as teams, and of liking players and teams both for reasons other than effectiveness at producing wins, and therefore making questions of taste and the art of advocating for taste a legitimate enterprise for someone thinking and writing about the game.

I doubt FreeDarko’s brain trust would want to claim that the idea was unknown before they tagged it with a catchy phrase (after all, as a kid in Wisconsin in the 70s, I vastly preferred the Vikings to the Packers because a) I dug purple and gold b) I liked watching Fran Tarkenton run around). And I know for a fact that in the years since they did so, they have, Shoals especially, tried to be careful to protect the nuances of the position.

I say this because I don’t want to overstate the novelty of this position or to rehearse a silly argument about whether there is room at the hoops banquet for raising a glass to those players or groups of players or teams that we love even when they are not effective; maybe even because of the way in which they are not effective. That compromises nobody’s right to cheer for the home team, or to bow in admiration of the one franchise that happens to put it together and secure the title in a given year. It just amplifies the range of what we can love in the game, the field of joy the game can provide and I don’t understand, frankly, how anybody could be against that.

Moreover, having spent most of my career thinking and writing about why I love the books that I love, I’m profoundly grateful for the path FD opened whereby I could apply my interests and skills to something I love even more than books: basketball.

In fact, in the very spirit of contributing the idea of something like a “sports criticism” that would be attentive simultaneously to specific, formal aspects of any given manifestation of the game and to the historical roots and social and cultural implications of that manifestation, as well as offer arguments supporting one’s affinities and aversions, I want here to push the idea of liberated fandom a little further along a path already suggested on FreeDarko and that I alluded to in an earlier post on style in the early NBA. I’m interested in advancing the possibility of a microphenomenal analysis of the game that could be the sports critical equivalent of close reading.

[WARNING: Over simplified literary critical excursus for those interested. Skip the following paragraph if you just want to get on with the ballin’.

In literary studies, close reading has traditionally been viewed as a way of approaching a text that excludes consideration of external factors in the course of interpretation. Understood in this way, it was felt to be at odds with approaches that would interpret texts in light of literary or cultural history, other art forms, philosophy, or society. But I’ve thought for some time that there’s no reason why close reading, where we attend to the formal details of a text (or even of just fragments of a text) like style, diction, and so forth, can’t be seen as a critical part of understanding how a text fits into the history of culture as well as into the social and cultural present of the world.]

Now back to the game. I’m interested in advancing the possibility that we can liberate ourselves from our attachment to individual player identities as well and in so doing open a space in which we can love (or hate) a fragment of physical motion, a facial expression, or an element of style.

As I say, I think this much is already implied by FreeDarko's Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac. Sure, it hews to the liberated fandom guidelines and organizes itself around individual players as expressions of certain types (the Master Builder, the Uncanny Peacocks, etc.). But when you look closely to see what those individual players are “made of” you find combinations of just the things I noted above: fragments of physical motion, facial expression (or gestures), and elements of style. In any given style guide illustration in that book the things I love are drawn and named in glorious living color. Take Chris Paul: “exacting vision at multiple depths” + inifintesimally brief stoppage of time” + extremely quick change od irection within fixed space” + minute incisions, precise and sharp” and so on. TO love, Chris Paul, in other words, is to love this particular combination of elements.

But can we love and organize our vision and thinking around these elments, and not only around the players that combine them artfully? I am trying to imagine a book on the game that organizes itself around these kinds of elements, fragments, or partial moves. The straight vertical rise: it’s a fragment of physical motion deployed by Ray Allen when he shoots a three, Dwayne Wade when he flushes at the end of a baseline drive, but also a Bill Russell block. Lateral change of speed and or direction: in Iverson’s cross over, but also in Artest’s perimeter defense.

From there, as is suggested in tantalizing, inventive brevity by FD’s almanac, that book would offer musings, meditations, fugues really, on the meanings (basketball, social, aesthetic, and philosophical) of these fragments. I would be free to love and follow “the move” (my shorthand for a piece of motion) as it migrates like an electric current from player to player, offense to defense, team to team, around the league, beyond the league, traversing all seemingly impermeable barriers at the speed of light and thereby reconfiguring all we hitherto deemed to be solid.

I know the Matrix is well-worn as a source for comparisons, but I can’t resist trying this one on for size. The so-called “old League”, where we are bound to our team affiliations regardless of who is wearing the jerseys, is like the Matrix when we don’t know how it works, like at the beginning of the movie. Liberated fandom is like being in the Matrix once you know how it works. It radically increases your potential and actual capacity within it, but still within certain limits. What I am fantasizing is having the eyes to be in the Matrix but seeing it all in code, like Neo does before he explodes the agent at the end. I’m dreaming of having the eyes to see all the zooming quantum particles of hoops action zooming around in all their defiant uncertainty and simplicity.

I feel like this would accommodate yet another – microphenomenal -- level on which I am drawn to the game. Not now only because “my team” wins (or loses artfully), not now only because “my player” excels (or fails to do so) through some freakish and exciting combination of skills, but also because “my move” – the bit of pure motion or rest that I love above all others – has momentarily gripped hold of the action on the court and become, for the briefest flash of time, the center around which the basketball universe turns.

But don’t let me mislead you. My enthusiasm for this, my fervent wish for the eyes to see and appreciate it, and my firm advocacy for amplifying our hoops vocabulary so that we might become fluent in the language of these dynamic fragments – none of that means that I don’t care about teams or players or about the game as a mystifying, beautiful whole.

On the contrary, for me, it is my way of caring about teams and individual players both. I want, in other words, to see at all levels at the same time and to be free to love (or hate) teams or players because I can see the way that they are themselves just uniquely invented combinations of these faster than light fragments. It might be something like a high-def sports criticism that could then begin to approximate the complexity not only of the game on the floor, but of the webs of affect that bind us to it.

Wilt: Just like any other 7 foot black millionaire anarchist who lives next door and is friends with Richard Nixon

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 01:22:00 +0000

What is Wilt: Just Like Any Other 7 Foot Black Millionaire Who Lives Next Door doing in the special anarchist collection of the University of Michigan library? Why is Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball and Cool by Walt “Clyde the Glide” Frazier shelved in the Children’s Literature section? As I was putting books on reserve for my upcoming course on hoops culture, these surprising discoveries got me thinking about what such misplacements can teach us about creative reclassification as means of shedding a burst of light on the shadowed sides of a too-familiar subject.

Wilt an anarchist? Hold up. I'll get to Clyde another day, but for now I want to deal with Wilt. I like anarchism and I like Wilt and I'm going to do my level best to invent a way for it to make profound sense for his autobiography to be in the anarchist collection. All I remember about Wilt’s political life was that he supported Nixon’s presidential run in 1968. For me it’s hard to spin that into anarchism or even radicalism. But, the truth is I last read Wilt’s autobiography in 1975 around the age of 10. So I took another look at the chapter on his involvement in that campaign.

Here’s the outline of the story as Wilt tells it in his anarchist autobiography. Sometime in the mid 1960s, Wilt befriends Nixon on a NY to LA plane ride (a lot happened to Wilt on planes, if the book is to be believed). Nixon impressed Wilt with his intellect and his “willingness to see things in global, rather than just national, terms.” Unconsciously, Wilt admits, he may also have been drawn to Nixon because he, like Wilt, had been saddled as a loser who couldn’t win the big one and as not very smart. Wilt hopes that if he works on the campaign then he’ll have the ear of the new President and be able to influence him on issues he feels strongly about, including overpopulation (“sweeping birth-control programs in the more backward countries”), equal opportunity for blacks, and the legalization and regulation of euthanasia and victimless crimes such as “gambling, prostitution, marijuana, and pornography.”

So first of all, how did Wilt and Nixon, who are both already megacelebrities by the 1960s -- even if they are both not smart losers, wind up sitting next to each other on a cross-country flight? What are the chances of that? Were they in coach? Who made the first move? And, what was Nixon thinking, I wonder. Fast forward years later, Wilt's in the oval office, sitting in front of Nixon who is at his desk. Kissinger in a chair maybe in the corner by the door. How would that have gone down?

Wilt begins, "I think we need some birth-control programs in the more backward countries." Nixon presses a button underneath his desk that starts the tape rolling, nods and smiles and thinks to himself: "This Bill Russell is more interesting than I expected." "For that matter," Wilt continues, encouraged, "I think it's cruel to keep some baby alive when it's born with so many mental and physical abnormalities that it can't possibly enjoy life. I feel the same way about prolong life for some sick old person who's in constant pain -- the way they did with President Truman last year." "But Bi - er, Wilt," says Nixon, leaning back in his chair smirking slyly, all faux innocence testing Wilt, "what about those who say it's humane to preserve life?" Wilt doesn't miss a beat, leaning forward in his chair he gestures with his huge palm, which flutters above Nixon's desk like an enormous black bird. Richard trembles slightly. "I'll tell you what to say to those people Richard: I think the only humane thing to do is end life. We need laws to make that possible." "Sweeping birth control abroad and euthanasia at home, Richard, and you've got that overpopulation problem beat." Nixon, chuckling, almost to himself "We've got our experiments in population control underway in Southeast Asia, you know, Wilt." The edges of Kissinger's lips curl up slightly.

Wilt’s high hopes are disappointed before Nixon even gets out of the gate, by the latter’s choice of Spiro Agnew as a running mate. Charged with selling the Nixon-Agnew ticket to black delegates at the 1968 RNC in Miami, Wilt counsels Agnew: “to say ‘black,’ not ‘Negro,’ and say it like he means it and isn’t afraid of it.” And to “say ‘law and order and justice,’ not just ‘law and order’ – and mean it.” Agnew appears to go along but then the next day “Spiro had a meeting with a group that had a lot of blacks in it. Do you know that dumb fuck must have said ‘Negro’ and ‘law and order’ 10,000 times? I’m sitting right there, looking at him, and sliding further down in my chair every minute. I finally walked out.” He’s further disappointed, once Nixon is elected, by his appointments to the Supreme Court and Attorney General and by his new posse of Watergate-bound henchmen. But the last straw? “I was also pissed off when Richard had our astronauts put an American flag on the moon. Outer space is supposed to be for all mankind, not just Americans. I was disappointed in Richard then.” Wilt wasn't the only one to have been fooled by Tricky Dick. Or to have been disappointed.

Of course, it depends entirely on what you mean by “anarchy,” but the only thing that to me reads as even vaguely anarchical (besides the story itself) is Wilt’s penchant for the world perspective on things; that, and maybe the fact that in the face of those who questioned his support for a Republican candidate Wilt declared himself to be the proto-liberated fan: “I’ve never paid much attention to labels and stereotypes. In sports, I root for individual players, not teams; in politics I vote for the man, not the party.”

And maybe there, in that last quotation, is something like a clue, or rather – more frankly – something that could be spun into a plausible or at least cool-ish reading of Wilt-as-Anarchist. Leonard Koppett once argued brilliantly that the essence of basketball is deception, but he also showed that if there is law of organization in basketball it is that it is “a team game to the nth degree,” more than any other sport. And, while Koppett and other good thinkers will readily admit that you can’t have a great team without great individual players, the law of the game still implies that if in conflict, the interests of the individual must be surbordinate to those of the team.

And so perhaps there is something a little anarchic in Wilt’s assertion of his preference for the individual over the team, the man over the party. Not just because he’s going against the accepted dogma ("basketball is a team game", "African-Americans who support republicans are working against their own interests as African-Americans" – both of which statements are no less likely to be true for being dogma); but because in asserting this he is also affirming that individuals are greater than the categories (party, team) we might employ in order to channel their powers and understand their meaning.

I don’t think that by itself that makes Wilt an anarchist. I do think it makes him a radical empiricist in the tradition of William James, who criticized what he called “vicious intellectualism” or “the abuse of naming”: “the treating of a name as excluding from the fact named what the name’s definition fails to positively positively to include" so that you might "contend that a person whom you have once called an 'equestrian' is thereby forever made uanble to walk on his own feet."

We know Wilt was sensitive to labels, sensitive to the abuse of naming. Labeled a scorer, he bent over backward to lead the league in assists – ironically, probably hurting his team in the process. Labeled a loser, he won a championship and then said that was enough for him, which somehow seems to negate the championship in the eyes of history. There are great players with no rings. It's almost as though, in basketball lore, Wilt has negative rings -- though he had two. Wilt always stood out at a time in American history when standing out as tall, black, physically powerful, and wealthy provoked fear and anxiety and set him up to be labeled.

