Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  But to my mind that says only a part of it. It seems to me that Jabbar has made basketball bigger. He has altered the game. He has upset the categories into which we would like to push our athletes. He has forced some of us to deal with the reality of a seven-foot-tall black who practices Islam, reads science fiction, was rated by Playgirl magazine one of the ten sexiest men around, and who plays a game with the precision of a surgeon, the dignity of a statesman, and a calm that, as Bill Bradley put it, “engulfs opponents.” His name on a roster, in a game program, his image on a TV screen, is a symbol of history, of the power of diversity, of the viability of alternatives, of the fact that the world is indeed bigger than all this. It may be that I have an overfondness for the values of our generation, or that I have watched so many basketball games that I am not happy unless I can see the world in passes and fast breaks, but I cannot see this same significance in other basketball players. What, I wonder, is the history of Ralph Sampson? What is the symbolism of Moses Malone?

  Donald Hall

  His fellow poets, Donald Hall (b. 1928) once noted, split into two camps: those bewildered by his fascination with sports, and an equal number who wished that they too could find paying work writing about the games that engross us. In 1975 Hall freed himself up to write about pretty much anything he wanted when he quit a professorship at Michigan and decamped to a farm in New Hampshire. The short-lived Inside Sports published much of his sportswriting, most of it about baseball, and that sport features prominently in the essay collection Fathers Playing Catch with Sons, as well as in Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball, which he wrote with the Pittsburgh Pirates’ pitcher. Basketball claimed more and more of his attention during the 1980s, as Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics held New England in their thrall; “Basketball: The Purest Sport of Bodies” was first published in the journal Yankee in 1984. A former U.S. poet laureate, Hall welcomed sporting events as downbeats in the rhythms of the poet’s life, and he eagerly carved out time to watch. Writing about sports transported him back to Hampden, Connecticut, where as a fifteen-year-old he had reported on his high school’s games for the New Haven Register. Those assignments provided a recurrent thrill, he noted, making him “the proud author of a story right now multiplying itself into morning newsprint, ready to turn up on the doorstep in a few hours, large as life, BY DON HALL.”

  Basketball:

  The Purest Sport of Bodies

  PROFESSIONAL basketball combines opposites—elegant gymnastics, ferocious ballet, gargantuan delicacy, colossal precision. . . . It is a continuous violent dream of levitating hulks. It is twist and turn, leap and fly, turn and counterturn, flick and respond, confront and evade. It is monstrous, or it would be monstrous if it were not witty.

  These athletes show wit in their bodies. Watching their abrupt speed, their instant reversals of direction, I think of minnows in the pond—how the small schools slide swiftly in one direction, then reverse-flip and flash the opposite way. NBA players are quick as minnows, and with an adjustment for size great whales drive down the road. As a ball careens from a rim, huge bodies leap with legs outspread; then two high hands grasp the ball, propel it instantly down court to a sprinting guard, and instantly seven to ten enormous bodies spin and sprint on the wooden floor, pass, dribble, pass, pass, shoot—block or whoosh. . . .

  Then the same bodies flip-flash back to the place they just departed from, fast as an LED display from a punched button—an intricate thrashing, a mercury-sudden pack of leviathans. . . .

  In all sport, nothing requires more of a body than NBA basketball; nothing so much uses—and celebrates—bodily improvisation, invention, and imagination.

  In football they measure forty-yard sprints. Nobody runs forty yards in basketball. Maybe you run the ninety-four feet of the court but more likely you sprint ten feet; then you stop, not on a dime, but on Miss Liberty’s torch. In football you run over somebody’s face.

  When I was growing up, the winter sport was hockey. At high school, hundreds of us would stand outside at 0 degrees Fahrenheit beside a white rink puffing out white air, stamping our painful feet, our toes like frozen fishsticks. On the ice, unhelmeted shoulder-padded thick-socked blocky young men swept up and down, wedded to the moves of a black hard-rubber disk and crushing each other into boards, fighting, crashing, shooting, fighting again. Then we tromped home to unfreeze by the hot-water radiators, red-cheeked and exhausted with cold, exhilarated with pain and crowd-fight.

