Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  But there was no connection. The only reason he wanted to go out with me was that he could just imagine telling everybody how we met at a dog party. The story was all the cuter because I didn’t even have a dog. It was very That Girl.

  People don’t want to say they met in a bar or through the personal ads. There’s always got to be some damn cute story or you don’t have a chance.

  Peter was all over me because he met me the way he always envisioned meeting the woman: on the basketball court. That’s what he said, “I always wanted to meet a woman on the basketball court.” Me personally, I don’t really care how I meet someone, so long as one of us doesn’t bore the other half to death.

  HORNER PARK

  There’s this other guy that keeps asking me out too. He plays with our coed group on Wednesday nights. Lucky me, he prefers my butt to all the other Wednesday night butts. I should write him a thank you note, I guess. But I already heard him say he has a girlfriend, the dumbass. Oh, and guess what; the girlfriend lives in another city.

  The thing about men is, they’ll ruin every last thing you like if you let them.

  Peter and I went out for a week. We rode our bikes to the lake, played basketball, sat on park benches kissing. All very romantic.

  He was funny, although he wasn’t the kind of funny where he knew he was funny. The day we went riding I met him at his house, and he came out carrying a bottle of wine, some plastic cups, a corkscrew, and two sheets to sit on, all in a white plastic garbage bag. That kind of stuff can be kind of funny.

  When he kissed me he was always pulling the back of my hair. I have short hair, and I kept thinking he was wishing I had longer hair so he could really grab on and pull. I really wanted to say, Hey what the hellareya doin’, but I didn’t.

  One night he asked me to come to his house and watch a Bears game. I was a little late getting there, and when he answered his door he just looked at me kind of sternly and said, “You’re late.”

  I think he was drunk, and there were two joints sitting on the kitchen counter. He was talking a mile a minute. In fact, I was starting to notice, Peter was the sort of person who didn’t let you get a word in edgewise. And, if he didn’t think you were listening closely enough, he would move closer and talk louder.

  We sat down to watch the game, and he lit up one of the joints. I hate to admit it, but I smoked some. I used to smoke in college, but I don’t anymore. I used to get too paranoid. I’m kind of self-conscious already and pot just makes it worse.

  All of a sudden I couldn’t tell if Peter was really stupid or just pretended to be as a joke. And I hadn’t really noticed he was stupid before. I mean, he wasn’t by any means the smartest guy I had ever run into, but I just thought he was really physical, that he related to the world in a physical way. If I think a guy is kind of cute, and he entertains me at all, and if he seems to like me, I can kind of make excuses for him and overlook a lot of rude and just plain stupid behavior. A lot of women do that. Decent men without girlfriends must really get sickened by it.

  So I was sitting on this chair, really stoned, trying to sit up straight. Peter sat down beside me in the chair and put his arm around me, and he was kind of absentmindedly digging his fingers into my arm, hard. It seemed compulsive. It was like he couldn’t help himself, it felt so good to him. And then, and this is really embarrassing, Peter got up and started gyrating around like a Chippendale dancer, saying, “So, what should I do . . . do you want me to dance for you?” I just kept hoping he meant to be cheesy to make me laugh. But I didn’t laugh, because I was afraid he was serious. All I could think of to say was, “Man, I’m stoned.”

  All of a sudden, Peter picked me up and carried me over to an open window. I never like it when guys physically pick me up. I know it’s supposed to be all romantic, but I just think it’s embarrassing. It’s too dramatic unless they’re going to laugh and maybe act like you’re so heavy they’re gonna throw their back out or something.

  Then I started to worry that he was going to sort of chuck me out the window. I squirmed to get down without saying why, and then Peter said, “I wouldn’t throw you out the window.”

