Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  I was in love all the way through high school with Sue. She had a clean, petite beauty. She had a lilting laugh. She had large green eyes and soft, light-brown hair. She had breathtakingly shapely legs. She also had very quick feet and hands that could slap at a basketball like a rattler’s tongue. She was an all-conference guard. When she graduated, she was given a trophy as Prairie City High School’s best female athlete.

  On the eve of a game, we would drive from school to her home in my 1951 semi-automatic Dodge. We would park in front and look out into the early-falling dark toward her unlit house. Sue’s mother, a widow, had a job in Des Moines and did not get home until an hour or so after school was dismissed.

  “Can I come in?”

  “Not tonight,” Sue would say, smiling. “Coach says we should rest. If we win tomorrow night, we’ll be tied with Pleasantville.”

  “Just to talk?”

  “We’re talking right here.” Not only her feet were quick.

  “What do you want to do this weekend?”

  “Depends. If we lose, Coach says we might have Saturday practice.”

  “Who you guarding tomorrow night?”

  “Sandy Sampson. She’s good. Has a good jump shot from the side of the lane. But she can’t drive to her left. I’ll overplay her, force her to the left, and it should be all right. Of course, if she’s hot from out. . . .”

  As she talked, I would gradually incline my head toward hers.

  “. . . it won’t be as effective, and I’ll have to try to keep a hand—what are you doing?” And she would execute as neat a head fake as Pete Maravich.

  No one cheered louder than I did during the girls’ games, not only for the good of the school but also for the hope that Sue would have Saturday night off and could journey 25 miles to the blinking neon of Des Moines. Streetlights, movies, pizza afterward. “None for me. Coach says it slows you half a step.” I cheered as well for Sue’s mood that followed a win, because she was not an athlete who left her game in the dressing room.

  It mattered little to me who won the boys’ game. We were at best a .500 team and another loss could not set back nonexistent title chances. And, as a substitute who had been given a place on the team mostly for the sake of symmetry, I became insulated from events on the floor. So after an evening’s exercise that consisted of warming up twice and, if the outcome of the game was settled early, playing the final 27 seconds, I left the dressing room showered and eager for companionship.

  Sue’s play, however, always had an important influence on the outcome, and she was in the lineup—working, stealing, fighting through picks—every second. If Prairie City lost, she was disconsolate and exhausted. If the team won, she was thrilled and exhausted. Neither condition allowed me much companionship, except to help her ease her spent body onto her living-room couch.

  One night we sat on the couch in her darkened living room, close but not touching. There was a gap between us, one as narrow and nearly as inviolate as the center line in the game she had just played. Outside, students’ cars were ritualistically roaming the streets after the game, their glass-packed exhausts deafeningly resonant. Her gloom was on every surface like a dull wax.

  “It’s O.K. It’s O.K.,” I said. “You played great. It wasn’t your. . . .”

  “I played lousy. Sampson got 38 points. She drove on me like I was nailed to the floor.”

  “You couldn’t hold her by yourself. You forced her to the left. You should have gotten some help from Ramona on that side.”

  “Coach told Ramona to stay put in the middle. Coach figured if we could keep Sampson going left, I would be able to handle her one-on-one.”

  Minutes passed. Outside, the engines throbbed at full volume. Finally, hoping against hope that the fog of her mood had lifted, I turned to her and whispered, “Whatcha thinking?”

  “Oh, if I’d played up on her, nose to nose, hassled her as soon as she got the ball, then she wouldn’t have had time to set up. She might have forced a shot.”

  There were lessons to be learned from those nights on the sagging maroon couch trying to console an all-conference guard who believed her play alone had led to a loss. Among the lessons were some first tentative feelings for the full equality of the sexes, for responsibilities. Free of any blame for the boys’ team’s performance, I said whatever comforting words there were to say and, mostly, listened. At the same time, I suppressed a deep wish to be able to trade the reserve’s sweat-free innocence for the exhausted burden of Sue’s talent. How great it would be to be so good that a bad night was the reason one’s team had lost.

