Pounding the Rock

by Marc Skelton

  Alams Beato, our statistician, was also Charles’s best friend. He acted like a modern-day Patroclus, best friend of Achilles. I asked him to talk to Charles and put a salve on our relationship so we could make up and go into the playoffs ready to do battle. Alams came to the rescue. I’m not sure what Alams said to Charles, but it worked.

  GOGOL IN THE BRONX

  In early February, another polar vortex has invaded New York City. In Washington Heights, the icy wind darts off the Hudson River while Nina and I walk up the street to the bus stop. It feels as if the wind has teeth and is biting my ears. Either Nina’s pants have shrunk or she grew an inch overnight. There is a space between her pants and socks about the size of a coffee cup. Her shins are pink from the cold.

  “I had to walk to school when it was colder than this in Moldova,” I said. “Then when I got to school there wouldn’t be any heat.”

  “Is Russia colder than Moldova?” Nina asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  I open the weather app and show Nina my phone. For some unexplainable reason I added the city of Yakutsk years ago to the list of cities on my weather app. I have never been to Yakutsk, but the coldest city on earth has always fascinated me.

  “Today Yakutsk is minus-twenty degrees. They also have lots of diamonds there,” I said.

  “Does the ice make the diamonds?” Nina asked. “I think diamonds need warmth to be shiny.”

  Here’s a potential deep dive into negative numbers, geography, and my strange obsession with Russia, but it is too early for a math lesson, too cold for geography, and there’s not enough time to talk about Russia as the yellow school bus is impatiently waiting for us.

  Today is the first day of the spring semester. Like on all first days of class, making an impression is important. I kiss Nina good-bye. I pedal faster to school than on most days. I’m excited. In the next few months I will get to teach my favorite subject, Russian literature. We will spend time with Tolstoy, Babel, Pushkin, and Gogol. Unfortunately, we will run out of time before we can examine Dostoevsky. When basketball ends, this class helps me stay afloat. I can honestly say no other body of literature comes closer to capturing the misery and joys of coaching basketball than Russian literature.

  How can Russian literature be akin to coaching high school basketball? There exists an undeniable if invisible thread binding basketball coaches with the starting five of Russia’s greatest characters: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Goncharov’s Oblomov, Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Pushkin’s Onegin, and Turgenev’s Bazarov. Gogol’s Akaky Akakievich and the Brothers Karamazov can come off the bench to man the second unit. Are all great basketball teams alike? Is each bad team unhappy in its own way? Who knows? What I do know is a winning team has somehow solved its most vital problems: toxic egos, inefficient shot selection, foul trouble, lack of size or speed. In truth, all happy teams are different; each one solved a specific problem to avoid losing. Clearly, all losing teams are the same: they failed to win. The concept of sacrifice is essentially a Russian tradition. When you win a championship, slights over playing time are forgiven. Those verbal transgressions, a rite of passage in the realm of the athlete-coach relationship, are washed away by the tide of winning, and the season becomes a positive experiment in brotherly bonding. When you lose, no one escapes innocently. A loss can turn you into a paranoid Raskolnikov.

  To young coaches I say: beware of the Anna Karenina principle. When I first started coaching, I couldn’t handle losing. I was prone to overreact after every loss. I felt like throwing myself before the next oncoming train. Soon you realize losing sucks, but it is not a deep despair. We all lose. It’s not that I got used to losing; I still go out of my way to avoid losing. But it’s a simple, irrefutable fact that you are going to lose games, and coaching basketball may make you the happiest guy in school one day and other days make you miserable.

  There’s a special pleasure teaching Russian literature. It is the chance to watch and listen to children talk, write, and think about the largest country in the world. A place that also occupies a suspicious corner of our American collective consciousness. When reading Gogol’s The Overcoat, students read about an experience that is not unfamiliar; a man dreamed of a fancy jacket that he couldn’t really afford. He was then robbed of that fancy jacket. Who wouldn’t want to get revenge on that person? Akaky Akakievich, the main character, is able to haunt the bureaucrats who did him in. It’s the ultimate revenge ghost story.