And so, philosophical and political labels -- precisely -- aside, I bet he felt a desire, proportionate to the labeling, to be himself and to be accepted as such. I don’t know whether Wilt would agree with any thing I’m saying, nor do I really believe that what I’m saying is the explanation for why his autobiography is in the anarchist section of the library. But I do think there’s something anarchical (maybe it’s what FreeDarko calls “the nuclear option”) in the legacy of Wilt – something uncontainable by any hierarchically organizing powers.

Both his solitary individuality and his uncontainability -- he's "amazin'" he's "a problem that'll never be solved" -- seem echoed in the fact his is the only basketball book in the anarchist library. Well, not quite. Of the 76 works in the Michigan library that are classified under the same Library of Congress class and subclass as Wilt’s book (GV 884) – only two others are shelved in the anarchist collection: 1) Bad as I wanna Be, by Dennis Rodman and 2) ... wait for it ... Bad as I wanna dress: the unauthorized Dennis Rodman paper doll book.

In the dazzling novel Hopscotch, there’s a moment where one of the characters is reading a tract called “The Light of World Peace.” Its author, Ceferino Piriz, enumerates the number and type of “National Corporations” (like Ministries or Cabinet Departments, but more encompassing) that would exist in his ideal nation. He proposes a National Corporation of Houses of Collection in which he includes “deposits, warehouses, archives, museums, cemeteries, jails, asylums, homes for the blind, etc.” He reasons that “an archive keeps files in a collection; a cemetery keeps corpses in a collection; a jail keeps prisoners in a collection, etc..” The character over whose shoulder we are reading admires the Piriz, commenting that “he has an intuition for relationships, and that, basically, is true intelligence.

And that character’s emphasis on relationships reminds me that for all the individuality and uniqueness, asserted with ironic understatement in the subtitle of his autobiography – “just like any other 7 foot black millionaire who lives next door” – there is an assertion of relatedness that perhaps corresponds somehow to the affective yearning that those who knew him report Wilt feeling – to be loved. After all, even his involvement in the Nixon campaign seems motivated mostly by an affective connection, expressed perhaps in the self-conscious way he draws attention to the fact that he only ever calls Nixon "Richard" in the book. Journalist Pete Axthelm ventured a similar view even at the time.

To be like any other 7 foot black millionaire who lives next door, of course, is to be like almost nobody else, which is in a sense to be alone, in a group of one’s own, sui generis. But it is to be that because one is related to so many others who aren’t normally related to one another: 7 footers, blacks, millionaires, and neighbors. Wilt, in that sense, the ultimate individual, and the champion and poster-boy -- for better and for worse -- of the rights of the expression of individual potency comes also to stand for relatedness, and for relationship. Maybe it is that combination of an irreducible freedom that finds its highest expression in relation, that makes Wilt at home in the anarchist library.

Or maybe it's something else.

P.S. - for Jorge Luis Borges

Just as I was putting the finishing touches on this, I received the following e-mail reply from Ms. Julie Herrada, Curator of the Labadie Collection, whom I had queried about the book's placement:

Dear Mr. Colas,
Thank you for your inquiry. You ask a very good question. The book in question is indeed one which could easily fit in the general stacks. We purchased it on our Diversity fund in 1999. The Labadie Collection contains materials not only on radical history but also in Black history, Latino/Chicano history, and other subject areas that were once covered under the heading of “minorities”. Sometimes this overlaps with the general circulating collections. This particular copy of Wilt is a first edition with a dust jacket in excellent condition, which makes it more suitable for closed stacks than for the open stacks where dust jackets are routinely discarded before a book is placed on the shelf. It is true that the Labadie has relatively few books in the GV section of the catalog, but we do have over 100 titles, including, one on the Negro League team, the Detroit Stars; a few books on the boxer Jack Johnson; sports in Apartheid South Africa; Floyd Patterson, Dennis Rodman, Alvin Ailey, etc. We even have a couple dozen periodicals in this subject area.

I hope this answers your question. We would be happy to place this book on reserve in our reading room for your class if you wish. Please keep in mind that our hours are 10 a.m. – 5 p.m. M-F and 10 a.m. – noon on Saturdays.

Inside Man: Some Thoughts on Spike Lee's "He Got Game" (1998)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 16:10:00 +0000

Considering that I am going to be teaching this stuff, it was about time that I finally filled the gap and saw Spike Lee’s 1998 “He Got Game.” While I was occasionally bored or disappointed, I did care enough to watch the whole thing through (not a given for me), and (after a helpful conversation with Claire) I ultimately felt like I expect I might have had I stumbled upon a Brecht play: good message if somewhat heavy handed, cleverly aware of its own medium, and certain moments of aesthetic genius.

If you're looking for ambiguity, this is not the film for you. "He Got Game" unambiguously states the case that in the ever-increasingly high stakes game of finding the second-coming of the transcendent superstar who will win games, fill seats, and sell shoes, the gifted urban adolescent athlete is pure of heart, clear of head and surrounded by scummy parasitic schemers and criminals offering cash, gifts, and women in exchange for a commitment that the young star, will turn pro or sign with their college program. In "He Got Game," Jesus Shuttlesworth, the nation's number one prospect (played pretty convincingly by a young Ray Allen) turns it all down, except for one bizarre lapse where he hooks-up with a couple of pretty gross white prostitutes procured for him by the staff at "Tech U."

I applaud Lee for painting the scene in this way. Though both the goodness of Jesus and the badness of the coaches, agents, and hangers-on feel exaggerated to the point of inexplicable implausibility, this is an appropriate corrective to the somehow still prevailing myth that the young (usually African-American) superstar athlete is morally confused at best (on account of a perilous upbringing) and the (usually white) fixers, scouts, middle-men, agents, and coaches who surround him -- apart from a few opportunistic bad apples -- are just trying "to do what's best for the kids and the game goshdarnit."

Lee reminds us -- and we seem to require it no matter how many books like George Dohrman's Play their Hearts Out or Darcy Frey's The Last Shot, or documentaries like "Hoop Dreams" (and Lee offers a nod to the latter, whose two stars Arthur Agee and William Gates make cameos in the opening credits), come out -- that if you love the game, and Spike definitely loves the game, these are some of the conditions of possibility for what you love. It goes with the territory. Sort of the way that Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me" reminded me of what goes into my Big Mac. If I have to choose my basketball propaganda film: I'll take this vision over "Hoosiers"'s nostalgic fantasy of the time we scrappy little white folks pulled it together and through effort and the superior evolutionary leap called teamwork beat that team of frighteningly athletic but hopelessly individualistic Blacks.

Anyway, propaganda aside, "Super Size Me" made me hungry for McDonald's. And He Got Game made me hungry for more game, especially Ray Allen's work-of-art jump shot. But I think for subtly different reasons that have to do with what makes Spike Lee more than a superb (and much needed) propagandist. Super Size me didn't make me want McDonald's because it's images of the food were enticing, or because Spurlock told a narrative that I could relate to. I think it made me want the food because the food is made to be addictive and so almost any mention of it reminds my body that I want it. He Got Game made me want more basketball because when Lee wasn't talking with his voice, but just with his eyes and camera he created tableaus and fragments of narrative into which I could project myself.

So this is genius:

Aaron Copland's score connotes nothing more than the innocent expansive landscape of rural America where individuals with pluck and determination carve each their own modest path and the sum of all those modest paths, the sum of those small triumphs is the greatness of the country as a whole, registered in the crescendos. Lee gives us what the music leads us to expect -- the farm boy playing ball in the dirt driveway a stone's throw from golden fields -- but then gives us more to boot: the middle-aged black men shooting and hanging around an urban playground, two girls executing a perfect give-and-go, a young African-American boy working on his cross in an abandoned lot. All of it tied together with the fabric of Copland's score: do you get the picture yet? he's painting you a portrait of America.

Lee also gets the beauty of the ball in motion, say, on its arc toward the basket: he understands and communicates with his camera far better than I ever could in words the possibility, perfection, and power in that path. He gets and transmits effectively the combination of grace, beauty and force in the basketball player in improvisational motion.

When he shows me, in the clip above, or in the opening credits, just a fragment of a shot in the air, or the beginnings of a move toward the hoop, I can fill in the rest with the memories and fantasies of my own lifetime.

Lee also taps into a particular narrative that, while obviously not strictly speaking universal, certainly works for me: the story of the love and hatred, the collaboration and rivalry that is the relationship between father and son. My dad never pushed me the way that Jake pushes young Jesus in the film's flashbacks, relentlessly baiting him with trash-talk, swatting his every shot attempt, and even knocking him to the ground. But I still felt pushed to tears and desperate rage and moments of excellence by something that I attributed to my father. And so also the fantasy of Jesus, now grown, dominating his father and turning the physical and psychological tables in a final game of one on one, appeals in equal measure.

My own relationship with my dad has certainly evolved over the decades. I now deeply appreciate what he has taught me. I love what he is that I am, for better and for worse, and what he is that, for better and for worse, I will never be. But whatever is unresolved in my relationship to my dad, I am certain, would be resolved once and for all if we could play one game of one on one, under the floodlights. But it would have to have these three elements: 1) me swatting his shot and saying "get that shit outta here" 2) me saying "What you want? Jump shot, dunk?" and, most of all, 3) him relentlessly talking trash -- "I think I'l go around again", "I'm teaching, like I always been teaching" -- even in the face of the overwhelmingly obvious reality that I'm now the better player.

Possibility is dead! Long live possibility!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 21:37:00 +0000

What I remember best about it is the blur as I lay on my back in bed, shooting it straight up into the air with perfect back spin: red, white, and blue giving way to the vaguely perceived promise of purple, even lavendar. I was not yet ten, and my dad had brought it back from a business trip to Texas: a genuine ABA basketball autographed by the San Antonio Spurs.

I was thinking about that ball this morning because no sooner had I submitted to the Facebook status gods my wish that there be a pro hoops franchise in Saint Louis (less for the games than for the gear) than I discovered that there is one: the St. Louis Pioneers. All life should be so easy. But wait, there's more. Not only is there a pro team in St. Louis, but they play in -- wait for it -- the American Basketball Association. That's right the ABA. It's not your daddy's ABA, but it wants badly to be. It even licensed the name from the NBA which apparently owns it (of course, it owns everything related to basketball).

What David Stern Sees

On the Pioneers web page, the first image you see is the towering afro of Julius Erving, decked out in his Nets uniform and a thin, gold choker. Then the image morphs to side by side images of players that actually have something to do with St. Louis: Marvin Barnes of the old ABA Spirits of St. Louis and Bob Pettit of the old NBA St. Louis Hawks, and then finally Barnes shifts over to the left hand side of the image and Moses Malone takes over the right hand side, dressed in his Spirits of St. Louis # 13 jersey. It's a chaotic little montage, historically speaking, tying together three icons of the scintillating blackness of the 70s ABA with Pettit, the icon of an era when St. Louis resisted the innovations in the game represented by Erving, Barnes, Malone and the whole ABA, not to mention stubbornly refused to integrate its roster and was the worst place in the NBA for visiting African-American players.

But nevermind all that: St. Louis basketball is back. That's the story, the narrative arc: there is this thing that is one, it is called St. Louis basketball. Like God, or the Word, it was made flesh. That flesh was called, first, the Hawks (Pettit), then the Spirits (Barnes, Malone) and now the Pioneers (um, Erving? the ABA).

a spirit of saint louis

Right, if it seems a bit thin as a narrative, in my mind that's just part of what stamps its authenticity as the heir of the old ABA. That old ABA, you remember it from Terry Pluto's Loose Balls, the Fish that Saved Pittsburgh or, today's versions, Chapter 3 of Free Darko's new basketball history and Will Farrell's Semi-Pro. The best thing about the old ABA, for me is its resistance to narrative. As FreeDarko asks there in Chapter 3: "What the Hell was the ABA?" Even the canonical history of the ABA -- Pluto's Loose Balls -- is really just a garbage can full of awesome quotations from participants, arranged in chronological order, and prefaced with a dizzying table that chronicles the emergence and disappearance of franchises like so many bubbles on the surface of a pot of boiling water.