  But basketball was a sweaty half-empty gym on a Friday afternoon, pale white legs clomping down court below billowing gym shorts; it was the two-handed set shot: pause, arch, aim, grunt. In the superheated dim gymnasium, twenty-seven friends and relatives watched the desultory to-and-fro of short, slow, awkward players who were eternally pulling up twelve feet from the basket to clatter a heavy brown beachball harmlessly off a white backboard. Always we lost thirty-eight to nineteen.

  It was a hockey town, and New England was hockey country.

  Meantime, elsewhere—in city parks, in crepuscular gymnasiums after school with the heat turned off, or in Indiana farmyards with a basket nailed to the side of a barn—other children practiced other motions . . . and the best of these motions found their showcase, over the decades and for decades ahead, in New England’s metropolis, in the leaky old ship of Boston Garden.

  When I was at college, I took the subway into Boston to watch college double-headers. My Harvard team was better than the high school I went to . . . but I do not recollect that we were invited to the NIT. I watched Harvard, Boston College, Boston University—and Holy Cross. Of course I remember the astonishment of one young man’s innovations: the infant Robert Cousy, who played for Holy Cross, dribbled behind his back and passed with perfect swift accuracy in a direction opposite the place toward which he gazed. Or he faked a pass, put the ball to the floor, and cut past bewildered defenders for an easy and graceful layup. As far as I am concerned, it was Robert Cousy, and not Colonel Naismith, who invented basketball.

  One of the extraordinary qualities of basketball is its suddenness of change, in pace and in momentum.

  Years ago, when I lived in Michigan, I frequented Cobo Hall when the Detroit Pistons played there. I watched good players on bad teams: great Bob Lanier, Big-Foot with bad knees, enormous and delicate and always hurt; Dave Bing and Chris Ford, who ended their careers with the Celtics. Once I took my young son to see the Detroit Pistons play the Boston Celtics in a play-off game. It was 1968, the first time the poor Pistons made the play-offs. It was Bill Russell’s next-to-last year as player-coach of the Celtics; they went on to beat the Lakers for the championship.

  I sat with my boy and his friend David, who was a Celtics fan because he had lived in Boston until he was eight months old, and watched three periods of desultory play. There were good moments from Bing and Lanier, good moments from Havlicek and White—my man Cousy retired in 1963—but Bill Russell looked half asleep even as he blocked shots. In the fourth quarter the Pistons, astonishingly, led—and I entertained notions of an upset. . . .

  Then my small charges developed a desire for hot dogs; I dashed out for a few minutes, and as I returned laden, I heard a swelling of wistful applause from the knowledgeable Cobo crowd. I looked toward the floor to see Bill Russell floating through the air to sink a basket. In the space of two hot dogs, Boston had gone up by ten points—or rather, not Boston but the usually inoffensive Russell. He had waked up—and when Russell opened his eyes it was over for Detroit. . . .

  “Momentum” is a cliché of the football field, but it is a habit of the wooden floor. Basketball is a game not so much of important baskets or of special plays as of violent pendulum swings. One team or another is always on a run, like a madcap gambler throwing a dozen sevens. When the Celtics are down by a dozen points in the second quarter, looking listless, hapless, helpless, we know that suddenly they can become energized—rag dolls wired with springy, reactive power. We know that twelve points down can be six points up with a crazy s
uddenness.

  Sometimes one player does it all by himself. On a night when Cedric Maxwell has twelve thumbs and Kevin McHale three knees, when every pass hits vacant air, when the foul-shooter clanks it off the rim, suddenly Larry Bird (usually it is Larry Bird) grows five inches taller and five seconds faster. With legs outspread he leaps above the rim to take a rebound, pivots, and throws a fastball the length of the court to Gerald Henderson who lays it up. Then as the Knicks (or the Bulls, or the Bullets . . .) go into their half-court offense, he appears to fall asleep. His slack jaw sags and he does his Idiot Thing . . . only to swoop around a guard and steal the ball cleanly, like plucking a sheep-tick off a big dog, then sprint down court and float a layup. Then he steals the inbound pass and, as the power-forward fouls him, falls heavily to the floor; only while he falls, he loops the ball up with his left hand over a high head into the basket—an impossible three-point play. Then he fast-breaks with Maxwell and Parish, zapping the ball back and forth, and leaps as if to shoot over an immense center. But, looking straight at the basket, he passes the ball blind to Robert Parish on his left, who stuffs it behind the center’s head. . . .

