Can I Keep My Jersey?

by Paul Shirley

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  INTRODUCTION

  I always dread the paperwork at the doctor’s office.

  YEAR 1

  YEAR 2

  YEAR 3

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  To my father, Ken, for telling me to use the backboard; to my brothers, Dan, Matt, and Tom, for being my best friends; and to my mother, Jane for everything else

  Introduction

  by Chuck Klosterman

  There are 6 billion humans on the face of this planet. About 2.5 billion of these humans are farmers; another 800 million are starving; an unrelated 18 million more purchased Boston’s debut album. Existence is inherently alienating. However, the overwhelming majority of these unwashed (and semi-washed) minions still share one unifying characteristic, and that characteristic is this: they are all relatively terrible at basketball.

  For chunks and stretches of the early twenty-first century, Paul Shirley has played in the National Basketball Association. The NBA has 30 franchises, and each club carries 12 players; this equates to a fraternity of just 360 people. These are the strongest, quickest, richest basketball players in the world. Even if your census includes (a) super-stars who retired in their prime, (b) the best players in college, (c) any undiscovered hoop geniuses still hidden in Eastern Europe, and (d) every Earl Manigaultesque washout roaming the frontcourts of playgrounds and prison yards, Shirley was (and perhaps still is) among the top 500 basketball players alive. How many people do you know who are in the world’s top 500 at anything? It’s easier to get into the U.S House of Representatives than it is to get into the NBA. But this is what Paul Shirley accomplished. And that’s really weird, because Paul Shirley would never define himself as a basketball player, even though that’s what he scrawls on the bottom of his tax return; he loves basketball, but he despises basketball players. And that peculiar detachment is what makes this book unlike anything you will ever read about professional sports.

  This is not a situation like Paper Lion, where George Plimpton was given the chance to pretend he was a Detroit Lion. It’s also not like Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, because Shirley never contributed to any NBA club as much as Bouton contributed to the Yankees, nor was Shirley particularly close to any of his teammates (when I briefly met the author in 2006, he had the name of exactly one professional basketball player in his cell phone, and I think the dude was Russian). Shirley is neither a dilettante nor an insider; he’s more akin to the most deeply imbedded reporter in the history of sport. Every on-court experience he had was authentic and consequential. Every off-court conversation he overheard was casual and unrehearsed. He has guarded Ron Artest on the perimeter, and he has listened to Amare Stoudemire discuss politics. He did not merely have exposure to basketball culture; he had complete emersion. Yet it is clear that Paul Shirley never became a pro basketball player. He never lost his perspective on the unreality of the NBA. He never stopped being the skeptical, reasonable person that farm kids from Kansas tend to be. He never drank the Kool-Aid; in fact, he openly mocked the Kool-Aid on the Internet. And this probably hurt his career. But it also made him an exceptional and hilarious journalist.

  As stated earlier, Paul Shirley was (and might still be) among the 500 best hoop specimens alive. And that, of course, is an ironic reality. Because we live in a world where everything is relative, Shirley is usually classified as a strikingly mediocre basketball player. This is the deepest insecurity of his life; the pages of Can I Keep My Jersey? are saturated with self-deprecating references surrounding Shirley’s on-court shortcomings and his eternally tendril future. He may have made the NBA, but he is not a confident athlete. He is, however, a remarkably confident intellectual. He writes about racial politics with a clarity that will make some readers uncomfortable. His hatred for religion (and the way it has infiltrated athletics) is on par with Vladimir Lenin. He doesn’t like fans (or fandom) because he doesn’t like stupid people. And he is obsessed with details, probably because the details are pretty much everything.

