Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  So Leon went back to the corner, to compete with the dope dealers, the gang-bangers and the storefront Marxist-Leninists for souls. For a while, he answered too many freelance distress calls from too many community groups and playground workers and plain messed-up families. “He was always moving 50 directions at once,” Hunter remembers, “and ten minutes late for everything.” It was almost as if he thought he could go one on one against death. Once, a lady with a kid on heroin called for help; Leon talked to the boy for four hours, made a few phone calls, and had him in a withdrawal clinic before the night was out. Another time, a street blood came at him with a piece, and Leon kung-fued him with words. “I mean, man, just shoot me, ’cause I’m tellin’ you what’s real. You done went to the movie and think you’re Superfly or somebody, and I’m tellin you where you gonna end up at—one-to-five, boy, a dollar a day, and then you either gonna be dead or wish you was dead, ’cause you gonna be a vegetable walkin’ around in these streets.” The blood backed off.

  It took Leon until his last year or so to get his act really together—to connect his streety wizardry with people organized to make it last. He tried for a while with the Abe Saperstein Foundation, but it got nearly as heavy working for Abe’s ghost as it had been working for Abe. So he cut out, along with Bob Love, then Chicago’s reigning black NBA hero, and Chick Sherrer, a close white pal who used to organize basket­ball camps for the NBA, and they started AFBE—Athletes For Better Education. The centerpiece of their year-round program was a two-week summer getaway for kids off the block, basketball plus saturation three-R academics plus Leonology 101–102—those rudimentary arts of life and survival known more formally as citizenship.

  Leon didn’t live long enough to get it really grooving, and his heirs at AFBE are left with their might-have-beens. Like the time at the first camp when one kid stole something from another, and the staff called all 125 campers together for a late-night meeting. Love was there, and Artis Gilmore of the Chicago Bulls, and a bunch of college All-Americans, but it was Leon who handled the problem—talked on nonstop for an hour about manhood and responsibility. Survivin’ for each other. “And he just captured the entire audience,” Sherrer remembers. “I mean, like nobody rustled, nobody made a noise, nobody got up to go to the bathroom. And at the end of the discussion, the kid who took whatever it was got up, tears in his eyes, and said, ‘I took it.’ And gave it back and apologized, and the whole camp just burst into applause.”

  Leon for the first time had it all—all, that is, except time. He lived out at the edge and knew it, going anywhere, confronting anybody, caring and not caring what happened to him. “I’m gonna go violently,” he began saying. “There’s too many things out here I can’t control.” He and his mother were close, in that bonding common to black families, and when she died last year, he dreamed one night that he was going, too. Felt a cleansing steal over him, and saw her standing in the room smiling at him, and suddenly he was face down on the floor, coming awake hollering, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

  What he didn’t see was where death was coming from. He knew what The Road can do to a family—had seen too many of them come apart over the short bread, the long absences and the seven-day, uptown-Saturday-night atmosphere. He had come back to Sandra with a worldly estate consisting of less than $1,000 a year for all those years away and the mortgage on their two-flat in a fading South Side neighborhood. His youth work couldn’t pay the bills, and even when he got his Lemmy’s hotdog franchise going on a federal loan secured by his own sweat, economics remained a source of tension in the family. And so did the habits of The Road. Globetrotter men tend to spend their summer furloughs on their best behavior, Leon once told me, because Globetrotter women “know what he been doin’ out there.” The trouble comes when the men can’t leave the life behind—and the gossip attending Leon’s death was that he couldn’t.

  There was talk of another woman; of Leon banging the bottle, though no one who knew him well saw or believed it; of quarrels over love and money so bitter that the Hillards, once devoted, started talking about divorce. The official investigation did not scratch much deeper than the chatter. The fatal shooting of one black person by another is known in the argot of Chicago criminal justice as a nigger disorderly, and there was no evident reason to question Sandra Hil­lard’s story. Yes, she told the police, she and Leon had argued till she walked out on him and took refuge with her mother downstairs. Leon, she said, phoned down and threatened mayhem unless she came home. She didn’t, and, as she told it to the police, Leon came storming after her, splintered the door loose from its jamb, and, silhouetted in the empty frame, stopped a slug fired by his own wife from his own gun. It was, under the law, a justifiable homicide—deadly force in self-defense against deadly force.

