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  BASKETBALL

  Great Writing About America’s Game

  Alexander Wolff, EDITOR

  WITH A FOREWORD BY

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  THE LIBRARY OF AMERICA

  Foreword, Introduction, headnotes, and volume compilation copyright © 2018 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., New York, N.Y.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Published in the United States by Library of America.

  LIBRARY OF AMERICA, a nonprofit publisher, is dedicated to publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America’s best and most significant writing. Each year the Library adds new volumes to its collection of essential works by America’s foremost novelists, poets, essayists, journalists, and statesmen.

  Visit our website at www.loa.org to find out more about Library of America, including our signature black-jacketed series, Paperback Classics, and American Poets Project; and to sign up to receive our occasional newsletter with exclusive interviews with Library of America authors and editors, and our popular Story of the Week e-mails.

  Some of the material in this volume is reprinted with the permission of holders of copyright and publishing rights. Acknowledgments are on page 445.

  Distributed to the trade in the United States by Penguin Random House Inc. and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951244

  e-ISBN 978–1–59853–564–8

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Contents

  Foreword by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  Introduction: February Reconsidered by Alexander Wolff

  JAMES NAISMITH

  from Basketball: Its Origin and Development

  RED SMITH

  A Case of Malnutrition

  EDITH ROBERTS

  Indiana’s Town of Champions

  HERBERT WARREN WIND

  Farewell to Cousy

  JOHN McPHEE

  from A Sense of Where You Are

  ROY BLOUNT, JR.

  47 Years A Shot-Freak

  PETE AXTHELM

  from The City Game

  GEORGE KISEDA

  A Reflection of Society

  JIMMY BRESLIN

  The Coach Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight

  TOM MESCHERY

  from Caught in the Pivot

  RICK TELANDER

  from Heaven Is a Playground

  MICHAEL NOVAK

  from The Joy of Sports

  STANLEY COHEN

  from The Game They Played

  PETER GOLDMAN

  Requiem for a Globetrotter

  DOUGLAS BAUER

  Girls Win, Boys Lose

  BILL RUSSELL AND TAYLOR BRANCH

  from Second Wind

  DAVID HALBERSTAM

  from The Breaks of the Game

  FRANK DEFORD

  The Rabbit Hunter

  DAVID BRADLEY

  The Autumn of the Age of Jabbar

  DONALD HALL

  Basketball: The Purest Sport of Bodies

  MARK JACOBSON

  The Passion of Doctor J

  CURRY KIRKPATRICK

  Memories

  BOB RYAN AND TERRY PLUTO

  from Forty-Eight Minutes

  DAVE KINDRED

  Pete Maravich

  ALEXANDER WOLFF

  The Coach and His Champion

  CHARLES P. PIERCE

  The Brother from Another Planet

  DARCY FREY

  from The Last Shot

  GARY SMITH

  Eyes of the Storm

  RICK REILLY

  Last Call?

  MELISSA KING

  It’s All in the Game

  KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR

  from A Season on the Reservation

  JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN

  from Hoop Roots

  PAT CONROY

  from My Losing Season

  STEVE RUSHIN

  I Believe in B-Ball

  JAMES McKEAN

  Playing for Jud

  FREEDARKO

  from The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac

  MICHAEL LEWIS

  The No-Stats All-Star

  GEORGE DOHRMANN

  from Play Their Hearts Out

  BRYAN CURTIS

  The Fiberglass Backboard

  JACK McCALLUM

  from Dream Team

  BRIAN DOYLE

  His Last Game

  LEE JENKINS

  The King: LeBron James, Sportsman of the Year 2012

  ZACH LOWE

  The Life and Death of Fandom

  ROWAN RICHARDO PHILLIPS

  Days of Wine and Curry

  DAVID SHIELDS

  Life Is Not a Playground

  Sources and Acknowledgments

  Index

  Foreword

  by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  TWO WOODEN PEACH BASKETS. A heavy leather soccer ball. Two nine-man teams. No dribbling allowed. No running with the ball.

  That was the basic setup for the first basketball game played on December 21, 1891, when the game’s inventor, Dr. James Naismith, asked his gym class students to try something new, a safer alternative to injury-prone football. One of Naismith’s students reacted with an unenthusiastic “Huh! Another new game!” But they played their two fifteen-minute halves with a five-minute break between, finishing with a resounding 1–0 score. It was just as well that the game was low-scoring considering that the peach basket still had its bottom intact, so after a basket was made the janitor had to climb up on a ladder and get the ball down.

  Huh, indeed!

  An inauspicious beginning for one of the world’s most popular sports. With over one billion fans worldwide, basketball is second only to soccer in having the largest number of professional teams and is the fastest growing sport in the world. One reason for its popularity is its simplicity. Basketball is one of the few major sports that you can play with a team or by yourself. All you need is a hoop and a ball. That’s why there are small basketball hoops on the backs of the doors of so many bedrooms, dorm rooms, and office rooms, and so many balled-up pieces of paper around wastebaskets.

