Days of Wine and Curry
For Jake Leland
WHEN NINA SIMONE first sings the title of “Feeling Good,” her voice has been alone for thirty-nine seconds. The solitary singer: there’s always something fiat lux about it. Resolute, the individual moves through the void. You know the accompaniment is coming, but the voice, all by itself, makes you care about it: form turns into feeling.
This is how the artist passes on her exuberance. You’re affected by her immediate present, implicated in her future, and interested in her past. This is how the strut between you two starts: “and I’m feeling good.”
The instruments come to life right after Simone sings those words, as though her voice has just confirmed that the coast is clear—a new dawn, a new day, a new life—the brass begins with those gravel-and-booze notes down low, the piano like morning birdsong, light and constant, up top. The world is being made, and you feel good enough to sing as if you yourself were making it. And maybe you are: the experience heats up, the experience becomes porous, and you don’t know anymore where you end and it begins. Is she feeling good? Am I feeling good? Am I being told to feel good? We’re feeling good.
And this is where we are with the Golden State Warriors—feeling good. They’re 23–0, the best start to a season in NBA history; they’re seven wins away from the longest streak the league has ever seen; they’re the reigning champions. We’ve seen phenomena like this before—the 1969–1970 Knicks, the 1971–1972 Lakers, the 1995–1996 Bulls, the 2012–2013 Miami Heat—but these were teams that engaged in different ways, using templates that were widely understood to bring success: a stifling defense, a dominant big man, a stockpiling of superstar players. Those Bulls and Heat, in particular, were when-the-going-gets-tough-the-tough-crushes-your-soul teams. The Bulls were an aging, bitter collection of legends who cut through the league like Sherman cut through the South; the Heat of a few years ago wasted their time trying to figure out if they wanted to be the heroes or the villains of the league.
But the Warriors—they play like, well, like they’re feeling good. There’s a refreshing absence of internal struggle, a looseness that pundits would condemn as unpreparedness if the Warriors hadn’t just won a championship. When you watch this team play, you’re watching something that’s broken from its tether. It makes no sense. Yes, the high pick-and-roll pace-and-space elements from Mike D’Antoni’s offense are there. But the Warriors play elite defense; D’Antoni’s teams played little defense at all. And where D’Antoni’s offense put the point guard at the center of its universe, the Warriors run something like a dark-matter offense: Curry may be the main ball handler, but anyone can initiate the attack. The center of the universe is wherever the ball is. They run inverted stuff, like ball screens for their center set by their MVP point guard. And while it’s in vogue to deploy a deep shooting power forward, the “stretch four,” the Warriors have abandoned that notion in favor of a playmaking four. They keep Draymond Green constantly moving, constantly altering his responsibilities in the offense—instead of merely stretching defenses, the Warriors implode them. The rest of the league has yet to catch on; they still extol the stretch four like priests extolling Ptolemy. You see the gob-smacked faces of the Warriors’ opponents, of those opponents’ coaches and fans. They haven’t seen this before. They don’t know what to do.
When you watch Steph Curry play these days, it’s pretty obvious that he’s feeling good. If you played basketball growing up, you learn the importance of follow-through when you shoot: forming the gooseneck, waving good-bye to the ball, reaching into the far off hoop like it’s a cookie jar—think Michael Jordan’s last shot as a Bull. Curry’s way, and I mean way, past that. He’s to the point where he’s putting the ball up like he’s getting rid of a bomb. He sometimes looks like he’s just throwing the ball up. Then there are the finger rolls, scoop shots and teardrops with either hand. He’s rising up from twenty-five feet out and skedaddling back to the other end of the court as soon as the ball leaves his hand. And I wasn’t trying to dig into the word-crate when I wrote skedaddle: it’s the only word that captures what he does as soon as the ball leaves his hand. You can’t give him any space at all to shoot, but if you don’t give him any space to shoot he’ll absolutely embarrass you off the bounce . . . no matter who you are. He’s given up on simply blowing past defenders who crowd him—he likes to lead them quick around the court in small figure eights, giving them the impression that they’re sticking with him until the rug gets pulled out from under them. The guy is beyond on fire. He’s gone full on Super Saiyan.