  That’s when I really got scared. Peter’s face looked really brutish to me, and when he moved anywhere near me it felt like he was trying to dominate me, not just get close. After I got out of his King Kong-like grasp, he tried to pick me up on his back, like we were going to play piggyback. And his movements were slow and, I don’t know, just slow, like a dumb animal’s. I got the distinct impression that he wanted to hurt me. That even if I said I would have sex with him he would still want to hurt me. I kept thinking about that postracquetball scene in Cape Fear, the new version, with Robert De Niro. If you saw the movie, you know what I’m talking about.

  Peter kept saying, “Why are you so afraid of me, try to have a little self-confidence, why don’tcha . . . I know I can make you feel good,” and other creepy stuff like that. I got the hell out of there. I was afraid to drive but I drove home anyway, thinking I was going to go mad the whole time if I had to drive that car one more inch.

  But like I said, I quit smoking pot because it makes me paranoid.

  WICKER PARK

  These three girls I had seen before came running over, saying, “There’s that girl again!”

  They looked like a female version of the Fat Albert gang. I asked them if they wanted to shoot around, and the youngest one, who wore about 25 colored barrettes in her hair and jeans about three sizes too big, took the ball.

  “I can’t do it,” she said every time she missed a shot.

  “Yes you can, you just need to practice some. Nobody makes it every time.”

  “Why aren’t you shootin’?” she asked me.

  “I’m all right, go ahead.”

  These girls, you had to draw them in. I’ve never seen any boy worry about if he was keeping you from playing.

  One girl wouldn’t play at all. We tried to play two-on-two, but she just wouldn’t play. She kept saying she didn’t know how, and she couldn’t make it, and all that stuff. The youngest one’s younger brother came up and tried to play. He was running all over the court, never dribbling, a big grin on his face, saying “almost” every time he shot the ball.

  The girls didn’t play long, but they didn’t leave, either. They hung around at the edge of the court, watching. You could see them kind of whispering together and looking at different boys.

  “Where’s you girls’ boyfriends?” I asked them, just to see what they’d say.

  “Twanisha got her a man,” the little one said.

  “Where’s Twanisha’s boyfriend?”

  “He over there with his boys.”

  “That why you won’t play basketball, Twanisha? What’s his name?”

  She shrugged her shoulders.

  They were doing it already, waiting around for something to happen. Damn, it made me sad. It reminded me of this story I saw on TV, on 20/20 maybe, about whether or not little girls could learn as well when they had boys in their class. They couldn’t, some researchers had decided, because the boys just got in there first, talking faster and talking louder. I wanted to shake Twanisha and say, “Listen here, young lady, you’re gonna spend your life falling for arrogant men and sitting around a dirty apartment waiting for them to call if you don’t start taking an interest in some things.”

  If I ever have a daughter, she’ll have to learn how not to be stupid about men. I don’t know how I’ll teach her, because I don’t entirely know myself. But somehow she’s got to know early on it’s OK to miss some shots on your own, that you can’t let other people always do your shooting for you.

  I started playing with some adults, so I told a bunch of adolescents who had walked up that they could play with my ball if they took care of it. They had a big game going before long.

  One of the guys on their court was mad because one of his peers had defected to play with us. Leon was on my team. He was two feet shorter than almost everyone else out there, b
ut he could play. He was smart and serious about it. This other kid was screaming at him: “Oh, yeah, I see how it is. You wanna play over there with them. Man, I hate people like you!” He was joined by a glaring fellow malcontent who ran up to us and said, “Can I play,” really sarcastic. Suddenly the tension was racial, because most of the adults were white.

  Once our ball flew over onto their court, and the loud kid shot it into their hoop like he thought it was the ball from their game, or I should say my ball. He looked over at us and went, “Oh, is that your ball?”

  Leon ignored them. He wouldn’t even look at them. We just kept playing. I kept looking over to make sure my ball was still there, and sure enough, the next time I looked up, all the kids and my ball were gone.

  So as our game was winding down I asked Leon, “Hey, do you know those kids that were over there?”

  “Which ones?”

  “Those ones that were playing with my ball over there.”

  “Your ball? What’s it look like?”

