Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  Sometimes I dream / That he is me / You’ve got to see that’s how I dream to be / I dream I move, I dream I groove / Like Mike / If I could be like Mike.

  As Magic looks on in this sticky-hot gym, sweat pouring off his body, towel around his neck, there is Jordan, captain of the winning team, singing a song written just for him, drinking a drink that’s raking in millions, rubbing it in as only Jordan can do. And on the bus back to the hotel? Jordan keeps singing, Be like Mike. . . . Be like Mike. . . .

  The game would have reverberations in Barcelona as Michael and Magic relentlessly continued to try to get the verbal edge on each other. And in the years that followed, this intrasquad game became a part of basketball lore, “kind of like an urban legend,” as Laettner describes it.

  And not everybody loved it. “You have to look at who relishes that kind of thing,” says Malone. “As they say, it’s their geeeg.” By their he means Jordan’s and Magic’s. (Last year I asked Malone if he wanted to watch a few minutes of the video. “No,” he said. “Doesn’t interest me.”)

  But Krzyzewski, no fan of trash talk, looks back on the game fondly, remembering almost every detail. “Every once in a while I’ll be doing something and a line from that game will just flash into my head,” he says. “They just moved Chicago Stadium to Monte Carlo.” It just makes me smile.

  “A lot of players talk trash because the TV cameras are on. But the doors on that day were closed. This was just you against me. This is what I got—whatta you got? It taught me a lot about accepting personal challenges. You know, if somebody could’ve taped the sound track of the game, not necessarily recorded the basketball but just the sounds, it would be priceless.”

  Well, I got the original VHS tape, converted it to DVD and even got a specialist to make a CD of the sound track. It picked up almost everything. The Greatest Game Nobody Ever Saw was not about the hoops. It was about the passion those guys put into playing, the importance they placed on winning and on personal pride.

  Years later Jordan brought up the game before I had a chance to ask him about it. “In many ways,” he said, “it was the best game I was ever in. Because the gym was locked and it was just about basketball. You saw a lot about players’ DNA, how much some guys want to win. Magic was mad about it for two days.”

  Magic, for his part, estimates that his anger lasted only a few hours. “Let me tell you something—it would’ve been worse for everybody if he lost,” says Johnson. “Because I could let something go after a while. But Michael? He’d never let it go. He never let anything go.”

  Brian Doyle

  The work of Oregon-based writer Brian Doyle (1956–2017) can be found in award-winning fiction, essays, and poetry, and has appeared in anthologies he edited as well as in the pages of Portland, the magazine of the University of Portland, which under his direction won a Sibley Award in 2005 as the best college publication in the U.S. In all that he did, Doyle faithfully paid tribute to the liege lord of story. “Stories swim by the millions,” he said, “and most of being a writer is listening and seeing and then madly scribbling.” Drawing on compassion, humor, gratitude, and a valent spirituality, Doyle connected with a legion of faithful readers, many of whom contributed to a crowdfunding account to cover medical expenses after he was diagnosed with the brain tumor that led to his death. In 2012 he wrote about driving his older brother Kevin around the Chicago suburb where Kevin then taught college, “to tell a story that sings of my brother and all brothers and grace and courage and hoops and pain and laughter and attentiveness and love and loss,” Doyle said, after this account of that afternoon, “His Last Game,” was chosen for the 2013 edition of The Best American Essays. Doyle’s piece features insights that anyone who has played pickup basketball will recognize. But the filmmaker Avery Rimer, who turned “His Last Game” into a ten-minute short of the same name, used her director’s statement to point out how the author also nests in just a few pages much larger truths—“about the teasingly feisty and protectively tender ways that men express deep love; about how splendid life is if you can develop . . . the capacity to see what is sacred and magical in the day-to-day ‘little things’; and about how our own memories can live on in those who really love us.”

