Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  As in love, the game should not become too easy; intense and long resistance must be applied. And so defense has come to be the heart of the game. So practiced and skillful are the pros that shooting percentages are as near perfection as one might imagine—as high as .890 for free throws and .630 for field goals. Almost every other time the ball goes up, it goes in. Thus the emphasis in modern basketball has shifted to make each thrust for the basket as laden as possible with friction, difficulty, obstruction, and reluctance to yield. Crowds love the new pressing defenses, the sweat, the toll they take on blistering feet, the pounding up and down the floor, hawking, falling, leaping, tangling, pushing, shoving for position. Each team in basketball is like a single living body: the two organisms clinging to each other up and down the floor like giant wrestlers, locked in high-velocity and sweating contact at every point of movement. Warily, at times, the dribbling guards approach the other team’s embrace; like arms, the defensive guards swing loosely right and left, circling, before clapping tightly into the foe’s line of movement. Each team is a mystical body, one, united. Enormous feats of concentration, enormous bursts of energy, vast reservoirs of habit and instinct are required.

  The solidarity of basketball makes it appealing in many cultures; slowly, it is beginning to spread. Europeans, with feet trained by soccer but hands and arms lacking in speed or subtlety, take a little while to reverse their development. The game is capable of many different cultural styles. The plodding, chesslike Russian juggernaut has proved successful against the individual talents of American All-Star teams; virtuoso excellence is not sufficient in this game, for solidarity is everything. But the deepest possibilities of the game are so embedded in the American experience, especially through the black experience, that it is difficult to believe that any other nation could consistently present teams that might outplay our own. A part of our deepest identity is uttered in this game. Those of us not black are taught possibilities we might otherwise have never known or emulated.

  Stanley Cohen

  A conversation with a stranger at a cocktail party during the 1970s led Stanley Cohen (b. 1934) to wonder what had become of the principals in college basketball’s betting scandals of the 1950s. He laid out answers in his book The Game They Played (1977), a revisiting of that convulsive period in the game’s history and the basis for the HBO documentary City Dump. In 1950, a City College of New York team that started three Jews and two blacks won both the NCAA tournament and the NIT. But the afterglow dimmed when seven players were implicated in taking payoffs from gamblers to shave points. “The City team represented us and our way of life—most of us locally bred sons of immigrant parents confronting a somewhat alien world,” said Cohen, who during a half-century in journalism wrote newspaper and magazine stories as well as five books, and taught at Hunter College and NYU. “It was crushing when we learned of the scandal.” Before he contracted with Farrar, Straus and Giroux to write the book, Cohen had secured the cooperation of several former CCNY players. But one of them, Floyd Lane, was then hired to coach at his alma mater and didn’t want to revisit a painful subject. Soon the others withdrew their support for the project. Cohen offered to return his advance, but editor Roger Straus suggested he forge ahead, believing the book would be more powerful, and less susceptible to the self-interested shadings of interview subjects, if Cohen personalized it. Here, in the prologue, Cohen takes us to Creston Playground in the Bronx. It’s in the neighborhood where the author himself grew up, sometimes playing with his heroes before and after their falls from grace—including the man at the center of this scene, former City College star Ed Roman. Cohen doesn’t identify Roman by name, which helps give what transpires the power of a short story.

  from

  The Game They Played

  IT WAS the big man who drew the crowd. He had been gone for a long season and now, in the first true chill of November, he was back, doing the thing he had always done best. He was playing the pivot in a schoolyard basketball game, positioned with his back to the basket and spinning left or right in the brief pirouettes of an unrehearsed choreography.

  He was a big man, but he had an unorthodox shape for the game he played. His body seemed to be formed by a succession of sharp hooks and angles, except for the slightly rounded shoulders and the face, which was full and fleshy. His very presence spoke of awkwardness, but in context everything he did acquired the mysterious beauty of function. For there was to his movements the quick stuttering ease, the economy of motion, that is taught in the brightness of the big time but is refined and finally possessed in the lonely litanies of the schoolyard dusk.

  The crowd had gathered slowly. They were clustered in a tight semicircle around the back of the basket, drawn in almost directly beneath the backboard. It was late in the day, and beyond the crossed wire fence, some six feet above the playing surface, twilight figures moved like shadows in the direction of the five- and six-story tenements that lined both sides of the street. Except for this one small corner, the schoolyard was empty now, and it was quiet. The only sounds to be heard were the sounds of the game itself, the ball drumming against the concrete court, or rattling against the rim or the metal backboard.

  There were five other players on the court. The big man was being guarded by a player of perhaps six feet two, who was giving away almost four inches in height. But he was quick and lean and very agile, and as one watched him the impression grew that his body had been wired together with catgut and whipcord. He wore a close-cropped crew cut, which was the fashion of the time, and his soft, almost casual jump shots were flicked lightly from the top of his head. The two had very different playing styles, one seemingly set against the other in the practiced medley of counterpoint.