  “Orange. Rubber.”

  “Man, I think they took off with it,” Leon said, kind of laughing.

  At the tender age of 12, Leon knew he was glad he wasn’t a thief or an idiot.

  Lewis, another kid about Leon’s size who was playing with us, said, “There they are. Hey, Thomas, you got that girl’s ball!” There they were, standing about 100 yards away with my ball. I wondered if Leon had seen them.

  “Come on man, you got that girl’s ball! Bring it back! Bring it back now!”

  Thomas threw it across the playground at us, and we went back to our game.

  WICKER PARK

  Oh my God, David. That child is pure love. He comes to the park with his mom on Saturdays. She’s a good player; you can tell she was really good in high school. She coaches a bunch of girls in the gym at Wicker Park.

  I played with her in a pickup game once, and after it was over I shot around and David came over to talk to me.

  “Where’s your friend?” he asked me.

  “What friend?”

  “Your friend. She wears black shoes too.”

  David thought he remembered me from somewhere, I guess, so I told him I didn’t know who he meant, was he sure it was me he had seen before, and he said yes, he was sure.

  I asked him how old he was. He’s five.

  “I play with my mama.”

  “You do? Was she the one who was playing with me a little earlier? She’s pretty good.”

  She came over to shoot around with us.

  “She made me in her stomach,” David informed me. I said, Really, how ’bout that.

  He said something quietly to his mom. “Well, she’s pretty good too,” his mom said.

  A few months later I was playing a two-on-two game and saw David’s mom again. She told us to come inside the gym and play if we wanted. After the game, David came running over to me, shouting, “Hi Melissa!”

  I couldn’t remember his name. What an asshole I am, I thought as I talked to him, said it looked like his front teeth were growing in and asked what he had been doing. Then he ran around all over the gym with kids his age while his mom and I and a bunch of teens played a game.

  In the middle of the game David came over and said, “Maaama . . . maaama . . . maaaaaaama!” His mom, the point guard, picked up her dribble and said, “What!”

  David hesitated, caught off guard by her attention. “Do you want me?” he asked. He looked at his mom expectantly.

  “I want you,” she said, “but not right this minute.”

  Satisfied, David resumed running around, and we went on with our game.

  Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  In his 1983 profile of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (b. 1947) included in this volume, David Bradley notes that, even as the longtime Los Angeles Lakers captain became the most prolific scorer in NBA history, “he was looking beyond to what he could do when he finished.” Soon after his retirement in 1989 we learned what that would be. Following years of resentment that the public saw him only as a one-dimensional athlete, Abdul-Jabbar reinvented himself—or more accurately, revealed himself—as a cultural omnivore and man of letters. He built a body of work that would be impressive for someone who had started in his twenties, much less his forties: more than a half-dozen books, including works of memoir, history, detective fiction, and juvenile literature; magazine pieces for outlets running the gamut from Jacobin to Time to Rotarian; online commentaries on the news; two autobiographical documentaries, including HBO’s Kareem: A Minority of One; and numerous television and radio appearances, where he weighed in on issues of the day. In fact, as a teenager, when he was known as Lew Alcindor, he had served on his high school debate team and, through a summer program for Harlem youth, had worked as an apprentice journalist, reporting on the 1964 riots and interviewing Martin Luther King. In 1998, eager to prove his desire to hook on as an assistant coach with some NBA team, he moved to Arizona to volunteer with the Alchesay High School Falcons on the White Mountain Apache Reservation. But that longing to return to a professional bench turned out to be at odds with his nature. The lasting result of Abdul-Jabbar’s desert sojourn is A Season on the Reservation (2000), the diary from which this selection comes. An account of the team’s first practice, it hints at the rocky patches he will navigate in his role as visiting coach. It edges into history, anthropology, and culture, subjects that will mark much of his writing to come. And it offers a taste of Kareem the public intellectual, the elevated mind that fans had little interest in learning about until he had hung up his goggles for good.