  The Bronx is very far—geographically, politically, and culturally—from Russia, but today the heating system is down and my classroom feels like Siberia. All we needed were some big furry hats and a Vladimir Vysotsky song to complete the setting. The longer I coach the more I see coaching as a parallel to the Russian novel; the subplots, the minor characters, the obstinate players, the paroxysm-producing plays, the unforgettable games. The subplots give the season their unequivocal vitality. The great plays and players become stories for the next generation of Fannie Lou Panthers.

  The regular season is over and the playoffs start March 2. For a brief time, I can concentrate just on my classes. In a few weeks the gospel of team ball will be put into practice. For the time being, I am messianic about Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat.

  “There’s a story about a man walking through a field of grass. Imagine the field has been plowed. And he comes across a lone blade of grass that somehow survived the blade of the tractor,” I say, opening the discussion. “It takes strength and a little luck to avoid the guillotine of life.”

  Retelling Hadji Murat in the Bronx on a freezing February morning didn’t really do it justice. Tolstoy wrote, “Man has conquered everything and destroyed millions of plants, yet this one won’t submit.” It’s a lesson about Chechnya’s relation with Russia. It’s a lesson about empire. It’s a lesson about durability and luck. Bryant and Kenneth are the only guys on the team I teach this semester. I will use it as a parable with the team: we want to be that plant that will not surrender, that one team that is left standing at the end of the season. Students see themselves as the blade of grass, the one person in their family to graduate high school and go to college. Teaching Russian literature and coaching basketball provide me with wood on the fire. I find whenever I am exhausted, Russia helps me. Hearing Russian on the streets, going to Tatiana’s restaurant in Brighton Beach, or watching my favorite Russian film, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return, are like an ennobling salve.

  I tell the class about the time I went to the Russian sauna in the East Village. There I witnessed an abnormally pliable Tajik wrestle with an old friend of mine. The Tajik whipped him with birch branches and then folded him like a pair of pants. Uncomfortable, I left my friend and slipped into the ice-cold pool. Here, surrounded by barrel-chested men, their nipples half submerged in the icy bath, I could only stare at the water. This idiosyncratic process of exposing yourself to extreme temperatures is supposed to allow you to experience epiphanies. I like to think it was in the icy pool, corralled by men twice my size, that I realized coaching basketball is like a Russian novel.

  I let the students know early that Russian novels are famous for the multiple names their multiple characters possess. In Russia, patronymics are vital. The books mirror real life. There are two or three different Nastashas in the same story—just as you might know three different Jacks in your life. Gogol and Tolstoy both overpopulate their novels, and we are left confused as to who the main character is, or if the information is important. Yet this happens all the time in life.

  “Noah called.”

  “Which Noah?”

  “Not sure.”

  In Russia it would be “Vanya Ivanovich called.” No questions need to be asked. Vanya, the son of Ivan. That Vanya.

  Every class is built on the process of forming some type of fidelity in the children to reading, thinking, and writing. In the classroom or on the court, literature allows us to see our own pers
onal awkwardness and inconsistencies. Or it mitigates a loss. Or gives meaning to unexplainable events.

  A friend once asked, “Do your students really like Russian literature?”

  Every year I hear either “Kids these days are impossible” or “I’ve never had a better group of kids.” That’s teaching, right? And coaching? And life. Life comes at us in waves. Sometimes we are sailing, other times sinking. In the end I can never forget I am working with someone’s child. The passive and slothful Oblomov reminds a journalist, “Don’t forget that there is a human being there. Where is your humanness?…Love him, remember yourself in him and treat him as you would yourself—then I will read you and bow my head before you. Give me a human being, a human being!” These are not fictional characters in my class, but real kids, with their own as-yet-unrealized dreams unfolding before us. Do they like Russian literature? They love it.

