Basketball Read online

  If poetry is the business of isolating moments in the rushing continuum of life, those drawn to writing and reading about basketball seek also to pull something memorable from the burbling that is this most fluid of games. And basketball writers keep the company of people who understand, viscerally if only subconsciously, that rhyme, meter, and poetic resonances lie in there somewhere. Ask the former English Lit professor and Los Angeles Lakers coach Paul Westhead about the jump shot of one of his players, forward Jamaal Wilkes, and the answer comes back: “It’s like snow on a bamboo leaf.”

  Verbiage produced by the human voice is the very sign of a basketball game’s vitality. In a comment to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who writes of his season coaching on a reservation in Arizona, a Native American colleague sees the silence with which Apache kids play the game as a virtue, approvingly calling it “ninja basketball.” But Abdul-Jabbar finds the quiet troubling. To him, it’s more than a matter of upholding basketball’s African American oral tradition, which encourages the selling of wolf tickets to claim a seat in an opponent’s head. If you play ball, you lay a rap on, for basketball demands verbal engagement as does no other sport. To play on a team, writes McKean, is to traffic in “single-word information—left, right, switch, mine, my fault—all directed to honing the moment to a simple edge, your two points and their absolute denial.” From spoken word, it’s just a short hop to vocal music: Phillips takes us beyond the simplistic assertion that “basketball is jazz,” matching a player, Steph Curry, with a standard, Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.”

  In their introduction to the collection Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball, Todd Davis and J. D. Scrimgoeur note that Walt Whitman died a few months after Naismith hung up the primordial peach baskets in December 1891. “Whitman doubtless would have been pleased with Naismith’s game, born of necessity and joy, requiring ego and egolessness,” they write. “A game with patterns that can feel elemental, yet distinguished by improbable improvisations, full of the energy of the city and the stillness (ever taken a foul shot?) of the prairie—an American game. Indeed, one might imagine Whitman’s spirit transferring from his body into this new game and the bodies that play it, their moves graceful as grasses in the wind, stunning as sunlight flashing off the East River.”

  Hold that image: New York City and the glint of sunlight, but off shards of glass, swept to the edge of a patch of macadam girdled by chain link. Three of the excerpts here—from Rick Telander’s Heaven Is a Playground, as well as The Last Shot and The City Game—address basketball at street level within the city’s boroughs. Each piece delivers a variation on the theme of striving in the face of racial barriers and urban poverty, from a white journalist who comes back with a handful of the naked city’s eight million hard-luck stories. But each earns its place here for a distinctive emphasis—for whom it reserves its sympathy or at whom it points a finger.

  It took the Knicks winning their 1969–70 NBA title for the provincial Manhattan book publishing world to fully embrace basketball, but when it did—that team alone spawned more than a half dozen titles—a dam broke. Heaven Is a Playground found its way to Hawaii, where an African American adolescent was being raised by white grandparents while attending an elite private school. After he enrolled at Columbia University in Manhattan, Barack Obama recounts in his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, he made sure to visit “courts I’d once read about.”

  Of course, Obama wasn’t merely a reader of basketball, even as Telander’s 1976 account of a summer spent on the playgrounds of Brooklyn helped the future president negotiate that fatherless, racially isolated upbringing. He loved to watch and play it, Obama said during the 2008 campaign, because the game features “improvisation within a discipline that I find very powerful.” In his memoir, Obama tells how basketball fired him with an early sense of self-sufficiency, manhood, and racial identity. He captures its folkways and initiation rites, and in one run-on sentence—a kind of prose poem in miniature—he both hints at what will be a lifelong engagement with the game and evokes its fluid nature with a writerly ambition. Basketball, he testifies, offers “a way of being together when the game was tight and the sweat broke and the best players stopped worrying about their points and the worst players got swept up in the moment and the score only mattered because that’s how you sustained the trance.”

  By confining his critique to books, Plimpton failed to account for basketball’s representation in magazines. The New Yorker editor William Shawn greenlit both McPhee on Bradley and Herbert Warren Wind on Bob Cousy. Harper’s bankrolled the original reporting by Axthelm and Frey, while the editors of Sport offered two moonlighting real-world journalists, Breslin and Goldman, a chance to scratch their itch to write on the game, and even coaxed a mash note to Earl (The Pearl) Monroe from director Woody Allen.

  But no periodical served basketball more faithfully than Sports Illustrated. In a thinly veiled reference in his novel Semi-Tough, longtime senior writer Dan Jenkins disparaged the old SI as “a slick cookbook for the two-yacht family.” The Sixties changed the magazine, as they changed so much: All nine of the selections here from SI were published in 1970 or afterward, six of them by some of the most distinctive voices to grace its pages—Blount, Frank Deford, Curry Kirkpatrick, Gary Smith, Rick Reilly, and Steve Rushin. Each enjoyed stylistic freedom and as much space as he wanted, with editors essentially calling for clear-outs, as a coach would for a star player. “He wrote like he was shooting for something,” SI copy chief Gabe Miller said of Deford, and the same might be said of those colleagues, especially Smith. All could deliver the lengthy piece that didn’t feel long, and built persuasively upon some kernel of truth, like this from Deford on Bobby Knight: “It’s the rabbits that are doing him in.”

