For a decade, I’ve watched this trend and been increasingly bothered by it. In the 1990s, only two big men—Shaquille O’Neal and Tim Duncan—have come into pro basketball and made a real impact, but Shaq hasn’t developed into a complete player. In addition to that, he hasn’t shown much respect for the kind of basketball that was around long before he arrived on the scene. He’s publicly referred to the way I used to play as “old man’s basketball,” which it may have been, but it earned me six more rings than he’s got so far.
If the fundamentals were missing from the college or pro game, how could I possibly expect to find them here on the reservation? Trends filter down through the layers of a sport, and the kids out on the floor watched the same ESPN highlights of the three-point-shooting superstars that the rest of us did. What did surprise me about this first practice was not just the nonstop running or that the boys hadn’t mastered or even seemed aware of many aspects of the game. What struck me was that they played the game virtually without speaking to one another. Nobody talked to anybody about anything.
Earlier in the day, the junior varsity coach, Rich Sanchez, had told me, “At Alchesay, we play ninja basketball. It’s silent but deadly. The guys play very quietly and the ball should never touch the floor. Just pass it and run and pass it and run some more. All you should hear is the pitter-patter of tennis shoes as they move down the court together and then the sound of the ball laying off the glass as it goes through the net. Run and play defense and wear the other team down with our quickness and stamina. That’s our style.”
What I was seeing in front of me was silent all right, but it only looked deadly to their own team.
Communication with your teammates is critical during a game. When I was playing for UCLA Coach John Wooden—who won ten NCAA titles in his last twelve years on the job, a record that most likely will never be challenged—he drilled into us the need to talk to one another throughout the game. If our opponent committed a turnover and one of our players got the ball, he had to let the others know immediately so they could all react at once and switch from playing defense to offense as a group. To signal this switch, we yelled “Ball!” and then everyone knew what to do next. On defense, our players were taught to talk as much as possible, about whom we were guarding and what was happening with the ball. Talking like this was an essential part of the game where I grew up in New York City, and in most other places, and the best teams usually have the best communication skills.
The Apache kids were almost mute on the court. No joking, no ribbing, no verbal horsing around, no telling one another what had just occurred or what to expect next. They shunned talking when they were in motion.
Yet once again, when I took a few moments and thought about it, I realized there were historical reasons behind their actions, things rooted deeply in the story of their own survival for many centuries in a harsh landscape. In order to ambush people or escape from their enemies, in order to stalk food while hunting, their ancestors had mastered the art of silence. That had helped feed them and protect them from their mortal enemies.
Silence had worked well enough in those situations, but this was basketball, and they were hurting themselves (at times, literally) on the floor by not speaking up. Anyone who had ever played street basketball in a big city knew that talking and sometimes “trash talking” to your opponent were as much a part of the action as a good jump shot or a pair of tennis shoes. If your game was good enough, you could get away with saying just about anything.
That custom didn’t apply here. I hadn’t heard one negative word all practice—almost no words of any kind. During one of my earlier trips to the reservation, I’d been given a sheet of paper that spells out the dos and don’ts of Apache culture. It’s shown to the tribe’s youngsters as behavioral guidelines and sometimes passed out to non-Apache visitors who travel to Whiteriver and drop by the White Mountain Apache headquarters. Under the title of “Etiquette of Apache Dos,” these things were listed: “Rise early with the sun and pray. Share. Be friendly and courteous. Respect people—the elderly, in-laws, ceremonies, Mother Nature, and the deceased. Tell stories during the winter. Keep home clean. Advise children about life. Learn about clans. Marry outside your clan. Forgive. Stay sober.”