  There is, I suppose, a glaring paradox to this three-year diary, and it won’t be lost on any serious reader: it often seems as if Paul Shirley did everything in his power to attain a life he never really wanted. The NBA he imagined as a thirteen-year-old had no relationship to the NBA he experienced at twenty-seven. He traveled around the world in the hope of throwing a leather sphere through a metal cylinder, and that never stopped seeming ridiculous. He did everything in his power to become a better player, even though he couldn’t relate to the type of person he aspired to become. It’s a contradiction that even Shirley struggles with; I’m still not sure he could adequately explain why he was so driven to become someone he couldn’t understand. But here’s the good news, and here’s what matters more—it didn’t happen. Paul Shirley never became that type of person, which is why this book exists.

  Like most of the world’s 6 billion humans, you will never be paid money to play basketball, and you will never have access to the rarified humans who do. But the following pages explain what such an experience might feel like, assuming you managed to remain the same person you are right now.

  I always dread the paperwork at the doctor’s office. I know I’ll have to walk the secretary through the spelling of my last name. To save time I usually explain that it’s just like the girl’s name. Then, nodding slowly, I agree that third grade was about the time my classmates realized why that was funny. Which made for three long years of boyhood abuse, since it wasn’t until sixth grade that I developed a grasp of the witty retort.

  But that isn’t the part I dread. I hate the section that asks for employer information. I feel guilty about my response in the box marked “Occupation.”

  I always write, “Professional basketball player.”

  Because that’s what I am. As absurd as it may seem, people pay me to play basketball. Thus, I am a professional basketball player.

  (I use such gravitas. My tone would have been more appropriate if I had written something much more intriguing, like “I am an under-cover assassin” or “I am a ninja.”)

  When I tell someone that I play professional basketball, I know that I will have to provide an explanation. I suppose it is better than many of the alternatives; saying that one is a data specialist rarely stimulates much of a conversation. But my story has always proved to be a difficult one to tell. When a person learns that my job is to put a three-dimensional circle through a two-dimensional one, the next question—invariably—is, “So who do you play for?” My response usually involves some stammering, the shifting of my feet, and some thorough consideration on my part. Much of the time, I don’t have an answer. Although it is fun to make something up, as in “I play for the Tampa Bay…Dirty…Devil…Hawks,” just to see what happens.

  My life—the life of a professional basketball player—is not as simplistic as it appears. I suppose it’s easy to understand the life of an NBA superstar. He goes to practice, collects the biweekly check derived from his multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract, and, generally, knows where he will be from year to year. Likewise, it isn’t difficult to comprehend the life of the college hero who wasn’t quite good enough. He tried it for a year, failed, and quit to become a vice president of the hometown Denison State Bank.

  My story is not so simple. I am the in-between. I’ve played for eleven teams in my four years as a pro. I’ve been at the top, playing in NBA games with three different teams…and the bottom, released or otherwise rejected eight times. But I keep going back. Much like a drug addict, a battered wife, or a guy who thought playing basketball for money, while sometimes maddening, remained a far better alternative to
life in a cubicle.

  In the end, I’m a lot like everyone else. I’ve had to prove myself over and over, which makes me no different from a real estate agent, a surgeon, or a garbage collector. (Well, a garbage collector who belongs to the worst union in the world and happens to live in the most waste-disposal-performance-conscious city on the planet.)

  The only difference between my life and everyone else’s? Instead of taking my first job in Peoria, I took one in Athens. Instead of morbidly obese co-workers named Patti and Bernice, my “colleagues” are large men who go by Kobe, Amare, and Viktor. Simply put, my professional life has been a lot like that of most people—filled with ups and downs. My ups and downs have just been a little more interesting.

  My initiation into the world of professional basketball came about in the locker room of the defending world champion Los Angeles Lakers. I was a fresh-faced rookie from Iowa State where—while no star—I had been well known and loved by the crowds who packed Hilton Coliseum to its capacity of 14,092. Standing in the Lakers locker room, I was nobody. Strangely, my introduction to a life of being paid to play a game was much more comfortable than I expected, thanks to a man named Shaquille O’Neal.

