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New Hoops Culture Course Syllabus!

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 19:15:00 +0000

The all new and improved Cultures of Basketball course syllabus for Winter 2012: Cultures of Basketball Course Syllabus

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

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — 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 (Yago Colás) — 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 (Yago Colás) — 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.

Dostoevsky on Dennis Rodman, or, Yago's Reading to Live Syllabus

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 19:47:00 +0000

In the spirit of nothing is foreign to a real baller, here is the final draft of my syllabus for Reading to Live: Introduction to Comparative Literature. I'll be teaching this at Michigan this fall (alongside Cultures of Basketball) and I intend to blog about the intersection of these two courses. For each of the written assignments, I've also written detailed guidelines, which I'll be happy to share if anyone is interested.

Yago's Reading to Live Syllabus

Of course, the connections between a text like Genesis and the invention of basketball by Dr. Naismith (especially as chronicled in FreeDarko's history) are obvious and I wrote a little in that vein in January. But it might be more surprising and fun to see what other pairings come up as I proceed through both classes: Shakespeare's The Tempest with the story of Connie Hawkins perhaps? Madame Bovary alongside Shaq and Kobe? Or Dostoevsky and Dennis Rodman? Who knows what connections might turn up, so stay tuned, and, as always, if you have any ideas, throw them my way.

Nothing human is foreign to a real baller

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 13:09:00 +0000

For the few of you still dropping by here, it's summertime! Go outside! Instead of looking for something to read about basketball, go pick one up and shoot it!! No, for real: thanks for continuing to drop by.

If you're looking for new writing from me, for the time being you'll be able to find me writing periodically at The Good Men Project magazine. Most recently, I wrote a two-part memoir on a basketball upbringing that had me veering between Jesus as the ultimate pass-first point guard and Wilt Chamberlain as a sweet, saving Satan. I should be putting stuff up there every couple of weeks, so make sure you check back.

In other news, for those with interests in things other than hoops (or who understand that nothing human is foreign to a real baller), I'm devoting a lot of energy to revamping one of my more popular courses at Michigan: an introductory literature course called Reading to Live. I'm having fun putting together an awesome syllabus including the Book of Genesis (R. Crumb's illustrated edition), Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, Shakespeare's Othello, Milton's Paradise Lost, Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Shelley's Frankenstein, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground, Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Steinbeck's East of Eden, Borges, Fictions, and Calvino's Mr. Palomar. Some truly tremendously rich and engaging, provocative texts here that have informed my thinking about everything including basketball.

We gon' be killin' the Western canon with this course!

It might seem far afield from Wilt, Walt, and the rest of the hoopiverse, but trust me - it's all connected.

Remember CLR James caution: "they know little of buckets who only buckets know."

If Shaq Had Been Perfect

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — 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.

The Lab

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Sat, 14 May 2011 23:48:00 +0000

For those who have been wondering where I've been, the answer is, in part, thinking about how to keep writing now that the hoops course is over. As a way to keep it flowing, I'm using this tumblr. page as a scratch pad. So check it out to see what I've been thinking about. I'll be setting my rough ideas down there periodically and then hopefully, and perhaps with your feedback, some of the raw experiments from that page will make their way, in more polished form, into Go Yago!

Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: Finals

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 23:54:00 +0000

Feelings shoot like sparks across time and place. The last time I’d felt this way about a basketball game was on Friday, March 4, 1983. I was lacing up a pair of Converse All-Stars (This was a few years before the Choose Your Weapon ad campaign, but if I’d had the choice, I'd have chosen Magic) in the lockerroom at the Milwaukee Arena, also known as The Mecca. In a few minutes, I’d proudly lead my maroon and gold clad (short shorted) team out onto the court for warm-ups prior to our quarterfinal matchup in the (now-defunct) 54th Annual Wisconsin Independent Schools Association Class A State Tournament against favored Oshkosh Lourdes and their 6-8 Indiana-bound star Todd Meier.

Lourdes had lost only four games all year and came into the tournament (for the second year in a row) riding a 15 game winning streak, including a waltz through their regional tournament. For our part, the Madison Edgewood Crusaders were 13-8, and had lost four of our last six games before putting together two decent ball games to win our own regional. The only other team in the tournament that we’d played during the season, Whitefish Bay Dominican, wound up posting a 9-13 record, but they beat us by 20 on our home floor. Despite this, we were an overachieving team that had made the State tournament against predictions; and where bigger, more talented representatives of our small school over the previous four years had failed. Our biggest player was a 6-6 sophomore who, though he would go on to set scoring records at Harvard, was at the time skinny, inexperienced, and under confident. As our coach had told me prior to the season, “let’s face it, your class is a great bunch of guys, but it’s only Flint and Mark (two bad-boy transfers to our school who started alongside me senior year) that have made you even respectable as an athletic class.” Or something like that.

Still, there I was, with my teammates, getting dressed in the same lockerroom that had been used by Oscar Robertson, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and others only a few years before, getting ready to tread the same floor, shoot at the same basket, with more fans in attendance than I, for one, had ever played for. I’m not sure the knot I felt in my stomach that day was any worse than it ever was before a game. I was used to it, I mean. And I knew enough to know that it only meant that I cared about the game – not, for example, that I was unprepared or overmatched. I knew, though I couldn’t have articulated it then, that it was a sign that the game hadn’t started yet. With the opening tip, there would be no more nerves. I guess, in that sense, it’s a sign of consciousness and of the way it grasps for a purchase on the slippery surface of an anticipated experience. My body would know what to do for the most part, but sitting in that lockerroom, it wasn’t time yet, wasn’t time for my body to do what it had done hundreds and hundreds of times since I was a small boy in my driveway: dribble, pass, shoot, defend, rebound.

We lost that game. We played hard defense though, and intelligently executed our patient offense. I was the pass first point guard on that team, a co-captain, the coach on the floor. But the last 2:04 of regulation provided me with memories that will last me forever when, down six, I hit 3 consecutive 18 ft jumpers over their zone to send the game into overtime (an opportunity to hit a fourth went awry when a cross-court pass sailed over my head). But in overtime, Meier was just too much. He scored the final points of my career on a frightening two handed dunk. I’d never played in a real game in which someone had dunked before.

And that dunk, as much as anything, marks the crossroads from which he and I would go in very different directions. He’d go on to a significant supporting role on Indiana’s 1987 NCAA Championship Team (as well as some mention in Feinstein’s Season on the Brink – the downside: he had to meet Reagan and give him a hat and sweater). Meanwhile, I’d go on, after a successful intramural and city league career, to become a college literature professor teaching a course on basketball culture. His career-ending dunk marks too, in that sense, the psychic spot from which my course developed: for it to go a different way, to see what a different road might have looked like, the wish for one more chance. And that has been the energy and the pitfall of the course all season – I mean, all semester – its emotional strength and its intellectual weakness.

I knew this already, well before lacing up my sneakers in the Intramural Building at Michigan last Wednesday night. But there’s a way in which the knot that I felt as I did so viscerally emblematized the fact that I was approaching this tournament as that second chance; as it emblematized also all that has been inseparably great and weak about the course. Once again, I’d be suiting up for a tournament. Once again, Big Ten basketball players would be playing on the opposing team. History repeats itself, Marx famously wrote, the first time as tragedy the second as farce. I think this particular repetition was probably neither, but if I had to choose, it was much closer to farce.

My team, Saline Sickness (pictured above from left: Big Will Campbell, Ryan Rain Drop Feeley, Light Skin Jesus, and Jordan The Technician Dumars), did not win the First Annual Free Yago Cultures of Basketball JAMboreee. We didn’t finish first, second, or third. We didn’t finish fourth, fifth, or sixth. We finished seventh. Out of eight. In our defense, we did not have a UM basketball player on our squad. Our player-owner, Jordan Dumars, rehabbing a torn meniscus, wisely decided not to play in the game. In his stead, he recruited Big Will Campbell, a 6-5, 333 pound defensive tackle from the UM football team. Will was a remarkably quick, skilled baller, and a really nice guy (he even addressed me as "Professor"... in the middle of a game, as in, "Professor, I'm open!"). But he’s no D-1 player. In fact, the only team that finished worse, the team we beat in the final game to avoid the ignominy of last place, also was missing its player-owner, 6-10 Evan Manatee Smotrycz who might otherwise have led his S.W.A.T. team (comprised of 6-3 Sam The Garbage Man Klein and 6-2 Matt the Hebrew Hammer Gordon) to a respectable finish. As it was, Evan, unlike everyone in the class, unlike everyone who has been reading the blog or following me on Twitter, somehow managed NOT to realize that the tournament was Wednesday night at 8:30 (not Wednesday morning) and so by tip-off was already back eating his mom’s home-cooked meals in Reading, Massachusetts. S.W.A.T. team thus had to make do with the kindness of strangers – a different UM player rotated in to hoop with them in each game – and so they were never able to gel as a team.

Tournament MVP went to Corey Bing Bing Person, a 6-3 UM walkon from Kalamazoo, who led his team, The Dream Killazzz (6-0 Elliott Darvy Darvish and 6-4 Nick Sizzle Pagano) through a difficult preliminary group round and then to a championship game victory over Los Tres Amigos! (featuring 6-11 Blake Bird McClimans, 6-2 Mack Bronco Ladd, and 5-8 Tim Soy Sauce Yeh). Other highlights included a devasting posterizing of 5-10 Ron The Professor Beach by Colton Chevy Christian, a Tim Pop Pop Hardaway dunk over the game but ineffectual challenge of my teammate Rain Drop (nice outward facing bookends to my career: Meier's dunk and Hardaway's dunk), the lights out three point shooting of Matt Wisconsin Lunchbox Vogrich and Stuart Dr Funk Douglass, the unrepentant and often effective long range gunning of Chantel Blue Steel Jennings, the 40 inch vertical leap of Sean Nugget Fletcher, and the 3rd place game clinching triple from unexpected hero Rajesh Shake n Bake Kumar.

But even those participants I’m not singling out here had, I hope, like me: their one shining moment: a swished jumper, a sweet no-look pass, a tough put back on an offensive rebound, a steal or blocked shot, no injury. I didn’t, of course, get to see every game, but I did see every team play at least one game, and in every game I saw each player on the team contributed something, and I saw teams working pretty well together. More importantly, everyone seemed to me, at least to be having a good time, to be competing joyfully, forming small rivalries and camaraderies, trying hard, talking a little trash, and developing running gags.

It was over too quickly, like my dream of winning the title and so righting the course of history that had gone so tragically wrong 28 years before on the floor of the Mecca. We took some team photos. Claire, bless her heart, gamely snapped hundreds of action shots with my phone. And then one by one, with fist bumps or handshakes or hugs, I said goodbye to them as they filed out of the gym, on their way to study for exams, on their way to the rest of their lives. That’s fine, of course, and it is as it should be. As a teacher I know that and to some degree I experience it at the end of every semester. Just not so much. It doesn't always hurt in this way.

And I guess that is what made this class, for better and for worse, what it was. It was made from my heart, and my memory, and my desire, relentless, to keep making life new. From the afternoon I spent crying in a bathtub in the Red Roof after the first day, trying to understand and to explain to Claire what it was all about, to the nerves and eager joy of the big game, and all points in between -- Bethlehem Shoals' visit, a bit of internets attention for me (thanks Beckley and the True Hoop gang) and Matt Gordon, a stirring tournament run by the UM team, and a visit from Coach John Beilein -- this class was infused with my feelings for the game, past and present and future. Sometimes, that probably got out of hand. Sometimes, it might have led me to attach too strongly to the players and perhaps to short shrift some of the other students, at least on occasion. I'm sorry for that if I did. I couldn't help it this time, but I'll learn from it. But even with whatever pitfalls might have ensued, I'm not sorry for the vulnerability I showed in teaching a class not only with my my mind, but with my heart; in modeling for students the attempt (leave aside success or failure) to do my job and fulfill my vocation as an integrated adult.

In the end, I’m heartened by three things. I won’t pretend these are really rational things, they are just things that have touched me and that, when I think of them, hearten me. I want to share these with you, but before I do I want to say, now this course is over, and so is the course diary. But it has opened up for me the possibility of bringing what tools I have to writing about basketball and I intend to keep doing that, even without the twice weekly inspiration and structure of my class to motivate my posts. I’ll keep writing. I hope you’ll keep reading.

So, my three heartening things:

1) After everyone was at the gym, shooting around and warming up at different baskets, we all started gravitating toward a single basket where we were just shooting around randomly. And then, like a flock of migratory birds, to my mind out of nowhere, we formed two lines leading away from that hoop: one line shooting layups and the other rebounding. So lovely, all the colors of our jerseys, somehow that common idea forming and materializing, the joking and kidding as people tried different crazy shots. I was so excited that when my turn came to shoot my lay up, I laid it up off the glass too hard and didn’t even draw iron. I swear I’m not a terrible basketball player, but I’m pretty sure that was the most terrible shot of the day.

2) After the tournament, there was a flurry of mutual Facebook friending among members of the class. I won’t pretend to know what that really means to this generation. But to me in the moment it felt that these people were at once reaching out and letting each other in; these people who perhaps started things off in January more aware of differences than similarities had studied together, argued sometimes, thought together, cheered for one another, organized a basketball tournament together, and played ball together and so were now, well, friends… at least on Facebook. And I don’t want snarkily trivialize the fact that it was on Facebook. Because I also felt happy to friend and be friended by them. I don’t mean to rationalize my failures as a professor in this class or any other – lord knows I’m aware of them – but I consider it one part of my job to teach and to model for younger human beings how to reach out and how to let in – how to be friends in and with the world.

3) Todd Meier, remember him? He did indeed end my high school career. He did go on to play Big Ten ball and even to win a National Championship and go to the White House. Today, Todd, having gotten his degree in Business from Indiana, is back home in Oshkosh working as the Director of Market Development for Mercury Marine. I hope this makes him happy. I have no reason to think it doesn’t. But I have to say, with no disrespect at all intended, that after all this, and because a life is a whole thing, I wouldn’t trade a single step of the path I began to walk in 1983, tears stinging mingled with sweat in my eyes after Todd’s dunk in Mecca, for a single step of his.

Now you can go back and see how it all started on the first day of school.

Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: Programs Here! Get your Programs Here!! (Day 21)

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 15:59:00 +0000

First Annual Free Yago Cultures of Basketball JAMboreee!! Official Program

Read about the previous day's discussion of homophobic language

Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: Kobe is Us (Day 20)

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 20:23:00 +0000

No clever pictures today. I don't feel like it. I wasn’t gonna write about this. In fact, I wasn’t gonna write again until after our tournament next Wednesday. I’m tired. But it came up in class and it came up in a way that made me feel compelled to call some students out. And that’s made me feel compelled to write about it here too. Now, I think I wish I’d felt compelled to write about it here anyway. I’m talking about Kobe Bryant hurling an anti-gay slur at a referee during the Lakers game against the Spurs on Tuesday night and the events and media coverage that have ensued in relation to the incident since. Here’s how it went down in class.

The classroom was already pretty riotous when I walked in. Our tournament jerseys had arrived and I was as excited as the students to check out my black dri-fit tee with the logo on the front and LIGHT SKIN JESUS emblazoned above the number 11 on the back. Tim Hardaway Jr. brought donuts (or at least he was the one passing them out when I walked into the room). Students were wearing a variety of basketball jerseys because it was wear-a-jersey-day in class. And, they were stoked, laptops out, to watch Youtube videos (which, by the way, for those unfamiliar with FreeDarko’s history of the NBA) is a legitimate use of class time since the final chapter of our textbook deals with the democratization of the NBA archive and of hoops memory via youtube. So consider that a lab.

I put on my tournament jersey and sat on the teacher’s table at the front of the room (boy I’ve come a long way from the insanely nervous wreck I was on the first day), when one of the players suggested we might talk about the Kobe incident. The player in question is a pretty sincere kid, but he also likes to needle and in this case I think he both wanted to talk about it and to needle the Laker fan in our class, which fan was promptly spotlighted to give his opinion on the matter.

I’ve got to be honest here. I can’t remember precisely what he said. And I think that’s because I wasn’t really listening to him. Or to the two or three other students who chimed in before I gave my opinion. I mean I heard them, but I wasn’t really listening because I was already thinking of what I wanted to say (and confident that no student was gonna say it). I know, I know. That’s absolutely horrific pedagogically. There’s an explanation, but no good excuse and I’m sorry.

I can say that nobody said anything offensive. Nobody thought it was “no big deal.” Everybody seemed to think that Kobe ought to apologize and the $100,000 fine levied by the NBA was merited. There was a bit of discussion back and forth on the main points that the mainstream sports media has raised in connection with the incident: 1) “the heat of the moment point” and 2) “the sports icons are held to a higher standard point”.

Those two points can and have been combined in different ways: e.g. I can understand saying that in the heat of the moment, BUT Kobe’s a sports icon and is held to a higher standard and out to know better; or I can understand saying that in the heat of the moment, but if I said it at my job, I’d be fired – sports icons should be held to higher standard. But however they are combined, when those are the terms of the discussion, it leaves a gaping hole where something much more direct and pointed should be.

Let’s pretend that at this point in our class discussion, stymied by the limited terms offered them by the media, my students had pleaded: “Yago, Professor, Professor Yago, Light Skin Jesus! Help us out of this bind, this whole thing has made us feel dirty and uncomfortable, but we aren’t sure how to think our way through those feelings. We feel weird because any of us might say some asshole things and we know it’s not okay and it shouldn’t be but, Christ, we’re only human and sometimes, well, shit comes out.” That’s what I pretended.

I told them that what I think about the incident is that everyone’s energy (and money) ought to go toward examining how something like this happens. As far as I can tell, I said, nobody is claiming that Kobe Bryant is a vitriolic homophobe in his daily life. In fact, it’s pointed out that he’s not and that seems sometimes to be invoked as a reason to stop talking about what happened (see “the heat of the moment point” above). But from my point of view that’s all the more reason why this incident, lamentable as it is in so many ways, is a superb talking and teaching opportunity.

The issue to me, I said to the class, is not should Kobe have said this or not, nor is it how should he be punished, nor even what should he say afterward. Kobe, I said, was feeling angry and frustrated in a high-pressure, high-stakes situation and he lashed out. That, I feel safe in saying, can happen to anyone.

Like most of us, in lashing out he gave voice to mental contents (you can say unconscious material if you want) that he might not normally even be aware of harboring, let alone willing to express. What interests me, I said, is to use this moment as a way to put the spotlight on how those ideas – how the words Kobe used – get deposited into his mind in the first place, and how they get associated in his mind with anger, insult, and disrespect.

I’m not trying to be mysterious or coy or obfuscating here. Nor do I think I’m saying things that haven’t been said before (though I certainly haven’t heard it discussed enough during my brief foray into the sports media world). The issue, I was trying to say to the students: is that we all participate in a culture and a society that casually uses “gay” (and related terms) as a synonym for “stupid,” “unworthy,” “emotional,” etc – in short, that casually uses “gay” as an insult. What’s really shocking, given how widespread this unacceptable discourse is (especially in the generally hyper-masculinist culture of pro sports), is that we haven’t caught more players doing what Kobe did the other night.

So, I am thinking yesterday in class, all semester I’ve been reading these students (mostly white males) write some pretty moving reflections on the struggles by women and African-Americans to be allowed to play the game on the same court as white males. And I want them to see that this is an issue much like those. That it’s an issue fought on many fronts simultaneously: in government and in the courts, to be sure; on the streets in political actions, certainly; in art and culture also. And then, in lunch rooms, and dorm rooms, and locker rooms and bars: basically anywhere that we are. If nothing else, in other words, we can fight this issue in our own heart and mind and in our own use of speech.

We can be conscious that not that long ago it would have been acceptable for a white person to use the “n” word as an insult. And we can recall that that piece of language was linked to a host of forms of material injustice and psychological harm. We can think about why there are (a few) African-Americans in our classroom, and (a few) women in our classroom, and one African-American woman in our classroom, but not one openly gay student. We can think about why in the history of men’s professional basketball in this country only one player has ever come out as gay, and he did it only four years after his retirement. And we can think about whether our own behavior explicitly or implicitly contributes to that situation or fights to change it. And then we can fight to change it, even if only by speaking up whenever we see the word “gay” casually used as an insult.

You know, I don’t feel particularly informed on these issues. I don’t know if it’s historically or philosophically legitimate to compare the struggles of African Americans and women with the struggles of gays in this country. But I don't think that I should wait until I feel fully informed, armed with knowledge, certain of every detail, to speak from my heart.

I’m just – I was just in class -- trying to say that it breaks my heart that people of whatever age who are gay, or lesbian, or trans, or gender queer in any way whatsoever (and I’m sorry I’m too ignorant to properly recognize all the possible modalities and the preferred nomenclature) ever have to feel shunned or ashamed, let alone hated and like it would be better to pretend they were something else, or worse, like it would be better to be dead. It's just so so wrong and so so sad.

Maybe I stopped talking then. Or around then. I’m not sure. Like I said, it was a pretty raucous day in our little classroom. The only thing I’m sure of at this point is that one student – I don’t know who – said to another “you’re probably gay” or something along the lines. Whatever it was, it prompted the other student to act out some clumsy mimicking of “fairy” before flipping the first student off. People laughed.

I wanted to cry. I felt so uncomfortable. Maybe I should've let myself cry. I think I’ve made more than clear in this blog how much I care about these students, how much I respect and admire and appreciate them. I’ve had precious few occasions to call them out over the course of the semester, and certainly none on an issue for me so emotionally charged as this one.

It’s a bit of a blur, but I think I said something like: “Hold up. Look, I don’t want to be an asshole, or to police anybody’s speech. But I gotta call you out on this. What just went down is exactly what I’m talking about. I know you were joking around, but joking around in that way reinforces the idea – in all our minds – that ‘gay’ is an insult. It’s not an insult. You don’t have to defend yourself against it. This is not just about gay people. It’s about collectively defending our freedom to be fully who we are as human beings. Finally, you just shouldn’t use it that way. It’s ignorant and wrong and you are smarter, better people than that.”

Maybe saying that or more would be really obvious to some of you. But I have a hard time calling people out and that goes at least double in this class. But for a moment, too quick to even be a thought, really, I just felt that teaching in this moment meant calling them out, however uncomfortably, and inarticulately, and probably lamely I did it. However little it probably stuck. Today, I’m glad I said something. I think I’d feel terrible today, ashamed really, if I hadn’t. One of the students, I noticed, nodded and seemed to smile quietly to himself.

I don’t care about the issues that I’ve seen most people discuss in relation to this incident. To me, they complicate and ghettoize the whole thing. To me, it’s simpler than all this: Kobe was wrong and hurtful in a way that expressed almost perfectly the way that American society (I include myself and my students) is wrong and hurtful on this issue and anything that isn’t primarily about making that the topic of conversation feels like a waste of an opportunity. We can villify him or exonerate him -- but the more time we spend talking about his behavior the less we spend examining -- let alone changing -- our own.

Read last class's discussion of the ethics of fan culture

or

Check out the program for our tournament

Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: "You're a fucking bum!" (Day 19)

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:26:00 +0000

We’re winding down. The temperature in Ann Arbor today is in the 60s. The sky is blue. We’ve all started to check out and to go, at least mentally, our separate ways. I have mixed feelings. Summers, of course, are when the college teaching gig really pays big. And in my case in particular, the end of this term means the end of two semesters of horrible, exhausting weekly commuting back and forth between my home in St. Louis and my job at Michigan. But I still feel a little sad. I’ve grown attached to this course, and to the students in it. They’ve worked hard, their writing and class participation have been excellent. I’ve felt rejuvenated as a teacher and, in some ways, as a person. The course was the realization of a dream I hadn’t even realized I had and for that reason, no matter how many times I teach it in again, this semester, this one class I think will always hold a uniquely special place in my heart. The other day we had a lively discussion that in many ways captured this for me.

We didn’t talk about the assigned reading (an excellent chapter on the point scoring renaissance, unleashed in part through imaginative positional innovations, ushered in by the Mavs, Kings, and Suns in the early 2000s). We didn’t look at any clips. A brief discussion of the Men’s and Women’s NCAA national championship games, and of media coverage, drifted into a spirited discussion of the meaning of being a fan.

This was particularly interesting in that in many ways it returned us to our beginning-of-semester state – remember? – where I at least was hyper-conscious of the course as consisting of players and fans. Only back then it was a problem I worried over a little bit. And part of what was especially rewarding about this conversation was the way it subtly indicated how far we had all come in being able to relate to each other as human beings first, and as players or fans second, or, really, third. I mean that the discussion was marked by a consciousness that we mostly inhabit different sides of the out of bounds lines, but that consciousness led not to separation or antagonism, but to an enhanced collective understanding of the issues in play when talking about fans.

Among the players, there was a strong, touching sense, of dependency on fan support. More than one clearly voiced the feeling that fan support, especially when expressed loudly in the arena (but not only there) motivated and inspired them, and helped them find new levels of intensity on the court. But the flip side of that also emerged: a desire to be supported and loved by the fans, a desire for the fans to be informed and knowledgeable, to understand individual and team strengths and limitations and to adopt a broad perspective on this basis. Even more interestingly, though these particular players at least are thoughtful and measured in their words, there was a certain resentment of the segment of fan culture that loses sight of these things.

On the other side, the fans (i.e. the students in the class who don’t play for the UM Men’s Basketball Team) were certainly understanding of the players feelings. But they were also firm and articulate in expressing the feelings that lead fans to passionate, at times unfair, criticism of their beloved teams and the players on them. Fans talked about feeling that the teams (whether pro or college, but we were especially talking about the college game I guess) represented them and that they experienced the players’ behavior and performance on the court as a reflection of themselves (the fans). Even Coach John Beilein of the UM team, who came to class yesterday to speak briefly with us, said that he tries to keep present and to impress upon his players that you can’t have the adulation and attention of 13,000 people without accepting your accountability to them.

That certainly seemed reasonable put in those terms. But does accountability also mean that you have to accept vitriol, an every manifestation of the volatile roller coaster of emotion that fans experience? That’s a heavy burden to bear, I said. I wondered aloud how many of us as students and faculty are mindful of representing the University of Michigan in our public behavior – in bars or other Ann Arbor business establishments, in airports, on the web. Maybe it’s not exactly the same thing. I know that players, students, and faculty all participate in the University in slightly different ways (faculty get paid, students pay, and players, well, that’s it’s own thing). But whether we have deliberately signed up for it or not, our public behavior, once we are known to be associated with the University, shapes the opinion of the general public of what Michigan is about. Whether or not that’s fair – it is and isn’t at the same time, I think -- is probably beside the point. My point was just to try to get across that the players don’t stop being human beings any more than the other students do, or than I do, just because we are associated with the University of Michigan. And as such, like the rest of us, they will sometimes make mistakes. Sometimes their attitude or behavior will leave something to be desired. Sometimes they will make errors in judgment. Sometimes their performance will fall short of hopes and even of reasonable expectations.

I think every student in the class understood this point and accepted it. And they were quick to affirm -- and to look straight at the players in the class in saying so -- how much of their fan experience involves pride, joy, gratitude, and a vicarious relishing of another's excellence. But they rightly asserted that being a fan isn’t only cheering and especially that it isn't only – or even mainly – about what’s rational. It’s about feelings. And they insisted on their right to experience the emotions awakened by identifying with a group of young men, and investing in the outcome of events, that they had finally very little control over.

As a fan myself, I wouldn’t want to argue with that. As a teacher, not just of basketball, but of human experience and its cultural manifestations (of which fandom is one), I also wanted to complicate and challenge that assertion. At the very least, I wanted to acknowledge the validity of the feelings while also putting the focus on the choices that we as fans make in how we deal with those valid feelings. As I’ve written here before, in some ways, this has become more important and more urgently impressed upon me as a result of this class. I mean, by the experience of getting to know to varying degrees the players on the team as adolescents, as young men, as college students; the disorienting experience of seeing them on national television – covered (I mean the word pointedly) by the media – and feeling the shock of familiarity at seeing that young face that I see twice a week in class, only now that face is looking anxious from the bench at the action on the court, or that face is lighting up with joy at some successful play, or that face seems a mask covering what I can only imagine are a rapidly evolving range of emotions in the wake of an error or setback, or that face seems to be fighting tears. These are my students and I care about them.

And that has led me, I confessed to the class, to try my best to employ a different criteria in my public and private fandom. It’s simple, but hard: I try to say or write about a player only what I would say to his or her face. This is new to me. Perhaps it is old news to many of you who have more experience covering and writing about sports than I do, though I have to say the media doesn’t seem very mindful of it by and large. As a fan, as an individual human being, I have a right to experience my full range of human emotions. And as an individual human being who must – who wants – to live with and feel connected to other human beings, I think I have an ethical responsibility to process those feelings in ways that keep present and don’t diminish the reality of other human beings. That includes athletes. And that includes athletes getting paid millions and millions of dollars, essentially, to entertain me. I think I can complain and criticize. But I think I ought to do so in ways that can meet the standard face to face communication.