  They gave Leon Hillard a funeral, and everybody came. Or almost everybody; the Globetrotters’ home office, since reconglomerated into Metromedia in Los Angeles, kept its silent distance, and only a couple of its currently employed hands showed up. But Bob Love came to help bear Leon’s pall, and Ernie Banks, and Bobby Hunter, of course, and Old Sweets Clifton, now a cabbie in Chicago, and a lot of people nobody but Leon ever heard of. In his eulogy, Chick Sherrer mentioned how I had asked Hunter who was Leon’s best friend; Hunter had automatically answered that he was—then reconsidered and guessed that there would be a lot of competition. There was. The friends of Leon Hillard overflowed the funeral and filled a hundred cars going to the graveyard, seeing Leon to the end of The Road.

  Douglas Bauer

  When Douglas Bauer (b. 1945) wrote this piece, he had recently returned to his hometown to take stock after a divorce, come to grips with turning thirty, and pare back his freelancing so as not to feel “like an itinerant fieldworker moving to his harvests.” That homecoming led to his first book, Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home. Rather than formally interview people, he would cock an ear to their conversations or casually join in, then retreat to a diner in a nearby town to find the privacy to write up his notes. Bauer went on to win National Endowment for the Arts grants in both fiction and nonfiction, and to teach—at Harvard, Ohio State, Smith, New Mexico, Rice, and Bennington. He returned to memoir with What Happens Next, which won the 2014 PEN/New England Book Award in nonfiction for what the judges’ citation called the “hauntingly beautiful” way he “lifts the great dome of sky that covers the American heartland and revisits interior spaces.” Bauer’s writing life has long been entangled with the opposite sex, from his first magazine gig after college, for which he adopted a female persona to write subscription come-ons for Better Homes and Gardens; to the influential maternal characters that crop up often in his fiction; to his great professional mentor, the food essayist M.F.K. Fisher. Recalling “my first true hero,” Janet Wilson of the Prairie City High girls’ team, and the thrill when the school bus stopped at the Wilson farm and Janet made her regal way down the aisle to her seat, Bauer pitched this story to another woman, Sports Illustrated articles editor Pat Ryan. It fixes the place of the six-to-a-side girls’ game in the lives of Iowans, and does so through male adolescent eyes. The author’s favorite diner refuge serves as the setting for the final scene in “Girls Win, Boys Lose,” a piece memorable on its own terms, but even more so for the aphorism of its title.

  Girls Win, Boys Lose

  THE TROPHY case in the old Prairie City, Iowa, gym was of light pine, shellacked to a deep glaze. It was tucked into an alcove inside the front door, the statues and plaques crowded into it arranged in tiers like a chorus. Stylized halfbacks, forwards and sprinters, perpetually frozen in midstride, midmotion, stared through the glass. The largest trophy was in the center of the second row. Adorned with pennants and a couple of eagles, it stood at least six inches taller than the others, and it was topped with a figurine of a woman raising a basketball, about to go in for a layup. Her uniform had a lot of folds and pleats, and there was a certain timidity about the modeling, which brought to mind old anatomical drawings in health textbo
oks that fade to pastel blanks in certain areas. But she was clearly female, clearly moving to the basket. The base of the trophy was emblazoned:

  GIRLS’ DISTRICT CHAMPIONS

  1948

  PRAIRIE CITY HIGH SCHOOL

  No Prairie City team before or after has played its sport as well. Following its 1948 district championship, Prairie City competed in the Iowa High School Girls’ State Championship, one of 16 teams from rural villages with populations in the hundreds to do so that year. Prairie City was beaten in the first round by the team that became state champion and, according to enduring local belief, would have been the champion itself if its coach had not stayed with a strategy so plainly wrong that the memory of it still rankles many of those who watched the game.