  His Last Game

  WE WERE supposed to be driving to the pharmacy for his prescriptions, but he said just drive around for a while, my prescriptions aren’t going anywhere without me, so we just drove around. We drove around the edges of the college where he had worked and we saw a blue heron in a field of stubble, which is not something you see every day, and we stopped for a while to see if the heron was fishing for mice or snakes, on which we bet a dollar, me taking mice and him taking snakes, but the heron glared at us and refused to work under scrutiny, so we drove on.

  We drove through the arboretum checking on the groves of ash and oak and willow trees, which were still where they were last time we looked, and then we checked on the wood duck boxes in the pond, which still seemed sturdy and did not feature ravenous weasels that we noticed, and then we saw a kestrel hanging in the crisp air like a tiny helicopter, but as soon as we bet mouse or snake the kestrel vanished, probably for religious reasons, said my brother, probably a lot of kestrels are adamant that gambling is immoral, but we are just not as informed as we should be about kestrels.

  We drove deeper into the city and I asked him why we were driving this direction, and he said I am looking for something that when I see it you will know what I am looking for, which made me grin, because he knew and I knew that I would indeed know, because we have been brothers for 50 years, and brothers have many languages, some of which are physical, like broken noses and fingers and teeth and punching each other when you want to say I love you but don’t know how to say that right, and some of them are laughter, and some of them are roaring and spitting, and some of them are weeping in the bathroom, and some of them we don’t have words for yet.

  By now it was almost evening, and just as I turned on the car’s running lights I saw what it was he was looking for, which was a basketball game in a park. I laughed and he laughed and I parked the car. There were six guys on the court, and to their credit they were playing full court. Five of the guys looked to be in their twenties, and they were fit and muscled, and one of them wore a porkpie hat. The sixth guy was much older, but he was that kind of older ballplayer who is comfortable with his age and he knew where to be and what not to try.

  We watched for a while and didn’t say anything but both of us noticed that one of the young guys was not as good as he thought he was, and one was better than he knew he was, and one was flashy but essentially useless, and the guy with the porkpie hat was a worker, setting picks, boxing out, whipping outlet passes, banging the boards not only on defense but on offense, which is much harder. The fifth young guy was one of those guys who ran up and down yelling and waving for the ball, which he never got. This guy was supposed to be covering the older guy but he didn’t bother, and the older guy gently made him pay for his inattention, scoring occasionally on backdoor cuts and shots from the corners on which he was so alone he could have opened a circus and sold tickets, as my brother said.

  The older man grew visibly weary as we watched, and my brother said he’s got one last basket in him, and I said I bet a dollar it’s a shot from the corner, and my brother said no, he doesn’t even have the gas for that, he’ll snake the kid somehow, you watch, and just then the older man, who was bent over holding the hems of his shorts like he was exhausted, suddenly cut to the basket, caught a bounce pass, and scored, and the game ended, maybe because the park lights didn’t go on even though the street lights did.

  On the way home my brother and I passed the heron in the field of stubble again, and the heron stopped work again and glared at us until we turned the corner.

  That is one withering glare, said my brother. That’s a ballplayer glare if ever I saw one. That’s the glare a guy gives another guy when the guy you were supposed to be covering scores on a backdoor cut
and you thought your guy was ancient and near death but it turns out he snaked you good and you are an idiot. I know that glare. You owe me a dollar. We better go get my prescriptions. They are not going to do any good but we better get them anyway so they don’t go to waste. One less thing for my family to do afterwards. That game was good but the heron was even better. I think the prescriptions are pointless now but we already paid for them so we might as well get them. They’ll just get thrown out if we don’t pick them up. That was a good last game, though. I’ll remember the old guy, sure, but the kid with the hat banging the boards, that was cool. You hardly ever see a guy with a porkpie hat hammering the boards.