It’s not that I think that totally covers my responsibility as a person. After all, I can be as much of an asshole to someone’s face as anyone else. But for me, at least, it’s a good start because imagining the real person really in front of me, imagining the look in their eyes, the way their muscles tighten, as I begin to say that I hate them, that they are losers, that they have no business being out there, that they are a waste, that they're a piece of trash – imagining all that creates a pause in which I can reflect on my feelings and choose my words with a little more care.

I think I rambled a bit on this point in class, as I think I’m doing now. I think I probably let my point extend to culture in general. But maybe that’s not a bad thing. I’m aware as I write that I’m looking at a computer screen and that I’ll send this off where it will be read mostly by people I will never see. And I’m aware of how much of my time, of our time, is spent in interactions like this. I know I’m not saying anything that hasn’t been said before. And I don’t mean to be hectoring or pontificating, let alone some kind of cop. I just mean to speak for myself and to let that resonate to whatever degree it will: I don’t think my experience as a fan or a person would be diminished by holding myself to the standard of only saying or writing what I would say to someone in person. Maybe this small constraint would stimulate me to be more creative and imaginative in my expression of emotion.

I think, too, that it’s important for me to try to practice this in the privacy of my own home as I watch games as it is in what I might say in a public forum. And the reason for that is that I think it is, in fact, a practice. For me at least, it’s not reasonable to expect that I can in the privacy of my home permit to flourish one sort of unrestrained expression of my fandom and then expect in public to regularly cultivate another sort. Or maybe it’s reasonable, but I don’t think it’s healthy for me. Public and private aren’t the same, and I’m okay with that distinction, don’t get me wrong. But with certain spheres of my behavior and my culture, I think it’s best for me to cultivate in private what I’d like to manifest in public.

I feel a little embarrassed by this. I’m not sure this is the sort of thing anybody comes here to read. Just as I felt embarrassed in class, unsure that it’s the sort of thing students come to a class to hear. But I’ll take heart from the fact that as they left the room several students – players and fans both – told me they felt it was the best class of the year.

Postscript (for humans like me):
Oh yeah, and then two other things happened:

1), one fan (coincidentally named Tim) confessed with a smile to feeling sad and embarrassed as CBS showed over and over again the footage of Duke's Nolan Smith breaking Michigan player Tim Hardaway Jr's ankles with a crossover during their NCAA tournament game. This fan named Tim was sitting right next to a player, also named Tim (as in Hardaway Jr.), in class. Then, someone (another player) shouted out that we should see the clip. Tim Hardaway Jr. started laughing and said okay, we should. Then, when I pressed him, he admitted that seeing the clip made him feel bad. So I said I didn't want to show it. Then he laughed, and said it was fine, and helped me navigate to the page on youtube where he knew -- because he's seen it dozens of time. And we watched it. And we all laughed. And then we watched a clip of one of Tim's ferocious reverse slams.

2), I had posted on our group Facebook Page a link to where a post by Matt Gordon (the student who has been blogging about the course for Hoopism.com) was picked up and cited approvingly by none other than Henry Abbott of ESPN's Truehoop. Before long, another student had "liked" the link and wrote "Damn man, nice!" and then Stuart Douglass, one of the players, cheered: "Yeahhhhhh boiiiiiii!" This was right after class.

This is a special group.

Read about last class' discussion of Allen Iverson

or

Go here for our discussion of homophobic language in NBA culture

Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: The Answer and The Dreams of David Stern (Day 18)

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 20:30:00 +0000

Sometime just before 1800, the Spanish painter Francisco de Goya completed a self-portrait. An etching, Goya shows himself sitting facing the viewer, but asleep with his head resting on his arms, which are folded on the table next to him. Behind him, owls and bats rise, and flutter, and hover, perhaps departing perhaps poised for attack. On the floor, at the lower right, a cat observes with wide eyes. A banner hanging from the front of the table reads, in Spanish, “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.” Though the Spanish word “sueño” can mean either “sleep” or “dream,” the most conventional rendering of the phrase is “the dream of reason produces monsters.”

Imagine NBA Commissioner David Stern asleep. What do you see rising menacingly above his slumbering head? I imagine it would be Allen Iverson. At least, that’s what I thought after our recent class discussion on AI, aka The Answer. I’m going to come back to the sleeping Stern and the Goya print, but first let me tell you what the students did.

We began with two clips, one of AI playing:

And then, as usual, I asked them to tell me what they saw. Someone said "steals". "Steals, okay, what about the steals?" Someone else says, "The anticipation and the speed, they look so easy, so clean." "Okay, what else did you see?" "Handle." "Handle, okay, what about it." "The crossover, he's got that left to right down, that's hard to do." I'm writing all these things down. "Okay, what else?" "Fearless, someone says." "Fearless in relation to what?" I ask. "Like on that tip slam on the free throw, he's fearless going after offensive rebounds." "Would you be afraid to do that?" I ask. "No, but I'm 6'9". What was he, 6'0? To throw himself in with all those bigs, that takes fearlessness."

This leads someone else to say something about his attitude, confidence, swag, which turns then, to commitment. Everyone seems to agree that Iverson lays it all out every second that he's on the court. "He just doesn't care..." somebody says, meaning to affirm what everyone else is saying about commitment. Here I pause for a second. Because it's interesting to me that somewhere along teh line in relation to AI "not caring" can be synonymous with commitment, that is, with caring. I don't mean to make too big a mystery out of it. I think the student meant simply that Iverson didn't care about risking his body, didn't care about being injured, didn't really care about anything but going 100 % in the pursuit of victory. So Iverson didn't care about anything but caring. And this leads students to comment on his independent streak and the way it goes hand and hand with taking risk.

So we start talking about how much of his game involves a delicately balanced dance of vulnerability and risk and courage. Obviously, going for steals involves risk and danger and exposure. The apparent vulnerability of Iverson's small stature as he leaves his feet to meet two or three much larger defenders. It's not apparent, he can and did get crushed at times. But at other times, more often than not, in fact, it all worked out and he sped or glided or twisted of fell away or spun and turned the risk of block or injury into success. But the back and forth that leads to the cross over. The ball exposed, the whole point being to expose the ball, but not so much as the defender thinks it is exposed, and then to take it away. In a certain sense, his hallmark one-man offensive repertoire itself flirts with danger and risk and transformed it, even if for just one season, into glorious against all the odds, rules, conventions, and mores, into success. This flirtation with danger, perhaps, carried out on his own terms is both what made Iverson thrilling and adored and also what made him anathema to Commissioner Stern.

Which led to the commercial.

There's so much going on in this ad. But to begin with, at the simplest level, it echoes what the students had seen in the clip and what they had perhaps, already in their memories. Iverson was a warrior. Average sized, fearlessly aggressive with the basketball, Iverson was often risking and suffering injury. And just as often, Iverson was playing injured or coming back from injury, as the ad concludes: "stronger than ever." But there's more, as I pointed out in class. There's the simple division of the narrative time of the ad between the time of preparation and the time of work. When it is time to work, the ad seems to say, despite what he has suffered, Allen Iverson will be there, on time, ready to work. But before it is time to work, the ad also seems to say, he will be alone, with his music, eyes closed, in his own world a world of solitude, the ad perhaps subtly argues, he has earned through his fearless effort and the sacrifice of his body. He will show up for work, in other words, but that is all he owes you. The rest is his.

Except, and I didn't say this in class, that the rest isn't exactly his either, even if he's right that it should be. Consider the noteworthy combination of discourses, scriptures strictly speaking, converging on Iverson's body. The tattoos, of course, which mark his body with memories, beliefs, alliances, psychological pain and the way these are paired with the more antiseptic medical scripture marking his body with a different kind of history: bursitis, fracture, contusion, bruises, dislocations. In a way, both kinds of writing do the same: they make visible the marks that history has left on Allen Iverson's body and soul. The scanning wavy grid lines suggest, to me anyway, both flashes of recurrent pain, but also a kind of constant surveillance or scanning. And the latter is echoed both by the camera's intrusive circling, panning, and zooming on Iverson during a "private" "solitary" moment and by the incessant gab of the announcer's voices played over and for a time drowning out, the quieter music that is perhaps the same music Allen is listening to. The ad, read this way, says, Iverson has never been alone.

And, perhaps because I am predisposed to sympathize with him, I feel that I understand better and want to support his desire to draw a sharp line between his game on the court (which, let us say, as a paid pro, he does owe and, be fair, he more than paid up) and everything else, which he should just be allowed, as much as he can, to live in whatever combination of company and solitude pleases him. Iverson in this ad is an innocent, by which I don't mean to say without experience or history. But innocent in the sense of guileless and without malice. An average man engaged in battles against the above average: giant centers, horrific social conditions, history has marked him with injuries of every sort, physical and spiritual, and he has responded with integrity, resolve and quiet determination.

I might not have said this in class in such detail, but that might be because I feel like the students were already there. Iverson was their hero, wherever they were from, whatever the color of their skin, whatever their background, whatever their style of ball: Iverson was their hero because he was the hero of being yourself. Which may also be why their strongest and most articulate impressions came in relation to what they saw as David Stern's foolish and clumsy war on all things Iverson.

We're talking about the "Dress Code" of course, and hanging perhaps too large a hat on it. But then again, I don't know. The code, announced just before OPening Day in 2005, was also accompanied by NBA Cares, a public service initiative. As for the code itself, here it is as reported in The New York Times on October 19, 1995:

Players must adhere to the following requirements at all team or league functions: collared dress shirts or turtlenecks; dress slacks, khaki pants or dress jeans; and dress shoes or boots or "other presentable shoes" with socks, and no sneakers, sandals, flip-flops or work boots. Players are prohibited from wearing headgear, T-shirts, team jerseys, chains, pendants or medallions. Sunglasses while indoors and headphones, except on the team bus, plane or in the locker room, are also banned. Players who are on the bench during a game but not in uniform must wear a sports coat. Both the player and his team will be fined for violating the rules, and repeat offenders could be suspended.

While the rhetoric of the dress code, and the NBA cares initiative was of encouraging increased professionalism, the racialization of the categories professional/unprofesssional; appopriate/inappropriate was lost on pretty much nobody, including the New York Time reporter who, in the same article, summarized the changes as Stern's latest push to get the players to "look a little less gangsta and a little more genteel."

We talked in class about what David Stern wants and what he doesn't want. In the David Stern plus column we had popularity, global markets, money, commercial sponsorship, exciting, creative basketball, marketable individual superstars. In the David Stern minus column we had: thugs, drugs, violence, badness, selfishness. And then, finally, someone said it: blackness.

But it was more complicated than that, of course. Because David Stern actually does seem to want a certain kind of blackness. He wants, it seemed to us in class, a blackness that has overcome itself and renounced its origins in poverty and desperation, in struggle against social and economic injustice. He wants the creativity, authenticity, the game and the credibility that for a long time have come from urban, primarily African-American neighborhoods. But he wants it without any of the "rough edges," sanitized, whitewashed. He doesn't just not want guns and drugs in NBA lockerrooms. Probably nobody wants that. He also doesn't want any of the sartorial markers of the hood: no drawers showing, no baggy jeans, no head gear, no bling. I don't think, though, that Stern banned these things just because they signified a blackness that might make the average 50-something corporate white fan/sponsor uncomfortable.

Or rather, I think that if he did, it is because this blackness and the cultural expressions and social conditions it is metonymically associated with reveals the failure (for America's inner cities, as for much of the third world) of the very political and economic tendencies towards unfettered, neo-liberal capitalist globalization that Stern and the NBA have ridden to explosive international popularity.

In a sense, to dream the dream of expanding global capital, to dream David Stern's dream is, necessarily to dream also of decimated inner cities without adequate housing, education, medical care or social services; it is to dream of the numerous killings that Iverson witness or mourned as a young man growing up in Virginia; it is to dream of the very cultural and economic improvisations that necessity urges on African-American youth; improvisations that Stern simultaneously exploits in sanitized form and despises when asserted with a little too much independence.

We talked in class about how bad it must feel, if you are a feeling human being (which we all assumed Allen Iverson to be), and no matter how much money you are getting paid, to be told quite directly that only a part of you is welcome. Moreover, that parts of you that you find to be inextricably tied together -- the courage of a warrior on the court and the life of an urban warrior off it -- must be severed. We want only the warrior on the court, please leave the other guy out and when you won't, we will airbrush him from our magazines (as happened to Iverson's tattoos) and we will take away his clothes.

I think that Goya's reason might dream of frightening, dark things in many senses. In the sense that when reason is dormant these nocturnal, irrational wildnesses can emerge to play; in the sense that these are the things that secretly threaten the domination of reason; and, finally, in the sense that the realized dream of reason for total domination would be terrifying.

It is as though Stern wanted the edge, the creativity, the intensity, the heroism that Iverson could give him, but he didn't want to know where Iverson had gotten it, doesn't want to know the suffering that has given rise to it and so aggressively represses any signs of it. And that is why I feel that Allen Iverson could be the poster boy for the neo-liberal global capitalist dreams of David Stern, which is to say: the poster-boy for what he desperately needs and equally desperately fears and despises.

Go back to read about the beauty of the Heat Knicks rivalry of the late 90s

or

forward to read about the ethics of fan culture

Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: Beautiful Monstrous (Day 17)

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 20:22:00 +0000

I know that over the past month I’ve fallen off the twice-weekly pace that I had set for this course diary in the first couple months of the term. Celebrity visits, travel commitments, the NCAA tournament all conspired to put other things at the top of the agenda. Now, we’re down to our last 4 classes of the semester and it’s tempting to throw in the towel. The stack of papers to grade isn’t getting any smaller. The commute isn’t getting any less tiring. And the end of the semester always seems to throw universities into spasms of urgently imperative bureaucratic activity. But the truth is the students' work in Cultures of Basketball, both in writing and in class discussion, has never been stronger. And our intra-class tournament seems to have enhanced still further the already remarkable camaraderie in the classroom. So we are, as they say, peaking at the right time.

