Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: Exquisite Corpse (Day 15)

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 intra-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 that decades I once harbored of what I might, but failed, to become. But also, though I hate to say it, it is because those damn 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 which is not at the same time 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.

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

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.” And I've even written about how Baruch Spinoza had a different take on the whole episode. 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.

You Dance and Shake The Hurt (Day 13)

The latest from Yago Colas.

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, 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 bounce pass? 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.]

What It Is (Day 12)

Yago Colas posts again about his Cultures of Basketball course, but also, what the ABA means to us today. Especially in the afterglow of All-Star Weekend. Here's Day 11, on kids and the seventies Knicks, if you missed it.

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 trailing off, 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 Cultures 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, as 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? Was 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.

Every Day Another Rumbling

As Dr. Santiago Colas conducts his Cultures of Basketball course at Michigan, and writes a bunch about it, we here at FD are committed to participating as second-hand participants, albeit with a somewhat privileged perspective. Yago's last two classes dealt with the early pro leagues and the great (and zany) barnstorming operations. Here, Jacob and I discuss his posts:

Bethlehem Shoals: It kind of blows my mind, and not necessarily in a good way, that our "textbook" includes the self-deprecating line about Jews being good at business and penny-pinching. Remember, we had to fight, gnash our teeth, and over-write in the master files to keep that in? At the time, it felt like a good inside joke, and the sort of thing we should be allowed to do, given our audience. But it is a little strange that college students would stumble across that line in what's, on all other counts, a pretty serious book about race and culture in sports. There's some sarcasm, to be sure. Flat-out irony, though? This might be the one line that lays it on that thick -- obviously, we only felt comfortable doing that with our own ethnic group -- and yet if the class isn't familiar with anti-Semitism (probably a good thing), I have no idea how that line comes across. The real shame might be that it comes at the high point of Jews as players of the game, which tarnishes that, in a way. Actually, maybe it makes it stronger, since there's no reason we can imagine the era of the Jews to have been one where, as a historical space, Jewish humor is free to roam the plains.

Jacob Weinstein: While I agree that line is sort of a tonal shift from the rest of the book, what it really highlights to me is the awkwardness and artificiality of lumping all these barnstorming teams together to begin with. Given the space considerations of the book it made sense, but really there is a huge difference in the quality and the historical importance of teams like the Celtics, Rens and Globetrotters, and teams like Olson's Terrible Swedes or the House of David which were almost sideshow or novelty acts. The SPHAs were sort of a middle ground, neither a novelty act nor a truly dominant team like the Celtics, and I think an ironic aside sneaks in mostly because, as you noted, it was our own ethnic group, but also because the entire section was a weird mix of bold face tragedies (Globetrotters) historical footnotes (Kues) and pure absurdity (House of David).

And while the SPHAs certainly were a legit team, in my research it seems like even former players or fans still regard the team with some good humor. In no small part because the organizational structure of the time was such a mess, and the rules themselves were in such flux, it's hard to even get a read on the quality of the team's play. For example, what does the high point of Jews as players of the game even mean, if the game they excelled in was so alien from what we know as basketball today? It's almost like claiming to have been the best doctor during the Middle Ages. And that's why I think the ethnic underpinning of the team--and the accompanying stereotypes-- really become almost all there is to remember. Otherwise, we could have just featured some other random team from the era like the Paterson Crescents or the Brooklyn Visitations. Newark Mules stand up!

BS: It's only artificial and awkward insofar as the game itself was, at that time, still kind of a mess. Barnstorming teams, whether they were the Globetrotters or the House of David, played whatever competition that town could offer up. Since players in the early pro leagues (so strange to call it "early", since we're talking about nearly fifty years -- as long as the "modern" game has been around) were hardly getting rich, we can assume that they were part of that equation. That's what makes the Buffalo Germans so representative: it's impossible to tell if they were a total fraud because the line between legitimate and illegitimate ball was so blurred. I'm sure there were plenty of nights that the Original Celtics got to phone it in against a bunch of eager high school students.

What's interesting to me, though, is that while the barnstorming teams did have this self-undermining quality to them, they also introduced and disseminated new ideas about the game. I'm not one-hundred percent sure about this, but it seems like most of the actual developments in how to play the game -- as opposed to the parameters and rules -- came out of barnstorming teams. At least until the forties. The Celtics are important for developing the pick and roll, not their inflated win-loss record; the Globetrotters paved the way for pretty much any basketball played with style and creativity.

Oddly, this brings it all back to the Paul Gallico quote that inspired our own off-color line: the SPHAS may not have been a truly dominant team, or even all that well-organized, but it's clear that they brought something to the game that resonated with those watching it comes into focus. Granted, today we have a somewhat different notion of the "city game", and yet the idea of a tough, streetwise, crafty player who is slick without being smooth -- that's still part of the way we talk about basketball today.

JW: Yeah, I guess you're right. Basketball was just a mess back then. Even now I still have no idea how we could have presented those barnstorming teams in a more logical or truthful way. But what I think I was trying to bring the discussion around to was Yago's questions of "How do we tell the pre-history of something, when they didn't know they were a part of anything," which, likewise, I'm still befuddled by. The game these teams were playing between the 1890s and 1950s was undoubtedly basketball, but at the edges you sort of have to squint to convince yourself of that.

As for the barnstorming teams introducing new ideas to the game, I would definitely agree. And while non-barnstorming players were probably just as crucial in coming up with innovations, the barnstormers certainly were more important in disseminating those ideas, since they were playing hundreds of games a year all over the country. What's interesting to me is the constant battle between these player innovations and the rules from on-high--I guess what Yago would call spontaneity and calculation. And to further complicate it, the push and pull between the professional organizations and the amateur organizations.

So picking up where you left off in discussing chapter 0 of the book, if Naismith is the founding father of the United States of Basketball, and his original rules are the constitution, then for the first fifty years or so the amateur and collegiate basketball organizations were sort of "constitutional originalists' who kept nudging the game back to what Naismith imagined (or more accurately, what they imagined Naismith imagined). For example, the YMCA's and the AAU never adopted the cage, outlawed double dribbling, tried to keep the game nonviolent, etc. And to push this crude analogy even further, during the same period the pro leagues would have believed in a "living consitution", a sort of free-market functionalism where regional oddities (no backboards in the Northeast) and functional innovations (dribbling, the pick and roll, the pivot man, etc. ) were all thrown together and either adopted, discarded, or refined through new rules by the organizational bodies in control at the time.

I have no idea where I was going with the last comment. I guess Phog Allen is Scalia and Marques Haynes is Ruth Bader Ginsburg?

BS: Bringing back the Constitutional analogy makes me wonder how it is that Naismith's rules can be fetishized, but the next five decades are this alien world that, somehow, spit out the NBL and BAA. With the exception of Prohibition, the Constitution is changed to account for some very linear notion of progress -- one that holds up to this day. This pre-history of the NBA is more like we now understand evolution to be: a series of random mutations that, through their interaction with the outside world, are streamlined and refined into adaptation. So whether we're talking about stylistic innovations, or changes the rules, the trial-and-error quality of this period doesn't mean it's negligible. We don't even have a situation like the ABA, where a lot of the craziness was external to the game. It's pretty clear that the instability, and occasional breakthroughs, in basketball during this time were directly tied to how topsy-turvy its circumstances were.

The idea of a non-linear history doesn't come naturally to us, because we're used to narrative. But it's probably closer to, you know, the way things really are. So in a way, it's good that we can't quite make sense of the early pro leagues and the barnstormers. Maybe we should be trying to bring that kind of perspective to the history that, in our minds, works out much more cleanly.