The NBA is a league of peacocking strutters with their signature celebrations for when a shot goes in. Curry is no stranger to celebration, but his looks unintended, as if some other body has taken over his own, which is exactly what happens when you’re feeling good on the court. You become muscle memory from head to toe. It barely lasts. You feel like you can’t miss, and this is where the infamous “heat check” comes in. You can’t miss. So you start taking shots you know should miss. You test the limits of being hot, of feeling good. Twenty-five feet out. Thirty feet out. Without looking at the rim. Quick-firing after dribbling between the legs four times. The heat check. The search for the end of the streak. No one really wants to be hot forever.
Steph Curry, at the moment, is on an endless heat check. Somewhere within the euphoria of his feats is a trace of sadness. He’s in a strange quantum all his own, where time and space barely obtain. Any shooter can tell you, things aren’t supposed to be this way. Not for the pros. Jimmer Fredette played like Steph Curry in college just a few years ago and he isn’t even in the NBA. Plenty of players have been Steph Curry in a high school game or messing around at Rucker Park. But shooters always get found out, always emerge as types: the spot shooter who waits for an opening, the gunner who comes off the bench for an offensive spark, the pick-and-roll point guard who knows just when to let his deadly shot fly, the blacktop legend who just couldn’t break through. These limits define the game—and shooters, especially, are supposed to be bound by the ruthlessness of space-time. But Curry has decided to ignore it all. It’s not that he’s breaking the system, it’s that he’s a broken system. You can see it in how he loosens his neck and shoulders constantly, how he chews on his mouth guard, the mellow glaze in his gaze during a stoppage of play. It’s as though he’s missing something. You know how he feels. You don’t know how he feels. I know how you feel.
David Shields
An essayist and humorist, but as much as anything an ironist, University of Washington professor David Shields (b. 1956) is known in the world of literary criticism for his provocations, including a belief that barriers between genres should be torn down. Over the years he has also ducked in and out of sports, particularly basketball. The book from which this essay comes, Other People: Takes and Mistakes, is one of twenty to Shields’s name, a body of work that includes Black Planet: Facing Race During an NBA Season (1999); Body Politic: The Great American Sports Machine (2004); and his first, the 1984 novel Heroes, about the relationship between a middle-aged sportswriter and a basketball star in a midwestern college town. Early in that book, the first-person narrator recalls shooting hoops as a third-grader: “I remember dusk and macadam combining into the sensation that the world was dying, but I was indestructible.” Twenty books later Shields reprises that very sentence—first uttered by his fictional Al Biederman of the River City Register—for the opening paragraph of this essay, “Life Is Not a Playground.” Shields has been noodling with his material for a long time; another theme at play here, mortality, was the subject of his 2008 New York Times best seller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead. This piece by a wannabe Warrior might be regarded as a corrective to the can-you-top-this conjurings of Steph Curry, the Bay Area star celebrated in the previous selection. (Curry seemed to fire the world not with death, but with life, and did so where bright lights and hardwood combine.) But as bittersweet as this meditation is, Shields lets the rea
der down gently. Perhaps it’s his way of reminding us that what we call an essay is based on the French word essai, or attempt, and that life is much the same thing—that is, a shot taken.
Life Is Not a Playground
THERE HAS always been some strange connection for me between basketball and the dark. I started shooting hoops after school in fourth grade, and I remember dusk and macadam combining into the sensation that the world was dying, but I was indestructible.
One afternoon I played H-O-R-S-E with a third grader, Renée Hahn, who threw the ball over the fence and said, “I don’t want to play with you anymore. You’re too good. I’ll bet one day you’re going to be a San Francisco Warrior.”