  In the past dozen years, Prairie City has grown to a population of 1,200, an increase of 25%. New homes dot the streets, mixed in among the old ones like young buds. There is new construction everywhere, notably the new school building and its gymnasium.

  The team’s most recent star was a senior forward, Virginia McFadden, and her play was favorably compared by the men gathered in Harold (Hoop) Timmons’ office beneath the co-op grain silos with Janet Wilson’s, with Judy Kutchin’s, even, hyperbolically, with Mona Van Steenbergen’s. Mona was the leader of the 1948 state tournament team and is a member of the Iowa Girls’ High School Basketball Hall of Fame. Virginia was shorter, smaller, one heard, but quick and tough and a shooter pure as back-porch butter.

  “I’d say she’s got it over Mona,” said a farmer seated near a whining space heater. He placed both hands inside the bib of his overalls and his arms flapped for emphasis like a dwarf’s.

  Hoop thought about it. “I ain’t so sure,” he said. “The game’s a whole lot faster now, so you think of Mona being slow, but she could move. Those long legs of hers.”

  “Smooth,” said another farmer. “Smooth is what Mona was.”

  “This girl scores more points,” said the first farmer.

  Hoop, an air of verdict about him, said, “You could argue it till you’re silly as a pet coon.” He looked up and saw a tractor hauling grain heading for his silos. “You gentlemen are free to stay,” he said, looking as he spoke for the Folger’s coffee can, bottom-lined with kernels, on the floor near the heater. His spittoon. He found it and wet the kernels with a stream of Red Man. “I got to go to work.”

  Outside, Hoop waited near the deep grate-covered hole into which the grain would be unloaded. The tractor came up to him and moved past, big as a house, pulling two wagons with mountains of grain sloping above their tops. The tractor roared and then abruptly quieted as it negotiated the narrow space between the silos. Idling, it came to a stop precisely above the hole. Most farmers bringing their grain in brake too abruptly, setting their wagons into clangorous jerking, but this movement was clean, light, agile. Hoop raised the wagon doors, let loose the hissing fall of grain and waved to the driver. A broad, comradely wave, appreciative of the skill that made his own work easy: over the hole, open it up, let it drop.

  From inside the tractor’s cab, the driver, Virginia’s mother, returned Hoop’s salutation. She had shown where Virginia got her touch. “Call it a gift, a feel, a fine tuning. . . . They have something in their fingers a boy doesn’t have.”

  Like all games, girls’ basketball has become swifter and surer with the years. But all that has fundamentally changed is the size of the schools playing the game. The larger Iowa cities, some with three and four high schools, now have teams, and there is fear that these schools, with more money, better facilities, a greater pool of players, will dominate the tiny farming towns. The New York Yankee syndrome. In the face of that fear, coaches in the small schools place their belief in the enduring will of the rural athlete. “It seems to me,” said the coach of a small Iowa school that almost always makes the tournament, “that a farm girl still knows how to hurt a little more.”

  At the north end of Colfax, near the junction of Highway 117 and Interstate 80, there is a diner popular with long-distance truckers and farmers. On a recent visit, I pulled in for Iowa eggs and bacon before going onto the interstate. As I walked inside I s
aw three women clustered around the cash register. They were huddled, as if planning some strategy. They wore the pink cotton uniforms of the diner. Sallow complexions, bags beneath their eyes. Lithe and poised for play. Flo, Martha Lynn and Irma.

  “Scramble two, whole wheat, extra sausage,” yelled the cook from her window at the back, placing a plate of food on a serving sill. The waitresses broke from their huddle. “Hot pork on white, mashed, extra gravy,” yelled the cook, placing another plate beside the first. Flo picked up the eggs and headed for her customer on the left side of the horseshoe-shaped counter. Martha Lynn, sweeping up the hot-pork plate, fell in a step behind her. Irma, with a coffee pot, worked the right side, moving down the counter of empty cups, dipping the pot as if she were watering a row of plants.