  I grew up as a shy kid in a small town. Actually, that’s not really true. I grew up in the country, not a small town, but we all have to claim somewhere as our home. For me, that town is Meriden, Kansas. It is my hometown only by default. My parents raised my brothers and me at the intersection of two unnamed gravel roads. As a child, I was fascinated to learn that the placement of our mailbox governed our address. Our mailbox was on the east side of our property, so I wrote “Grantville” in the upper left corner of my letters to Santa. Had our mailbox been on the north side, I would have written “Meriden.”

  Address confusion notwithstanding, I went to school in Meriden. So when I started my first game as a sophomore at Iowa State, I heard, “and at center, six-ten, from Meriden, Kansas, Paul Shirley.”

  I learned the basics of the game of basketball on a gravel driveway. (I realize that this is all sickeningly quaint. But I can’t go back and make my parents move to the city.) My childhood heroes were of two types. They were either (a) members of the University of Kansas basketball team or (b) Larry Bird. My brothers and I watched the former group play televised games on cold Saturday afternoons, keeping track of players’ statistics in intricately named columns like “Points” and “Fouls.” At halftime, we would report to the basketball goal suspended from the deck and imitate our favorite players. Our ill-advised excursions into the elements invariably resulted in, at minimum, one jammed finger or one basketball to the face. Neither occurrence was especially pleasurable when the air temperature was hovering around freezing.

  By high school, I was a fair basketball player. (Note: That was an example of self-deprecation. It will remain a theme. I was really good. Obviously. I wouldn’t be telling the story of my professional basketball career if I’d been a bad high school basketball player.) I wasn’t able to lead my high school team to a state championship, but we won far more games than the citizenry of Meriden was used to. I remain disappointed by my failure to achieve the ultimate small-town basketball triumph. Without a state championship, my story derails from the hokey, vomit-inducing course it was taking. I’m sure that when the movie is made, a gaudy, yellowed banner reading “State Champs” will hang in the Jefferson West gymnasium.

  And then I went off to college. I was not a hotly pursued recruit, so my options were limited. (Averaging a load of points against tiny schools in northeast Kansas is not a shortcut to a scholarship at UCLA.) Fortunately for me, a man named Tim Floyd saw in me a bargain from which he could hardly walk away. It turns out that I am not a complete idiot; I was a National Merit Scholarship finalist. I don’t even really remember what that means; I think I did well on a test. At any rate, Coach Floyd used my qualifications as a non-imbecile to secure for me a full academic scholarship at Iowa State. The arrangement worked out well: he wasn’t forced to use an athletic scholarship on a skinny kid with potential, and I didn’t have to pay for college. It was a good deal for both of us.

  I survived two head coaches, eleven assistant coaches, forty-nine teammates, and approximately three real dates, and graduated from Iowa State with a degree in mechanical engineering. By the end of my career in Ames, I was fed up with basketball. I told my mother—on a forgettable January morning—that my senior year of college would be my last season of basketball.

  My athletic career at an end, I retired to the woods, where I lived peacefully among the forest creatures, dining on scavenged acorns and pine sap for the rest of my long life.

  And so, it would seem that I’ve reached the end of my tale, in just under four pages. The remainder of the book will be spent in the crafting of knock-knock jokes and haikuy….

  Fortunately for the sanity of the reader (and me), that bizarre departure from reality never transpired. I recovered from my one-day bout with early-twenties angst and allowed myself to be convinced to play a game for money. It was a tough sell.

  When I would shoot baskets in my parents’ driveway as a child, I always dreamed of playing in the NBA. It was an absurd dream—and the impossibility of it was hammered into my classmates and me on nearly any available occasion. I think our high school football coach—who doubled as the calculus teacher—even had a poster hanging on his wall that spelled out a statistical breakdown of how unlikely a job in professional sports was. And he was right. Then again, he did not post a chart specifically for those in his class who would grow to a height of six feet ten inches.

  If I had followed through with my plan to give up basketball after college, my math teacher would have been proved correct. Because I am a stubborn bastard, I couldn’t allow that. And if I had quit after my senior year of college, my little-boy hopes would have been dashed forever.