A Time Machine

What story can you tell about a pot of boiling water? "It wasn't boiling, I heated it up, it boiled. Now it's boiling."? Not much of A Story there, though lots of stories: like when none other than the Spirits' Marvin Barnes once refused to get on a plane home from Louisville (Eastern Time) because it would arrive in St Louis (Central Time) before it had left: "I ain't goin' on no time machine." Oh yes you are, sooner or later. Now the St. Louis Pioneers have given him a middle seat on theirs. But I'm down with the Pioneers' weird historical montage because it's weird and ultimately contradictory, incoherent, and unpolished (when I friended the Pioneers on Facebook I got a message from them with a dead link).

A More Dangerous Time Machine

When the old ABA merged into the NBA, not only did the NBA get some dazzling players, a handful of viable franchises, and the rights to the name, it exercised its irresistible Story-Making power to fold the ABA's own non-narrative existence into the NBA's larger story of global domination. It's the titanic chapter of the dialectic of the NBA where individual creativity and entertainment was sublimated by the Association into what would become the racial harmony of the Bird-Magic era + the awesome marketing extravaganza that is Michael Jordan. And it's not that that's wrong or untrue. The nine-years of ABA basketball are part of the NBA's history and it's right to tell it that way. But as always happens with time machines of this sort, possibilities get left behind. Possibility gets left behind.

Another kind of history

But a watched pot, they say never boils, and the part of the ABA that is unwatched, roiling craziness, unwitnessed by just about everyone: that's also part of what should be registered of its existence, then and now. I don't know how to tell that: maybe a poem, maybe a Nietzschean aphorism, maybe just a physical spasm. But I know it when I see it: the St. Louis Pioneers, whose home games are played at St. Louis Community College and whose roster includes nobody I have ever heard of. The ABA is dead. Long live the ABA. nbsp;At first I felt like a fool for having not known (or forgotten) about the new ABA (which began in 2000). But then as I clicked around some more I realized that this league takes the old ABA's resistance to narrative and intensifies it exponentially. It's hyperlink madness. The same hyperlink madness that led me to find a photo of a genuine ABA ball signed by the San Antonio Spurs just one year after I got mine. In fact, Claire just discovered the fine print on the bottom of this page, where the publishers of the online sports media outlet oursportscentral.com -- dedicated to "major league coverage of independent and minor league sports" -- throw in the towel: "Our SportsCentral no longer actively covers the American Basketball Association (ABA) as a professional league due in part to its inability to publish and play a schedule and the transitory nature of many of its teams." You can get an ABA franchise for around $10K (AI's mom did, back in 2008) and that will make your squad one of the 50 or so that float and sink in a given ABA season.

George Karl: One Last Time Machine

That ball my dad brought me back from San Antonio was one of two gifts from his business trips that I will never forget. The other was a genuine St. Louis Cardinals football helmet. So everything seems to come together, or at least it does when you begin to tell stories about it. The ball bore the autographs of (in order of recognition by me at the time): 1) Swen Nater; 2) George Gervin; 3) George Karl. I imagine their head coach, Tom Nissalke, also signed it since he was our neighbor who lived up the street from us in Madison, Wisconsin (I don't know, don't ask) and was probably the reason my dad got into the Spurs locker room after the game.

[Addendum from my father via e-mail, demonstrating how every history can be improved through surprising complication: "Sorry to disappoint you. Cannot remember the year of the meeting at San Antonio. I can tell you that it was not Nissalke who was instrumental in getting me the autographed ball but the representative of one of the laboratory companies that had a stand at the scientific meeting and when he learned that I planned to attend a game of the Spurs he said he was going too and he would get me the autographed ball. I shall continue digging into my records and hope to find some document (program, abstract, etc.) which might allow me to identify for certain which year was the meeting." My dad's research proved fruitful, determining that he was attending a conference in San Antonio from March 19 to 21 of 1975. That means he had caught the Spurs playing the Virginia Squires at home on March 21, just back from a road trip to -- you guessed it -- the Spirits of St. Louis.]

For many years that ball remained pristine. I saved it -- now displaying, now storing it in a bedroom closet -- long after the ABA merged into the NBA. When I moved out for college it stayed behind in the bedroom. At some point, I came home -- probably from graduate school, maybe later -- and wanted to shoot some hoops. Usually we kept a ball (a regular orange one) in a box in the garage. But for some reason, there wasn't one this time. So, without a second thought I retrieved the old ABA souvenir and used it to shoot away in the driveway, every meaningless dribble wearing away forever a bit of myth made mine. I still am unsure how I could have done that. The truth is, I think that I probably found it in the equipment box, already worn a bit as though someone else had taken a few shots with it. I'm going home in a week or so and I want to see if that ball is still there. If it is, even if it is flat and ordinary, the markings of ordinary time erasing the markings of legend that it once bore, I'm going to bring it back home with me to St. Louis and protect it. Maybe I'll even take it to a Pioneers game and get some autographs. Better yet: maybe I'll bring it with me to a tryout.

Could Be...

Capsule Reviews (IV): Bios of Pistol Pete and AI, Jabbar on the Reservation

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 22:04:00 +0000

Bios of two of the most culturally unassimilable and phenomenally skilled individual players to ever play the game -- Pistol Pete Maravich and Allen Iverson -- are featured here, along with Kareem Abdul Jabbar's memoir of his mid-life crisis spent as an assistant coach for a high school team on White Mountain Apache reservation.

Mark Kriegel, Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich (2007) Excellent biography of the hoops prodigy and college wonder whose pro career rarely lived up to its promise. Kriegel is a terrific prose stylist, and is both sensitive and thorough in portraying the powerful and powerfully vexed relationship between the Pistol and the father who formed him in the image of his own fantasies, as well as the social and athletic environment that shaped them both. Maravich emerged for me as a skill wizard whose growth as an all around player was stunted by a combination of his father's unwillingness to let go and his own unwillingness to accept opportunities to break away. By the end, when Pistol is carrying his father, dying of cancer, around his house in his arms, the full force of the story Kriegel had been telling hit me like an anvil. A touching, absorbing, sometimes humorous, informative must read.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, A Season on the Reservation: My Sojourn with the White Mountain Apache (1999) Nearly ten years after his retirement from the NBA as the all-time leading scorer, Kareem's interest in Native American history leads him unexpectedly to a one-season assistant coaching gig on the reservation. The strength of this book lies in the honesty with which Kareem lays out the surprises and difficulties he encountered along the way and in his attempt to connect his historical interests to his contemporary encounter with these teenagers. There's no simple tale of underdog triumph, or even of middle-age enlightenment. It's just a quietly told (perhaps a bit too quietly told), real-feeling story of some people thrown together in many ways by history and chance, who make each others' lives a little bit better by sharing a passion for the game.

Larry Platt, Only the Strong Survive: The Odyssey of Allen Iverson (2003). Nearly a decade old, I turned to this recently because of Iverson's decision to play ball in Turkey when no NBA team would pick him up. Despite his explicit intentions to the contrary, Platt's take veers pretty close to the hagiographical. But that's okay because AI is a saint. No, seriously, the book is at its strongest in helping to see the forces in AI's formative years that would shape not only his style of play on the court, but also his relationship to coaches and other players. AI may not have been a saint, but he is certainly a human being, and Platt does a good job of portraying the fear and the courage that drove one of the most exciting college and NBA players of the past two decades. Anyone who has dismissed AI for anything other than his play on the court needs to read this book and wake up. The book is also strong in its analysis of the cultural and economic meaning of AI as he entered the NBA from Georgetown and in this sense intersects well with Todd Boyd's book and others that I reviewedhere

The Professor is IN

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 19:59:00 +0000

Some of you know that I'm going to be teaching a course in the upcoming semester called "The Cultures of Basketball." I have a general sense of what I'd like to explore in the course -- the different meanings and stories we create around the game and the ways in which we create them -- and also a general sense of what I'd like the students to learn -- that their enjoyment of an activity that primarily serves as entertaining distraction can be enriched and complicated by thought, or, to put it in other words: that you can think about something you love without ruining it -- you can even love it more. But that's about all I know for sure. So I'm issuing an open invitation for suggestions. The course is for undergraduates. I don't know too much about the particular students I'll have, but from their responses to a querying e-mail I sent out, it appears they vary in experience from casual pick-up players and fans to members of my university's varsity men's team. I'll welcome suggestions for materials (books, essays, movies, clips, songs, etc.) of course, but also especially ways of structuring the course itself (historically, by level, by topic, by the genre or type of media through which we create these meanings, etc.).

Pat Riley's Pickle: L'il Gherkin on the Heat and Coach Spo

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 14:07:00 +0000

If you can't, or don't want to, beat 'em, join 'em. Just when everyone outside Miami was feeling that karmic justice had settled in on the basketball universe by making Miami a mediocre team so that we could pay attention to the teams and players who are actually doing something worth talking about this season, the imp of the schedule sends the Heat to Cleveland for Lebron's first return to the city he ditched. Armored vehicles, undercover cops, bans on "vulgar and profane" t-shirts, threats of violence, cats and dogs living together: TNT knows drama! In honor of the event, L'il Gherkin offers Go Yago! his two cents on the Heat's woes and the future of coach Erik Spoelstra.

Why have so many people been crapping all over Lebron? Didn’t he do what true champions do? Go to the team with the best chance of winning. It’s not like he went to NY where he would get the most money from salary as well as advertising and promotions. Or stayed in Cleveland where he wouldn’t win anything because management was never able to surround him with good enough supporting players. Sure he didn’t do what he said he would do (stay in Cleveland till he won a championship there), which explains why Cavalier fans should be upset. And of course they are, but I think New York, and basically the rest of the country except Miami is upset with Lebron.

I often wonder if there was a “correct” choice for Lebron. If he had chosen a different team would the outrage over his decision have been subdued and perhaps his public image saved? The recent struggles of the Heat are the only reason I am currently thinking about this subject again since the decision was made. It’s not like the Heat are playing awful, in fact they are over .500. And while they aren’t blowing any teams away with Wade’s struggles, injuries to key role players, and the drama between Coach Erik Spoelstra and the players it seems that we are at a crucial turning point. If the Heat end the month of December at or below .500 it’s likely Spoelstra will be fired and then the team will start to hit the panic button.

Luckily it’s still very early in the season and, not to the point where there’s any need to worry about missing out on the playoffs. Also; it’s fair to keep in mind how weak the Eastern conference is and, winning 41 games is probably enough for the 8th spot in the playoffs. Now I’m not suggesting that the Heat will only go .500. Realistically a team with such talent, despite the lack of chemistry should easily make the playoffs in the East. Now add to that the fact that the big 3 will eventually learn to play together the right way and that Mike Miller, at least, will return to the line-up, and there’s no reason why this team cannot win 50 games. Talentwise this is a team that could, in future seasons, rival the greats (71-72 Lakers, 85-86 Celtics and of course the 95-96 Bulls) but is Spoelstra capable of leading this team to greatness? After only two coaching seasons we don’t really know enough about him to make that judgment but from what I’ve seen he shows a great understanding for the game. Spoelstra did a fantastic job as the coach of the Heat the last two years but with this added star power it’s a much different situation. Managing the egos of two superstars and a perennial all-star is a job left for the greats. Especially when your team is calling “players only” meetings, it seems that things are starting to get out of control.

So what is Pat Riley to do? Slick his hair back like Gordon Gekko, and take control of this star stacked team? I gotta’ be honest, I’ve always been a huge Pat Riley fan, aside from the hair I loved the intensity he brought to his coaching and let’s be honest he is an elite coach. With 5 rings as a head coach he is clearly the better choice over Spoelstra, but then again he has also affirmed his faith in the Heat head coach. What is the best action at this point? Unfortunately there isn’t much Riley can do for now. You cannot relieve Spoelstra of his duties yet and it would be silly to give him a clear bill of confidence for the remainder of the season. However in a month there will be another Decision to be made. Hopefully for the owner’s sake the team is either playing up to potential or continuing to struggle. Anything in between will prolong the wait and see period for as long as it takes. And of course, the longer it takes to make a decision, the worse. - by L'il Gherkin

Capsule Reviews (III): On Simmons on Basketball, Goudsouzian on Bill Russell, Anderson and Millman on Pick-Up Ball, and Jackson on the 2004 Lakers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 21:07:00 +0000

A "broseph"'s biblical Book of Basketball, makes me laugh (a little) and cringe (a lot); a scholar writing an elegant history of one of the game's noblest stars; a couple of journalists publishing their subterranean history of the country's street games with the major press of the British New Left; and perhaps the greatest coach ever offering major revelations that turn out to have been rendered false by the passage of time. It's all here in my latest Capsule Review (remember each book is rated on a scaled of 1 to 5 basketballs).