  There’s so much to love, my brother added. All the little things. Remember shooting baskets at night and the only way you could tell if the shot went in was the sound of the net? Remember the time we cut the fingertips off our gloves so we could shoot on icy days and dad was so angry he lost his voice and he was supposed to give a speech and had to gargle and mom laughed so hard we thought she was going to pee? Remember that? I remember that. What happens to what I remember? You remember it for me, okay? You remember the way that heron glared at us like he would kick our ass except he was working. And you remember that old man snaking that kid. Stupid kid, you could say, but that’s the obvious thing. The beautiful thing is the little thing that the old guy knew full well he wasn’t going to cut around picks and drift out into the corner again, that would burn his last gallon of gas, not to mention he would have to hoist up a shot from way out there, so he snakes the kid beautiful, he knows the kid thinks he’s old, and the guy with the hat sees him cut, and gets him the ball on a dime, that’s a beautiful thing because it’s little, and we saw it and we knew what it meant. You remember that for me. You owe me a dollar.

  Lee Jenkins

  Through the 1980s, as the NBA started to pull itself out of a lengthy funk, Commissioner David Stern made a habit of namechecking the players responsible for the league’s turnaround. If he didn’t specifically mention Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan, he usually took care to refer to “the NBA and its players” with such fastidiousness that the phrase all but spawned an acronym in its own right—the NBAAIP. Soon enough, fans began to see the league as a collection of those personalities, which in turn led reporters to lash themselves to the names featured on marquees and in shoe commercials. No one brought this approach into the twenty-first century more stylishly than Sports Illustrated’s Lee Jenkins (b. 1977). A graduate of Vanderbilt, where he studied on a Grantland Rice Sportswriting Scholarship, he left The New York Times in 2007 to join SI. There he cultivated relationships with top players and, critically, several orbitals’ worth of people around them. When it came time to file—be it a straight profile, a trend story, or a forensic inquiry into a critical moment in some playoff game—Jenkins would deliver a piece as exhaustively reported as it was gracefully told, conveying the burdens and glories of being an NBA star without voyeurism or fawning. Steph Curry, Russell Westbrook, and Kevin Durant are among the players he attached himself to, but he plumbed no one deeper than LeBron James, whose selection as the magazine’s 2012 Sportsman of the Year occasioned this piece. It includes a striking opening scene in which Jenkins captures the polar emotions James experienced as he made his way from Cleveland to Miami and his first NBA title.

  The King:

  LeBron James, Sportsman of the Year 2012

  PAT RILEY stood in the mouth of the tunnel at Boston’s TD Garden, between the court and the locker room, and waited for the Boat. That’s what he calls LeBron James—“You know,” Riley explains, “best of all time”—an acronym he conjured to remind the planet’s preeminent basketball player of frontiers still to be conquered. “Hey, Boat,” Riley will say. “How is the Boat doing today?” James will reflexively laugh and shake his head because he is not the Boat, at least not yet. But on that sweaty night at the Garden, in Game 6 of the Eastern Conference finals, facing yet another summer cast as the villain foiled, he delivered one of the Boat performances in NBA history. The image of James throughout the game, bent at the waist, staring skyward with pupils pushed to his eyelids, recalled predators of different breeds. “He was primal,” Riley says. “He was a cobra, a leopard, a tiger hunched over his kill.”

  After James had unleashed 45 points, snatched 15 rebounds and sucked all the juice from an expectant crowd, he marched toward Riley, the Heat president who lured him to South Beach two years ago with his six sparkling rings. He was just a few steps from Riley when a 20-something man perched above the tunnel poured what remained of his beer through a net canopy, dousing James’s head and jersey. While a national television audience recoiled, Riley was transported back to the 1980s, when he coached the Lakers and rabble-rousers at the old Garden rocked their buses, spit in their faces and once shoved his mother-in-law over a railing.

  “I’m a Catholic, and I was an altar boy, so I say my prayers at night and I believe someone up there is taking care of us,” Riley begins. “From where I was standing, there was a backlight on LeBron from the arena, and as the [beer] pellets sprayed up in the air, they looked like they were forming a halo over him. This is what I saw: The good Lord was saying, ‘LeBron, I’m going to help you through this night because you’re a nice person, and I’m going to give you 45 and 15. But as you walk off, I’m going to humble the heck out of you.’ And, you know what, that’s the best thing that could have happened.”