  As a child, I was more interested in baseball. However, my height and encouragement from the basketball coach brought me out on the court to give it a try. At first, I was a lousy player, all arms and legs and very little coordination. I moved like a daddy longlegs spider on roller skates. But the more I played, the more the game became an integral part of me. It was no longer just something I did, it was how I saw myself as an individual and how I saw myself as part of my peers.

  Growing up in Catholic schools, I was one of only two or three black kids in the entire student population. This was during the 1950s and 1960s, when America was going through a tumultuous political upheaval. Atrocities against African Americans were being broadcast on the nightly news and the black community responded with protests in the streets, some nonviolent, others descending into riots. I was just a school kid trying to figure out where I stood in all this turmoil. At school, the white kids were also trying to figure where I stood.

  Playing for the school teams from middle school through high school was one way I was able to demonstrate that, while I was well aware of the social inequities and was outspoken about them, I was still a loyal part of the school itself. Being part of a team was important to me because I learned how to work with others so that we all could be successful together. It was satisfying to me as a player, but
it was also satisfying to me as an African American to show us all working in harmony.

  Also, the better I played as an individual, the more of a statement I was making about the negative stereotypes about blacks that were prevalent at that time. When a hook shot soared over an opponent and swished through the basket, I felt like I’d scored for all blacks. “See what we can do if given a chance?” I was saying. Sure, there were plenty of successful black athletes out there, but each addition to their ranks made the statement even bolder. I was determined to join in that statement with each game.

  Basketball gave me the confidence to speak out and it gave me the platform to be heard. And, while the sport helped forge my personal and social values, it was never just about making a statement. There was also the pure joy of the game. When ten players are on the court, hustling, sweating, passing, muscling, looking for a shot, the outside world fades away to a distant thrum. There is only your training, your will, and your trust in your teammates. You feel it deep inside in a way that defies description.

  That’s where writers come in. Writing about basketball isn’t just about showing enthusiasm for the game, it’s also about understanding the elegance of the sport, the chesslike intricacies of the gameplans, the emotional impact on the fans, and what it says about the society that heralds it. This definitive collection includes some of the most famous sportswriters, players, aficionados, and enthusiasts the sport of basketball has ever known. And they get it right.

  Whether you already love basketball or you’re just wondering what the fuss is all about, this book will give you insights into all aspects of the game, from personal experiences playing and coaching to the joys and frustrations of being a fan to the relevance of the sport in our culture.

  And you don’t even have to work up a sweat.

  Introduction

  by Alexander Wolff

  February Reconsidered

  GEORGE PLIMPTON was the embodiment of the literary sportswriter, respected equally in the saloon and the salon. Perhaps that explains why his “Small Ball Theory” has hung like a shroud over writing about America’s homegrown sport. “The smaller the ball, the more formidable the literature,” Plimpton wrote in 1992. “There are superb books about golf, very good books about baseball, not many good books about football or soccer, very few good books about basketball and no good books about beach balls.”

  In his slight regard for basketball writing, Plimpton had company. There’s only one basketball story among the fifty-nine pieces in the 1999 collection The Best American Sports Writing of the Century. (You can find it in this volume on page 150.) Decades before that, after he left sports to write novels, New York Daily News columnist Paul Gallico was asked why. “February,” Gallico replied—not fingering basketball explicitly, but delivering an indictment by association just the same.

  Consider this collection a rebuttal, as well as an updated survey of a basketball bibliography that, a quarter century after Plimpton’s pronouncement, can stand unapologetically tall. His theory couldn’t yet account for such books set far from the spotlight as Darcy Frey’s The Last Shot (1994), John Edgar Wideman’s Hoop Roots (2001), Pat Conroy’s My Losing Season (2002), and George Dohrmann’s Play Their Hearts Out (2010), much less work inspired by the NBA’s Nineties boom or college basketball’s ESPN-aided ascendancy. Attention begets fame, which begets public curiosity—in Bobby Knight, in Michael Jordan, in the Dream Team, in LeBron James. In meeting that demand, contemporary writers have backloaded the hoops canon.

  To get a fix on what basketball writing is, it’s worth stipulating what it isn’t. It’s less concerned with individual characters than boxing writing is, even if basketball also features large personalities performing outsized feats. Nor is the genre marked by the nostalgia that consumes so much baseball writing. Football writing tends to convey that sport’s violent nature and steady evolution into spectacle; basketball is physical and commercialized, to be sure, but it’s more balletic than brutal, with an intimacy that keeps writers from dwelling on the game as mass entertainment.