  For the first eight years of the magazine’s existence, a writer and editor named Jeremiah (Jerry) Tax had maintained a mostly lonely vigil over the sport. The colleges were especially challenging to cover, with isolated hotbeds in the Bay Area, Philadelphia, and the river valleys of the Ohio and Missouri. As Tax made his rounds, and coaches pressed him on where he had been and what he had seen, he recognized an opportunity if only the magazine would see the sport as one sprawling, national whole. In 1962, spotting Deford’s six feet, four inches, and learning of his pedigree as a high school star, Tax commandeered the new hire for the basketball beat. NBA players then ate on thin-gruel per diems, and here was a guy their age and size and fortified by a Time Inc. expense account. The journalist who rarely dines alone seldom fears for an empty notebook, and the man from SI, whom Boston Celtics like Bill Russell and John Havlicek could glimpse in the front cabin as they languished in coach, would become a lifelong friend. Even as the Celtics won title after title through the mid-sixties, television did little beyond parachuting in for the Finals; in the aftermath of one championship, a network gofer, charged with wrangling Red Auerbach for an interview, found himself waved off by the Celtics coach’s signature cigar. “Where the fuck were you in February?” Auerbach said, draping his other arm around Deford. “I’m going with my writers.”

  But college basketball benefited the most as SI expanded its coverage. Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp invited Deford into the locker room at halftime of the 1966 NCAA title game, in which his all-white Wildcats would lose to Texas Western and its all-black starting five. What Junior Johnson was to Tom Wolfe, rebel spirits like (Pistol) Pete Maravich, Johnny Neumann, and Dwight (Bo) Lamar were to Kirkpatrick, whose work turned each into a familiar name, and trafficked in scenes like that of Texas Western coach Don Haskins, on the eve of the game’s Brown v. Board of Ed moment, throwing back beers with frat boys at the team’s motel lest the students wake his sleeping players.

  In 1973, when the NCAA moved its title game to prime time on Monday night, SI held open its cover and several front-of-the-book pages, and soon a symbiosis between the magazine and the tournament set in: SI got first dibs on hanging strobe lights from arena rafters; the NCAA reached seventeen million people with a
words-and-pictures keepsake of an event, the Final Four, that would eventually chase the Oscars from Monday night. As pro basketball bristled with new life through the Bird-and-Magic Era, Michael Jordan’s six titles, and the age of the NBA’s Superteams, SI’s Jack McCallum and Lee Jenkins captured the league’s personalities and increasing social relevance with scenes and quotes born of unusual access. “Come back, Paul Gallico!” Deford wrote in 2012. “It’s a new and improved February!”

  With the 2010s winding down, magazines in crisis, and SI scaling back from weekly publication, a counterweight of voices has already materialized on the web. When it launched in 2005, the site FreeDarko made the case that, to fulfill the potential of being an NBA fan, it wasn’t enough to cheer for some team. You had to luxuriate in the variety of players in “the Association,” each worth following and studying on his own terms. Members of the FreeDarko collective brought their overstuffed minds to bear on the NBA in hopes of making pro basketball, in the words of cofounder Nathaniel Friedman, aka Bethlehem Shoals, “a little more appealing to people who don’t get off on X’s and O’s or tired macho posturing.”

  Although he never wrote for FreeDarko, Zach Lowe folded some of its spirit into his work for ESPN.com, as did many of the correspondents Henry Abbott assembled for the True Hoop network at the same site. Soon voice and quirkiness began leaching through online writing about the game. Readers devoured Bill Simmons’s blog and his fan’s manifesto, The Book of Basketball, but Simmons would make an even bigger impact as impresario at Grantland and The Ringer. Two highly personal pieces in this volume, by Lowe and Bryan Curtis, benefited from Simmons’s midwifery. And perhaps it takes a decorated poet to deliver poetic justice: In 2015, Rowan Ricardo Phillips began blogging regularly about basketball at the website of The Paris Review, the literary journal founded by and still identified with George Plimpton.

  When Plimpton advanced his Small Ball Theory, basketball wasn’t just a less unbridled game. The kind of sports piece likely to earn acclaim as “good writing” was also much more circumscribed. Today basketball doesn’t wear a straitjacket well, and writing about the game similarly resists the encumbrances of taxonomy. Consider the range of genres represented here: game account, profile, column, obituary, diary, memoir, essay, web take, and road piece, with plenty of blurring of one category into another. This collection covers the pros and colleges and high schools, to be sure, but also playground, driveway, trick-shot, summer travel team, and six-to-a-side girls basketball, as well as clowning, officiating, and analytics.

  If writing about other sports fails to encompass quite so much, hold those games blameless. Instead, all credit to basketball. Hoops is broad and deep enough to lend itself to the finest deli-slicing. It’s a companionable subject whether you want to pick nits with the world as you find it or excavate the achingly intimate. Today those who play the game and those who write about it find themselves empowered as never before; just as NBA free agents can plot to sign with the same team in a flurry of texts, the basketball web supplies a soapbox to anyone with something to say. Versatile, adaptable, available to all, basketball is that two-way player, comfortable on either side of the ball.