  The remaining four players formed the supporting cast. They had their own skills, some of them considerable, and on other days one or another might have stolen the game, but not today. This day, they all seemed to understand, was special because the big man was back. And so they played to the strength of his inside game, feeding the pivot and then cutting across, fast and tight, like spokes slicing past the hub of a wheel.

  The pace of the game was swift and precise. The big man’s team scored the first three baskets. He made the first two himself on two short spin shots, one to his right, the other to his left. On the next play he passed off for a driving lay-up. Then a shot was missed, and the crew-cut player answered back with two jump shots, fired in a flat trajectory that appeared to be short of the basket, but somehow just cleared the top and grazed the inside of the back rim before falling to the ground.

  There were no nets on the baskets, and as the afternoon faded the rim seemed to lose itself against the green of the backboard. But schoolyard basketball is a game played on the accumulated instincts of one’s own time and place. There were no markings on the court; no keyhole or foul line, and one learned to take his points of reference from anonymous landmarks—a jagged crack in the pavement, an imperceptible dip in the wall along the sideline, the subtle geography that is known and stored only in the private preserve of the body.

  Three-man basketball is conceivably the most demanding game played in the schoolyards of America. It is not as sophisticated as the full-court game. It does not require the same kind of speed or versatility, the almost artistic devotion to discipline. But what it lacks in complexity is compensated by the intense quality of the game. It is pressure basketball, compacted in time and space, as if a boxing match were to be held in a ring cut to half its normal size. There is no place to hide and no clock to offer respite.

  The game is played by the improvised rules of the home court. In some neighborhoods ten baskets win a game, in others the point is eight, but always a two-basket, or four-point, margin is required for victory. It is a game played to its own cadence, and without a referee to call fouls, it can be brutally tough. But the most important feature of three-man basketball is that the team that scores keeps possession of the ball, and so one plays always with the nagging knowle
dge that the game might be lost without his ever having had the chance to score. It is a shooter’s game, a game that is won or lost quickly on the trigger of the hottest gun.

  Now, from the corner of the court, the big man sent up a one-hand push shot that cut the center of the rim so cleanly that one could not be certain it had gone through. It broke a 10–10 tie, and before the defensive team could recover, another shot, as whistling clean as the first, fell through from slightly closer range, and the game was one basket short of completion. They were the first outside shots the big man had made, and now one recalled how easily he had made those shots, and how often, on brighter nights, beneath the hundred blazing suns of big-city arenas.

  That was a while ago of course, and a long season had passed since those days of early spring in 1950 when time seemed to move on private clocks, and each night was a herald to the sound of trumpets. He was not yet twenty then, a college sophomore with honors for grades and a basketball talent that might earn him All-American mention. He had not played much basketball until he reached high school, and his natural gifts were modest. He had size, of course, and good hands, and a remarkably soft touch from the outside. But the rest of it was learned. It was learned while in high school, and then honed and polished in the schoolyards of the Bronx. He worked hard at it, shooting at night-darkened rims, and in winter clearing a path through the snow so that his shooting eye would not lose its edge. Basketball was a sport without season in the canyons of New York, and the big man, who had grown to love the game, worked at it through the months and years of his teens.

  He was all-scholastic in high school, and in college he joined four other all-scholastic players on a freshman squad that could have taken the measure of more than a few college varsities. A year later they moved up as a unit to a team that was deep in talent. It was a team marked early for greatness, but no one, not even its most optimistic fans and alumni, suspected that by season’s end this young racehorse band of schoolyard players would beat the best the country had to offer and win both of America’s major college tournaments.

  They had become instant celebrities, their fame of a type seldom known to professional athletes. For they were, after all, college kids, none yet old enough to vote, and they were the local property of the neighborhoods in which they lived. It was not through bubble-gum cards or the filter of the television screen that you knew them. You would see them on the block, or at the corner candy store, and of course in the schoolyard where you would watch them play in street clothes on the Sunday after a game, and on occasion, if the available talent was skimpy that day, you might even share the court with one of them in a three-man game.

  The big man was a schoolyard regular. He would arrive late on a Sunday morning, sometimes carrying a basketball under his arm, and he would shoot at an open basket while waiting his turn to take the court. He was genial and unassuming, and even on the day after his team had won the National Invitation Tournament, he came to play choose-up ball, and as he entered the schoolyard he received the applause with a diffident grace.

  It had all seemed right then. The days fell together with brickwork precision, and time was the filament on which success was measured. There was not the slightest intimation then that a year later his well-ordered world of campus and schoolyard would lay in ruin. Other glories waited; the NCAA championship would be added to the NIT title within the next two weeks, but further on, around the bend of the seasons, lay the wreckage of a national scandal. He and some of his teammates would be arrested for manipulating the scores of basketball games. They would be booked on charges of bribery and conspiracy, they would be arraigned, bail would be set, they would be convicted and sentenced. Some would receive jail terms. That is what lay ahead, eleven months to the day, and that was not necessarily the worst of it.