  “He put Mona out front where she couldn’t. . . . Guy’s about as smart as a board fence. . . . Couldn’t rebound out there. . . . Four fouls. . . . Fellow’s brains wouldn’t cover the bottom of a coffee cup.” That’s the sort of thing you hear if you bring the subject up at the co-op filling station when Dick Zaayer or Don Sparks is there.

  For those too young to have been witnesses, it has never been clear just what the coach did, beyond losing the championship. But what’s important to know is that a powerful feeling about it has survived; that in this remote central Iowa town the idea of girls playing basketball can heat a conversation with emotions free of any condescension. One could grow up in the town in the late 1950s and early ’60s, as I did, watching girls’ sports without the least notion that there was anything prophetic about a custom that in small Iowa farming towns is as deeply embedded in the psyche as the suspicion of skies and the certainty that a stranger is a Democrat.

  Prairie City’s girls usually had better seasons than its boys. When I was in grade school and went with my father to watch Janet Wilson release her fluid hook shot, the girls’ team nearly always won. The boys, playing afterward, usually lost. And so we drove home with predictable dispatches. Mother, in a cone of reading light in her living-room chair, looked up as we came into the house and said, “Well?”

  “Girls won, boys lost.”

  Girls won, boys lost. Girls won, boys lost. Tuesday and Friday nights. Season after season.

  In fact, most nights the boys had their best moment while the girls’ game was still being played. Almost all the high school students sat together in a section near the southwest corner of the gym. At the end of the third quarter, those boys who played basketball rose up like suddenly blooming plants. Because the game had stopped, attention was directed to the stir in the bleachers, and the boys played to it for all it was worth, stretching to full height with elaborate indolence. There seemed to be the hard-bitten courage of soldiers in their rising: “Love to stay but the Huns are waiting.” They slowly walked in single file the length of the floor, took a right, walked the width of the floor and disappeared into their dressing room.

  After the girls’ game was over, the boys came out and got beat 68–37. But, Lord, they walked like champions. Naturally, then, my grade school heroes were Janet Wilson; Joellen Wassenaar, a quick, knife-thin girl, her limbs milk-white stems, who faked a jumper and drove to either side; Margaret Morhauser, the powerful guard. I took notice of the way Judy Kutchin folded her sweat socks—down, then up again—so they formed snowy tufts above her shoes, and I resolved to wear, as Joellen did, only one (left) knee pad.

  I was not alone in my adoration. In Iowa the girls’ state championships draw better than the boys’ tournament, invariably filling the 15,000 seats in Veterans’ Memorial Auditorium, Des Moines, for five days in March. One could argue that the scheduling of the girls’ games before the boys’ in Prairie City implied the girls were a warmup act, a preview. But I have a clear memory of looking up into the balcony, its bleachers rising like a cliff wall, where the farmers and merchants, the town’s strongest fans, sat in the dim, atticy light. Many of them put on their coats after the girls’ game had ended. They knew they had just seen the best basketball they would watch that evening, and they were going home. Let the boys lose in front of their parents and their girl friends.

  As it’s played in Iowa high schools, girls’ basketball differs significantly from the boys’ game. There are six players to a team: three forwards who remain all evening on one half court, with the sole responsibility for the offense, and three guards who do nothing but guard the opponent’s forwards.

  After a score, the ball returns to midcourt, is handed to the other team, and a second half-court game begins. No one crosses the midcourt line. It is inviolable. Stepping over it or on it constitutes a turnover. With a half-court of momentum, a player must brake furiously once she reaches the line. Frantic ballets are danced all along it. A girl often looks as if she’s teetering dangerously at a roof’s edge as she strives to remain on her side of the court.

  The other distinctive rules include one that stipulates that a girl must stop after two dribbles and pass or shoot. The game takes on a high syncopation. Bounce, bounce, pass. Bounce, pass, shoot. The two-dribble rule is the 24-second clock of the game; it accelerates it, raises its scores. Only a few seconds elapse between shots. The best teams frequently score 100 points. The best players sometimes score 100 points.