Bill Simmons, The Book of Basketball (2009). Hmmm. This book was a major event for sports fans when it came out as Simmons writes one of the most popular fan sites on the web. I had a mixed experience with it, due primarily to Simmons’ style. Simmons shtick is that he is the regular sports fan, just like you, who finally gets his voice heard in the media. As you might expect, hearing the voice of the regular sports fan amplified by the media is both refreshing and unpleasant, reminding me that journalism is actually a skilled profession. Simmons’ unwieldy tome (697 pp.) is, I must admit, surprisingly coherent considering the variety (and varying lengths) of the chapters: it really just consists of variations on the very simple theme that basketball is a team game and so the players that most thorough understood and consistently embodied that truth are the ones most worthy of celebrating and remembering.

The Prologue and First three chapters are especially tight, moving from Simmons recollections of the birth of his passion for the game to an assertion of the importance of chemistry, teamwork, and a passion for winning as the secret to hoops success, to a reassessment of the most storied rivalry in the game’s history (between Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain – spoiler: Chamberlain comes off really badly), to a more general history of the NBA – all from the vantage point of deeply ingrained lessons in the importance of unselfishness and teamwork. After this we get, well, the kind of things that obsessive sports fans obsessively argue about such as who should be in the Hall of Fame and what would make it a cooler place to visit (taking up more than half the book), a discussion of MVP voting, what’s wrong with it, and how it should have played out, and the “What-If Game” where Simmons imagines the fall-out from any number of NBA road-not-taken scenarios (my favorite: what if the Pistons had not taken Carmelo Anthony instead of Darko Milicic with the # 2 pick in the 2003 NBA draft?)

In this course of this, Simmons seems never to have met a feeling or thought of his own that he does not consider worth writing down. His hampered editorial faculty leads both to comic gems and to cringetastic turds. Simmons is more informed than the average Buffalo Wildwings Broseph, and funnier too (in fact, he’s most of all a comedian whose material revolves around sports). But he seems also to have an almost hysterical compulsion to say “the thing he thinks we think he wouldn’t dare say”, as though he’s forever trying to get us to say “Oh no you didn’t!” And he then covers his embarrassment by trumpeting that “Hey, at least I’m honest.” I should say that there’s nothing I found truly offensive in here. But I bet Michael Kors would "question his taste level.” Funny sometimes, unpleasant sometimes, insightful on rare occasion, but as a compulsion, Simmons need to say everything finally grows tiresome and spreads like a oil spill through what could be a very well informed, more intelligent than average, and humorous take on the history and culture of the NBA.

Lars Anderson and Chad Millman, Pickup Artists: Street Basketball in America (1998) I found this a fascinating, and mostly entertaining, reading. Anderson and Millman cover a surprisingly broad range of forms of pickup ball from the 1940s to the present, from the well-known like Rucker Park to the (to me) less well known like prison and reservation leagues. Along the way, they show a socially informed sensitivity to the issues that have prevented great pickup players (men and women) from making it in organized professional leagues like the NBA and WNBA. Vivid, but understated, descriptions of the various streetball venues, with profiles of individuals supported by interviews with them (or, if they have passed away, with players who know them), as well as smartly paced narratives of particular games keep the book moving along nicely. One of the striking things about these tales is how they weave in and out of, approaching and then veering away from the better-known histories of mainstream organized basketball. A bonus is Anderson and Millman’s awareness of the way in which streetball is as much about the stories that get told about legendary players, moves, and games as it is about those players, moves, and games themselves. I'd call this an essential addition to any basketball library.

Aram Goudsouzian, King of the Court: Bill Russell and the Basketball Revolution (2010) Excellent biography of Russell, weaving together what he did that was new on the court, with what he did that was new as an African-American in the league, with what he did that was new as an athlete involved in politics. Goudsouzian is a historian and a good one and he sticks to what he does well. There's not much depth or subtlety on the motivation and psychology of Russell, but it doesn't feel like a deficiency. On the contrary, it comes off as an appropriate cautiousness. He's writing about what he feels he knows for sure, in order to illuminate and inform, not to be exploit drama.

Goudsouzian manages to combine a highly readable style with complex, interlocking portraits of an individual, a profession and its surrounding culture, and a society. Like all the best sportswriting, King of the Court is unafraid of the contradiction, complexity, and ambiguity that must inevitably arise when one looks thoughtfully at professional athletes in this country (thus we see Russell, wealthy, famous and celebrated, facing discrimination when trying to buy a house in the city he entertained and inspired); indeed when one looks thoughtfully at any single human life (we learn that Russell was insecure and fiercely proud, intensely self-disciplined and wildly self-indulgent, principled and pragmatic). This is the sort of thoughtful, compassionate, and honest treatment that all remarkable figures, really, that all of us deserve. Anyone with an interest in the NBA, the Celtics or Russell in particular, post-World War II US history, especially as regards race, will profit from and enjoy this work.

Phil Jackson, The Last Season: A Team in Search of its Soul (2004). This is an odd book, in part just because I read it six years after it was published, when the course of history not only belied its title (Jackson didn’t retire, but rather went on to preside over the Lakers rebuilding process culminating in back to back NBA titles in the last two years) but also its central drama (Jackson and star Kobe Bryant’s relationship, in this book apparently deteriorated beyond repair, seems now to be stronger than ever). In this sense, the book was like a time-capsule, or perhaps more like an old yearbook – “look at Dad’s hair!” “Mom, you actually wore that?!”. If I’d bought and read this in 2004, when it came out, I no doubt would have felt – as I believe most who reviewed the book did at the time – that I was getting an illuminating behind the scenes look at the implosion of one of the more stunning under-achievements in recent NBA history (Jackson’s heavily favored Lakers, featuring four future Hall of Fame players, was dismantled 4 games to 1 in the NBA finals by a Detroit Pistons team with no star). Reading it now, in the wake of subsequent events, it seems like it doesn’t tell me as much about that Lakers team as it does about Phil Jackson’s mind at work.

Certainly, there is something interesting about Jackson’s thinking about particular basketball issues that came up during the season, how to contend with certain match-ups and so forth. But the book is mostly about how Jackson plots a narrative and that, finally, isn’t all that interesting, perhaps even less so on account of the diary form of the book, which somehow rings false. Jackson’s a coach, a very good one, maybe the best ever, and at times we catch a glimpse of what makes that so (although I feel that Sacred Hoops did that better). But he’s not much of a story teller, doesn’t really even seem to like telling stories. And so the kick of this book for me, mostly came from measuring the difference between how things looked then and how they turned out. Fun, and probably worth the minimal time and effort that it takes to get through this one.

In the Beginning was The Handle

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 24 Oct 2010 17:48:00 +0000

"Hi! Can Yago play?"

Which came first, the comforting feel of the ball in my hands or my ability to keep it in my hands?

I don't know. But I know I don’t remember ever feeling bad with a basketball in my hand.

To this day, there is some mysterious connection that occurs when I pick up the ball, a current that begins to flow. I do remember sometimes feeling bad when thinking about basketball, especially in high school, especially junior and sometimes, more rarely, senior year. I might feel bad in a game when the ball was knocked out of my hands, but never, ever when the ball was in my hands. When the ball was in my hands, and even just when I stepped on the court, all was right: I always felt good, confident, hopeful, optimistic, relaxed, and at ease.

Don't Think Too Much

If I wasn’t playing I was looking forward to playing. When I finished playing I felt a bit of sadness, loss. Sometimes I’d feel disappointed in how I’d played. Sometimes I’d feel frustrated about the play of teammates or the breaks that hadn’t gone our way. Sometimes (usually) I’d feel nervous looking ahead to a game. But those feelings never grew to the point where I dreaded playing, or was afraid to play. On the contrary, they were always swaddled in eager anticipation of the next game, the next time the ball would be in my hands. Usually, just lying back in my bed, picking up my ball, move it around in my hands, just feeling it was enough to comfort me.

Near the beginning of his basketball memoir My Losing Season, the novelist Pat Conroy talks about the staccato rhythms of the ball on the floor:

Where did all those games go, the ones I threw myself headlong into as a boy, a rawboned kid who fell in love with the smell and shape of a basketball, who longed for its smooth skin on the nerve endings of my fingers and hands, who lived for the sound of its unmistakable heartbeat, its staccato rhythms, as I bounced it along the pavement throughout the ten thousand days of my boyhood.

I know well the comfort of that feel and of that sound. The sense of absolute easy, effortless control dribbling the basketball. It was on a string, a part of my hand. Casually dribbling, then springing into motion, intensifying the rhythm of the ball, which followed me a like a cheerfully obedient pet. And there was a kind of pleasure I felt and indulged in varying and controlling the rhythm of the ball hitting the pavement on the floor. I can’t consciously keep a beat to save my life, but with the ball in my hands, I was a percussionist -- the ball and pavement my instruments -- and more than once I dribbled around the driveway laying down the track of the bouncing ball over the rhythms of Earth, Wind and Fire blaring out of my father’s boom box (which he’d allowed me to take out to the garage).

I don't know. But I know I developed and refined my handle playing against my older brothers and my father in the driveway, probably starting around the summer I turned 5. They were bigger, stronger, and faster than me. Tony was the best athlete and most skilled, my Dad was the toughest and most physical, and Juan was the one would wear me down psychologically. But the truth is, I couldn’t shoot over any of them and I couldn’t back any of them down, and they were all three aggressive defenders who got up in my chest, suffocating me, and they all three got under my skin. If they took it easy on me on account of our age and size differences, they were masters at disguising it. My game was protecting the ball, and using its motion as I protected it to create an opening, a passage, a line of flight through which I could burst on my way to the hoop. Post moves, jumpers, fade-aways, they came later (in response to different defenders and different defenses).

This primal ability to protect the ball stayed with me and served me well, even years later, in high school. Our coach installed the North Carolina four-corners offense for the first time in my junior year when I joined the varsity as the starting point guard.

It's all about me

It might have been my favorite part of the game. We would lead by a point or two in the final couple of minutes, coach would signal for the four corners, and I would be back in my driveway, dribbling and dribbling, beating my man, dishing off to one of my teammates in the corner, keeping alive an endless possession, the feel of the ball in my hands - an opportunity to be selfish in a system that mostly had me thinking about others.

Those possessions in high school might end with a teammate’s easy lay-up; more often with me shooting free-throws, which I made, especially at the end of games. I loved being at the line at the end of close games with the ball in my hand. But at the beginning, when I was a kid, it was all lay-ups, earned lay-ups crafted in traffic, under duress. They never gave up, even when I’d created my half-step margin, they rode on the back of my hip, the steel bar of a man’s arm across my chest, a sharp knee in my thigh as I pushed past, knowing in my bones and muscles that the path to the hoop was mine, a thing I had made and that I had a right to.

Tony was the best athlete and the most skilled of my first three opponents. And so even as I got my step on him (earned when I was older, granted perhaps by him sometimes when I was younger, either because he wanted to keep it interesting or he wanted to teach me wordlessly), I know it wasn’t done. He might block my shot from behind and so I developed the knowledge of using my body and the hoop to protect the shot, to protect my space.

I learned that I could go under the basket to shoot the reverse, I learned to change my shot in mid-air, I learned to stop on a dime, fake, and when he had committed and gone up or by me I would toss it up softly off the board. So if my handle and my quickness were my first game, finishing strongly and creatively near the hoop were the second, and a corollary of the first, and like my handle forged by the conditions of the games and especially the opponents I had at hand.

(Here is a hoops axiom: You develop what your toughest competition forces you develop, or, You become what you cannot yet beat. It is true at the improvisational level of a single one-on-one play and it is true at the level of teams and organizations from season to season.)

My ball handling skills could also have been built upon the foundation of drills I would only learn later, and they were certainly eventually enhanced by those drills. But the fundamentals and their principled, systematic and orderly, development by rote came much later. First there was this pragmatic academy founded on the chaotic urgency of my small body and my desire to keep up, my will to be grown, and equal at least to the best around me. Somehow, there was no intimidation, no fear. I was anger and determination, I was that ball on a string in the beginning and that crazy, intuitively calculated prayer I would toss up off the glass at the end.

An End to Innocence, or How I Learned to Shoot a Jump Shot

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 23:37:00 +0000

My brother, Tony, through my childhood eyes

Tony is nine years older than I, my oldest sibling. As a boy, I idolized him completely. It wasn’t one thing in particular about him that I idolized, it was just his way of being in the world: energetic, confident, attractive, imaginative and spectacular in both success and failure. There’s a lot that I didn’t know about Tony’s life when I was young, a lot about his struggles that I didn’t really discover, let alone understand, until much later.