  And there’s no late-winter wait to see if it will emerge to glimpse its shadow. The heirs to Plimpton and Gallico can vouch that by February the game has long since been out and about, and that it will be with us through June and beyond, a muse for all seasons.

  James Naismith

  For a game with American origins and an unbuttoned spirit, basketball owes its invention to an unlikely figure: a teetotaling, Canadian-born, Presbyterian minister and physical educator. A devotee of the popular muscular Christianity movement, Dr. James Naismith (1861–1939) believed that “by using up our surplus energy, we invite to rest, rather than to mischief.” In December 1891, while teaching at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, he devised a game both challenging enough to engage a class of wintering rugby and football players and safe enough to be played indoors. Naismith went on to spend four decades running the Physical Education department at the University of Kansas, where he watched with some befuddlement as others capitalized on his invention. In the mid-1930s, shortly after his retirement, family members urged him to write about the beginnings of the game that had become a fixture in America’s cities and small towns and was poised to make its Olympic debut. Naismith’s oldest son tried to move the process along, taking dictation during fitful sessions one summer at the family cabin on the Kaw River outside Lawrence. Frustrated, he enlisted the help of an English composition instructor he had studied under as a Kansas undergraduate, and she helped shape, edit, and proofread the posthumously published Basketball: Its Origins and Development (1941). Here Naismith recalls the restless hours he spent coming up with the game. He also describes a children’s pastime back in Bennie’s Corners, Ontario, which inspired the precise, arching throw the world would come to know as a basketball shot.

  from

  Basketball: Its Origin and Development

  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 they 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. How I hated the thought of going back to the group and admitting that, after all my theories, I, too, had failed to hold the interest of the class. It was worse than losing a game. All the stubborn­ness of my Scotch ancestry was aroused, all my pride of achievement urged me on; I would not go back and admit that I had failed.

  The day before my two weeks ended I met the class. I will always remember that meeting. I had nothing new to try and no idea of what I was going to do. The class period passed with little order, and at the end of the hour the boys left the gym. I can still see that group of fellows filing out the door. As that last pair of grey pants vanished into the locker room, I saw the end of all my ambitions and hopes.

  With weary footsteps I mounted the flight of narrow stairs that led to my office directly over the locker room. 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. Below me, I could hear the boys in the locker room having a good time; they were giving expression to the very spirit that I had tried so hard to evoke.

  I had been a student the year before, and I could picture the group in that locker room. A towel would snap and some fellow would jerk erect and try to locate the guilty individual. Some of it was rough play, but it was all in fun, and each of them entered into it with that spirit. There would be talking and jesting, and I could even imagine the things that the group would be saying about my efforts. I was sure that the fellows did not dislike me, but I was just as sure that they felt that I had given them nothing better than the other instructors.

  As I listened to the noise in the room below, my discouragement left me. I looked back over my attempts to see, if possible, the cause of my failures. I passed in review the gymnastic games that I had tried, and I saw that they were impossible. They were really children’s games; the object that was to be obtained changed with each play, and no man could be interested in this type of game. It was necessary to have some permanent objective that would keep the minds of the participants active and interested.

  As I thought of the other games that I had tried, I realized that the normal individual is strongly influenced by tradition. If he is interested in a game, any attempt to modify that game sets up an antagonism in his mind. I realized that any attempt to change the known games would necessarily result in failure. It was evident that a new principle was necessary; but how to evolve this principle was beyond my ken.

  As I sat there at my desk, I began to study games from the philosophical side. I had been taking one game at a time and had failed to find what I was looking for. This time I would take games as a whole and study them.

  My firs
t generalization was that all team games used a ball of some kind; therefore, any new game must have a ball. Two kinds of balls were used at that time, one large and the other small. I noted that all games that used a small ball had some intermediate equipment with which to handle it. Cricket and baseball had bats, lacrosse and hockey had sticks, tennis and squash had rackets. In each of these games, the use of the intermediate equipment made the game more difficult to learn. The Americans were at sea with a lacrosse stick, and the Canadians could not use a baseball bat.

  The game that we sought would be played by many; therefore, it must be easy to learn. Another objection to a small ball was that it could be easily hidden. It would be difficult for a group to play a game in which the ball was in sight only part of the time.

  I then considered a large ball that could be easily handled and which almost anyone could catch and throw with very little practice. I decided that the ball should be large and light, one that could be easily handled and yet could not be concealed. There were two balls of this kind then in use, one the spheroid of Rugby and the other the round ball of soccer. It was not until later that I decided which one of these two I would select.

  The type of a ball being settled, I turned next to the point of interest of various games. I concluded that the most interesting game at that time was American Rugby. I asked myself why this game could not be used as an indoor sport. The answer to this was easy. It was because tackling was necessary in Rugby. But why was tackling necessary? Again the answer was easy. It was because the men were allowed to run with the ball, and it was necessary to stop them. With these facts in mind, I sat erect at my desk and said aloud:

  “If he can’t run with the ball, we don’t have to tackle; and if we don’t have to tackle, the roughness will be eliminated.”