  It was the story of his life. James could log 47 flawless minutes, or win 60 regular-season games, or spend seven years as a one-man stimulus package for a hard-bitten Rust Belt city and still end up with a beer in the face. We forgive our favorite athletes many imperfections and foibles, but James was held to a higher standard. He was too strong, too fast, too blessed to stumble, especially in the fourth quarter of a playoff game. “I’m in a different place than other people,” he says. “That’s O.K. I understand. I was chosen for this. It’s my gift. It’s my responsibility.”

  When James was nine, he played running back for a Pop Warner team in his hometown of Akron called the East Dragons, and he scored 18 touchdowns in six games. “That’s when I first knew I had talent,” he says. When he was a freshman at St. Vincent–St. Mary High, a basketball coach confided in friends that the best player of all time was on his roster. When he was a sophomore, a local newspaper dubbed him King James, and never again did he play in front of a gym that wasn’t jammed.

  James is a sucker for underdogs—“I love Arian Foster, from the Houston Texans,” he says, “because he didn’t get drafted, he played on the practice squad, and now he’s probably the best running back in the NFL”—knowing full well he will never be one himself. He will never win in an upset, never know what it feels like to overachieve. He assumes the most unsustainable position in sports, the eternal front-runner, and he kept coming up short at the finish. But after each colossal disappointment, while the talking heads returned their attention to Tim Tebow or whatever topic du jour gooses the ratings, James wiped the beer from his chin and resumed his discovery. “In every adversity there is a seed of equivalent benefit,” Riley says, and the Boat finds it. When James lost in the Finals in 2007, with the Cavaliers, he remade his jump shot. When he fell again in 2011, with the Heat, he built a post game. James was born with supernatural ability, but he lets none of it lie dormant. He extracts every ounce, through a distillation process created and refined by failure.

  “The game is a house, and some players only have one or two windows in their house because they can’t absorb any more light,” says Mike Krzyzewski, head coach of Team USA. “When I met LeBron, he only had a few windows, but then he learned how beautiful the game can be, so he put more windows in. Now he sees the damn game so well, it’s like he lives in a glass building. He has entered a state of mastery. There’s nothing he can’t do. God gave him a lot but he is using everything. He’s one of the unique sports figures of all time, really, and he’s right in that area where it’s all come together.”
A voracious mind has caught up with a supreme body. The marriage is a marvel.

  “It gets no better for a basketball player,” says Heat guard Dwyane Wade of the year James just completed: NBA champion, NBA MVP, Finals MVP, Olympic gold medalist, hardwood revolutionary. Call him the best point guard in the league, or the best power forward, or both, or neither. “He has no position,” says an NBA scout. “His position is to do whatever he wants. There’s never been anything like it. You just give him the ball and you win the game.” Defend James with bigger players and he pulls them out to the three-point line so he can breeze past them. Try smaller, more nimble players and he backs them all the way into the basket stanchion. The formula sounds simple, for a Mack truck with a Ferrari engine, but only now has it come into focus.

  And so, less than 29 months after he sat on a stage at a Boys & Girls Club in Greenwich, Conn., and incurred a nation’s wrath, LeBron James is the Sportsman of the Year. He is not the Sportsman of 2010, when he announced his decision to leave Cleveland in a misguided television special, or 2011, when he paid dearly for his lapse in judgment. He is the Sportsman of 2012. “Did I think an award like this was possible two years ago?” James says. “No, I did not. I thought I would be helping a lot of kids and raise $3 million by going on TV and saying, ‘Hey, I want to play for the Miami Heat.’ But it affected far more people than I imagined. I know it wasn’t on the level of an injury or an addiction, but it was something I had to recover from. I had to become a better person, a better player, a better father, a better friend, a better mentor and a better leader. I’ve changed, and I think people have started to understand who I really am.”