When Tony graduated high school, I was not quite nine years old. After one year of college (where he studied agronomy, trying to nourish into reality a long held dream of being a farmer), he moved out of my parents house and embarked on the first in a series of jobs in construction. At this point, the daily reality of him begins to fade from my memory, yielding to a simple, vague image of Tony as the embodiment of misunderstood strength, a strength that masked a tenderness and sensitivity that I fantasized he only revealed to me, his baby brother. He called me “Bean.”

But the concrete focal point of my admiration had already been established years before. Tony was a naturally gifted athlete with a special gift for basketball. He played ball as he lived: with an intensity that veered into recklessness, with intelligence, and with grace. He was also played out of position. An even 6 feet tall, with great quickness, strength and leaping ability, not to mention a fine jump shot and good ballhandling skills, he ought to have played guard. But on his high school team, he played center. He excelled, and maybe enjoyed himself. I don’t know. But I’ve often imagined that playing center confined the expression of his skill and athleticism and that somehow that stands for other hard luck constraints he would face in life. But I didn’t know any of that then. I just remember that on Friday or Saturday nights my parents would take me to his games and then for the rest of the weekend I would replay those games by myself in the driveway.

Me, in the driveway

I wasn’t in the driveway trying to do the particular things that I’d seen Tony do, nor was I practicing the things that he had shown me that I might want to learn first. I was just playing basketball by myself. Dribbling that perfectly beautiful orange rubber ball with the mysterious lines whose pattern I could never quite grasp around the driveway and then trying to heave it through the hoop. Just playing basketball. The patch of grass around the basketball pole grew bare so that when it rained mud puddles formed. My dad (or one of my brothers – I don’t remember which) put a couple of small pieces of scrap plywood there so that I could use that space without the ball thudding in a puddle, dead. Someone – I was so ignorant of the many little things that the grown-ups did to make my life easier -- also rigged a couple of extra workshop lights to the gutter of the garage to illuminate the driveway so that I could play after dark. In the winter, we shoveled away the snow, put salt on the patches of ice, and wore gloves. Year round, I played nearly every day.

When I got to middle school I made my school team and began to learn about plays and defenses and teamwork. But in terms of individual skills, I still just did what I had always done in the driveway. I dribbled, passed, and shot the ball, just as I had naturally grown to do them. Even the drills we did in practice to reinforce those skills were pretty much the same as what I did in the driveway, except that there were other people around doing them too. I got along just fine, an above average guard with good ball-handling, passing, and shooting skills and a growing intellectual and intuitive sense of the ways of the game. And I loved the game.

Most kids, when they shoot a basketball, will just push it up toward the basket from around their chest with two hands. They might leave their feet to do so, but it is more that the momentum created by their upper bodies pull their feet up off the ground in a kind of half-hearted, uncontrolled jump after the fact of the shot. And for most kids, including me, if you do it enough times, it starts to work pretty well. But around eighth grade, some of the kids suddenly grow, not just taller, but facial hair and defined muscles. If you happen to be defended by one of these kids when you are trying to push that ball up to the basket from your chest, you are very likely, as they used to say, to wind up with “Spalding” imprinted on your forehead. You’ll get your shot blocked.

This sucks

Enter what is called a “jump shot.” Enter my first teacher. Enter my first lesson in the art and value and pain of discipline, practice, and the cultivation of a second nature. Or, in another words, enter the trying rewards of being banished from The Garden. One day in eighth grade, before our season had started, as we were all just shooting around before practice, or maybe it was after practice, Coach drew me away from the group and toward a side hoop. “Yago,” he said, “I expect you to do more scoring this year. But you are doing to have to develop a jump shot.”

Now, I was a pretty conformist kid, afraid enough of getting in trouble and eager enough to please that I rarely questioned or rebelled against authority. And I didn’t this time either. But I did feel a kind of dread and inner resistance upon hearing Coach’s words. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to learn to shoot a jump shot, or didn’t want to score more points, or help the team. I think it was mainly that I didn’t want to change what had always worked just fine for me, and then maybe partly also that I was a little afraid that I wouldn’t be able to learn to shoot a jump shot. It’s still that way for me sometimes, for example when someone has read a draft of something I’ve written and tells me they have some suggestions.

But as I say I was a pretty obedient kid and I did respect my Coach. So that day I learned the mechanics of the jump shot. In almost every way, it ran absolutely counter to everything my body and mind had been doing with a basketball for the last nearly ten years. To begin with, there were the physical changes in my shot. Now, I had to shift the ball from my chest to just above my forehead, my right arm cocked at a ninety angle below the ball. Plus I had to push with just my right hand, positioned in the center of the ball, halfway between the bottom and the middle, while my left hand was relegated to a spot alongside the ball, merely guiding its path. And then, of course, I had to jump. But I had to jump, while beginning to push the ball, and releasing it only at the top of my jump. You might be surprised at how hard it is just to execute the motion – let alone putting the ball in the hoop -- if you’ve never done it before. It was incredibly awkward. My first attempts looked much more like the seizures of an epileptic frog than like the graceful jumpers I’d seen my older brother drain hundreds of times.

But the very hardest change was the mental one. Or rather, more precisely, the hardest change was the fact that now there was a mental aspect. For the first time, I had to think about what I was doing with a basketball in my hands. The physical motions of the jump shot certainly were awkward. But I felt absolutely out of my element thinking at the same time, trying to coordinate the rapid fire list of instructions I had internalized with the still unfamiliar and uncomfortable motions of my body. I felt intensely self-conscious and judgmental. Before this I felt myself one with my body and the ball. I dribbled. I passed. I shot. It went in or it didn’t. I don’t even remember thinking I was good or bad or that I’d done something well or poorly.

But a separation now grew within me. My mind knew what it was supposed to do and what my body was supposed to. And my body would gamely, but highly erratically try to follow along. Running alongside this was an annoying mosquito buzz of self-assessment, usually negative and rarely constructively so. This split weighed on me. It introduced a dimension of experience and tragedy into what had been for me a completely innocent and joyful activity. Of course, I didn’t think in these terms at that age. I just felt for the first time in my life ill-at-ease with a basketball in my hands. And so also for the first time in my life I felt unhappiness on a basketball court.

Not only that, but my accuracy plummeted. I could barely hit the court with my new jump shot, let alone put it through the hoop. And I wasn’t even doing it with one of those big, muscly, hairy guys with body odor in my face. Coach encouraged me, told me not to worry about it, that this happens to everyone when they learn a jump shot and that soon, if I kept at it, I’d be more accurate than I had been before and in a greater variety of game situations. But I had almost no faith that this jump shot thing had been a good idea.

Almost no faith. But a lot of some other things that wound up working much the way that faith is supposed to work. Whether it was the desire to please someone I respected, a prideful aversion to looking like an idiot, or some kind of stubbornness within me, I don’t know. I know it wasn’t some sort of Rocky-esque heroic determination to succeed, grounded in a solid belief in what I was doing. Whatever it was, semi-depressed,

This feels weird

I stuck with the jump shot. I shot hundreds a day. I took extra time in the gym after practice. Then after dinner, go out to the garage, retrieve my ball out of the big wooden box my dad had built for our sports equipment, switch on the lights, and shoot jump shots. I no longer just dribbled aimlessly around the driveway, heaving set shots at the hoop. I no longer played out the last seconds of a championship game culminating in my hitting the winning bucket at the buzzer (or, if I missed, in getting fouled and sinking the winning free throws or, if I missed those, getting another chance because my opponent had stepped in the lane prematurely).

I wasn’t just playing any more. I was practicing. Five spots: baseline on either side of the hoop, each wing (a forty-five degree angle from the baseline), and right in front of the hoop. I did what Coach told me to do. I shot from those spots, beginning just five feet or so away. I tried to shoot one hundred shots from each spot. Sometimes I made it to 100. More often, I’d yield to despair and discouragement and pack it in after about fifty, angrily slam the ball into the wooden box and storm upstairs to my room (having sullenly grabbed a handful of chocolate chip cookies), where I’d eat and rage silently in self-pity at the injustice of having to change my shot.

But then, after a few minutes of sulking I would take my other basketball, and just lay there in bed, practicing the arm motions of the shot, practicing my follow through, the ball just rising with backspin in a straight line for a few feet before descending back into the open palm of my right hand. I still don’t know how that works. What made me pick up the ball and do that. It could have been – it could be – so many different things. Just contingencies of the moment I guess.

All the while, I was growing physically stronger and little by little I didn’t have to think so much about the motions. I still practiced constantly. But I made up little games for myself. Make three in a row from a spot and then move to the next spot. Make three in a row from all five spots and then back up a couple of steps and do it again. Then as a treat I would let myself take a few dribbles to one side or the other and then pull up to shoot the jump shot. Or I’d toss the ball, with back spin (so that it would bounce back toward me), step to it and catch it like a pass and then square up to shoot. It felt like an eternity at the time (imagine how time felt to Adam and Eve after they got in trouble with God), but looking it back it probably wasn’t more than a month or so before the bulk of my time spent in the driveway looked a lot like it always had. Sure there was some structured practice at the beginning. But mostly I’d dribble around the driveway, counting down the final seconds in my mind, evade an imaginary defender and then pull up, rising over his helpless teammate, and effortlessly swish a jump shot to win the championship game.

The striking thing to me is that it is still with me. I love to get into pickup games, especially full court. But sometimes, when I can’t find a game, or just because, I take my ball and go to the gym or the playground and I practice my jump shot. I’m not 13 anymore trying to get better to as to impress a coach, or make a team, or get to the next level. I have no hopes of that sort.

Same, but different

I’m 45 and my knees often hurt and there is no next level for me. But I still start on the baseline, five feet away, and take a five jumpers. I still check and correct my mechanics when shots go awry. I still work my way around the perimeter, gradually increasing the distance until I’m working my way around the three point line. A hundred, two hundred, three hundred shots. I don’t really find myself imagining game winning shots anymore. I think I'm probably a better shooter than I ever have been, but I don't think that even matters to me too much. But I find that take a deep, comforting pleasure in the feel of the ball, the sight of the rim above me, the breaking of a sweat, the entering into a rhythm and, above all, the sound of the ball rustling the net. I love this practice that has no purpose other than itself, this practice that has become play.

I only wish that I could play a game of one on one with my brother.

A Three-Pointer for AnarchoHoops: 101 Words

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 01:47:00 +0000

Who do we need?

Once, watching Sheed and the Pistons with me, Claire indignantly asked, “why do they need refs?!”

From Alexander Wolff’s forward to Pickup Artists: “Some folks – the kind who take any exuberant young talent and try to truss it up in a blazer – sneer at basketball in its freest form. Those people would not have an ally in the inventor of the game. . . . The original Doctor J also said, ‘Basketball is a game that cannot be coached. It can only be played.”

Did William Gates, one of the exuberant young talents in Hoop Dreams need Gene Pingatore?

Capsule Reviews (II): On Davis, Araton, Boyd and Wetzel and Yaeger

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 17:26:00 +0000

The four books that I'm including in this second "capsule review" all revolve around basketball culture (NBA, NCAA, AAU, and HS) over the last three decades. They also all share the perspective that something changed dramatically during that time. But each configures the basic components of the story -- the game, race, money, the media, players, coaches, organizing institutions, apparel -- in slightly different ways. These books left me with the impression of four different sound boards, where the components I just listed are the "channels." The volume of each channel and the combination of channels made for sometimes strikingly different outputs; so much so that it was hard to believe at times that they were looking at the same game.

Seth Davis, author of When March Went Mad: The Game That Transformed Basketball (2009), seems like the happiest of our campers. "The Game" of the title refers to the 1979 NCAA Men's Basketball Championship Game, held in Salt Lake City, Utah. That year's title game featured the Michigan State Spartans and their sophomore point guard Earvin "Magic" Johnson and the Indiana State Sycamores, led by their senior forward Larry Bird. It was the highest rated basketball game, of any level, ever televised: nearly one quarter of all television sets in America tuned into it. By the Fall of 1979, Magic and Bird were preparing for their first NBA training camps and the start of careers that would help to transform that league, ESPN would be broadcasting from Bristol, Connecticut, and the NCAA tournament committee was contemplating another expansion of the men's tournament field (to 48). The money involved is perhaps most astonishing. The 1979 tournament grossed $5.2 million in TV revenues. Twenty years later, CBS paid the NCAA $6 billion dollars for an eleven year deal. Last year, the NCAA opted out of the final three years of that earlier deal and inked a new one that will expand the tournament field to 68 teams and net the NCAA $771 million per year for fourteen years.