Under the title of “Etiquette of Apache Don’ts,” it mentioned some things that may have explained the boys’ reluctance to talk to one another or bang each other with their bodies on the court. It said not to: “Stare. Point. Whistle at night. Gossip. Be destructive. Misuse words when angry. Waste food. Panic. Make fun of people. Make fun of deer. Push another person. Spit on people. Bump people on purpose. Step over people. Marry into the same clan. Act smart and snobbish. Use makeup [facial]. Chew on fingernails. Get drunk. Lie. Steal. Touch physically unnecessarily. Plan ahead. Make fun of traditions. Pull another person’s hair. Be jealous. Kick. Count the stars. Make faces. Be lazy. Bother with things you don’t know about, especially Crown Dancers.”
And finally it said: “Apache females do NOT participate in sweat hut ceremonies.”
I watched the practice, gradually absorbing what I was seeing. It looked like a free-for-all instead of a drill, but I didn’t point this out to others or say anything else. It was my first day on the job and I didn’t even have a whistle around my neck, because I had forgotten to take care of this detail. I didn’t feel in charge without one, but tomorrow that would change, because I would bring a whistle with me.
John Edgar Wideman
There’s almost no genre that MacArthur Fellowship recipient John Edgar Wideman (b. 1941) has failed to explore: novel, short story, microfiction, poetry, review, magazine profile, historical narrative. His 2001 memoir, Hoop Roots, is where he undertakes his deepest and most resonant drilling down into the sport that has been a lifelong passion. A professor emeritus of Africana Studies and Literary Arts at Brown, Wideman was an All-Ivy forward at the University of Pennsylvania during the early 1960s and played with Bill Bradley when both studied at Oxford as Rhodes Scholars. His daughter Jamila exceeded his distinction as a basketball player, starring at Stanford and spending four seasons in the WNBA. In this excerpt from Hoop Roots, a pulsating, adapted-for-basketball prose style hurtles his sentences forward. Wideman often dispenses with the verb to be and delivers interrogatories as declaratives, sending words zigging and zagging like ballplayers inside a chain-link fence. He takes us to Pittsburgh’s East End, to a funeral home in the Homewood neighborhood where he grew up, for the wake of a nephew who has been the victim of a gang killing. There he runs into Ed Fleming, a 6′3″ former NBA center who has tested two generations of Wideman men on the local courts. The encounter prompts a meditation on several of the author’s touchstone themes—race, inheritance, manhood, history—as well as on the game that, as Wideman has said, “can give us a kind of mystical awareness.”
from
Hoop Roots
ED FLEMING whom I’d seen last . . . when . . . where . . . now here in Warden’s in his charcoal gray, fashionable, gangster-shouldered suit in the midst of a crowd of mourners congregated just inside the entrance of Parlor A.
After we’d talked a minute or so and he had to go back inside and I needed to return to Omar, he said, Uh-huh. My mom lived on Finance. For a good long while before she passed. Heard her speak highly of Mrs. French. And Mrs. French your grandmother, huh. Hmmm. I never knew that. Heard my mother praise Mrs. French many times. Good to see you, man. You take care of yourself now, John. Don’t be a stranger. Holler next time you’re in town.
John. I don’t believe I’d ever heard Ed Fleming say my first name. A baptism of sorts, in Warden’s of all places. He’d always called me Wideman on the court. The surname detached, objectified, like when it’s entered in a scorebook. Wideman. A clean slate for each new game. Every game you’re obligated, challenged to fill the line of empty slots following your name with field goals attempted and made, foul shots hit or missed, personal fouls, rebounds, steals, turnovers, assists, blocked shots. Who Wideman i
s is drastically simplified. You are the numbers, period. Nothing else matters—where you came from, who your daddy or grandmammy might be—you’re just a player. Wideman. The numbers—over the course of a game, over the course of a season, a career—accumulate or not, may resonate or not when another player says your name, an announcer or fan says your name. You get used to people observing the last-name-only convention until Wideman’s a tag that doesn’t exactly belong to you anymore. Wideman only signifies the numbers racked up, then wiped clean so your name’s a question mark each time a game begins. And unfair though it may be, the sole numbers really mattering always the ones in progress—when they’re skimpy, they peg you as a chump, forget how you kicked ass the game before or the last dozen games.