Renée had a way of moving her body like a boy but still like a girl, too, and that game of H-O-R-S-E is one of the happiest memories of my childhood: dribbling around in the dark but knowing by instinct where the basket was; not being able to see her but smelling her sweat; keeping close to her voice, in which I could hear her love for me and my future life as a Warrior opening up into the night. I remember the sloped half-court at the far end of the playground, its orange pole, orange rim, and wooden green backboard, the chain net clanging in the wind, the sand on the court, the overhanging eucalyptus trees, the fence the ball bounced over into the street, and the bench the girls sat on, watching, trying to look bored.
The first two weeks of summer Renée and I went steady, but we broke up when I didn’t risk rescuing her in a game of Capture the Flag, so she wasn’t around for my tenth birthday. I begged my parents to let Ethan Saunders, Jim Morrow, Bradley Gamble, and me shoot baskets by ourselves all night at the court across the street. My mother and father reluctantly agreed, and my father swung by every few hours to make sure we were safe and bring more Coke, more birthday cake, more candy.
Near midnight, Bradley and I were playing two-on-two against Jim and Ethan. The moon was falling. We had a lot of sugar in our blood, and all of us were totally zonked and totally wired. With the score tied at eighteen in a game to twenty, I took a very long shot from the deepest corner. Before the ball had even left my hand, Bradley said, “Way to hit.”
I was a good shooter because it was the only thing I ever did and I did it all the time, but even for me such a shot was doubtful. Still, Bradley knew and I knew and Jim and Ethan knew, too, and we knew the way we knew our own names or the batting averages of the Giants’ starting lineup or the lifelines in our palms. I felt it in my legs and up my spine, which arched as I fell back. My fingers tingled and my hand squeezed the night in joyful follow-through. We knew the shot was perfect, and when we heard the ball (a birthday present from my parents) whip through the net, we heard it as something we had already known for at least a second. What happened in that second during which we knew? Did the world stop? Did my soul ascend a couple of notches? What happens to ESP, to such keen eyesight? What did we have then, anyway, radar? When did we have to start working so hard to hear our own hearts?
As members of the Borel Junior High Bobcats, we worked out in a tiny gym with loose buckets and slippery linoleum and butcher-paper posters exhorting us on. I remember late practices full of wind sprints and tipping drills. One day the coach said, “Okay, gang, let me show you how we’re gonna run picks for Dave.”
My friends ran around the court, passing, cutting, and screening for me. All for me. Set plays for me to shoot from the top of the circle or the left corner—my favorite spots. It felt as if the whole world were weaving to protect me, then release me, and the only thing I had to do was pop my jumper. Afterward, we went to a little market down the street. I bought paper bags of penny candy for everybody, to make sure they didn’t think I was going to get conceited.
The junior varsity played immediately after the varsity. At the end of the third quarter of the varsity game, all of us on the JV, wearing our good sweaters, good shoes, and only ties, would leave the gym to go change for our game. I loved leaving right when the varsity game was getting interesting; I loved everyone seeing us as a group, me belonging to that group, and everyone wishing us luck; I loved being part of the crowd and breaking away from the crowd to go play. And then when I was playing, I knew the spectators were out there, but they slid into the distance like the overhead lights.
As a freshman I was the JV’s designated shooter, our gunner whenever we faced a zone. Long-distance shooting was a way for me to perform the most immaculate feat in basketball, to stay outside where no one could hurt me. I’d hit two or three in a row, force the other team out of its zone, and then sit down. I wasn’t a creator. I couldn’t beat anyone off the dribble, but I could shoot. Give me a step, some space, and a screen—a lot to ask for—and I was money in the bank.
The JV coach told me I had to learn to take the ball to the basket and mix it up with the big guys underneath. I didn’t want to because I knew I couldn’t. I already feared I was a full step slow.