I've noted before how silly I think it is to trace discernible historical changes back to a single event. And this is no exception. The very fact that 24.1 percent of American television sets were tuned into the 1979 championship game already indicates that some things had already changed before that game: the game was being broadcast live in prime time, the viewing public already knew the players, having had the opportunity to see them each at least once on national television. Among basketball fans, even young ones like myself, broadcasters Al McGuire, Dick Enberg, and Billy Packer were already household names, personalities you loved to hate and celebrities in their own right. So it's not as though this one game transformed basketball. But it was a great story, it does serve as an acceptable symbolic watershed, and since the power brokers in the media seem to think, according to this book, in the oversimplified terms of the single epoch-making event then, in a certain sense, it does also gain some substantive weight.

Davis's story, however, focuses more than anything on the stories behind the two teams. There's a lot of detail here and that very detail, in chronicling the personalities of the players, the conflicts in the locker rooms, and the ups and downs of MSU and ISU's respective seasons, complicates the narrative tapestry that unfolds toward and from the pivotal championship game. This increasing complexity both diminishes and augments the importance of the game itself. After all, I asked myself, reading Davis's account, is the title game more important than Magic's decision to attend MSU (by no means a foregone conclusion)? More important than Bird's to enroll in ISU after having dropped out of Indiana? More important than the coaching changes that occurred at each school? Than the numerous last second shots that kept Indiana State's won-loss record pristine up until their loss to MSU in the championship game? On the other hand, immersed in the myriad contingent factors that happened to converge to produce this particular game and to lend it narrative richness (not to mention with the retrospective knowledge that Magic and Bird would become great rivals and friends in the NBA -- or was that an effect of this game as well?), it's easy to begin to feel, irrational as that may be, that this game was somehow meant to be, the crowning convergence of a number of factors that could have -- that maybe even should have -- gone a different way.

I liked thinking about this, but I feel that this had more to do with me and the basic structure of the "x that changed y" school of sports history. Perhaps Davis knew what he was doing with that and I am undercrediting him. But it didn't feel that way as I read it. The prose tends to be bland, and most of the fascinating social and culture dimensions of the game are barely grazed. Think about it the prevailing attitude among the typical white male fan toward game at that moment: NBA (black, drug infested, overpaid, unpopular) vs. NCAA (white, clean, spirited, popular). Into this come Michigan State University (less glamorous than Michigan, and led by a black star, but one who is charming and charismatic and comes from a solid working class family) and Indiana State (whoever they are, they are not powerhouse Indiana, and they are led by a white star, but who is surly, dirt poor, and from a broken family -- Bird's parents were divorced, his father had killed himself, and Bird himself had fathered a child out of wedlock). The ironic twists and turns of this can get to be dizzying, but Davis barely registers these dimensions.

Finally, a "game that transformed basketball", and featured two of the greatest players who ever played, deserves a more poetic treatment than it gets here. No doubt my own memories of the beauty and enchantment of that game are intensified by the fact that I was not yet 14 at the time. Still, the miraculous perfection, both fragile and inevitable, of a Magic to Special K (Greg Kelser, Spartans forward) alley-oop jam or of Bird's effortless, economical motion on impossibly long range jumpers; both deserve more "french pastry" -- as Al McGuire used to refer to decorative embellishment -- than Davis gives it. Davis's writing reminded me, most of all, of very good young adult sports fiction.

The cover of the book is mesmerizing to me, mimicking a faded handbill publicizing the game. The image is brilliant, giving the multiple sense of a game that perhaps, then, still needed publicizing and in a media (the handbill) that has long-since been rendered irrelevant, perhaps by the very forces that game set in motion, or, at least, accelerated. The image also effectively activates a perfect nostalgia in the sense that it makes me fondly remember something that never happened. And I guess, ultimately, my disappointment stems not from my intellectual critique of the over-simplified history, but from the fact that, for me, this game did transform basketball and I wanted the book that told its story to rise -- like a Magic alley-oop pass, like a Bird long jumper -- to assume the full social, cultural, and athletic dimensions of that memory. It didn't.

Whether or not this one game was responsible, it is clear that the game and its culture, as described in the other books I've recently read, has indeed undergone a transformation since 1979. In a certain sense, these books pick up where Davis leaves off. In Sole Influence: Basketball, Corporate Greed, and the Corruption of America's Youth (2000), journalists Dan Wetzel and Don Yaeger reveal the yucky crap stuck to the soles of my beloved Air Jordans. This is not primarily the story of exploited third world labor, but rather of the weird culture of those who comb America's playgrounds and schools in search of the next Michael Jordan. In the wake of the massive increase in their sales (and the expansion of the sports apparel market more generally) thanks first of all to Michael Jordan, Nike sparked a kind of advanced competition among shoe manufacturers to identify, equip, and secure the future services of young players who might one day rise to superstardom in the NBA and, like Mike, be skillful pitchmen with crossover appeal. In the course of this competition, "stage" parents, ambitious high school, college, and AAU coaches, sychopantic adult groupies who worship teenage boys, pedophiles, drug dealers, and, of course, the barely adolescent young phenoms themselves all have a part to play.

Wetzel and Yaeger provide excellent reporting, good storytelling, and a clear sense of moral outrage. As the title suggests, this for them is primarily the story of multinational corporations obsessed with adding a dollar to the profit margin and more than willing to ignore the harm they do to the pure souls of America's youth in the process. In this respect, at first glance, they give me sort of the same feeling as watching Michael Moore's Roger and Me: namely, isn't corporate greed redundant? Or, in other words, is this really shocking to you? And it even resonates oddly with nostalgic tales about the old days in the NBA. We might remember, then, team play and hard nosed competition for the love of the game and clean-cut, fair, profit-taking in business as both signs of how things were better back in the day.

That's easy to ridicule, but the devil of that story really is in the details. And as I read the numerous particular stories that Wetzel and Yaeger track down and then weave into this overall narrative of unfettered greed and corruption, I find myself persuaded. For each of the few hundred players that actually make it into the NBA and get rich playing ball, there are many, many more who are drawn into a web that distorts their lives and leaves them with an even more restricted set of opportunities than the meager set they were probably born with. This web, the book makes clear, may sometimes expoit the fantasies and desperation of the kids and their families, but it is unmistakably designed by shoe company executives and spun by a decidedly unsavory and selfish cast of hangers-on. The whole thing is then fueled by a vortex of marketing and consumption facilitated by a proliferation of media exposure.

For Wetzel and Yaeger, the game itself has been a main casualty of the shoe wars, to wit:

"The quality of play the NBA is putting out each night is not up to the aesthetic levels of the past few decades. The level of boorish player behavior, however, is at a record high. The league's newest generation of players, the ones weaned on a steady diet of free gear and AAU ball, is generally regarded as pushing the game to new depths. The worst are vocal defenders of their individual rights. They are shocked when informed marijuana is illegal, hustle is demanded, off season workouts are expected. They talk on the cell phones a lot. They don't dive on the floor very often."

Maybe. Though as I've absorbing massive amounts of basketball narrative in recent months, I'm amazed at how widespread is the feeling, in each generation, that the game is worse than it used to be, and worse in a strange moral sense of the word. In their final chapter, Wetzel and Yaeger make a stab at transforming the growing sense of sad helplessness their own narrative has generated into a call to action. But unfortunately, that call can only, I think because of the moralizing overarching structure of the book, be a Peter Parkeresque insistence that with great power (or, they put it, "rights") come responsibilities. Maybe. But even if we subscribe to that same principle, the call itself forgets the larger social and cultural forces that keep that moral from sticking, forces that the authors themselves have painstakingly exposed.

The last two books offer two distinct takes on what Wetzel and Yaeger see as the injury to the game. Harvey Araton seems to share that sense of the NBA as having experienced a recent dip in beauty and moral quality, though he sees hope in the infusion of international players. Meanwhile, Todd Boyd takes issue with the very characterization of the NBA's recent past as a distortion fueled by cultural misunderstanding and racial fear and resentment.

In Crashing the Borders: How Basketball Won the World and Lost Its Soul at Home (2005), Araton, a New York Times columnist, tells the history of the NBA from around the time of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics to the November 2004 brawl between the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers, and between the Pacers and the Pistons' fans. The arc of that history, for Araton, is obviously a fall from grace (the losing of its soul). However, Araton also seems to see hope for the game in that the very success it enjoyed abroad (as a result of the 1992 Barcelona dream team's popularity) generated an influx of international players who, as Araton sees it, are revitalizing the game and deprioritizing some of those dimensions of the game (one-on-one play, the slam dunk) that Araton feels have hurt it. I'd say that this is just one more middle-aged white man's lament for the loss of the game of his boyhood when the game itself was more horizontal and the players, regardless of race, more -- as they say today -- "relatable".

But I must give Araton some credit here. While I do feel that nostalgia is the overarching narrative governor in this book, he is more than capable of airing a different, and critical perspective on that way of telling the story, and he is able to accommodate and articulate his own mixed feelings about the game today. And, Araton's sensibilities are capacious enough to deal with the social and political forces running through the game. Above all, I appreciate Araton's willingness to air both this ambivalence and honest uncertainty about how to move forward. This allows me to feel included in the conversation as a conversation (as opposed to just a PTI style sports-guys-shouting dialogue of the deaf).

Professor Todd Boyd, of USC, offers a different take on all this NBA and NCAA history in Young, Black, Rich, & Famous: The Rise of the NBA, the Hip Hop Invasion, and the Transformation of American Culture (2003). Though, frankly, I found this book disappointing, frustrating, and hard to get through, I also found it a refreshing alternative to the more restricted analytical scope of mainstream journalistic accounts and I'm glad it exists. Boyd's book positions itself as history with a thesis, as all history must necessarily be. In this case, the history is of the NBA since the 1970s and the thesis is that as the league's player pool grew to be predominantly black, NBA culture intertwined with other forms of black popular culture (primarily hip hop) characterized by an unapologetic individualism and that white owners and white fans find this racialized cultural amalgam highly threatening. I don't really disagree with this. In fact, I find it, particularly in light of the flap over Lebron using the "R-word", refreshing and valuable. Boyd's periodization of the NBA in relation to music history is also provocative and provides food for thought, though I wish that he had deepened it to include analysis of musical structures themselves (rather than restricting himself to the occasional reference to lyrics or marketing styles). I found it interesting to think about the relationships and transitions between Oscar Robertson and Motown or between Magic Johnson and Michael Jackson; as well as Boyd's more general reflections on the politics of relating basketball to various musical genres such as jazz, classical, funk, or hip hop.

At the same time, I found the structure and style of Boyd's writing confusing and, at times, contradictory and alienating. I have no issues with his desire to marry the "formal and the vernacular" as he puts it. On the contrary, I applaud his intention and admire his skill in doing so. But the book also suffers from flaws that I don't think stem from this particular stylistic strategy: unnecessary repetition that makes the book sometimes feel like a series of essays pretending to be a book, unhelpful oversimplification that makes even a sympathetic reader like me take issue, and the presentation of conjecture (however warranted) as fact. I'm glad this book was written, because the topic is both interesting and important to me. But because the topic is both interesting and important to me, I wish it had been written with more care and subtlety and with more desire to persuade a broader audience.

Thinking With And: 101 Words

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 18:51:00 +0000

Introducing a new feature. My friend Jason encourages me, like John Wooden but in his own words to "be quick but don't hurry." In the spirit all of who create within the constraints of arbitrary rules (and honoring and surpassing Wilt): 101 words, no more no less.

...and it could be like this

I’ve lost patience.

Couldn't Lebron's Decision Spectacle (backlash included) be complex? Couldn't Lebron be narcissistic AND immature AND want to play with friends AND want a championship AND feel unsure AND want publicity AND want money? AND couldn't we feel annoyed AND jealous AND value loyalty AND stability? AND couldn't white men secretly resent wealthy, young, independent black men?

Couldn't this be about race AND class AND tribe AND...?

Couldn't we, Lebron too, “contain multitudes”?

Would it be so terrible to say “Yes”?

“Thinking with AND. . . Try it, it is a quite extraordinary thought, and yet it is life.”