  Various factors—the rules, the range of young women’s accuracy—keep the game near the basket. Twelve-to-15-foot jump shots predominate and field-goal percentages are consequently high. A girl who cannot shoot 60% has a future as a guard.

  But there’s more, some believe, to the girls’ accuracy than the short distances from which they shoot. (From the free-throw line, eight of 10 or nine of 10 is routine. A girl who expects to win the annual state free-throw contest cannot afford to miss any of her 25 attempts. After a first perfect round, she will advance to a playoff.) One of the state’s most successful coaches once claimed that girls have a unique sensitivity in the tips of their fingers.

  “They’re born with it,” he says fervently. “They have something in their fingers boys don’t have. Call it a gift, a feel, a fine tuning. Look at a girl’s hands—soft, delicate. They’re just better shooters. That’s a fact that’s clear as a sparrow’s dew.”

  The Pentagon recently issued a report that says women soldiers throw hand grenades more accurately than men. Thousands of Iowans were, no doubt, not at all surprised.

  Year after year the Prairie City girls fought Colfax for the Rock Lake Conference title. Only six miles of undulating farmland separates the towns. Their teams had played each other—all sports, both sexes—for many years, and were nearly always closely matched. Colfax, which is the larger of the towns, with a couple of thousand people, had a legacy of railroads and coal mines and a reputation as a rough and mean-spirited place. Its inhabitants, many of them no further than a generation removed from the dead mines, drank and cursed and took menacing energy from the phases of the moon. And so, with the passing of genes, did the children who were the members of Colfax’ teams.

  Prairie City was reserved and humorless, predominantly influenced by a Dutch Reformed faith that found sin in dances, movies and playing cards. Secular happiness came from one’s work, and if one hadn’t felt a blood-rushing joy after lifting 80 bales of hay, then he should lift an 81st.

  Three sour-faced Colfax guards, a kind of delinquent malice in their manner and expressions, remain memorable. They had sallow complexions and bags under their eyes that hinted of late hours and bad diets. Their hair was black, short, tucked behind their ears like matted wings. They had names like Flo and Martha Lynn and Irma. They were sinewy and quick, and they worked together with the precision of the machinery in a watch. It seemed to me as if they played for Colfax for about 12 years, a running presence through all the seasons of my memory. They were mean.

  Here is a moment from their play, from the countless heated evenings of claustrophobic tension that Prairie City vs. Colfax inspired. Judy Kutchin stood with the ball at the top of the key, a teammate positioned on her right near the sideline. Her center, stationed bene
ath the basket, is swinging now parabolically toward the free-throw line. Kutchin passes to her teammate on her right and cuts for the basket. Right-sideline passes to center, ball and girl arriving simultaneously at the line. Center looks for Kutchin racing by. Give and go. A formulistic score. The classic maneuver of the game. Prairie City’s fans are up to cheer, having already finished the play, having added the two points.

  No! Flo springs from a crouch behind our center and roughly strips Kutchin of the ball. Martha Lynn comes rushing over like a vulture. Irma is angling upcourt, a receiver. Unanimous action against the grain. Martha Lynn sweeps up the ball and fires to Irma, who passes to one of her forwards waiting at the center line. It’s done in a split second and with the timing of conspiratorial street thieves. Flo, Martha Lynn, Irma nod coolly. No doubt they’ll committee-lip a cigarette after the game.

  But just as often, Kutchin took the pass, deftly moved past the mugging and scored. Two for Calvinism.

  When I was in high school, I sat in the student section, stood melodramatically at the end of the third quarter, walked the length of the court, took a right, walked its width and entered the dressing room. I was a bad basketball player, having neither size nor speed. Yet the school was so small that I won a uniform, a place on the 12-man squad and made the ceremonial walk with the rest of a mediocre team. I played perhaps three minutes and 12 seconds of high school varsity basketball. But I wore a knee pad, left knee only.