That summer I played basketball. I don’t mean that I got in some games when I wasn’t working at A&W or that I tried to play a couple of hours every afternoon. I mean the summer of 1971 I played basketball. Period. Nothing else. Nothing else even close to something else. All day long that summer, all summer, all night until at least ten.
The high school court was protected by a bank of ice plants and the walls of the school. Kelly-green rims, with chain nets, were attached to half-moon boards that were kind only to real shooters. The court was on a grassy hill overlooking the street; when I envision Eden, I think of that court during that summer—shirts against skins, five-on-five, running the break.
Alone, I did drills outlined in an instructional book. A certain number of free throws and lay-ins from both sides and with each hand, hook shots, set shots from all over, turnaround jumpers, jumpers off the move and off the pass, tip-ins. Everything endlessly repeated. I wanted my shoulders to become as high hung as Warriors star Nate Thurmond’s, my wrists as taut, my glare as merciless. After a while I’d feel as if my head were the rim and my body were the ball. I was trying to put my body completely inside my head. The basketball was shot by itself. At that point I’d call it quits, keeping the feeling.
My father would tell me, “Basketball isn’t just shooting. You’ve got to learn the rest of the game.” He set up garbage cans around the court that I had to shuffle-step through, then backpedal through, then dribble through with my right hand, left hand, between my legs, behind my back. On the dead run I had to throw the ball off a banked gutter so that it came back to me as a perfect pass for a layup—the rest of the game, or so I gathered.
Toward the end of my sophomore year—Mother’s Day, actually—I went to the beach with my mother. After a while she dozed off, so I walked along the shore until I was invited to join a game of Tackle the Guy with the Ball. After I scored three times, several of the other guys ganged up to tackle the guy with the ball (me) and down I went. Suddenly my left leg was tickling my right ear, the water was lapping at my legs, and a crowd of a hundred people gathered around me to speculate as to whether I was permanently paralyzed.
The summer between my junior and senior years of high school, my father tried to work with me to get back my wind and speed after the long layoff due to my broken leg, but he gave up when it became obvious my heart wasn’t in it. I realized I was now better at describing basketball and analyzing it than playing it. To my father’s deep disappointment, I not only was not going to become a professional athlete; I was becoming, as he had been on and off throughout his life and always quite happily, a sportswriter. I was pitiless on our mediocre team and the coach called me Ace, as in “ace reporter,” since I certainly wasn’t his star ballhawk. I could still shoot when left open but couldn’t guard anyone quick or shake someone who hounded me tough. I fell into the role of the guy with all the answers and explanations, the well-informed benchwarmer who knew how zones were supposed to work but had nothing to contribute on the floor himself.
That same summer, I went to the San Mateo County Fair with Renée Hahn, who had fin
ally forgiven me for not rescuing her in Capture the Flag. Her knowledge of basketball hadn’t increased greatly over the years, but she did know she wanted a pink panda hanging from a hook near the basketball toss.
The free-throw line was eighteen rather than fifteen feet away, and the ball must have been pumped to double its pressure, hard as a bike tire. My shot had to be dead on or it would bounce way off. I wasn’t going to get any soft rolls out of this carnival. The rim was rickety, bent upward, and was probably closer to ten feet six inches than the regulation ten feet. A canopy overhung both sides of the rim, so I wasn’t able to put any arc on my shot. With people elbowing me in back, I could hardly take a dribble to get in rhythm.
I won seven pandas. I got into a groove, and sometimes when I got into a groove from eighteen feet straighatway, I couldn’t come out of it. Standing among spilled paper cups and September heat and ice and screaming barkers and glass bottles and darts and bumper cars, Renée and I handed out panda bears to the next half-dozen kids who walked by. This struck me then, as it does now, as pretty much the culmination of existence: doing something well and having someone admire it, then getting to give away prizes together. Renée wound up working with me on the school paper that fall; I don’t think I ever saw her happier than she was that afternoon.
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