You can't guard me

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 13:59:00 +0000

How do you get to be a trash talker? What is that all about anyway? Why do I love it? And, since I love it, why can’t I seem to do it? I don’t mean, why am I incapable of executing trash talk. I mean, why am I unwilling to talk smack? What does it mean to me that stops me short?

A couple of weeks ago, on one of my recent commuting trips from St. Louis to Ann Arbor, where my job is, I went to the North Campus Recreation Building to try to run some pick-up ball. It took a little doing, since faculty members at the University of Michigan don’t get into the campus recreational facilities for nothing, but I finally got some cash, paid my $10 for a courtesy day pass, checked out a ball, and made my way to the gym.

There are two courts at the NCRB. On one there was a full court game going with a line several players deep for next game. I went across the gym to the other court and saw that one half had a volleyball game going and the other a half-court four on four game with only a couple of guys standing around on the sidelines. I’d have preferred a full court run, but was kind of tight for time so I approached one of the young guys who was holding a ball near the baseline and watching the half-court action. He was a lanky kid, around 6-1. I asked him if he had next, he nodded silently, and I asked if I could run with him. He nodded again, again silently. Then he wandered around to the sideline and asked another guy – short and stocky – if he wanted to play with us as well. When the game finally ended, we picked up another 6 footer, also lanky, who had shown some outside shooting ability for the losing team.

While the winning team filed over to the water fountain, my new teammates and I shot around a little bit. I like to know the names of my teammates. It helps with communication on defense and on offense, and, I believe, facilitates building a little chemistry, even in a half-court pick up game. I also think it makes me feel a little less inhibited during the game. The winners came back and we started our game, up to 12, straight up, by 1s and 2s (that means that shots from behind the three point line count as 2 points and everything else counts as 1 point and that the first team to 12 wins without having to win by 2 points).

We won that game, Charles, Leon, Andy, and myself, and then we won five more after that before I had to get going and so we retired, undefeated. I had a great work out, played pretty well, and enjoyed the wins, some of which involved exciting rallies in which we banded together to lock down on defense and worked patiently to get higher percentage shots on offense.

Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but feel a little empty, a little disconnected from the action. Though we were all – my teammates and our opponents -- clearly working hard to win games, something was missing. The only sounds were the pounding of the ball, the squeaks of their sneakers on the polished wood floor, and the occasionally correctly called out “pick right!”, “Switch!” or “Shot!” and then the obediently mumbled “good game” after the run ended. They were competent, business-like and joyless. I thought about my recent experiences playing on the outdoor courts at Heman Park in St. Louis, and how joyful and expansive I feel after every run, even when my team loses so that we don’t get to hold court like my team did in Ann Arbor.

I’m guessing that most people reading this know that trash talk, also known as talking smack or smack talk (and probably by a bunch of other names that I don’t know), involves a running commentary on the action while a game is underway. It usually takes the form of boasting about your own talent, declaring the success of the play you are about to execute, or insulting your opponents abilities, or a combination of all of these. Sometimes it sounds serious and intense, though in my experience it’s mostly humorous.

At Heman Park, it seems to me, everyone talks trash, everyone but me. From the prepubescent 8th grader, Mook, who is talented but still shoots a push shot from his chest to the 6-4 “old school” guy, whose name I don’t know, but who dominated play the couple of times he showed up to play, trash gets talked. Even Bob, a 64 year-old white dude with knee braces, a backward baseball cap, and wrap around sunglasses. Bob can’t even walk without visible effort, but he talks trash. Just like Mook, just like Old School.

One player, about 6-3 and in his late 20s, I would guess, and who looks like Dwyane Wade, pulls the ball out to the three point line, executes a series of complex stationary cross-over and between-the-legs dribbles, all the while repeating “Class is in session. Hoopin’ 101.” Then, he laughs, and just before either flying past his defender or draining the three ball, asks “You ready for school?” and then, after the play, “Go home! You ain’t ready for school!”

My favorite is probably Vic, the nearly toothless drunk who plays in street clothes and boots and one time not only won our game of “buckets” (the St. Louis version of “21” – actually played to 32); but then went on to lead our four to two victories before leaving us with this vintage piece of smack for our opponents – “Y’all can’t guard me and I’m drunk. I’m’a come back sober and y’all really see something.” Everyone broke out laughing and a bystander came back with “If you were sober you couldn’t even find your way here.”

I loved this exchange as I love all the trash talk on the courts at Heman. It’s an integral part of my enjoyment of the game. So, given the choice, I’ll take the game with the good trash talkers. The question is why doesn’t it come out of me? By the time I was in high school I was regularly playing on playgrounds in Madison where trash talk was the rule of the day, so it’s not as though this is some unfamiliar cultural form or a court protocol that’s foreign to me. On the contrary, I immediately relax when I hear it, as though I were returning to my native land after a long stay abroad.

I feel like I have the requisite qualities for talking trash. I’m competitive. I love dominating as much as the next guy. I have no problem telling guys where to go on offense or defense, even guys I don’t know, or that are individually more talented than I am. I do tend to be a little shy socially at the park or gym, but that just seems to beg the question of why that is so and why my shyness doesn’t prevent me from asserting myself in other ways on the floor. So, like with anything else I find puzzling about my own behavior I asked my therapist about this (yeah, I know). Doc did the therapist thing and threw the question back at me. In fact, I knew this would happen, like I know what would happen if I took the ball into the paint on Ben Wallace. “Let’s explore this. What comes to mind for you?”

“Larry Bird.” I could’ve said Michael Jordan or Reggie Miller or Kevin Garnett. Or, my favorite trash talker, because he looks like he’s having so much fun doing it: Rasheed Wallace. But at the time I had been reading Bird and Magic Johnson’s book about when the league was theirs. One of the things that stood out to me in that account – more as a reminder of a fact I’d forgotten than as something new – was Bird’s legendary trash talking. The usual stories were there, the ones I remember from his playing days. How on a Christmas game he told Chuck “The Rifleman” Person (who had previously made some comment about “The Rifleman going Bird hunting”) that he, Bird, had a present for him. Then he proceeded to launch a three right in front of Person on the Pacers bench while saying “Merry Fucking Christmas”, just before the ball dropped through. Or the time he pointed out to Xavier McDaniel the spot on the floor from where he would hit the game winning shot. Then went to that spot, got the ball, and hit the game winner over McDaniel.

So I tell my therapist about this and he sees me smiling and animated as I tell the stories and just voices this observation, asking me why I think I’m drawn to that story. My first stab is the obvious. “It’s the confidence. I mean, I feel pretty confident when I’m playing basketball and I know my limitations so I’m not too often in a position where I’m trying to do something that’s not going to work. But that just seems like a crazy level of confidence,” I say. Then I trail off, unconvinced and feeling that by-now familiar feeling that there are more thoughts and more feelings. I’m observing them in my head or wherever they are, like a dark opening into a darker forest, and briefly but deliberately mulling over whether I feel like going there, like starting down that path that I know is going to lead to something surprising, something that is closer to the bone.

This time I do. I continue, “It’s not just the confidence. I have that when I play. It’s the verbal aggressiveness. It’s one thing to be confident, it’s another thing to explicitly assert your superiority by telling your opponent what you are going to before or while you are doing it, and then doing it anyway, showing up that they are powerless to stop you so superior are you.” Now, let me just acknowledge that I’m rarely in the position of superiority (the need to acknowledge that is like a vacuum sucking the trash-talk energy right out of me), but that fact doesn't stop most of the players at Heman from talking trash.

Please like me (or at least don't be mad at me)

The more relevant explanation is that I’m too concerned with other people’s feelings, too worried that too much feeling, too much self-expression, too much me will cause problems for them. So I’m a pleaser (interestingly, though Magic could talk trash, he rarely did, and close teammates described him as a pleaser too). This concern with other people’s perceptions becomes a kind of abyss for me when it comes to trash talking. A corollary avenue of exploration would be my almost compulsive need to say “My bad” on the court. My guy scores, no matter how tough the shot, no matter how good my defense, I will say “My bad” to my teammates (and “Tough shot” to the opponent). Pathetic.

First off, there’s just the obvious worry that I won’t deliver on the promise of whatever smack I throw out there. I see myself falling away on a baseline jumper – “Money!” – and then watch in horror as the ball barely grazes the bottom of the net. Then, there’s an additional worry that my trash talk will be outdated or in some other way idiomatically clumsy or inappropriate. But most of all, I’m worried that the other guy will be mad at me, won’t like me anymore.

What’s interesting to me about this is that the first two worries, which really aren’t seriously inhibiting concerns of mine, are the more likely outcomes in reality. On the other hand, my third concern, which I think is what really holds me back, is the least likely, particularly in a neighborhood game like the ones at Heman park where I know most of the guys by their first name and they know me. Maybe I’m unrealistically terrified in proportion as I am desperately grateful for the sense of inclusion that playing at Heman gives me.

That’s probably true. But it’s also true that after throwing all this out there for my therapist, as a kind of afterthought, I added “Larry Bird must have been filled with rage.” Awkward moment. I realize I have never read or heard that about Larry Bird. I feel as though my psyche just farted. Loud. I realize I’m not talking about Bird anymore. I’m talking about myself. It’s not just asserting myself, not just worrying about doing something awkwardly, it’s about expressing something particular that I feel: my rage. And it’s made all the more tempting because trash talk on a city playground is an absolutely acceptable form of expression and all the more alarming because I certainly have no reason to be angry with my opponent at Heman Park. That’s just what scares me about rage, that it will be out of off target, out of proportion, and out of control.

My fear, my wish

I think about the only basketball situation in which I was ever really comfortable talking trash. It was when I used to play one on one with my older brother, Juan. Juan is 8 years older than me, the second in our family. Our oldest brother was probably the best athlete in the family and Juan never played competitively. But he was no slouch. He was about four inches taller and about 25 or 30 pounds heavier than me. He had a pretty good jump shot from the wings, released from behind his head which made it hard to block, and he was (having also played against my dad) physical and aggressive on defense and on the boards. As I got older, and spent more and more time playing ball and as Juan got older and spent less and less time playing ball, I began to beat him more regularly. And I started talking trash to him.

Did I not care what Juan thought of me? Was I so sure of his affection for me that I could risk giving free rein to these scandalously excessive self-expressions? Maybe. But Juan, in addition to his accurate over the head jump shot, has a wickedly incisive, dry sense of humor. In other words, he started it (or at least that’s how I remember it). He might call me too weak, or too small, or tell me I didn’t have the heart to really d him up. And that would make me angry and in my anger I would play harder and better and then, especially by the time I was around 18 or 19, I would want to humiliate him, not just by beating him, but by telling him I was beating him and how I was beating him and making it evident that there was nothing he could do to stop it.

I think of how many of my formative basketball experiences in that driveway in Madison were filled with rage. I don’t know why (it’s typical of me to think that there had to be some reason, to try to domesticate and justify and rationalize rage). I just know that as I contended with my father’s physical play, or my brother Juan’s teasing, or my oldest brother Tony’s effortless, unreachable superiority over me – as I contended with the feeling of being too damn small, smaller than everyone else, the rage would grow in me. I see my small body going harder, faster, digging in on defense, seeking rather than trying to avoid contact, unafraid of pain.

I see the bemused expression on my brothers’ faces as I hurl my angry body around the court, and I get angrier and I’m determined that when I grow, when I finally, grow, I will leave them standing still, a blur on my way to the hoop. “You can’t guard me.” I will swat the ball back in their faces, then give it to them to try again, and then swat it again. “Get that weak shit outta here.” And then, when it’s game point, I will spot up from way in the corner, 25 feet away from the hoop and when they dare me to shoot it, I will look them in the eye, and then as I effortlessly shoot my jumper I will say “Cash.” Of course, the ball will go in, and they will finally collapse like the deactivated droids in The Phantom Menace, left powerless and humiliated by the recognition that they can’t stop me.

(Sorry. My bad.)

The Voices of My Father

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 21:59:00 +0000

Sometimes it felt like this too

What is my father’s voice? What does it sound and feel like? What does it say? What difference does it make? In a recent post, I told part of that story, recalling how radio broadcasts would help me mute the sound of his voice as he and my mother argued and also, how, at a metaphorical level, my father desires and voice loomed as large in my childhood perceptions as Wilt Chamberlain in the Philadelphia Warriors offense. But in fishing out the memories of those feelings, I’ve also snagged some others, other memories, other stories, other feelings. They don't all literally involve his voice, but the most important one does.