  The worst of it, they would find, was that forgiveness would be slow. They would be remembered more widely as dumpers than as the celebrated grand-slam team. Careers would be broken, their educations stunted. They would never again play big-time basketball. Culture heroes in their teens, by the time they turned twenty they would be part of the dark side of American folklore. And it would not be short-lived. Twenty-five years later their telephone numbers would still be unlisted. They were to learn something soon about one of life’s fundamental truths, as relentless as it is just: that the past is not neutral; it takes revenge.

  Now, as you watched him again, you had to wonder what it all meant for him, you would like to know how much of it he understood now that the legalities were done, now that he was free to do anything except what he really wanted to do. You imagined the inside of his head to be a kaleidoscope of gray-green colors, of pictures that fed one into the other, whipping like wind through the tunnels of memory. And you wondered where it might stop, which frame might be frozen in view even now, as the ball snapped into the pivot, into the hands held high above the head, the ball raised like a torch against the dusk.

  He stayed that way, motionless, for an instant, his back to the basket, the ball held high. Then he started to turn quickly to his right, his head and shoulders doing all of the work, and as quickly he was spinning the other way now, spinning left, the ball balanced lightly on the tips of his fingers, his arm stretching high toward the right side of the basket, and then the ball, in the air now, struck the crease between the rim and the backboard and bounced away, out of bounds.

  And then something happened. It happened so quickly that it all seemed at the time to blur into the bleakness of imagination. But it would be recalled later in the finest of detail, summoned forth as if it had all taken place in slow motion to be run at will in the instant replay of the mind.

  Two copper pennies were thrown out onto the court. They were tossed at the same time, in the same motion, and they hit one in back of the other with the abrupt report of two shots fired from a pistol. You heard them hit that way, and then you saw them roll briefly and fall, and then they were lying right beneath the basket, at the big man’s feet.

  The game stopped now, and everyone was looking in the direction of a boy of perhaps fifteen or sixteen. He was of medium build, and he was wearing a brown suede zipper jacket above faded blue jeans. He was smiling now, a tentative smile, as if to assure that no malice was intended, but he said nothing. He said nothing and you could hear the silence as the crew-cut jump shooter walked toward the youth. He was just a few steps away, and he walked up to him matter-of-factly and with his left hand he seized the kid by the front of the jacket, and without saying a word he eased him back in the direction of the wall.

  Then, with a quick short motion, he punched out with his right hand and landed hard and clean against the side of the youth’s face. You could hear the sound of the punch landing and then the kid’s head bouncing lightly against the black metal door, and nothing else. The kid did not even cry out. All you heard was a muffled groan, almost inaudible, the type that follows a blow to the body. But the punch had landed flush, and the kid, making hardly a sound, sagged to the single step at the base of the door. He said nothing, and for a moment you could hardly believe it had happened.

  But when the kid picked himself up you could see that his jaw was hanging loose. His jaw was dangling as if from a swivel, and on the left side of his face, where the blow had struck, there was a lump that jutted out and up in the direction of his ear. It was not the puffed-out swelling that comes with a bruise. It was, clearly, the sharp impression of a splintered bone pushing against the inside of his cheek.

  The jump shooter had turned away, even before the youth drew himself up, and he walked slowly back to the court. He stopped beneath the basket, at the in-bounds line, and he waited.

  “Your ball,” the big man said.

  Peter Goldman

  Peter Goldman (b. 1933) “may have done more to explain America to itself, week in and week out, than any other journalist of his generation.” Those words appeared in the final print issue of Newsweek to describe the man who spent forty-five of the magazine’s
eighty years contributing to its pages. Goldman wrote more than 120 cover stories on subjects ranging from civil rights to Vietnam to Watergate. After leaving the staff in 1988, he continued to contribute to the magazine for another two decades. “Knowing, insiderly, vaguely literary and yet unassuming” is how fellow Newsweek veteran Howard Fineman described Goldman’s voice. The image of “Goldie” pacing the halls on a Friday night, searching for a narrative thread in reports from correspondents in the field, struck another colleague as looking like “a one-man funeral cortege.” Yet by daybreak Goldman would rise from his Underwood, having pounded out the lead story for that week’s national affairs section. Thirty-five of his covers came on what was known as “the race beat,” as did his 1973 book The Death and Life of Malcolm X. “It occurred to me that the Harlem ­Globetrotters would be a good metaphor for race relations given their odd place in American lore,” said Goldman, who began shopping a book proposal with the working title The Last Minstrel Show. But no publisher offered the advance necessary to do the job. When word reached him in 1977 that one of dozens of ex-Globetrotters he had already interviewed, Leon Hillard, had been shot dead, Goldman dusted off his notes and produced this piece for Sport. It’s a profile of a man who was to the Trotters what Goldman was to Newsweek: largely anonymous, devoted to the institution, gaited for the long run.