Over our past two class meetings we’ve had very lively and engaged, productive class discussions of the Heat-Knicks rivalry of the late 1990s and of Allen Iverson. I threw out some questions to get things going, but the students drove both of those excellent discussions not only with their responses to the questions but with their “off-track” comments as well. Today, I’m going to focus especially on the Heat-Knicks discussion (cause it’s fresher in my mind), and leave the Iverson discussion for the next post. But first an update on what has now come to be known as the First Annual Free Yago CoB JAMboreee.

Light Skin Jesus

The tournament has felt all along to me like a thrilling, fragile, and vaguely illicit possibility. Perhaps – it would be like me – it has felt fragile and vaguely illicit because it has been so thrilling. I’m pretty sure I’ve already written on here somewhere that I never played D1 basketball. The closest I ever came to that was when Bo Ryan – then an assistant at Wisconsin -- told me at a summer camp when I was fourteen that “he’d be watching my development.” I guess he was disappointed, but no more so than I, that I didn’t grow more than a few millimeters beyond the 5-8 that I already was by that time.

You know the visual meme of the shoe box of hundreds of recruitment letters that appear in every film about the game? The one where an avalanche of envelopes – Duke University, The University of Kansas, UCLA, The University of Kentucky, etc. – cascade into rapidly growing pile on the coffee table of some high school phenom? Well, I had a shoe box too. I think there were about six letters in it, the highlight being Dartmouth College, but a more representative one being St. Mary’s (of Minnesota). Don’t get me wrong, they were good schools and I was absolutely thrilled to get the letters. Ultimately, money and a more sober assessment of my post-collegiate possibilities, led me to turn down the lavish offers of financial aid and the intimate, small college experience and I stayed home to attend Wisconsin.

But sometime last fall, I did Chris Milk's Wilderness Downtown interactive film on Google Chrome, the one where you are invited to identify with an adolescent boy running the streets of an anonymous suburb at night only, magically, to arrive at your very home. The experience concludes with an invitation to write a postcard offering advice to the child who lived at that address. My eyes brimming with tears, I wrote “play college ball.” That very fact gives you a sense of how powerful are the youthful yearnings tapped by having some Division I college players ask me to play ball with them. It’s immature, I know, this fixation. But as my player-owner Jordan Dumars aka The Technician has said to me of growing up in the long shadow of a famous athlete father: “I embrace it!”

So it's on! The teams are formed, the nicknames and numbers chosen, the jerseys ordered, the trash talk flowing (most recently 6-9 Evan Smotrycz aka Manatee warned me on Twitter: “don’t come into the lane Yago” -- I laughed, and then felt a shudder of fear). The date -- April 20th, 2011 8:30 to 11 pm – is set and the venue all but pinned down (note my cautious hedging against the terror that this will all still fall through). And I couldn’t be more thrilled.

I’ve had some injuries this year, most recently a broken hand that kept me off the court throughout February and March. But I have thrown myself into a training camp of my own devising – work outs, balling with my guys in St. Louis, purifying my stroke, and a training table regimen of Chipotle and La Pizza (best in St. Louis). I’m preparing psychologically. Probably the main weakness in my game – shockingly – is an overthinking born of a truly loathsome streak of insecurity and self-doubt that, when it grips me, becomes a self-fulfilling vortex. So at the moment, I’m doing the equivalent of Keanu rubbing his hands together as he stands atop a skyscraper in the “jump program”, reminding himself that “it’s all in my mind, it’s all in my mind,” before running, leaping, briefly believing, and then plummeting to city street below. You know he’s gonna fall the second he has to think about not falling. I better stop thinking and just play. Not so easy. But how ever short my performance falls of my ludicrous fantasy of proving at the age of 45 that I could’ve played D1 ball 27 years ago, I know I’ll have a blast and, more to the point of my actual life right now, I’ll have a great story to write about.

Beautiful Monstrous

Somewhere toward the tail end of that clip summing up the Knicks-Heat playoff rivalry from 1997-2000, Pat Riley – the sadistic, bad Daddy who engendered the two monsters and then set them at each other’s throats – says with an unsettling, calm bemusement: “It might not have been the most artistic, but from an effort standpoint, from a defensive standpoint, from a competitive standpoint, where you were not going to give your man anything, and he wasn’t going to give you anything, it was some of the best basketball that’s ever been played.” “Some of the best basketball that’s ever been played.” I latched on to that statement as a take-off point for class discussion because it clashed so starkly – while occupying the very same interpretive terrain – as “Rotten Island: Knicks-Heat, the Rivalry That Made Hate a Virtue,” Joey Litman’s elegantly written chapter on the rivalry in FreeDarko’s Undisputed History of Pro Basketball.

Litman both accurately recaps the rivalry and pinpoints the very real emotional forces and their causes that gave the series such intensity: Riley’s leaving New York to take the job in Miami and the match-up between defensive minded, ex-Georgetown centers Patrick Ewing (Knicks) and Alonzo Mourning (Heat). He then concludes with the following: “In the end, it never was about the basketball. What the Knicks and Heat played could hardly even be called that at times. Their rivalry, staged over ninety-four feet of hardwood, was nonetheless about strength and frailty, about the many costumes in which passion arrives. Humanity, sometimes beautiful, sometimes hideous, and oftentimes just passable, was truly on display. Not basketball. And such an honest depiction was a riveting counterweight in an era filled with the soaring victories and freakish sucessess of so many superheroes.”

What I think is at stake in this rivalry and in these two evaluations of it is the weight that beauty and morality, respectively, should be given in judging the quality or goodness of a particular manifestation of basketball. Riley, for his part, acknowledges that the rivalry fell short in the beautiful, but insists that moral virtue is a legitimate standard in its own right, a standard from which point of view the rivalry could be judged “some of the best basketball ever played.” Litman agrees that it was unbeautiful. He also agrees that the rivalry itself put forward a different set of criteria derived from the moral sphere. But he diverges from Riley by concluding, if I understand it correctly, that the absence of beauty made the rivalry not only not the best basketball ever played, as Riley claims, but not basketball at all (even though he accepts its fascination and value as a human drama).

This constellation of terms – beauty vs. morality and the quality and nature of basketball in relation to them – was the focus of our discussion. So I started off discussion by putting them on the board. On the left, at the top, I wrote “artistry” and below it I wrote “aesthetic beauty”. On the right, at the top, I wrote “effort, defense, competitiveness” and below that I wrote “moral virtue.” I drew a line between them, reaching about half way down the board. At the bottom of this line I wrote “(good/the best) basketball.” We didn’t, of course, resolve this unresolvable matter. But in the course of the discussion, the students generated a pretty complex matrix of associated ideas.

We talked about first how artistry is associated with offense and morality with defense. And we mused about the proper role of defense in the game. After all, we wondered, isn’t it a great defense that helps to make offensive artistry stand out (as Dave Hickey pointed out in his essay on Dr. J, Kareem, and the Heresey of zone Defense)? And, more concretely, wasn’t Riley’s contribution to the game in the 1990s partly about the willingness to offer – to borrow Litman’s phrase – a “counterweight” to the unbearable lightness of Jordan’s dominating Bulls’ dynasty? Aren’t these two linked inextricably in anything we’d call great basketball?

Why should great defense be typically, if not exclusively, associated with a set of moral virtues and great offense with a set of aesthetic virtues? Is there no such thing as defensive artistry? As offensive virtue? What do those combinations look like? Isn’t Bill Russell, to take just one example raised in class, a good example of defensive artistry, by which was meant beauty, grace, elegance in the service of defense (or vice versa)? And does it really make sense – of any kind – to exclude effort and competitiveness (the moral virtues) from the offensive games of, say, Reggie Miller or Ray Allen, Bird or Magic, or Jordan?

The students then noted, quite properly in my opinion, that in the history of basketball culture, the two categories of artistry and effort, aesthetics and morality, set against each other as such, seemed to carry significant racial baggage. Artistry, beauty, elegance, and style – along with their connotations of ease, naturalness, and effortlessness – have been racially overcoded as black. Meanwhile, moral virtue – effort, hard work, competitiveness, even or especially when manifested with what is seen as a plucky, independent-minded disregard for appearance, style, or looks – have been racialized as white.

Of course, the point of this was not and is not here that either Riley or Litman were stirring up this kind of racial coding. Nor do the racial codes apply in any meaningful way to the two teams in question. The point, rather, was the way in which the intensely racialized history of basketball attaches itself to practically any evaluation of the game, however removed it may seem and intend to be from matters of race. More specifically, thinking about it in this context helped us to understand, to some degree, how racial (or racist) dichotomies can force apart the complex greatness of the whole that is aesthetically beautifully, morally virtuous offensive and defensive basketball into a set of sterile dichotomies, in both thought and in the sport itself.

As a bonus, the students also took the discussion in the direction of class, where they noted associations of the moral virtues cited by Riley with the working class, the blue collar ethic. At this point, my overly schematic chalkboard visualization, led them understandably to characterize the aesthetic as white collar. From a certain point of view, I could see it, but I was at the moment in the grip of thinking about class in slightly – possibly ahistorical – terms. I was thinking about the historic, ideological association of effortless beauty and ease with the old European nobility, for whom the mark of status was not to have to work, not to have to try, not to have to compete and this status was transformed culturally into a quasi-proprietary standard of beauty. While the aristocracy as a socio-economic category may not be particularly relevant today, many of the terms that basketball culture uses to describe its greatest moments derive quite directly from aristocratic culture: grace, elegance, ease, even nobility.

I just have to say that this was an awesomely rewarding moment for me as a teacher. I’ve had a fantastic time teaching this class, and we certainly have had some entertaining and interesting discussions. But in this particular one (and in the one about Iverson that I’ll talk about in my next post) I felt that the students had, suddenly it seemed to me, put it all together. Players, non-players, pretty much everyone was contributing a close eye for the happenings on the court with a willingness to think in broader terms about what and how those happenings on the court signify culturally and socially.

Anyway, we were now presented with a kind of puzzle. On the right hand side, we had morality: “effort,” “hard work,” “competitiveness,” “grittiness” “white,” and “blue collar” (and a few other terms). On the left hand side, we had “aesthetic beauty,” “artistry” “ease” “black,” “white collar” and “aristocracy.” Right. Right there, black aristocracy? I’m no historian, but I’m pretty sure that’s a fairly sparsely populated set, at least in the European context.

It was as though, all of a sudden, our very discussion had eradicated African-Americans from the game – a troubling result to say the least. If anything, speaking in sociological generalities, “Black” should have gone with the working class category. But “Black” isn’t “allowed” there because “whiteness” has appropriated the moral virtues of the working class while assigning the attributes associated with “Black” game to a sociological-cultural category – aristocracy or nobility – that a) has never been significant in this country and b) real African-Americans haven’t for obvious reasons belonged to. As a student pointed out, whatever the gains of the civil rights movement, the problem isn’t solved by associating the left hand side with a white collar ownership, executive or managerial, or professional class from which African-Americans are still disproportionately absent.

I think that impasse says something more than just that we were thinking poorly in class. At least I hope so. And anyway, I think, if we were thinking poorly, at least we were groping along with critical self-awareness and that’s a pretty decent start. But leaving that aside, does our “puzzle” mean that the culture and analysis of class has no place in a discussion of basketball culture? Does it not map? Does it mean that there’s something about this very way of talking about the game that somehow expresses the secret desire of a certain segment of the white fan base to do away with the “Black” game entirely? Would we have been better off just sticking to pointing out the truism that great basketball involves both great offense and great defense and that both of these both involve aesthetic qualities like beauty, grace, and elegance and moral qualities like hard work, effort, intensity, and competitiveness? That would have made for a short class.

If you read my review of Leonard Koppett’s The Essence of the Game is Deception or my paper on Manu Ginobili, then you know I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between deception, artfulness, and art and, with a boost from Chris Flink (who also publishes as Fat Contradiction and Chris Collision), the connection between these two and what Marx called the lumpenproletariat and more contemporary sociologists refer to as the underclass. This is the class of individuals for which capitalism has no use: excluded by birth from the aristocracy, barred from ownership of the means of production, they also can’t or won’t be absorbed into the industrial working class.

Thus ejected, they devise any number of strategies and informal economies by which to survive and to survive, even, with a sense of autonomy (while the system that pushes them toward these strategies also criminalizes them). While Marx characterized the class, broadly speaking, in pejorative terms as shifty and politically unreliable, I was interested in recuperating the very qualities of deceptiveness and street smarts in order to relate it to basketball. It’s also the case that this class happens in the United States to be disproportionately populated by African Americans.

I quickly explained this and then wrote “lumpenproletariat” up in between our two columns, where I’d already written “(good/best) basketball” (to reference how the categories of beauty and morality can converge and conflict in an assessment of the quality and nature of the game). I meant to suggest that perhaps this category lay at the heart of basketball and that despite or because of this it somehow scrambled and complicated all the analysis we’d done so far. But our time was up and we didn’t get a chance to pursue it further.

I didn’t in class, and I don’t want here to pretend that this somewhat thin thread of associations forms the key to understanding the (especially unconscious) work that race and class do in basketball culture. Or even, conversely, that it can provide a way to get from basketball cultural manifestations – like the Knicks Heat rivalry – to any major original insights about race and class in the United States. That’s all too big for one person, at least if the person is me, at least right now.

I brought it up in class on the spur of the moment, they way you might make an unusual move on the court – one you haven’t practiced or calculated, but that is born of the exchanges and flows that have occurred in the immediacy of the game and that you haven’t yet cognitive or self-consciously processed. In the moment, that move might or might not have the desired effect. You might not remember it later and so it might just fade back into some kind of oblivion, a primordial soup creative possibilities from which, under the right circumstances, it might emerge again.

Or, as sometimes also happens, you (or someone else) might remember it and think about what purpose it was supposed to serve. You might then practice it and make it second nature and, faced with similar circumstances, execute it again. It might in that way become part of your repertoire, even part of the repertoire of the game.

That’s all that was. In this case, I think the move works well to talk about Manu. I’m not so sure yet what purpose it serves in our discussion of the Knicks and the Heat. There are still a lot of vexing questions that the rivalry and its crystallization in our collective basketball memory as a moment of emotional, effort-full ugliness raise for me. Most apparently, I’m still not sure how to interpret the racial and class undertones of that crystallization. I’m not sure what I think defense contributes to the game of basketball, especially physical defense. Heck, I’m not sure how I even feel about it, which might be part of why I have a hard time thinking clearly about it.