My dad was one of my earliest opponents on the basketball court (my two older brothers and, on occasion my sister or her boyfriend, were the others). My father loved to watch basketball, and he was a quick and intelligent student of the game’s more subtle dynamics, but, a Spanish immigrant to the United States, he was neither experienced nor skilled as a player. Moreover, around the time I was 8 or 9, he suffered a serious back injury that made it impossible for him to run and jump. Most of my memories of playing against my dad come from that time, when he was grounded, but still willing – somehow – to come out and play with me.

What a complex classroom in basketball and in life those contests would be. I say he was inexperienced, unskilled, and hampered by injury. But my father, as I recall his game, possessed a fair bit of natural athletic ability. I don’t remember him jumping, but I imagine he had pretty good hops in his day. Around 5-9 with a medium build, he was quick with wiry strong muscles in his legs and arms.

And he was a very determined competitor, which I appreciated because playing ball at that time was for me most of all about playing against grown-ups and thereby feeling like less of the family baby and I couldn’t tolerate the idea that someone was going easy on me. I’m aware now that the grown ups were 1) probably going easy on me to some degree and 2) protecting me from the knowledge of that. But the memory I have of my experience of those games is of an all-out war of bodies and minds.

Offensively, my dad had a somewhat limited repertoire. He had a fairly accurate one-handed set shot, given the time to set it up. He had a pretty quick first step to the basket, but for the most part he needed to look at the ball to dribble and so that slowed his drives to the hoop. He also had a methodical way of backing in toward the basket, keeping his dribble alive, and then, finally close enough, a kind of quick turn-around toss, half shot, half hook, off the backboard. That was tough for me to stop because he was bigger and stronger and I remember still feeling the dread of the inevitable as I desperately dug in, trying to hold my ground.

But what I remember most viscerally is his suffocating style of defense. My dad gave new meaning to the phrase man-up. I see him feet wide apart, crouched low, back ramrod straight, my dad played torso to torso defense. He got as close as he possibly could without touching, his hands stretched to the side or straight up in the air depending on whether I was shooting. Most vividly in my memory, as I begin to dribble (because of course I can’t get a shot off over him when he’s so close with his hands up – I am probably somewhere around 5-1 or 5-2 or so at the time), his arms begin to come together, a kind of stiff-armed hug so that as I continue to press my drive around him I feel like I’m trying to go through a turnstile the wrong way: there’s a little play, but I’m not getting through that way. I imagine that we acknowledged fouls in those games, but I don’t actually remember calling them or having them called on me at all.

Kinda like my dad playing defense

I do remember the combination of frustration and determination that his intense defense used to provoke in me, as well as the sense of elation and triumph I would feel when I scored. Sometimes I felt so beaten and trapped that I wanted to cry in frustration and complaint. Sometimes, I’m sure, I did (I cried easily as a boy). But sometimes, I found that my father’s will to stop me seemed to infect me in transmuted form and I felt an unshakeable will not to give up until I got past him. Then, no matter how many times I slammed into that turnstile, I’d backtrack my dribble, try a still emerging cross-over or fake, and try to get around him on the other side, or I’d try a wider path to the hoop, trying just to elude his reach entirely. Five, six, ten times this might happen and more than anything what stays with me is the sense that I lost myself, in a way that felt good, in that tiny, intense battle for a swath of poured concrete.

On those times I made it, I felt elated, proud, relieved, but also a little anxious – I couldn’t tell what my dad felt and that worried me: was he proud? Hurt? Angry? All I felt that I could be sure of was that he was determined and serious. But probably I was wrong even about that. Maybe all he was doing was trying to endure the pain caused by the herniated disk in his back. Maybe he was thinking about something else entirely. Yet it never felt that way. It felt like he was all there, and all about stopping me by hook or by crook, and that there was something personal at stake in it for both of us.

Maybe sometimes this was confusing for me, or unsettling, but most of all I remember those games against my dad as strengthening, and building my confidence, not to mention certain skills and qualities in my game that I still notice today in pick-up games, when I am being guarded by a stronger, bigger, more physical player. I still usually respond by going to the basket with extra determination, I still do my best to bang underneath and to hold my ground when he tries to post me up. And so, above all, I feel the surging and energizing desire to win – more, to vanquish. And if I do, when I do, I feel as much that it has to do with will, with wanting it more, and I think of my dad, and feel sure that nobody but him could have instilled that in me.

I’m reminded a little of Dave Hickey’s excellent essay “The Heresy of Zone Defense” in the book Air Guitar, his collection of essays in art criticism. Hickey opens this way, with a description of this play:

Julius [Erving] takes the ball in one hand and elevates, leaves the floor. Kareem [Jabbar] goes up to block his path, arms above his head. Julius ducks, passes under Kareem’s outside arm and then under the backboard. He looks like he’s flying out of bounds. But no! Somehow, Erving turns his body in the air, reaches back under the backboard from behind, and lays the ball up into the basket from the left side.

Hickey thinks about the joy the play elicits, still today, watching it in replay and decides that the perfection of the play is as much Kareem’s doing as Dr. J’s. Kareem’s perfect defense elicited Dr. J’s perfect response. That’s how I think of my dad, now, as my Kareem: as the one whose perfect intensity and, ultimately, respect for me as his opponent, elicited from me my best, not only a set of technical skills, but also endurance and determination, not to mention the ability to transform feelings of frustration and anger into a combination of focused desire and intelligent calculation on the floor.

But my dad was more than my opponent. For once I started playing competitively, he was also my biggest, most conscientious, and most enthusiastic and vocal fan. I started playing soccer in competitive leagues when I was around 5 or 6 and played every season through my senior in high school. I started playing competitive basketball in 6th grade and, likewise, played all the way through high school. I'm sure he must have missed a game or two because I know he was traveling regularly during part of that time. But I don't remember him ever missing a single game.

Always he was there, with my mother, a fixture among the sparse crowd of parents and friends on the sidelines of a soccer game, or up about five or six rows behind our bench in our more crowded basketball games, home and away. He had a terribly painful bad back. I don't know if it really hurt him to sit in the pull-out wooden bleachers, or to stand for the duration of a soccer game. I always imagined that it must, that this why he paced the sidelines. But if it did, he never told me about it, never complained to me about that.

What’s more, and I've never heard of any other dad doing this, he kept track of the statistics at my basketball games all the way from 6th grade through high school. He used a small yellow steno pad and one of the ever-present fine-point pens from his shirt pocket. And on that, in neatly labeled colums, he recorded my field goals attempts, field goals, free throw attempts, free throws, assists, steals, turnovers, rebounds, fouls, and points. I believe that when I joined the high school varsity, he started doing this for the whole team as well, at least in my senior year.

My dad never used these statistics as the basis to criticize me or my teammates. I don’t remember him actually ever even making any neutral observations about the statistics he eventually came to enter into a database and to print from his new personal computer in the early 1980s. My dad was a scientist, a very capable scientist, with a brilliant statistical mind, and love of numbers. Though I never had his aptitude, I did love the mathematical games and tricks he shared with me when I was a boy, and I did love to pore over sports statistics. I even, I am a little embarrassed to say, kept track of the statistics of the different players I would imagine myself to be incarnating in one-on-one games against my friend Robb (I kept track, consulting him of course, of his “players” statistics too). All of this to say that I think what my dad was doing there was connecting more deeply to my life. It was enough that he was always there at the games, no matter what else might be going on. But he also joined one of his abilities and passions to one of mine and in so doing enhanced and augmented the space we shared.

Of all these memories, though, of competing with my dad, of poring over statistics with him, the one that most sticks out in my mind is the sound of his voice – deep, hoarse, slightly accented – bellowing over the sound of my coaches and the hundreds of fans at one of our basketball games: “Go Yago! Goooooo Yago!!!!” My friends sometimes made a little fun of me for that and I felt simultaneously embarrassed and annoyed with them and, very secretly, grateful to my dad for being the kind of dad-fan who yells for and not at his kid. Not all my friends’ dads were like that. Some of them never came to games. Others came but were quiet supporters. Others came and berated their sons publicly during and after each game. My dad came, kept stats, and shouted “Go Yago!!!!” (Maybe he also laid into the refs a little bit.)

It’s not just that he yelled “Go Yago!!!”, it’s that in that Go Yago he expressed all the pride and love and joy he drew not only from my accomplishments but from my participation. My dad let me know that he was proud of me when I won an award, or made all my free throws, or had a high assist-turnover ratio. But he also let me know, just as frequently, that he was proud of me and loved just watching me run down the floor. He just loved to watch me run. I don’t even know if it was the running per se. I dimly feel that my running on the court (or on the soccer field) really just stands for my being. And, in that way, that in loving my running my father was expressing his love for me, just as I was, just because I was. So “Go Yago” – the name of my basketball blog – is most deeply that: a calling forth of the love and acceptance of my father for me, not because I accomplish a particular thing or because I do it well, but just because I am and my being brings him joy.

Capsule Reviews (I): On Robertson, McPhee, and Bird and Magic

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 18:08:00 +0000

Because reading has been almost as huge a part of my life as basketball, I've wanted to include in the blog a regular feature on the books I've been reading. Nothing profound, just some quick impressions. These will appear regularly in the box on the left hand side of the blog. But I'll also collect these from time to time as "Capsule Reviews" blogposts. Here then is the first of these, my brief thoughts on the last three books I've read: Oscar Robertson's 2003 autobiography, The Big O: My Life, My Times, My Game; Larry Bird and Magic Johnson's 2009 recollection (written with Jackie McCullan) of their intertwined NBA careers, When the Game Was Ours, and John McPhee's classic 1965 profile of Bill Bradley. At the end of each review, I'll rate each book on a scale of one (forced my way through it) to five (would read it again and again) basketballs.

Oscar Robertson, The Big "O": My Life, My Times, My Game (2003) very worthwhile read. Robertson structures his book chronologically, recalling his early childhood in rural Tennessee, his youth and adolescence in Indianapolis, college years at the University of Cincinnati, and pro career in Cincinnati and then in Milwaukee. Robertson is skilled and interesting in communicating how his game looked and felt from the inside and how it played out on the floor in a number of exciting descriptions of particular games and seasons But what most moves me in his writing is the honesty and precision with which he weaves emotional, cultural, and social observation into his account of a basketball life. He emerges as a full human being who also happens to be one of the greatest basketball players of all time. He is particularly intelligent and refreshingly incisive on the forms of racism he encountered, both on and off the court, and on the economics of pro ball (in which he played a major role as head of the NBA player's union). Finally he is splendidly curmudgeonly on today's NBA, and delightfully ungenerous in comparing contemporary and recent stars with those of his own times.

John McPhee, A Sense of Where You Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton (1965), is a very elegantly written profile of Bill Bradley, former US Senator and New York Knick star, during his college years at Princeton. McPhee, successfully aiming at a general audience who might never have seen or read about a basketball game before, does a wonderful job of breaking down the nuts and bolts of Bradley's individual game and of integrating that into a narrative of his Princeton teams' fortunes in the NCAAs. Bradley was one of the greatest, for sure, but McPhee's intelligent and poetic hagiography unfortunately departs from the author's uncharitable description of his growing aversion to the game (over the course of the 50s):

the game seemed to me to have lost its balance, as players became taller and more powerful, and scores increased...it impressed me as a glut of scoring, with few patterns of attack and almost no defense any more....Moreover, it attracted exhibitionists who seemed to be more intent on amazing a crowd with aimless prestidigitation than with advancing their team by giving a sound performance.

This seems like an odd characterization of the game in an era whose greatest stars included Bill Russell, Oscar Robertson, and Jerry West. It's also striking in how it prefigures the sort of recurring nostalgic complaint that subsequent generations of writers (including Bird and Johnson, in their book below) would lodge against the current version of the game right up to the present day.

Larry Bird and Earvin "Magic" Johnson, When the Game Was Ours (2009) a light and entertaining read, well plotted, if not very profound or stylistically elegant. Since I was in 8th grade when they first met in the 1979 NCAA championship game, this was enjoyable opportunity to revisit some of the memorable games they played during my high school and college years. Excellent stuff on Bird's legendary trash talking. For younger readers, this would be a good introduction to NBA history in the pre-Jordan era. Of course NBA history goes back much farther, but these guys are an entertaining hinge point between Jordan and Old School. You see a real love for and commitment to the game in both these players. Also, the accounts of Magic's battle with HIV, and of Magic's and Bird's respective retirements I found quite moving.