  Over this season, I have seen Shamar and Walfri morph into very good basketball players and perform admirably in the classroom too. The X’s and O’s of the season will fade. As will the plot twists and dialogue of this class. A coach’s passion or a teacher’s enthusiasm melts away the coldness of the unfamiliar. What remains is the human connection; a relationship that rests on trust. In the end it doesn’t matter if I was teaching students how to play the digeridoo. The ever-present sense of devotion in a teacher evokes both an awakening and a feeling of pride in students. It all comes down to an infectious element. Students become owners of their learning. I have watched this unfold over and over.

  You’ll find coaching basketball or teaching Russian literature is not so unlike your own life. There’s a rhythm to the season that’s filled with the duality of the unpredictability of games and repetitiveness of practice. Russian literature has a mysterious universality that makes the logorrheic student listen and allows the silent student to say something profound. Students don’t want super lesson plans with lots of gizmos and gadgets. They can see through transparent actions. Lesson plans don’t win students over. Teenagers aren’t impressed with intellectuals. Knowing this and acknowledging it are important. They like adults who treat them with respect and dignity.

  Like a fireplace that takes a while to heat a cold room, students warm up over the semester to strange names and alien backdrops. Throughout the semester the students have various reactions to the stories we read. When we meet Tolstoy, Michelle E., an eleventh grader, sees the kindness and contradictions of the Russian soldier held prisoner in the Caucasus. Leaving the mountains for the city, we encounter Gogol’s St. Petersburg, where Anthony G. relates to Akaky’s temptation to buy a fancy coat. Wislady asks about how societal pressure shapes us and forces us to buy stuff we don’t necessarily need. Diamond describes the pain of loss, even if it is a coat, and the ache it can cause. She suggests there may be justice only in the afterlife.

  We continue to Pushkin and Babel. Bryant observes how characters lost their moral fortitude, like Herman in Pushkin’s Queen of Spades and the soldier in Babel’s My First Goose. I watched Sebastiann excitedly compare Herman’s desire to unlock the secret in The Queen of Spades with Akaky’s obsession to retrieve his jacket, and how it led them both to ruin. He sees ambition as a vice; a warning in life. Zayasha pronounces that we have to experience something to know it. As she is getting ready for college, she is infatuated with how the characters’ identity shifts through these short stories as her own identity is shifting before us. There’s a beauty to reading and teaching here. The fateful collision of the Bronx meeting St. Petersburg through Gogol and Pushkin and experiencing the surreal beauty of Tolstoy’s Caucasus makes me smile and generates a little warmth in the freezing classroom.

  HARPOON

  I was home alone. Jess took the girls to Maryland for the weekend. The goal was twofold: she could spend time with her best friend, and I could spend some time writing this book and subsequently get ready for the playoffs. I planned to create a basketball bunker. I wasn’t leaving until I figured out a way to get this team ready and devised a way to beat South Bronx Prep. I would order takeout. I wouldn’t leave my desk. I would watch coaching clinic videos and read endless articles looking for the right word or phrase that would shift the rudder toward a championship. I would spend hours in my self-imposed basketball prison watching games: Fannie Lou basketball, the Filipino national team, Celtics, Warriors, teams from upstate New York, anything I could find on YouTube. Charles was right, it was hunting season.

  As we were preparing for the playoffs, President Trump announced he would ban CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Politico, and the BBC from the White House briefing. I was taking notes on the new tyranny unfolding in America. Was I being tyrannical? To play for me, you have to abandon the five-dribble move. You have to have faith in statistically sound shots. We want wide-open threes, free throws, and layups. Finally, I was able to conceptualize the postseason with an easy-to-remember alternative axiom, all with the letter P. I called it “the three P’s”: Pace, Pressure, and comPosure.

  I can remember the practice we found out the seedings. We would play Robert F. Wagner High School.

  “We will play Wagner on Thursday,” I wrote on the whiteboard. With twelve wins and four losses in the season, Wagner was going to be a formidable matchup. There are a lot of great coaches in the PSAL, along with a lot of talented players. I knew the Wagner Panthers would come in ready, and it was my job to get my team prepared.