I only know that I feel uncomfortable with – even as I’m drawn to – dichotomous thinking: beauty vs. morality, mind vs. body, black vs. white. That, and that I’m drawn even more strongly to the terms and experiences that dichotomous thinking can’t process. These might be third alternatives, middle grounds, or hybrids. They might be paradoxes, contradictions, or outliers entirely. Or monsters, which, etymologically speaking, stand as warnings. In this case, perhaps, as a warning that we are encountering something that we don't yet know how to think about, that will challenge our received categories of understanding, that might make us feel confused and say things that seem stupid.

In my own experience as a teacher, thinker, writer, and, well, person, even as I’m attracted to these monsters, I can also feel an impulse (born of fear of the unknown, I think) to clip away their edges and fold them neatly back into the envelope of my received categories. But it can also be thrilling to explore the confusion they can engender and, when possible, to see what sort of new and hitherto unknown capacities they can provoke us to develop and to exercise. Maybe the Knicks Heat rivalary – for at least one way of thinking about the game and its philosophical, racial, and class implications – is that sort of beautiful monster.

Go forward to read about Allen Iverson and the nightmares of David Stern

go backward to read about the developing discussions of our class tournament

or

go sideways to read my take on the racial and geo-politics of Manu Ginobili's deceptive game

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

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — 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.

Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: Where's Yago? (Bulletin)

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 16:38:00 +0000

I'm working pretty furiously to put together a talk for the American Comparative Literature Association Conference that begins in Vancouver tomorrow. I'll be reading Manu Ginobili in relation to deception and the race(s), class (lumpenproletariat), and politics (anarchism) of his style; all in the context of globalization and crisis (both in and of the NBA, and beyond it). So once that is all written, I'll be posting that here.

Also, we had a great, focused discussion yesterday in class on the Heat-Knicks rivalry of the late 90s: specifically a propos of beauty, moral virtue and the subtle prejudices that inform our judgment of what is and isn't basketball and what is "good" basketball. So hopefully I'll that up early next week (assuming I've finish grading the stack of papers that is also staring at me).

In the meantime, enjoy the logo above, which we'll have printed on our jerseys for our intra-class tournament.

Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: March Madness, or, Confessions of a Bad Professor (Day 16)

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 21:29:00 +0000

So, yesterday, I came to class committed to a rational division of class time: we would of course take a few minutes to air out are excitement over the Wolverine’s blow-out of Tennessee and 2 point loss to number 1 seed Duke. And then we’d take a few more minutes to get up to speed on the planning of our own intraclass tournament. But even allotting generously for these matters, that would still leave us an hour to talk about the luminescence of Jordan's Bulls and the shadow it cast over the rest of the NBA in the 1990s. And that, I expected, would be the topic of my post for today.

Instead, to summarize in rough order: we talked about the first two rounds of NCAA tournament games, the likelihood of various college players going pro, Jimmer Fredette, BYU, and the history of Mormonism in the United States, the real vs. hyped merits of various Duke players, Tim Hardaway Jr. being crossed by Nolan Smith (hey, he brought it up!), Stuart Douglass’ two handed jam against Tennessee and his 30 foot triple moments before that, the team’s prospects for next year, and, our own upcoming tournament (which topic can be further subdivided into: participant nicknames, jerseys, dates, venues, tourney format, the actual composition of teams, and team names).

The simplest thing to say would be that I’ve lost control of the class. And that would be true, but putting it that way obscures the unexpectedly complex dynamics unfolding as my first stab at teaching Cultures of Basketball unfolds. And it’d be easy for me to caricature the students’ jovial unruliness and to make this a story about how their chaotic energy overwhelmed my own best steadfast and sober efforts to focus our energy on The Reading Assignment and The Real Topic for the day. I could probably make that pretty amusing. But I don’t think it’s really how it went down and I don’t think that would really help me understood or communicate to you the experience of teaching this odd course.

It’s much truer to say that I came in spoiling for it, I was the instigator and, especially once we started talking about the intra-class tourney and I saw their enthusiasm, what interest I had in the day’s material and what guilt I felt about being a Bad Professor (would be a great nickname by the way), seemed to vanish and I was all in. Go big or go home. So I’m embracing the day’s events and am going to utilize this space to describe the First Annual Free Yago CoB JAMboreeee, as we finally determined our event shall be called. To really throw caution to the wind, and licensed by the arbitrary rationalization that the players' season is now over, I will use real names here when necessary.

We had already determined that the tournament field would consist of 8 3-person teams. Each of the eight UM players would be designated in advance as a “team owner.” The rest of us would put our chosen nicknames on a ping pong ball, and the ping pong balls would be placed in a box. The owners would then draw randomly in a variation of the NBA draft lottery and one by one the rosters for the 8 teams would be filled out.

As for the format, we’d agreed that we wanted maximum play for everyone. So we decided to go World Cup style. Four teams would comprise a “Maize” group and four teams would comprise a “Blue” group – the groups would be formed randomly. In Round I, the four teams in each group would play a round robin tournament. From there, the top two teams in each group enter the Championship bracket, wherein Blue 1 would face Maize 2 and Maize 1 would face Blue 2. Similarly, the bottom two teams in each group enter the Losers’ Bracket (Blue 3 vs. Maize 4 and Maize 3 vs. Blue 4). The winners of the two semi-final games in the Championship Bracket would, of course, face off to determine the Champion and runner up. The losers of the two Championship Bracket semi-final games would play for 3rd and 4th place. Over in the Losers’ Bracket, the winners of the semis would play for 5th and 6th place, and the losers of the semis would play for 7th and 8th place. This way, everyone will get to play 5 games. This much had already been determined and so I began our discussion by putting it all on the board. Then we turned our attention to still undecided issues.

First, the bad news. Crisler Arena is closed for construction. That left us mulling two possibilities: one of the University’s recreational facilities or an outdoor court. Because of the tournament format, we really need games going on two baskets at a time. I was pushing for an outdoor venue, figuring that by the time we play in mid April the weather will be “good” and, more importantly, that the irregularities of the playground might serve as an equalizer (Tim Hardaway, Jr. agreed with this but I couldn’t tell if he favored the outdoor option or not). But others seemed clearly averse to that possibility. Some suggested reserving a court in one of the IM buildings, which remains a possibility, though I find myself strangely cowed by the prospect of calling to arrange this. Evan Smotrycz suggested we just show up, figuring that people would be “intimated by . . . you know, we’ve got like 30 people”. I’m not sure what thoughts were contained by that pause, but I was imagining that he was thinking people will be intimidated because, well, we are the UM basketball team. I was thinking that. Ultimately, a final decision on the venue was tabled pending further inquiries and “discussion”.

0-1.

I passed out a sign-up sheet on which students were to indicate, if they had not already, their chosen nickname and their top three jersey number preferences. One student, Rajesh Kumar, had graciously volunteered to make the necessary inquiries at the printing shop. He reported back that we could get regular cotton tees printed with a logo (a single one for all) and a team name on the front, and a name and number on the back for $15 a piece, or the same thing but printed on a dri-fit tee for $20. At first count, a majority favored the dri-fit option. However, the minority presented the argument that the cotton tee would make for a better souvenir. I was nearly swayed by this, touched as I was that they would want a souvenir of the event. Ultimately, we charged Rajesh with finding out if the printer could accommodate individual requests for the type of shirt or if we all had to go the same route. Another decision tabled.

0-2

We discuss the name and logo for the event itself. I initially reject all options involving my own name. In athletic contexts, and despite the influx of Latin players into the NBA game, it still horrifies me to utter it and then, inevitably, to have to repeat it, slowly, as though it were immensely complicated to pronounce rather than two short syllables that most infants manage to articulate before they can even speak.

Jordan Dumars helpfully offers to come up with the name. He’s shown himself to be a quiet kid, but a clever and quick-witted thinker and adept in language. I’ll take the help. He only needs two minutes he says. In the meantime, good natured Mack Ladd volunteers to design the logo. I ask him, do you have the skill set for this. “No,” he says, “but I’ll get it done.” I forget that a lot of these kids are in the b school so that the fact they can’t do something doesn’t automatically induce panic as it would in me. It just induces outsourcing.

Jordan and Colton Christian start laughing. Jordan has come up with a name but initially tries to pass it off as Colton’s idea. Finally, we get Jordan to share: “The Washtenaw County Colonoscopy Invitational.” He’s concerned, naturally, about copyright issues, but other than that seems to feel pretty good about it. I’m not so sure, though strangely, I am also delighted.

Someone – I don’t remember who – shouts out “jamboree”, someone else picks it up, I turn it into JAMboreee and that seems to stick. Or maybe they have lost interest. But it gets put together with Free Yago (a nod to the Free Darko textbook we are ignoring today). Finally, I have to admit, I like that they have been so insistent that the tournament should bear my embarrassing name. And when I remember that some of them want the souvenir tee shirt, I glow. No official conclusion was reached in class, but there was enough consensus around it that, later in the evening, enterprising Mack, who had already lined up his graphic designer, was running possibilities by me that all involved some combination of “Free Yago” and “JAMboree.”

Let’s call that a free throw. 0-2 from the field, 1-2 from the line.

Discussion turned to the date. Now here it would seem the best thing would be to just pick, say, the last day of class. After all, it’s guaranteed that everybody can make that time. But I vetoed that option in advance, perversely arguing that I didn’t want to take up “class time” with the tournament (!) and also, somewhat more reasonably, that we’d need more time than the hour and twenty minutes of class to play out the whole tourney. We talked about weekend dates in April but that was proving tough to manage since someone it seemed would be out of town every weekend in April. So we began to turn to weekday dates, but the cacophonous mix of helpful suggestions, idle chatter, and objections combined with my own limitations as a logistician made the room spin and my eyes swim. I tabled that decision as well, pending the submission by all participants of a full calendar for the next month indicating the dates and times they would be absolutely unavailable to play.

We are sucking at making decisions. The stat line is not encouraging: 0-3 from the floor, 1-2 from the line.

About the only thing of which I am feeling certain at this point is that this beautiful dream, this highly cool idea, is fading faster than Michigan State’s NCAA title aspirations this season. I can feel the pressure rising, a half hour remains of class time. We have done no real work and at this point, I feel so despairing about the intractability of pulling off the tourney that I don’t even want to do any. I'm not sure we will ever make it back to the syllabus. I buy time by checking to see if the nickname sheet has made its way around. It is, almost everyone has signed up. We have spent 50 of our 80 minutes.

I’m seeing only the failures in this moment: not only the failure to tackle tournament logistics, not even only the failure to manage class time so as to be able actually to think and discuss the cultures of basketball. I’m thinking bigger failures: failure to generate in the students, after 2 ½ months, enough interest in my approach to hoops culture that they themselves would be demanding we study; and, even bigger than that, lifelong failure to assert myself, independently of what I fear others might think of me. I play at cheerful impatience, but inside I’m withering, And I’m figuring I’ll just collect the sheet, send them home, resign my job on grounds of incompetence, and fly home to regroup. It is a low point for me.

They save me, they buoy me, they lift me once again to new heights of delectable triumph. “Let’s pick our teams NOWWW!” they shout, almost in unison. I pause. I am thinking, with a kind of whiny, loserly petulance: “but what about the ping pong balls?” But fortunately, a saner, more desperate, less stubborn and more pragmatic voice prevails: “Don’t be a madman!! They are still enthusiastic, don’t kill it over some pathetic detail of your fantasy!! Ride it, man, ride it!!”

So I say, as enticingly as possible, “you wanna go ahead and do that? Even without the ping pong balls” (as if they were the ones dying to do the ping pong balls). “Yay! Yay!” they crow brightly and beneath the cheering one of them – maybe Mack – asks me was I really planning to do ping pong balls. I think there is genuine concern for me in his voice. I say yes, but tell him it’s totally fine. While the last of the students fill in their nicknames and jersey numbers on the sheet, I start tearing up scraps of paper and then feverishly scribbling the nicknames I already know on them in order to speed things up. Finally, we have all the names on paper and all the paper in my hat.

I write the chosen nicknames of the 8 players/owners in a row across the top of the board: Bird (Blake McClimans), Manatee (Evan Smotrycz), The Technician a/k/a Daddy (Jordan Dumars), Chevy (Colton Christian), Wisconsin Lunchbox (Matt Vogrich), “Stuart” (Stu Douglass, who still hadn’t decided, but has since gone with Dr. Funk from a Vince Carter Nike commercial), Bing Bing (Corey Person) and Pop Pop a/k/a Thard Nation (Tim Hardaway Jr). Everyone seems to be laughing, the air thick with excited anticipation. I am hot. Even with my hat off. I’m boiling hot and nervous. My hands shake as I approach Blake with my hat. I worry suddenly that they will be grossed out picking names out of my hat, as if instead of just wearing it on my head I’d been using it for a chamberpot. I worry that somehow our hands will touch. I worry that they will see my hands shake. My hands shake more.

Blake picks out the first paper: “Bronco”. That’s Mack Ladd. Applause, laughter, shouting, and hollering ring out. Even though it was a random drawing, some honor seems to go along with being the first pick in the draft and while I’m genuinely happy for Mack (already an absurd feeling), I’m also jealous (oh God!). I make some crack about the max rookie contract he'll be able to command. Then I turn to The Technician a/k/a Daddy. Jordan rustles around in the hat, pulls out the paper, reads it and then silently extends his arm and fist to me. Oh! I realize suddenly, he’s picked me! I awkwardly fold my still healing right hand into a small fist and bump it against his, hoping he won't hit it too hard, realizing I don't know how hard to hit it. David Shields was wrong, I think: this camaraderie is mine too. Perhaps this is the best moment of my life.

For the record, I’d been going over this moment in my mind for weeks, and I’d honestly come to realize that I would have been thrilled to join any of the players' teams. I’ve come to like and respect them all as individuals a great deal. And likewise, I found something exciting about every possible non-player student I might have been teamed up with. Still not only do I like Jordan a lot, but because he is Joe Dumars’ son a deeply irrational part of my soul reacts as if Joe D just plucked me from obscurity with the second pick of the draft! Wait a minute, I don’t mean that to connote what it inevitably will, especially in light of the title of our textbook. But you get the idea.

The draft progresses, now that I’ve been picked I can focus on the genuinely touching dynamic as each “owner” picks the nickname of a classmate, who recognizes his or her own name as it is called out, and lights up, shyly or gregariously raising his or her hand. Perhaps this moment is great for them too. And the players respond with enthusiasm; not because they know anything about their classmate’s skills, but seemingly just because it is fun for them to make new teammates. They delight in each others choice of nicknames. Maybe I’m just inventing all this, but I liked the feeling that these big time college athletes, who just two days earlier had taken # 1 seeded Duke University to the wire before the biggest television audience of the first two rounds were now undeniably joyful in a cramped attic classroom, at the news that they’d just added a 5-8 4th year mechanical engineering student to their squad.