  “Hiya, Flo,” said a trucker, frisky with sleep or pills to fight it. “Howya doing?” He reached a hand for Flo’s hip as she swished past with the haste of a woman at work. Flo gave the trucker a quick move and left his hand pinching air. Martha Lynn, a step behind, knowing the move, did not break stride. “Watch the hand, honey,” she said to the trucker, “’less you want hot pork in your ear.” And she moved on swiftly with her plate, handing, as she walked, another customer’s check to Irma, who had finished her coffee refills and stood up front at the register, waiting for the pass.

  Girls win, boys lose. Girls win, boys lose.

  Bill Russell and Taylor Branch

  For its frankness, wide range, and philosophical flights, the autobiography of Bill Russell (b. 1934), Second Wind: The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man, reconfigured the bounds of the sports as-told-to upon its publication in 1979. In its pages, Russell tells again and again of being touched by the magical and mystical. In one episode, two-year-old Bill suffers from an ailment that doctors can’t diagnose, and is saved only after the Russells, acting on the results of a prayer session led by a nun in a Louisiana hospital, hold him upside down by his feet—whereupon a piece of cornbread is dislodged from his throat. In another scene, as a junior walking down a California high school hallway, Russell experiences a life-altering moment when he’s overcome by a signal serenity that he has integrity and worth, despite the norms of a mid-century America that seems determined not to see him and other African Americans as equals. In this excerpt, Russell shares one more juju-inflected confidence—a secret likely to astonish anyone who regards him as perhaps the most constitutional winner in the game’s history. Journalist and historian Taylor Branch (b. 1947) midwifed Second Wind from Russell; Branch would go on to become a Pulitzer Prize–winning chronicler of the civil rights movement with a trilogy of books, and eventually return to sports in 2011 to write a scathing and influential critique of the NCAA for The Atlantic.

  from

  Second Wind

  EVERY SO often a Celtic game would heat up so that it became more than a physical or even mental game, and would be magical. That feeling is difficult to describe, and I certainly never talked about it when I was playing. When it happened I could feel my play rise to a new level. It came rarely, and would last anywhere from five minutes to a whole quarter or more. Three or four plays were not enough to get it going. It would surround not only me and the other Celtics but also the players on the other team, and even the referees. To me, the key was that both teams had to be playing at their peaks, and they had to be competitive. The Celtics could not do it alone. I remember the fifth and final game of the 1965 championship series, when we opened the fourth quarter ahead of the Lakers by sixteen points, playing beautifully together, and then we simply took off into unknown peaks and ran off twenty straight points to go up by thirty-six points, an astounding margin for a championship series. We were on fire, intimidating, making shots, running the break, and the Lakers just couldn’t score. As much as I wanted to win that championship, I remember being disappointed that the Lakers were not playing better. We were playing well enough to attain that special level, but we couldn’t do it without them.

  That mystical feeling usually came with the better teams in the league that were challenging us for the championship. Over the years that the Celtics were consistently good, our rivals would change, as teams would come up to challenge and then fall off again. First it was the Hawks, then the Lakers, Royals, Warriors, 76ers and then the Lakers again, with the Knicks beginning to move. They were the teams good enough to reach that level with us some nights. It never started with a hot streak by a single player, or with a breakdown of one team’s defense. It usually began when three or four of the ten guys on the floor would heat up; they would be the catalysts, and they were almost always the stars in the league. If we were playing the Lakers, for example, West and Baylor and Cousy or Sam and I would be enough. The feeling would spread to the other guys, and we’d all levitate. Then the game would just take off, and there’d be a natural ebb and flow that reminded you of how rhythmic and musical basketball is supposed to be. I’d find myself thinking, “This is it. I want this to keep going,” and I’d actually be rooting for the other team. When their players made spectacular moves, I wanted their shots to go into the bucket; that’s how pumped up I’d be. I’d be out there talking to the other Celtics, encouraging them and pushing myself harder, but at the same time part of me would be pulling for the other players too.