  Practice began as usual. Shots. Dribbles. Three-on-two, two-on-one. A modified fast-break drill. The announcement unified us. Now we had a common opponent. The ball raced up the court. Suddenly, a loud pop resounded. Mack was down.

  “Oh, Coach, this isn’t good.”

  He was holding his leg. Later we would find out Mack had a torn patella and would miss the rest of the season. And it happened just when we looked to be a complete unit. We needed everyone on deck if we were going to go deep into the playoffs. The one thing about Mack’s injury: it cleansed us of any fears or jealousy. Mack, a junior, had served honorably as the backup point guard. His injury coalesced the team. They seemed to realize the finality of the injury. Maybe his career was over. They knew the end of our season was also near. They sensed we needed even more unity and team spirit and less pettiness and selfishness. Strange that Troilus and Cressida would be so filled with coaching aphorisms. Shakespeare in the Park is one of the greatest gifts to New York City. I borrowed another line from the play: “Troy in our weakness stands, not in her strength.” We had to eliminate our weaknesses and stop worrying about the other teams’ strengths.

  That night after practice, as if I hadn’t overfilled my cup of basketball, a couple of friends and I went to the Lehman College–CCNY semifinal game. A great game, it ended in a buzzer beater by CCNY. My heart sank. I watched Coach Schulman, the Lehman coach, walk across the court after the loss. He looked like the loneliest man on earth. Because of games like this I am never sanguine going into the playoffs. March can be so cruel. It’s about missed opportunities, injuries, bad luck. The vagaries of the game linger long after the buzzer has sounded. Sometimes you get only one shot to kill the whale.

  PART THREE

  PLAYOFFS

  NYC HOOPS

  You might be surprised to learn that New York City is the fountainhead of college basketball; we have everything from Michelin-rated hoops to fried chicken spot games. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet. In fact, even most New Yorkers don’t know there is more college basketball in New York City than any other city in the world. College basketball is something of an afterthought on our sports menu, but in fact you could feast on it in New York City throughout the winter.

  For example, the table is set on any given Tuesday. Dress in layers, because the gyms are hot and the streets are freezing. In January you could attend the battle of the Jesuits: the Manhattan-Fordham game in Riverdale. Get there early; the pews are filled quickly by hungry Fenians. Then you can head south in
to Manhattan on the 1 train to 181st Street. Grab a sesame chicken on a laffa at Golan Heights. Walk by the Dominican teenagers rolling blunts on Amsterdam Avenue and watch the kosher Fighting Maccabees of Yeshiva University battle the College of Staten Island Dolphins. Reminder: don’t forget your Blistex, the winter wind will burn your lips. Jump on the M101 bus to City College and visit the home of the iconic coach Nat Holman, “Mr. Basketball,” and the site of the 1951 basketball scandal that shook the world of amateur athletics. Next, stroll down Broadway to Levien Gym for some Ivy League basketball: the Columbia-Harvard game. (You’ll need reservations.) If there are too many screens and each team is sycophantically overpassing and being overcoached, we can leave.

  Then I suggest we hop on the Metro-North to New Rochelle for dessert. The highest-scoring offense in the country is thirty-five minutes away at Iona College; you won’t be disappointed. There’s Division II basketball at Queens College, and more Division III at Baruch College around the corner from the world’s number-one restaurant, Eleven Madison Park. I haven’t even mentioned the bounty of Brooklyn basketball yet. The motherland of Connie Hawkins, Bob Cousy, Chris Mullin, Bernard King, Billy Cunningham, Roger Brown, Dwayne “Pearl” Washington and tutti quanti, up to Stephon Marbury and Lance Stephenson. If you still have some time, there is the junior college circuit. Hop over to the Boogie Down and catch the Hostos Caimans and the Bronx Community College Broncos. I’m sure this game isn’t on anyone’s bucket list, but it’s a heated rivalry nonetheless. While in the Bronx you must try to taste-test the artful Apex Center on the Lehman College campus and see the Lehman Lightning versus the John Jay Bulldogs. New Yorkers love basketball as much as their restaurants. There is plenty to eat and see. It is hoop heaven for the epicureans.