  At its best, writing about basketball is likely to feature at least one of several characteristics. The first is what might be called a formalist approach. Even many non-sportswriters have been moved to examine the masters of this expressive team game that seeks to hold in balance freedom and unity, two tenets at the heart of the American experiment. That might mean celebrating conspicuous talents, like those of Julius Erving, as limned here by Mark Jacobson; or highlighting the subservient, almost imperceptible gifts of Shane Battier, a player, Michael Lewis writes, “widely regarded inside the NBA as, at best, a replaceable cog in a machine driven by superstars. And yet every team he has ever played on has acquired some magical ability to win.” Another type of compelling piece sketches one of the characters the game has a knack for attracting, someone like Wilfred Hetzel, the aging trick-shot specialist profiled by Roy Blount, Jr., or Marquette coach Al McGuire, of whom Jimmy Breslin writes, in the argot of their native Queens, “I know the guy a long time.” And given the game’s African American inflections, as well as a lifespan that runs from Plessy v. Ferguson through the civil rights era to Charlottesville, good basketball writing tends to extend to themes beyond the arena or playground, race above all. Peter Goldman’s ode to a Harlem Globe­trotter, the dribbling wizard and certified character Leon Hillard, satisfies on each of these counts, but especially the last. When Goldman sets the scene of a terrified band of Trotters about to go on strike, holed up in a motel room and peering through the blinds as fans file into the arena across the street, we see the opening act of a stage play begging to be written.

  More than anything, some of the best basketball writing can be personal in a way that writing about other games simply can’t be. No other major sport so lends itself to playing alone, or is so anthropological, rife with both tribes to which the individual belongs and rites in which he participates—or to which she is subjected. “This is the way it works,” writes Melissa King in “It’s All in the Game,” inviting us to consider what it’s like to be the oddest of ducks on the courts of Chicago. Pat Conroy’s book is a multisession exercise in post-traumatic psychoanalysis. Wideman suggests that basketball is so profoundly personal that it can create a parallel persona: “Read something in a newspaper about one of your basketball buddies and never know it’s him. Snobs, inside the disguise of a whole, proper name. You’ll have to hear the good news or bad news over again on the sidelines from somebody who tells the story with the court name in place. D’you hear about Snobs, man.”

  Just as a game can turn on one play, many of the pieces here turn on one sentence or phrase. Here’s Douglas Bauer, a high school benchwarmer, on his girlfriend, the star of the girls’ team: “How great it would be to be so good that a bad night was the reason one’s team had lost.” George Dohrmann, on an adolescent casualty of the basketball-industrial complex: “Now, with his future hanging in the air like a ball on the rim, he cowered in a bathroom stall.” Bryan Curtis, on the therapeutic value of sending shots thunggg-ing against a fiberglass backboard: “It was like shooting a silky Rabbit Angstrom jumper and committing a flagrant foul in the same motion.” Brian Doyle, on a telepathic moment between brothers as they watch a pickup game: “That’s a beautiful thing because it’s little, and we saw it and we knew what it meant.” Read these in context and you’ll wind up remembering each story by its essential fragment, the same way you remember a play-off game by that moment LeBron pinned a last-minute layup as if mounting it on a wall.

  Basketball’s rise as popular entertainment coincided with the ascendancy of a new school of sportswriting. By the dawn of the Sixties a cohort of newspaper and magazine writers, refusing to “god up” athletes, began to focus instead on sports in their social context. The old guard called them “the Chipmunks,” and these antiestablishment reporters, chattering among themselves in the press room, wore the epithet as a badge of honor. Journalists became more confident and allusive, pulling into a bas
ketball piece not just race but also money and, at their intersection, labor relations. Another chronicler of the Sixties, David Halberstam, joined Peter Goldman in hitting those notes in the basketball work included here.

  A glance at this volume’s table of contents over the space of a few years highlights this revolution in sensibility. In 1965, John McPhee profiles Princeton star Bill Bradley, a Sunday School teacher and exemplar of the very muscular Christianity that motivated James Nais­mith, the game’s inventor, to become a physical educator. Not a half dozen years later, in The City Game, Pete Axthelm is juxtaposing the exploits of Bradley and his New York Knicks teammates with sketches of heroin casualties in Harlem. George Kiseda is championing the lonely calvary of Vanderbilt star Perry Wallace as he integrated the Southeastern Conference. And Breslin is telling of how McGuire called time-out so his black players could raise their fists to honor Malcolm X in the middle of a game. We’ve come a long way from Bradley in his dorm room pregame, motivating himself by playing the warhorse from The Sound of Music, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” If basketball writing has now found its stride, it helps that the Sixties happened, but that the New Journalism did, too. A hoops piece now refracts even old verities like diligence and teamwork through a lens with the warp of the modern game.

  The selections here are limited to nonfiction, but the contributors include a striking number of poets—not only poets by primary vocation, like Donald Hall, James McKean, and Rowan Ricardo Phillips, but also such essayists as Bauer and Doyle, for whom poetry has been a supplemental genre, as well as Tom Meschery, who wrote verse during and after his NBA career. The critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick once ascribed her love for the prose of poets to “the offhand flashes, the absence of the lumber . . . the quickness, the deftness, confidence, and even the relief from spelling everything out, plank by plank.” Which is to say she kindled to the very things that basketball delivers.