  At that special level all sorts of odd things happened. The game would be in a white heat of competition, and yet somehow I wouldn’t feel competitive—which is a miracle in itself. I’d be putting out the maximum effort, straining, coughing up parts of my lungs as we ran, and yet I never felt the pain. The game would move so quickly that every fake, cut and pass would be surprising, and yet nothing could surprise me. It was almost as if we were playing in slow motion. During those spells I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. Even before the other team brought the ball in bounds, I could feel it so keenly that I’d want to shout to my teammates, “It’s coming there!”—except that I knew everything would change if I did. My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt then that I not only knew all the Celtics by heart but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me. There have been many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine.

  But these spells were fragile. An injury would break them, and so would a couple of bad plays or a bad call by a referee. Once a referee broke a run by making a bad call in my favor, which so irritated me that I protested it as I stood at the foul line to take my free throws. “You know that was a bad call, ref,” I said wearily. He looked at me as if I was crazy, and then got so angry that I never again protested a call unless it went against me. Still, I always suffered a letdown when one of those spells died, because I never knew how to bring them back; all I could do was to keep playing my best and hope. They were sweet when they came, and the hope that one would come was one of my strongest motivations for walking out there.

  Sometimes the feeling would last all the way to the end of the game, and when that happened I never cared who won. I can honestly say that those few times were the only ones when I did not care. I don’t mean that I was a good sport about it—that I’d played my best and had nothing to be ashamed of. On the five or ten occasions when the game ended at that special level, I literally did not care who had won. If we lost, I’d still be as free and high as a sky hawk. But I had to be quiet about it. At times I’d hint around to other players about this feeling, but I never talked about it much, least of all to the other Celtics. I felt a little weird about it, and quite private. Besides, I couldn’t let on to my teammates that it was ever all right to lose; I had too much influence on the team. We were the Celtics, and our reason for being was to win championships, so I had to keep those private feelings to myself. It’s good I did; if I’d tried to explain, I’d never have gotten past the first two sentences. Anything I confided would sound too awkward and sincere for Celtic tastes, and I could just hear Satch and Nelson. The
next time we lost an ordinary game they’d have been cackling, “That’s all right, Russ. It don’t matter that we lost, because we had that special feeling out there tonight. Yeah, it felt real special.”

  David Halberstam

  Seven of the twenty-one books that David Halberstam (1934–2007) wrote focused on sports, and he had begun work on an eighth, about the 1958 NFL Championship Game, when he was killed in a traffic accident at age seventy-three. He called sportswriters Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, and W. C. Heinz “the trinity of my early heroes,” for “they were changing the rules, not accepting the bland, rigid, constricting form of journalism.” And it was his admiration for a sports story—Gay Talese writing on Joe DiMaggio for Esquire—that moved him to leave daily newspapers for longer work, first at Harper’s and then between hard covers. Halberstam had written two panoramic doorstops about twentieth-century America, The Best and the Brightest and The Powers That Be, when he decided to turn to the peculiar mix of entertainment, business, race, and group dynamics that is the NBA. For The Breaks of the Game he followed the Portland Trail Blazers over the 1979–80 season, when elsewhere in the league Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were rookies and the NBA had reached an auspicious inflection point that wouldn’t be fully apparent for several years. The many rewards of that book include this set piece about Billy Ray Bates, the poor, black, Mississippi-born, minor-league call-up whose individualistic style ran up against Coach Jack Ramsay’s fetish for team play. The Blazers’ mercurial signee was a perfect subject for his chronicler, who broke into journalism in Mississippi with the West Point Daily Times Leader and covered civil rights for The Tennessean and The New York Times. Bates would go on to struggle with alcoholism and financial problems, and land in prison after a robbery gone bad. Just the same, Halberstam recalled, “I remember his sweetness. He had such a humanity to him.” In the context of Bates’s brief stretch of NBA glory, one of the giants of American journalism captures that quality, among others, for posterity.