  We have just run off nine points.

  This is a game you can study on television because it is small enough to fit in the box; and, through television’s slow-motion replay, we study at our leisure the learned body’s performances—as when Dr. J. or George Gervin soars from the base line, ball in the right hand, appears to shoot, pauses in midair, and, when a shot-blocker hovers beside him, transfers the ball to the left hand, twists the body, and stuffs the ball through the hoop.

  It is only two points. If this were gymnastics or diving from the high board at the Olympics, it would be ten points.

  The Celtics play team ball, passing, seeking the open man when defenders double-team Bird or Parish. The ball moves so rapidly, it is like a pinball machine in which the steel ball gathers speed as it bounces off springs, rioting up and out, down and across. Zany ball, with its own wild life, always like the rabbit seeking its hole.

  Or.

  The Game.

  Slows.

  Down.

  Despite the twenty-four-second clock, there are passages of sheer stasis. The point guard bounces the ball: once, twice, three times. The guard in front of him is all alert nerves, arms spread and quivering. Will he drive right? Left?

  Bounce.

  Bounce . . .

  Bounce . . . . . .

  He goes right NO-he-only-seemed-to-go-right-he-is-left-around-his-man, he rises into the air and . . . blocked-by-a-giant-under-hands-to-his-own-giant . . . who backward-stuffs it. BANG.

  Oh, my. Basketball is the purest sport of bodies.

  Mark Jacobson

  Before being hailed as a “street writer” and “journalistic provocateur,” Mark Jacobson (b. 1948) had dropped out of both Wisconsin and Cal-Berkeley during the 1960s and done time as a cab driver, a bus-terminal baggage porter, and a producer of psychedelic light shows. Only then did he find his vocation. Jacobson has called journalism “a 24/7 job, the kind of hours I like,” and all-hours entropies have long appealed to this contributor to The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Men’s Journal, Esquire, and New York: gang life, punk rock, urban decay. This 1985 profile of Julius Erving, the utterly composed Doctor J, would seem to be an odd fit in the Jacobson oeuvre. But as the author notes, Erving’s legend began as a whisper in the demimonde of the American Basketball Association, a kind of jazz-club circuit known best to aficionados. And it was just like Jacobson to develop an ahead-of-the-curve enthusiasm for the Philadelphia 76er who, during the time they spent together for the story, would swing by 30th Street Station in his Maserati to pick Jacobson up. Here the author oscillates between unabashed fanboy and cold analyst, and for long, gratifying stretches simply lets one of the game’s most eloquent figures speak for himself. As profile, it’s as graceful a flight as any of Erving’s toward the rim, and in the end as satisfying as a culminating dunk.

  The Passion of Doctor J

  I WENT for a ride through downtown Philadelphia with Julius Erving in his Maserati the other day, and with each passing block it became more apparent: Julius cannot drive very well. It wasn’t a question of reckless speed or ignored signals. Rather, he seemed unsure, tentative. His huge, famous hands clutched the steering wheel a bit too tightly, his large head craned uncomfortably toward the slope of the windshield. He accelerated with a lurch; there was no smooth rush of power. Obvious openings in the flow of traffic went unseen or untried. All in all, it reflected a total absence of feel.

  This struck me as amusing—Julius Erving, the fabulous Doctor of the court, driving a Maserati with an automatic transmission.

  Just an hour before, I’d compared the act of seeing Julius play basketball to Saint Francis watching birds in flight. It was my Ultimate Compliment. When a reporter with pretensions meets an Official Legend, especially a Sports Legend, it is mandatory to concoct the Ultimate Compliment, something beyond a plebeian “gee whiz.” Something along the lines of the august Mailer’s referring to Ali as a Prince of Heaven, whose very gaze caused men to look down. Or, perhaps, Liebling’s mentioning that Sugar Ray Robinson had “slumberland in either hand.” Saint Francis was what I’d come up with.