I choose to see that as a pedagogical success.

Once we’d picked all the teams (obviously doing the second round in reverse), they clamored to break into their teams and begin to devise team names. Jordan and I got together (our third, as yet nickname-less Ryan Feeley was competing in the NCAA men’s swimming championships and so was absent from class). Washtenaw County Colonoscopy Invitational notwithstanding, Jordan really is good at this kind of thing, so I was eager to hear his suggestion.

He immediately won me over: “You know that movie I just wrote about? Semi-Pro? You know how they were called Flint Tropics?” I’m on it straight away. It’s brilliant, a faux ABA name. I’m down, I love the ABA, Jordan truly is a great teammate!! “So we need the name of an obscure town then.” “How about Saline?” Jordan suggests. I like that. Saline, a small town outside Ann Arbor, is not pronounced SAY-lean, like the solution, but rather suh-LEAN, like, well, nothing. It’s perfect. Now we need a nickname, “something intimidating,” I say. “Yeah, it should be intimidating,” he agrees. “I got an idea,” I say, extremely apprehensively. “How ‘bout the Saline Sickness.” Jordan pauses. Fist bump. For the win.

Postscript: For those keeping score at home, here are the rosters for the First Annual Free Yago CoB JAMboree (date and venue TBA). Some team names have yet to be announced, but for each team I’ve listed nickname, real name, and jersey number

MAIZE GROUP:

The Dream Killazzz
   Bing Bing (Corey Person) 93
   Darvy (Elliott Darvish) 24
   Sizzle (Nick Pagano) 33

Team Name TBA
   Pop Pop a/k/a Thard Nation (Tim Hardaway, Jr.) 10
   White Lightning (Morgan Bailey) 800 [Morgan is a ceremonial pick     since she runs the 400 and 800 on the Women’s Track Team and     will still be competing]
   Burr!! (Nick Berlage) 4
   Flyy Kicks (Christina Albert) 16

Team Name TBA
   Bird (Blake McClimans) 88
   Bronco (Mack Ladd) 269
   Panchero (Tim Yeh) 8

Team Name TBA
   Manatee (Evan Smotrycz) -6
   The Garbage Man (Sam Klein) 12
   The Hebrew Hammer (Matt Gordon) 18

BLUE GROUP

Team Name TBA
   Dr. Funk (Stuart Douglass) 3.14
   Hot Sauce (Shantanu Kumar) 23
   TBA (Sean Fletcher) TBA

The Melting Pot (tentative only, subject to change)
   Wisconsin Lunchbox (Matt Vogrich) infinity symbol
   The Professor (Ronald Beach II) 14
   Shake n Bake (Rajesh Kumar) 7

Save 2nd Base (BYU)
   Chevy (Colton Christian) #
   Blue Steel (Chantel Jennings) 22
   The Caucasian Invasion (Andrew Dickson) 13

Saline Sickness
   The Technician a/k/a Daddy (Jordan Dumars) 84
   Light Skin Jesus (Yago Colas) 11
   TBA (Ryan Feeley) TBA

Go backward if you want to read about last class' discussion of the young Michael Jordan

or

forward if you want to read about the Knicks Heat rivalry of the late 90s

The Art of the Art of Basketball

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — 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: Exquisite Corpse (Day 15)

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 01:22:00 +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

I'm tense. Whenever something good happens (like being asked to play last week), I'm immediately afraid it of it breaking. So I'm tense. Not only is Shoals about to come to Michigan to visit class and give his talk, but the Big Ten Tournament was to begin on Thursday and, while my students weren’t actually scheduled to play until Friday, I’d already received the form e-mail informing that they’d be traveling to Indianapolis for the tournament on Thursday. Still I gripped tightly to the vain hope that they’d be there on Thursday. After all, we had so much to talk about: our intra-class game had evolved in my mind into an intra-class World Cup style 8 team two round tournament complete with jerseys, nicknames, team names and logos and a ping pong ball lottery to round out the eight teams (each of which would be headed by a UM player).

Alas, as I walked into the room, my heart sank: no players. The e-mail had spoken truth. There were more important things in their lives than this class and the class tournament … more important things than me. It’s weird to me, but I guess I can understand it. And anyway, my heart didn’t sink too far, because the flipside of the players being gone is that there’s more room in our classroom and it’s easier to keep the discussion focused and, particularly, to keep it on the text. I’m sure it’s partly just that the lower numbers are easier for me to handle. Partly also that I am more properly teacherly when I’m faced with students who do not simultaneously embody a fantasy I once harbored for myself decades ago. But also, though I hate to say it, it is because those players giggle and whisper to each other like 6th grade schoolgirls at recess. What’s up with that?

Still, even without the players, it took us a while to settle down. We had to discuss their chances in the Big Ten Tourney, plus the various projections about where they might be seeded in the NCAA tournament. Then, of course, we had to talk about our tournament – lots of announcements there. And then finally, we had to discuss Bethlehem Shoals upcoming visit to our classroom and his public lecture at Michigan. Then, Oh God! they actually proposed that we should hold our St. Patrick’s Day class meeting, which in all likelihood would also be Michigan’s first day in the NCAA tournament at a bar with beer, or, in class with beer where, it was proposed, we could watch tournament games via the projector in the classroom. I’m thinking that this class has gotten away from me. I’m thinking that I never had this class in the first place. I’m realizing that I have gotten away from me.

As usual, I regain a grip on myself by ruthlessly repressing them. “Settle down,” I intone, repeating the phrase as if they were preschoolers, “settle down now.” I feel like a phlebotomist jabbing at an elusive vein. Except I’m trying to jab at that button that I thought a repressive educational system would have installed in these students long ago: you know, the one that infantilizes them, makes them afraid of authority and humiliation and incapable of thinking for themselves.

"Go to your cubbies, take out your mats, It’s time to have a short nap. After that we’ll have snack and then we’ll watch clips of the young Michael Jordan to go along with Shoals’ chapter on the subject.” I know they’re not the only ones who are excited. In fact, they didn’t even start it today. Well, maybe they did. The truth is I don’t remember. I just know that we’ve burned a good twenty minutes on fun, happy-go-lucky, laissez-faire bullshit and it feels like what the announcers call a “turning point”. I need to get a stop right here. I do, they settle in to watch the video, but I think it’s less out of fear, or even respect, and more just out of a kind of bored indulgence in my fantasy that this is actually a university classroom and not an annex of Good Time Charley’s that just happens to be located on campus.

We watch the 4:35 seconds of NBA sponsored, pre 1990 MJ highlights. I feel like I’m at a Fireworks show. Darkness, silence, expectation, restlessness – each in his or her own private world from which we emerge periodically, briefly, to exchange a collective “ooh.” It is, it strikes me, as though we are staging a skit about the birth of language and society. Or perhaps it is more than that because we haven’t rehearsed or planned this ahead of time and we are surprisingly unselfconscious. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that in these sporadic, exchanged exhalations we are spontaneously living a moment like the ones from which language first emerged.

The lights come on and as always they break the spell. But somehow it seems gentler this time around. Maybe because even though the darkness has been dispelled, the silence pervades. I take a second to unhook cords, let the big screen roll back up, turn off equipment. Then I ask them what they saw besides elevation. Here is what they said:

1.Lots of run outs
2.Lots of isos
3 Few passes
4.Few jumpers
5.Everything at the rim
6.How adept he is at using his large hands and his body control to protect the ball in order to get a clean shot off in traffic.

All of these were accurate observations. In fact, I counted. The clip showed 24 different made baskets. Those 24 baskets came on 2 jump shots, 8 variations on the lay up, and 14 dunks. Tactically speaking, 11 of the 24 baskets came on fast break run outs, 9 came on half court isolation sets, and 2 came on give and go’s in the half court. And I myself had felt moved to write, when I was first watching the clip myself, that the way Jordan uses his body in mid air it is almost as though he is setting moving picks for himself.

Now, there are several students in the class from Chicago whose first basketball memories – as mine are of Clyde, Big O, and the early 70s Bucks – are of Jordan of the second three-peat era from 1996-1998. We call them Jordan babies. By no means were they the only ones to participate in the discussion but they were, I would say, perhaps, the most invested. For these students, this young Jordan really stood out. Don’t get me wrong: these are knowledgeable Bulls fans and they’ve seen this younger Jordan on video before. All the more reason why, perhaps, they were so clear and emphatic on the difference between this Jordan and the one of their early childhoods.

Which brought us perfectly to the FD chapter, written by Bethlehem Shoals, on “The Invention of Air: The Brash, Brilliant Doodles of Young Jordan.” The first comment a student made was that it seemed to him that Shoals was almost trying to “villainize” Young MJ. I felt the student was perhaps himself uncertain about his word choice, but I knew what he was getting at: that: Shoals’ chapter seems to be trying to keep alive for memory a rougher-around-the-edges, more confrontational Jordan, on and off the floor, than the one that these students grew up idolizing.

I had worried there would be resistance to this in class and this first comment put me a bit on my guard. I meant to ask him: “Why might this be so? What is the value of this move? Why does Shoals devote two chapters to Jordan, the young brash Jordan and the six title winning Jordan?” But instead, I immediately defended the choice. I pointed out that within the ethical universe of FreeDarko, a Jordan who isn’t always an obedient and polished corporate spokesman is less a villain than a hero, or perhaps best of all “an anti-hero” (which was cool, because that after all is the topic of Shoals upcoming lecture). He’s the one shaking up the comfortable, and their comfortable narratives. So I kind of spilled the beans.

But the students weren’t resistant to the idea anyway. On the contrary they seemed into it. They unanimously agreed that it was a good idea to split Jordan up into two Jordans. And they seemed intrigued by the characterization of the young Jordan; maybe the way some teenagers are intrigued by stories of the time their parents first got drunk, or smoked weed. I told them some stories about the Bad Boys and the rivalry between Isiah and Michael, which seemed to interest them more than any other stories I’ve ever shared with them.

Toward the end of class we got the point in the text that most fascinates me (and, I was pleased, fascinated them as well). But we didn’t get as much time on it as I wanted, so I want to do a bit more thinking about it here. Speaking of the transition, where Jordan began to give up the dunk for the jump shot, Shoals writes: “The dunk takes an instant and an eternity; it’s both completely frivolous and totally domineering, a flash of light so blinding and brief that it might as well have never happened. A shot was the stuff of narrative; it was itself a story with a built-in arc, climax, and resolution. It also served as the perfect punctuation to any possession, game, season, or career.”

The first thing the students and I both thought about this was that it was a stroke of hoops culture genius to yoke together two kinds of shot – dunk and jumper – with two forms of expression: the exclamation, let us say, and the narrative. Within the overall argument of the chapter, Shoals point is that Michael made a choice to alter his game, and his image, not only to win titles but to become the stuff of official NBA history.

It is to say that Michael’s transition from the high-flying solo dunker that we watched in class – all run-outs and isos – to the Triangle-playing, Phil-obeying, jump shooting team player that won 6 titles in 8 years was not only effective on the court in making his team more successful and not only more effective, thereby, in cementing his place as the consensus Greatest of All Time. It was also effective as a – admittedly probably unintentional -- poetic tactic whereby he made his game more amenable to narrative; narrative, which, after all is essential to the circulation of legend and its transmutation into the concrete forms of Official History.

I think about the fireworks. I think about the “oohs” and “aahs” in class. And I see perfectly what Shoals is saying. There’s no way to build a history out of those exclamations. They are, as I had felt in class, little more than a baby’s first words. Significant as such, but with little staying power, like leftover pieces of a puzzle we have lost; or the screws leftover after assembling some piece of furniture.

In this case, as Shoals already pointed out earlier in the chapter the Story of Michael’s Greatness borrows a specific narrative trajectory, well known to lit crit types like me: the bildungsroman, or novel of formation. In that novelistic form, the protagonist, usually a talented and energetic, but raw, provincial comes to the big city, to the center of culture in his universe. There, little by little, he is formed, shaped at once by his own ambition to be recognized by that culture and by the demands that culture makes of those who would be recognized by it. In the end, the individual accepts the prevailing ethos of the culture in exchange for recognition by it and that ethos is thereby affirmed.

According to Shoals, Michael, the brutally talented individual, eventually works hard, learns (from the Master Phil Jackson no less) how “less is more” (see the graphic in the chapter that shows how the Bulls win totals rise each year as Jordan’s scoring average drops), subordinates himself for the team and, in the end, wins titles and the eternal admiration of all.

As Obi Wan says to Darth Vader, “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Something like that is the deal the young Jordan strikes with the old Jordan. If you agree not to score 37 points per game for your whole career (which is an abomination to the game), then you can win titles with obscene ease, drain a few legendary game winning jumpers, and we will never, ever forget you. Young Michael lowers his light sabre, folds his hands across his chest, and is launched into hoops immortality.

I’m totally down with all this and think it does a brilliant job of rescuing some promising castoffs from the side of the road of history. I’m reminded of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s recognition that there is “no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.” He meant that all that we remember, all that we celebrate as triumph is simultaneously a defeat for someone else, a record of something or someone having been crushed and tossed to the side. Accordingly, he recommended a way of thinking about history whereby those fragments might be gathered up. They might not ever form a standard narrative, but they could, with care, be held together, and presented as a kind of alternative to that standard narrative and a reminder that what took place was neither inevitable, nor one sided, nor without some struggle and violence.

Shoals here has presented the fragments left behind, the McDonald’s wrappers that Jordan and the NBA and hoops culture as a whole threw out the window as they tore town the Interstate at breakneck speed toward individual immortality and league global domination. It reminds me of the difference between Old Elvis and Young Elvis, between Old Marx and Young Marx and makes me think that Jordan, thanks to Shoals, gets like so few others to have it both ways: to have died young and so become immortal, and to have lived out and fulfilled his promise in the established world and so to have that immortality narrativized. Jordan is James Dean and Laurence Olivier; Maurice Stokes and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Maybe that is what it is to be the Greatest of All Time: to dunk and shoot the jumper. And I can’t really improve on that version of the story.

But I’d like to extend it with some wondering. I’m thinking of the dunk as the monosyllabic exclamation. And I’m thinking of the smooth, inevitable jump shot as the narrative of ineluctable triumphant conformity. But then I’m thinking of the video we watched. 14 dunks, 2 jump shots. But there were 8 other shots that were neither dunks nor jump shots. What is their discursive equivalent?