  from

  A Season on the Reservation

  AS I kept watching the three-on-three drill, I realized that there were obvious reasons why the boys liked to run so much on the court. For one thing, they were going to be shorter than most of the opponents they played who were not Native American. (One of their most bitter rivals, as I would soon find out, was San Carlos, which was to the south of Whiteriver; it had its own Apache squad on the San Carlos Reservation, and in the half-serious parlance of the sports world, these two teams didn’t like each other.) Because the Falcons were smaller than other squads, they tried to wear down their opponents with this running style of basketball and win late in the game. They were playing at 5,300 feet above sea level, and if they could sprint like this throughout all four quarters, the other guys would probably collapse.

  The Falcons were carrying on a long tradition of running from things that were chasing them or standing in their way. There were legendary stories from the Apache past of their warriors being pursued by enemies and simply riding their horses to death. There were stories of the warriors crossing sixty miles a day on foot over rough terrain and high-country mesas while the U.S. Cavalry aggressively pursued them on horseback, but still weren’t able to catch up. There were stories of the Apache covering a hundred miles a day when they had to. A book written about the Apache exploits during the nineteenth-century Indian wars was called Once They Moved Like the Wind. Standing in the activity center, watching the boys run up and down the court that first afternoon, I knew that I really hadn’t understood that title until now.

  The players made a lot of mistakes on the floor. They didn’t dribble well, especially with their weak hands (for the right-handed player that’s the left hand, and vice versa). Their passes were often amiss. They didn’t know how to position themselves under the basket for a rebound or how to use their hips, legs, shoulders, backs, or buttocks to keep other players away from the goal. They didn’t shoot layups well with either their weak or strong hands. They tried to grab rebounds with one hand instead of two. (You can reach higher with one hand but have much more control over the ball when you use both.) They weren’t physical with one another when playing defense and seemed reluctant to put their hands or arms on their opponents. They shot the ball off the palms of their hands rather than their fingertips. They didn’t give the ball the spin needed to keep it on course.

  None of this surprised me. Basketball’s fu
ndamentals are no longer being taught the way they used to be—at any level of the game. This is why today you see even pro players who can’t do some of the basic things mentioned above. I stayed in college for four years and had the fundamentals of the sport driven into me at every practice. Coach Wooden made every player on the team do every single thing involved in the game. He correctly believed that basketball is such a fluid sport that a player could never know when he would be called upon to dribble or shoot or pass or rebound or play defense or do any of a hundred other things, so he always had to be prepared, no matter what happened next.

  Those days are past. College stars are not only failing to learn all the fundamentals of the game, as players my age once did, but they are leaving their schools after one or two years to turn professional; the money offered them now is simply too great to refuse. If you can get a $50 million guaranteed contract for having half a game, how can anyone turn that down? What’s the incentive to keep expanding your skills? What’s the monetary payoff for achieving more success?

  Competition in the NBA has suffered throughout the past decade, with virtually no one able even to challenge the supremacy of the Chicago Bulls. Very few impact players, who can carry their team through the playoffs and toward a championship, have entered the league in the Nineties. The young guys just aren’t getting the seasoning and apprenticeship they need at the university level before climbing up the higher rungs of the sport. Ironically, the country is now full of basketball clinics put on by renowned coaches, clinics that hardly existed when I was starting my career. But these events are mostly just celebrity get-togethers, where you pay your money and can shake a star’s hand, but avoid the real task of learning how to play the game.

  Big men have suffered the most from all this. The college game is no longer dominated by centers, the way it was for much of basketball’s history, and the pro game is now largely a perimeter-shooting contest. Kids love to watch pro stars toss up long-range, three-point jump shots or throw down spectacular, rim-shaking dunks, and that’s what they now aspire to imitate. But how many Michael Jordans are there out there? The hard and sometimes dirty work of taking the ball inside and putting up a high-percentage shot near the basket is still the most efficient way of scoring, but it’s becoming a lost art.