  Jesus Christ. If that wasn’t the worst goddamned line ever.

  My team at Iowa State was fairly well known on the national stage. I shared the floor with players named Marcus Fizer and Jamaal Tinsley, who would both go on to be starters in the NBA. We won back-to-back conference titles my junior and senior years. At the end of both years, we were ranked in the national top ten. Sometimes, I was a big contributor to our cause. On other occasions, I was simply along for the ride. I spent much of college playing with injuries to various locations on my body and limped, both literally and figuratively, my way to the end of my career. (And a tragic end it was. It came at the hands of tiny Hampton University. Or perhaps it’s called Hampton College. In fact, it could actually be Hampton Technical School. No one had ever heard of the place before it became only the fourth team seeded fifteenth to win a first-round game in the NCAA tournament.)

  When my college days were over, I was invited to play in the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament. My invitation was probably not by virtue of my individual ability. I was invited because I had played on a really good team. In fact, because two of my teammates were also invited to the showcase for college seniors, Iowa State had the largest contingent at the event. In all, sixty-four players are invited every year to the tournament. We were divided into eight teams, and each team played in three games over the course of the weekend.

  I didn’t have much fun playing basketball in college. I enjoyed the winning and the accomplishment of certain goals, but the actual act of playing the game rarely brought about much joy. I took my collegiate career—and myself—entirely too seriously. When I left for Portsmouth, I decided to change my ways and forced myself to let go. In the least-shocking news ever, my plan worked. No longer encumbered by a mind-numbing attention to the implications of every play, I allowed myself to enjoy the game in a way I hadn’t since high school.

  The Portsmouth tournament was a glorified meat market. Agents and scouts—both from overseas and the NBA—swarmed the games like Puerto Ricans at a cockfight. The players involved were generally midlevel; anyone good enough to know that he would be drafted skipped the event and waited
for the NBA’s more high-profile scouting opportunities. Obviously, I was not in that category. I needed some help to get my fledgling career off the ground. During the week, I met with two agents who approached me, and I signed with one of them.

  The one I chose, Keith Glass, didn’t sugarcoat his analysis. He told me that he had been pleasantly surprised by my basketball abilities but that life as a white professional basketball player would be a constant struggle. He listed off some of his clients and noted that he generally represented good players who are decent human beings. Since I can often fool people into thinking that I am both, he didn’t have to say much else to convince me that our styles might mesh. Keith told me that he thought I had a chance to play in the NBA but that he couldn’t guarantee it would ever happen. (Something about hell freezing over…) He compared me to one of his clients, a player from Marquette named Chris Crawford, who had just signed a long-term contract with the Atlanta Hawks. In the same breath, he said that such an event wasn’t necessarily likely. (Which is just what I needed—another realist in my life.) But if I fell short of the NBA, it seemed likely that I would find a home in Europe. Keith claimed to have contacts all over that continent.

  After Portsmouth, players who stimulated interest from NBA teams were invited to individual workouts in NBA cities. Some attended as many as fifteen such workouts in the run-up to the NBA draft. Number of scheduled workouts for me: zero. As draft day approached, it became apparent that my name would not appear on the television broadcast of the event. The Cleveland Cavaliers had expressed some interest, but their second-round pick came and went with no fanfare.

  The NBA runs summer leagues as an opportunity for teams to work with draft picks and young players and to try out free agents. A member of the last category, I was invited by the Cavaliers franchise to play with its summer league team in Salt Lake City. I was a nervous wreck when my mother dropped me at the airport in Kansas City. My overriding fear was complete embarrassment—which, now that I think about it, is probably everyone’s main fear when they start something new. So my experience was really no different from that of the guy who goes off to a new job as an investment banker. Fortunately, summer league isn’t exactly the full-on NBA. Or Deutsche Bank. I held my own. In fact, because I was a complete unknown, anything I did beyond successfully putting on my own uniform and/or not defecating in that same uniform was viewed as an improvement on expectations.