They were Jordan taking off somewhere within the general vicinity of the basket, leaving behind some earthbound defenders, encountering other, rising, obstacles in mid flight, fragments of bodies – arms, and hands – floating into his space, and Michael’s response: the body beginning to turn away from the basket and the defender, or, the knees drawing up toward the abdomen and the ball extending in one hand, he may begin to float beneath the basket; in either case, Michael designs and creates a physical space that he occupies alone, as he designs and creates it, in order to get the clear shot. Really, it is a space just for his left or right hand and the ball since that is all he needed to have cleared.

These plays, which are what I most remember of Jordan’s career, seem to me to carry the power of narrative unfolding, like a jumper, but without the foregone, prewritten character of that more predictable and repeatable shot. If these are part of what Shoals means by the “brash, brilliant doodles” of the chapter’s title, they might also be seen, in poetic terms, as Surrealist exquisite corpse prose exercises in which the story begin by one individual is continued by another and finished by yet another and nobody really knows how it will end until it has ended and then, and only then, will it have looked inevitable.

And that makes me realize that, whatever their differences, both the early Jordan dunk and the late Jordan jump shot share a sense of inevitability. But before one of the myriad variations on a layup that he improvised bounces around and drops in, before Michael lands in a cat like, thief like crouch, surrounded by defenders shaking their heads befuddled, before space once again becomes one, and grounded, and shared by us all – before all that, there is the dilated moment of extended exclamation, and wonder, and invested uncertainty: we don’t know how it will end, but it doesn’t matter, because we already care, it is already amazing, just as it is, a perfect slice of pure invention in process.

go backward to see our discussion of Magic and Bird

or

forward to follow us into the insanity of our class tournament planning

I'm Talkin' Very Lucid

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 15:20:00 +0000

Don't miss it: Nathaniel Friedman (a/k/a Bethlehem Shoals of FreeDarko) visits the "Cultures of Basketball" class and gives a public lecture at the University of Michigan (details below)

Oh, and for those wondering: the photo of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then Lew Alcindor) was taken on May 2, 1963 by Richard Avedon at the corner of 61st and Amsterdam in New York City. That is: two about two weeks after Kareem's 16th birthday.

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

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — 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 (Yago Colás) — 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 (Yago Colás) — 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.

Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: You Dance and Shake the Hurt (Day 13)

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 23:05:00 +0000

My students, and readers following me here, know that in 1968, when I was 3, my family moved to Madison, Wisconsin and that my memories of my first few years there are dominated by the Bucks and their meteoric rise to a title and to perennial contention. But all that changed forever in the summer of 1975. The knowledgeable among you are thinking that’s the summer that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar left Milwaukee for LA. But that’s only part of it. The other part is that I celebrated my 10th birthday with a family vacation to Portland, Oregon (where I was born) and came back with a Trailblazers pennant. So this chapter of the Undisputed Guide to the History of Pro Basketball, which links the mid to late 70s dominance of Kareem and Portland’s Bill Walton, seemed tailored especially for me.

Maybe three months before we headed west for my birthday trip, Kareem played his last game with the Milwaukee Bucks on April 6th, 1975, a home loss to the Chicago Bulls. The season had been a disappointment, especially after taking the Celtics to seven games in the NBA Finals the previous season. But Oscar had retired, Lucius Allen, the other starting guard, had already been traded, and Kareem himself had missed the first two months of the season with a broken hand. Kareem was in the last year of his contract, and though he wrote fondly of the Milwaukee fans in his 1983 autobiography Giant Steps, he was feeling isolated, alien, and alone: a 7-2 black Muslim, native of Harlem, in a small market Midwestern city. The Bucks ultimately agreed to trade him to the Lakers, where, as everyone knows, he would play the rest of his career, winning 5 more championships alongside Magic Johnson and becoming the all-time leading scorer in NBA history.

As for the Bucks, they sucked for the next two seasons before Don Nelson began to turn them around in the 1977-78 season. I still liked them and wanted them to do well, but I had moved on, adopting the Portland Trailblazers as my new home team on the grounds that I had been born there and that I had visited there in 1975. I even had that Trailblazers pennant up in my bedroom, right next to the Bucks pennant. Now, the 75-76 Blazers weren’t anything to write home about either, finishing 37-45 and missing the playoffs. But even so they held my attention because, among other things, they had Bill Walton, in his second year out of UCLA. As I’ve written elsewhere on here, as far as college hoops went I was a Bruin. And indeed, the very next season Walton led the Blazers to the NBA championship and vindicated my decision to adopt them as my home team.

In his chapter on this period of my life – I mean, on these two centers and the period of NBA history they dominated – Shoals first establishes some of the contrasts, in fact and perception, around which we might organize our understanding of their careers. There are, first of all, the very arcs of their careers. While Kareem played over 1500 games in 20 seasons, Walton played less than 500 games over 10 seasons. Kareem won six titles and six MVP awards, and played in 19 All-Star games. Walton won two titles, one MVP award, and played in two All-Star games.

But if that were all there was to it, then it would seem Walton – exceptionally skilled though he was -- hardly merits a co-starring role in the story of this period of league history. But that’s not all there is to it. Though to fully and honestly understand why Walton continues to be considered among the all time great centers of league history and as one of the dominant players of the 70s we have to follow Shoals out of the arena and into American society at large.

There we find that each player embodied different facets of 1970s America. Kareem, as is widely known, converted to Islam and changed his name from Lew Alcindor in May 1971, the day after the Bucks won their first and only NBA championship. That was right around the time that Walton would enroll at UCLA and embark not only on a legendary college career, but also break the athletic mold by experimenting with a variety of extra-curricular activities from political protests to vegetarianism. Kareem, already perceived as stoic if not aloof, came with his conversion to emblematize angry blackness that would not be appeased or assimilated. Walton, meanwhile, would be seen as the eccentric, outgoing campus radical.

But in an NBA era in which the increases in black players, salaries, and reports of drug use would combine to turn off a white audience that would rationalize its disinterest as a sorrowful lament for the decline of the team game, the rise of egotism and flamboyance, there was more: Walton would be stationed as the standard bearer for the traditional game played the right (read: white) way. This perception would culminate, and Walton’s historical reputation be set in stone, when his disproportionately white Trailblazers team, playing an effective passing game, defeated what Shoals calls the “badder than thou” 76ers of Julius Erving, Darryl Dawkins, and World B. Free in the 1978 finals.

I was oblivious to these dynamics at the time, though in another way I was living them and, in yet another way, I was undoing or at least complicating them. As I’ve written before, one of the more striking aspects of my memories of the Bucks is how sparsely attended their games in Madison were. In Packer country, none of my (all white) Catholic school friends really cared much about the Bucks, let alone about basketball. So I gravitated to the only kid who did, who also happened to be the only black kid in my neighborhood, Robb. Robb had moved into the neighborhood in 1976 and went to public school. He was a Dr. J fanatic.

I will be the Blazers and Robb will be the Sixers. Best of 7. Blazers home games will be played in my driveway. Sixers home games will be played up on the court up The Park, which borders Robb’s back yard. His terrifying German Shepard, Ginger, chained to her dog house in the back yard, will cheer Robb on and intimidate me, especially when Robb, laughing, will say, “Kill Ginger Kill.” We will have boom boxes blaring music during our games and, for night games in my driveway, we will hook up shop lights to the garage door. We will introduce the starting line-ups: “at forward, from the University of Massachusetts, NUMBer SIX, JOOOOLLLLIUSSSS ERRRRRRVINGGGGGGGGGG.”

Robb had the edge in one respect for sure: it was much easier to imitate the Sixers than the Blazers. He could pull up for long jumpers and be World B. Free, he could back me in for a power lay up as Darryl Dawkins or a little Caldwell Jones jump hook, or, of course, he could swoop in for demoralizing driving Dr. J. layup – the crowd in “The Spectrum” going nuts (or the crowd in Memorial Coliseum hushed by the display of athleticism and blackness).

Meanwhile, what was I going to do: be Bill Walton throwing an outlet pass? Be Dave Twardzik hitting Bob Gross for a backdoor bouncepass? Maurice Lucas ripping down a board? Of course, I did all these things, but it wasn’t quite the same and I still recall the confusion I often felt as I attempted to translate what I was doing in my one-on-one game with Robb into the language of a Blazers broadcast.

I don’t remember how those series turned out. I remember we kept stats, “arbitrarily” assigning a certain number of points, rebounds, and assists to each of our “players.” Robb was about a year and a half older than me and though his time was split between hoops and football (and mine was not), I think he probably still won more of those games than he lost (that would change over the course of high school). I know that our games were fiercely competitive and serious, frequently leading to arguments, but these always seemed to resolve themselves over post-game meals. At the Spectrum, we would enjoy postgame homemade sweet potato pie and iced tea. At the Coliseum it was more likely to be fresh baked chocolate chip cookies and milk,

I came to consider Robb my closest friend, even though we went to different middle schools, high schools, and colleges. He introduced me to Earth, Wind and Fire, and later to Luther Vandross. We went to see Purple Rain together, several times (but also, before that, Rocky, also several times, and Conan the Barbarian too, because of Wilt’s cameo – just one time). We even “recorded” a song together, covering EW&F’s “After the Love is Gone” under the pseudonyms McAlister and Whitehead, for which we carefully drew the LP art.

To this day, Robb erroneously believes it was McFadden, not McAlister. We don’t get in touch regularly, but every time we do it is as if no time had passed. We smoothly integrate the victories and defeats of our respective passing lives into our friendship, a friendship we built when we were competing for the NBA title back in the 1970s and stumbling with awkward gait through family discord into adolescence.

But I realized reading Shoals that Robb and I were also playing with social and ideological, especially racial, dynamite. It’s as though the grownups left us these fucked-up toys and we still did something cool with them. After all, we saw and loved both Rocky and Purple Rain (maybe we loved Purple Rain a little more). Robb may have been the Sixers and I may have been the Blazers, he the hard-to-contain slasher, I the dead-eye shooter, he black and I white. But somehow, for better or worse (for better and worse), we never seemed to understand that these affinities had racial significance. Or maybe, at some deep level we did, but we didn’t care. I certainly don’t remember us talking much about race until we were older, maybe late in high school. Maybe I’ve repressed it and Robb remembers this differently. Maybe it just wasn’t as important as trying to find a way to feel less alone and more at home.

Or (and) maybe we were both tapping into something that Shoals points out toward the end of his chapter, something that undoes the dichotomous opposition between Kareem and Walton, Blazers and Sixers, and all the broader moral and racial meanings mapped onto those figures; something that the two of them shared, not only as players but as figures on different edges of the American mainstream at the time. “Each,” Shoals argues, “embodied a different kind of purism. In the stately Kareem and the playful Walton, there was a wholly original perspective on how to approach the game, philosophically speaking. . . . Each lived by his own version of the philosophy expressed in this statement by Kareem: “Don’t ever forget that you play basketball with your soul as well as your body.”

I’m not sure that the philosophy was a new one, but I think that the articulation of it and in those terms specifically was a new one and very much of its time. I suspect, for example, that Bill Russell also played basketball with his soul as well as his body, but I don’t think Bill’s time (nor perhaps his temperament) were ready to say so, let alone to stand for that. But Kareem and Bill both did stand for that, as did by the way, in my opinion, Dr J and the Sixers of that era. Those Sixers after all more than any other team at the time embodied the ABA genome that was just then impacting the NBA, a genome, as I wrote last week, that could be summed up with the phrase psychedelia, or “soul, manifesting.” It’s a nifty way to sum up, perhaps, what is shared by every wonderful player, event, or moment in the game’s history: they are played with soul as well as with body. I think Kareem and Walton hold the distinction of being the first notable players of the modern NBA to fully live the consequences of that commitment, on and off the court.

Given the durability of our friendship, and the other interests that we shared and introduced each other too, given the intensity with which we constructed an imaginary space in which we could, with soul and body, embody these heroes of ours, I suspect that Robb and I were more than anything loving and trying to live Kareem’s maxim in our games and in that way to elude the painfully alienating dichotomies that marked the time, and the game at the time, and that we were perhaps just beginning to fathom, each in our own way.

A French philosopher I much admire, Gilles Deleuze, once wrote in favor of what he called “intensive reading,” which he described in the following terms: “the only question [of a book] is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through you try a different book. . . . A book is a little cog in much more complicated external machinery. Writing is one flow among others, with no special place in relation to the others, that comes into relations of current, countercurrent, and eddy with other flows. . . This intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything…is reading with love.”

Let me now just type that passage again with some simple substitutions: “the only question [of the game] is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through you try a different game. . . . A game is a little cog in much more complicated external machinery. Hooping is one flow among others, with no special place in relation to the others, that comes into relations of current, countercurrent, and eddy with other flows. . . This intensive way of playing and watching, in contact with what’s outside the game, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each player and fan in the midst of events that have nothing to do with the game, as tearing the game into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything…is playing (or watching) with love.”

The cases of Walton and Kareem’s respective careers and personas, Shoals writing on those cases, and my own memories of the time offer, I think, another important instance of how the game is more than a game, or, in other words, of what it means to play, watch, and think about the game with love. In this particular case, the instance is inflected specifically by the tones of the era in question. And the cases are instructive of that time, in which during the decline of American civilization some people were still talking about soul, desperately trying to find their way to something like an integrated existence in a rapidly transforming (not to say disintegrating) culture that was America around the time of its bicentennial, in the wake of Vietnam, and Watergate, and in the thick of the energy crisis.

In this, we can see also the conditions under which the game allows itself to be experienced and understood as more than just the game, more than just the moves on the court, more than just the technical innovations. Kareem and Walton offer examples of throwing oneself so fully into the game that you come out the other side and see the game as a swatch in a much vaster fabric through which our very selves are threaded.

We were just playing, sure, Robb and I, just like Walton and Kareem and the Doctor were just playing, but we were also, like them, taking the promising and unpromising threads of our time and place, private and public, and weaving ourselves, body and soul, from them, And in turn, we were – we are -- weaving those unfinishable selves into the fabric of the world.