  Viewing Doctor J move to the hoop inspired what I imagined to be an awe similar to what Saint Francis felt sitting in a field with the sparrows buzzing overhead, I told Julius. It was as if a curtain had been parted, affording a peek into the Realm of the Extraordinary, a marvelous communication that ennobled both the watcher and the watched equally. What wonders there are in the Kingdom of God! How glorious they are to behold!

  “What you do affirms the supremacy of all beings,” I told Julius as we sat in the offices of the Erving Group, a holding company designed to spread around the wads of capital Julius has accumulated during his career as Doctor J. Large gold-leaf plaques calling Julius things like TASTYKAKE PLAYER OF THE YEAR dot the walls. “Seeing you play basketball has enriched my life,” I finished.

  “Thanks, thanks a lot,” Julius said politely. Then again, Julius is always polite. It was obvious, my Ultimate Compliment clearly did not knock his socks off. It was as if he were saying, “Funny thing, you’re the third guy who’s told me that today.”

  Every serious hoop fan remembers the first time he saw Julius ­Erving play basketball. My grandfather, a great New York Giants baseball fan, probably had the same feeling the first time he ever saw Willie Mays go back on a fly ball. There was Julius, mad-haired and scowl-faced, doing what everyone else did, rebounding, scoring, passing, but doing it with the accents shifted from the accepted but now totally humdrum position to a new, infinitely more thrilling somewhere else. Who was this man with two Jewish names who came from parts unknown with powers far greater than the mortal Trailblazer?

  Flat out, there was nothing like him. No one had ever taken off from the foul line as if on a dare, cradled the ball above his head, and not come down until he crashed it through the hoop. Not like that, anyway. Julius acknowledges a debt to Elgin Baylor, whom he calls “the biggest gazelle, the first of the gliders,” but, to the stunned observer, the Doctor seemed to arrive from outside the boundaries of the game itself. His body, streamlined like none before him, festooned by arms longer and hands bigger, soared with an athletic ferocity matched only by the mystical, unprecedented catapult of Bob Beamon down the Mexico City runway, or by the screaming flight of Bruce Lee.

  Has any other individual in team sports radically altered the idea of how his particular game should be played to the degree Julius has? Jackie Robinson? Babe Ruth? Jim Brown? A more instructive comparison would be someone like Joe DiMaggio. DiMaggio was impeccable, the nonpareil. He was simply better. Yet there is something hermetic about Joe DiMaggio. He did what everyone else did, but with incomparable excellence. Joe’s exemplariness is to be admired, but it doesn’t offer a whole program of reform. His greatness is a dead end, specific to Joe and Joe alone. Julius, on the other hand, may n
ot have invented the slam dunk, the finger roll, or the hanging rebound—the entire airborne game in general. But he certainly popularized it, and by doing so he announced that others could follow in his footsteps, even surpass him. Seeing Julius fly to the hoop spread the news: it can be done, so do it. Nine years ago Julius appeared alone in his ability to go pyrotechnic at any time. This past year, however, lined up against a gaggle of his poetic offspring, “human highlight film” youngbloods like Dominique Wilkins and Larry Nance, Julius was content to make his final attempt a running foul-line takeoff: the “classical” dunk, a bit of archaeology demonstrated by the father of the form.

  Befitting the matter-of-factness of a legend discussing his craft, Julius is not falsely modest about his contributions to the game. In the clinical fashion he employs when delineating the x’s and o’s of his profession, he says, “I’d say I’ve had an effect in three main areas. First, I have taken a smaller man’s game, ball-handling, passing, and the like, and brought it to the front court. Second, I’ve taken the big man’s game, rebounding, shot-blocking, and been able to execute that even though I’m only six-foot-six. What I’ve tried to do is merge those two types of games, which were considered to be separate—for instance, Bill Russell does the rebounding, Cousy handles the ball—and combine them into the same player. This has more or less changed the definition of what’s called the small forward position, and it creates a lot more flexibility for the individual player, and, of course, creates a lot more opportunities for the whole team. The third thing I’ve tried to do, and this is the most important thing, is to make this kind of basketball a winning kind of basketball, taking into account a degree of showmanship that gets people excited. My overall goal is to give people the feeling they are being entertained by an artist—and to win.”