[postscript for readers with writerly interests: I didn’t actually have a class this week. I cancelled it to stay in St. Louis to care for my fiancée, Claire, who was sick. I expected that to have no impact at all on my post this week (odd as I realize that may sound). But it did. Normally, I leave class and take a few minutes to jot down a few key notions – some from the book, some from the clips, some from the students, and some of my own. Then later, when I have some time, I write out the blog, which usually comes out in the first draft more or less as you have been reading it. This time, of course, I didn’t have those notes. But I didn’t think that would matter at all. I wrote and wrote. What I wrote was a lovely, extensive recollection of my life between 1975 and 1977. But, as Claire, who I believe is a more talented writer and professor than I, gently pointed out when she read it, it didn’t have much to say about what was important, in terms of the Cultures of Basketball, about Kareem and Walton and the game at that time. We went back and forth once more: me drafting and she reading, before, lo and behold, I found myself jotting down a few notions: some from the book, some from the clips, some from the students, and some of my own. And these became the basis for the post you’ve just read.

That really might only be of interest to me. But it strikes me as offering yet another instance of what I think Deleuze is promoting in the passage I quoted above. I had mistakenly thought that the class and the students weren’t important to my own thinking; that, in a sense, I didn’t need anything but myself and my memories to communicate about the history of the game. And it’s not that that was useless. But it was, in a sense, closed. What Claire did, which is perhaps what my students in their own way do in class, is open the game, open my game, my experience of the game, and my thinking and writing about the game out to that wider world. Talking about this with Claire, she reminded me of an adage along the lines that you must study the Torah in pairs so that God can come in between. It might be sloppy analogical thinking on my part, but that strikes me as another way of recommending reading with love. Or sometimes, to put it in other words, the best way to tear the book, or the game, into pieces is to share it with someone else.]

Go backward to read about the true meaning of the ABA

or

forward to read about Magic and Bird and Satan

Cultures of Basketball Course DIary: What It Is (Day 12)

noreply@blogger.com (Yago Colás) — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 17:00:00 +0000

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

I didn’t plan it this way when I designed the syllabus, but it seems especially appropriate to be teaching, thinking, and writing about the old ABA during the media-amped spawn of pure skill and utter silliness that is NBA All-Star Weekend. We wrestled no bears, but it was as though the giddy 70s hallucination that the ABA can appear to have been infected my students (and me) so that we had a wacky day worthy of the most surreal of that defunct’s league’s half-time shows.

I undoubtedly set the tone for this, in part, by beginning class with my personal anecdote about watching the Michigan game the night before at Applebee’s next to a couple of puffy, red-faced, slick-haired vulgarians who were ragging endlessly on each and every one of the players that I have in class. I was surprised to find myself offended. The students (players more than anyone) insisted on hearing the criticisms in all their blockheaded, paunchy glory. And with that I seem to have informalized the classroom beyond the point of no return.

From there, after a brief and meaningless introduction, I rolled a 3-minute clip of Julius Erving tearing up the ABA. As Dr J exhibited his assortment of pull-up threes, twisting finger rolls, and, of course, elegant swooping slams to a funky instrumental backbeat, the students got rowdy and loud.

Beating on their little desks, they screamed for more clips: "Where’s the drifting-out-from-behind-the backboard scoop?!!" "That was the NBA," I tell them, oldly, "against the Lakers." “We wanna see that!” “Julius in the NBA!” Inside I’m resisting – this isn’t about Julius per se, but about the ABA – but I’m weak. I don’t want to lose them, I don’t want to police them, and most of all, as I’ve said before, I could watch these clips all day. I want to see the Doctor too. “You really wanna see that?” I ask, suggestively, blithely unaware of the doom about to descend. “Yayyyyyyy!!” they shouted, birthday hats akimbo, noisemakers blaring, faces smeared with cake. “Okay!” I say brightly.

With my computer’s desktop projected enormously on the screen in the front of the room, I quickly Google “Dr J in the NBA”, self-conscious about how slow I am in this medium compared to these kids who were all born and raised in the Matrix (even slower than usual since I can’t type normally because of the splint immobilizing my right hand). But I manage to get to a long list of video links. Now I can’t decide. We see one called “NBA Julius Erving Mix”, with a subtitle in Spanish: “dunk de Julius Erving.” That looks like fun. I click and then watch with horror as the first static image appears on my screen (and therefore, I know, 1 billion times larger on the screen over my left shoulder, and probably on a monitor in the Dean’s office): a woman wearing a cut off tank-top with the words “Got dick?” emblazoned across the front. Yeah. Of all the stupid things I’ve done, of all the humiliations I’ve suffered in the classroom since I taught my first class as a graduate student at Duke University in 1988, nothing like this has ever happened. Now we are indeed in a time machine hurtling toward the ABA.

The students are like teenagers – well, most of them are teenagers – at their first keg party. Howling, laughing, shouting clever comments to the person sitting two inches away from them, hysterical with embarrassment and excitement at having blasted through a taboo. Jumping over a car seems like nothing when you've just seen that in your college class. My crippled fingers stab at the keyboard trying to make it go away, my clumsiness magnified exponentially as I try to restore a semblance of calm to what has become a roomful of very large, coked-up 6th graders. I find a new clip and, as always, the graceful moving images of baller excellence gradually bring them back to their senses, or, at least, make them quiet down a bit. But, as the last image fades, along with the last bellowed note of Whitney’s “Greatest Love of All,” I sense the loopy energy bubble back up to a boil.

I try to channel it: “what do you see in the clips of Erving? “ Some of the answers: “grace, dunks, the range on his finger-roll, his athleticism.” Great, I tell them. And then I remind them that much of what we saw in the Dr J clips was occurring at the same time as what we had seen two days before in clips of the Knicks. But it looks like a different game, like a different era, like our era. And, in fact, it’s true, they see it too, today’s NBA game – driving athletic layups, rim rattling dunks, three-pointers – owes much more to Erving and the ABA than it does to Red Holzman and the Knicks. Unfortunately, scintillating and promising though that postulation may be, they’ve lost interest and begin to bombard me with irrelevant questions about Dr J’s career. That happens a lot: class disintegrating into a streetball version of Jeopardy.

I countered by putting a concrete focal object in front of them. "Take out your books," I droned, "and open to this picture, on p. 86." At least they are obedient, even if glumly so. We look at Jacob Weinstein’s trippy ABA artwork, a two-page visual explosion, in magenta, yellow, and the palest of pale blues, of elevating players, towering stylized afros, skyrocketing shapes and stripes, squiggles and loops, and bears and dancing girls. It’s really a brilliant piece of work, like mainlining Terry Pluto’s Loose Balls (the canonical documentary account of ABA zaniness). “Let’s look at this,” I say, “like a work of art, what jumps out at you?”

First answer: “the 70s.” I press for a little elaboration. They do pretty well, pointing to the color palette and the explosive lines and forms just barely ordered. They smartly contrast this with the art work we’ve already examined in the class: the neat lines and subdued colors of the Celtics trophy machine, the slightly more individualized and fantastic but still by no means chaotic image of the Knicks plying their trade against a skyline of newspaper headlines and box scores. What do the 70s mean to you? I ask.

One kid’s answer: “I don’t exist.” By which, it turns out, he meant neither to roll out a slip-n-slide of Cartesian doubt, nor to transport us into a paradoxical first-person consciousness prior to his conception, but rather just to state the obvious: it’s before his time and so doesn’t mean much. It’s the flipside of the Trivial Pursuit version of historical interest: none. I choke back the rising gorge of self-righteous indignation so as to glide past that worrisome – and all too common -- ignorance and lack of curiosity about any frame of reference outside the first person singular in the present tense. Fortunately, someone else says, “It’s the 70s, it just looks like, like, anything could happen. You tell me something crazy happened in the 70s and I’d believe it, because anything could happen in the 70s.” A couple of students echo that, as though the first one hadn’t even spoken, like academics in a committee meeting.

Bingo. I can work with that. "The 70s," I say, "I’m hearing means possibility to you, an expanded field of possibilities." I hear a sound. Everybody laughs. I look confused. I hear the sound again. Not sure if it is a fart or a snore. Everyone laughs again. "Please," I think I begged, "can y’all stay with me here." A hand goes up: "Who is the guy holding the McDonald’s bag in the fur coat?" I look more closely at the illustration. I can’t remember and I’m so irritated by their unrepressed fascination with the marginal detail. Then I come up with it: Marvin Barnes. I tell them the story about Barnes refusing to board a St Louis bound plane in Louisville because it would arrive “before” it departed: “I’m not getting on no time machine,” said the player some felt could’ve been the greatest ever. No hand, but a voice calls out, "Who is the guy with the gun in the Condors uniform?" I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t fucking know. Their fucking attention spans are like the 2005-6 Phoenix offense: 7 seconds or less. I say none of this. Instead I laugh: "you can look it up if you want, y’all are so much faster on your devices than I am." (it was John Brisker, for the record).

I try again: "Possibility," I say richly, trying to make the word sound like an open door rather than a lead balloon. I really want to bring home the point that this marginalized insanity of the ABA, the league that apparently folded, had actually migrated into the NBA and taken over, viz. All-Star Weekend. But I also want them to get not only that historical point about the game, but to glimpse that there’s a way of thinking about possibility and growth, about marginality and centrality here. I fantasize about them going out in the world and scrambling social hierarchies because of Culture of Basketball class.

"Wendell Berry," I tell them, "is an American poet and essayist, who is also a farmer in Kentucky." (Snickers). "He’s interested in questions of land use, farming, productivity, and ecology," I say. Back in the late 70s, just after the ABA folded, he took a trip to Peru to study the farming practices of Andean peasants there. I remember almost nothing of this essay except the following (which I may in fact be misremembering): Berry was struck by the fact that the Peruvian farmers would leave a wild margin all around their cultivated plots. Accustomed to the US practice of tilling and planting every possible square inch of arable land, Berry was puzzled. The farmers explained that the margin was sort of like a research laboratory. If some sort of pest, for example, destroyed their crop one year, they could look to the margins and see what had survived and in that way begin to develop hybrids that would resist that blight the next time.

Now it all started coming together for me. I began to see the students’ wildness today as an expression of, a way of responding to, by reflecting, the wildness of the ABA. “What the hell was the ABA?” asks the subtitle of Bethlehem Shoals’s chapter (entitled Notes from the Underground) on the league in FreeDarko’s history of the pro game. Indeed, what the hell was that? The question we ask after something absurd occurs. Or, even more pertinently, after we come to our senses having participated in something absurd and inexplicable, or maybe even embarrassing. The question we ask having seen a UFO shoot across the evening sky, a quick trailing flash in our peripheral vision. It’s the question that might be asked of anything that grows in the unpoliced, uncultivated, untended margins of our attention. What the hell was that?

Indeed, that’s why I’ve allowed myself (why I always allow myself), against my judgment, to ramble about the seemingly unproductive, distracted and distracting occurrences and comments in class. The students seemed to me to be pestering for the identities of players on the margins of the picture, but they were really asking what the hell was that on the periphery of their egocentric, adolescent vision? What was that in a cowboy hat and six shooter? In a fur coat clutching a McDonald’s bag? Is Will Ferrell true? What was that world before I was born? (Indeed, the viral metaphor helps me understand how I kept getting carried away on the tide of their appetite for the decontextualized marginal detail; they were bitten by the ABA and I was bitten by them). What the hell was that?

And the answer, just like when someone hauls out the baby pictures (or better yet, the ultrasound images), is: it’s you, silly! Your game, your day and age. Saturday night Claire and I watched – riveted, bored, and embarrassed all at once -- a high-heeled, dolled up Heather Cox (I know its obvious, but really, why is a woman wearing heels to a basketball game?) escort Clippers guard Eric Gordon to a green screen, where he bashfully donned a Spartan helmet, grabbed a fake sword, and stood awkwardly before Jon Barry, ESPN commentator, who himself was also holding a sword and wearing a gladiator mask. They proceeded to mumble a few lines from the movie “Gladiator” and half-heartedly to knock their swords together like two embarrassed six year olds who are friends only because their parents are. “Thanks for the giggles, Eric” said Heather. He wandered off probably wondering “What the hell was that?” That was just before Justin Bieber nailed a three pointer in the celebrity game; which was just before he claimed his MVP trophy shouting props to “my boy Magic Johnson.” Did Justin Bieber really say “my boy Magic Johnson”? Did Magic really not only let him, but slap palms with him as he did? What the hell was that? The ABA –oops, the NBA – Its FANtastic! Have we really come so far from wrestling bears and playboy bunnies?

It’s true, the ABA may primarily be a mine of retro cache for a few urban hipsters, or a nostalgia trip for some middle-aged ballers like myself, but in some very real ways the ABA didn’t fold at all, it just implanted itself parasitically into the NBA and mutated (Shoals himself offers the viral metaphor in passing, and refers to the league as a “workshop or laboratory”). Add it’s not just the shamelessly, insatiable appetite for attention in the global media marketplace or the brazen techniques for securing it that the farmers of the NBA found and hybridized in the margins that were the ABA. It’s also, as I pointed out to the students, the game itself, the product on the floor.

If LeBron idolized Michael Jordan, well, it’s well-known that Michael idolized North Carolina State, then ABA, high-flyer David Thompson. Thompson may have burned out, but Dr. J didn’t, becoming instead a dominant gene in the host body of his new league. Where clips of the 70s Knicks offer an endless series of sober layups and mid-range jumpers (their regularity only emphasized by the oddity of an Earl Monroe scoop shot), the typical NBA game today presents itself as a series of 3 pointers, twisting layups in traffic, and mighty jams: in short, as a Dr J ABA highlight reel. And never is that more evident than during All-Star weekend, when the game turns itself inside out: parading as spectacular exhibition what in fact it is all the time.

There is a beautiful coda I would like to add, though it didn’t occur to me in class, lest I sound too disdainful. I’m only a little disdainful. After all, I’m of original ABA vintage and my authentic ABA game ball (autographed by the 1975 Spurs) sits proudly on our mantle. It’s in my DNA. But if I nonetheless seem less than caught up in the spectacle let me offer this by way of gratitude to the progenitors of Amazing.

The students, in responding to the artwork, mentioned the word “psychedelic.” In the feverish haze of my own ABA acid trip, I neglected to tell them that etymologically, “psychedelic” means “soul manifesting.” But it strikes me now that the phrase is a perfect response to the question: what the hell was the ABA? It was soul, manifesting. And while it may well have been an economically futile, exploitative, drug driven ride for a few martini-soaked businessmen, it also implanted some much needed soul (and style) into the genetic material of the mother ship that would first absorb and then be possessed by it.

go backward to read the previous day's explanation for why the early 70s Knicks didn't dunk and why it matters

or

Go on to read Day 13 and another version of soul