On the playground no uniforms and numbers identify you. A single name’s enough on Homewood court, and if it’s your surname, Wideman, it’s said with a little intentional chill of depersonalization, the way a referee calls you by your uniform number, foul on Ten in high school or college games. Strictly business on the playground too, when somebody chooses you in the meat-market picking of teams for the first serious run of the day. Alternating choices till a limit of ten spots filled, the two guys choosing—they earn the privilege by being the first two to hit a foul shot—call you by your last name or maybe a nickname: Got Smith—Gimme Pooky—Got Jones—Take Sky. You can go years, a lifetime, playing alongside guys and know them only by their court handles. Read something in a newspaper about one of your basketball buddies and never know it’s him. Snobs, inside the disguise of a whole, proper name. You’ll have to hear the good news or bad news over again on the sidelines from somebody who tells the story with the court name in place. D’you hear about Snobs, man.
Ed Fleming had always called me Wideman in my coming-up days. For him to acknowledge a life for me off the court would have been highly improbable back then. Why would he care who I was. Or who I thought I was. He was a legend. He ruled. He was a grown man, born into a different age set, with different running buddies who’d come up hooping together, getting in and out of trouble together, and obviously no outsider could enter that cohort, just like nobody could leave it. Because I was precocious on the court, my age-group friends seldom accompanied me when I played ball. In some ways it meant I stuck out like a sore thumb. I didn’t mind being a special case, didn’t like the loneliness. No crew to hang with on walks to the court or back home again. No chance to replay games in our words, from our rookies’ perspective. No opportunity to boast or tease each other or badmouth some old head turkey who thought he was god’s gift. Over time I’d discover half the fun of playground ball resided in these rituals that extended the game, the imagined recreations like a good preacher retelling Adam and Eve, jazzing up his version with parables and homilies and metaphor not only to stitch together a way to live in the world but exemplify a style of doing it with his words. No crew meant I had no one to watch my back unless an older player chose to look out for me. Literally a look. One look all it took to dissuade a bully from coming down too hard on the youngblood. Rules, consequences communicated in a single glance from one of the enforcers like Ed Fleming nobody’s hardly going to the mat to challenge.
To some of his peers he was Ed or Fleming. Always Ed Fleming in my mind. Both names necessary, three inseparable syllables, more incantation or open-sesame mantra than a name. A mini-sound bite like those heroic epithets identifying characters—Ox-eyed Hera, Swift-heeled Achilles—whose adventures I followed in the Golden Book of Greek Myth or in Classics Illustrated comic versions of the Iliad and Odyssey. See the guy down low, backing into the key, pat, pat, pat, demanding inch by inch the space he needs. That’s not just any old Ed or Fleming. He’s the Ed Fleming. Implacable. Irresistible. Each dribble a hammerstroke staking out his claim. Pat. Pat. Both names, all three syllables spoken internally, honored, even when I don’t say them aloud. Even now, forty years later in Warden’s, when I call him Ed, the single, naked sound coming out of my mouth almost as surprising for me to hear as hearing John pass through Ed Fleming’s lips.
To my father, Edgar, he would have been Fleming, one of a vintage crop of good young players rising up behind him. Fleming, Stokes, and their teammates, winners at Homewood’s Westinghouse High of the state title, kids good enough to groom and be wary of simultaneously, especially the Fleming boy since one day soon he might also encroach upon Eddie, my father’s court name. My father, Edgar Wideman, would have taken a prodigy like Ed Fleming under his wing, tested him, whipped on him unmercifully, protected him with hard stares if anybody got too close to actually damaging the precious talent, the fragile ego and vulnerable physique of a large, scrappy, tough kid just about but not quite ready to handle the weight and anger of adult males who used the court to certify their deepest resources of skill, determination, heart, resources they could publicly exhibit and hone few other places in a Jim Crow society. Homewood court a threshing ground, and the weak better not stray too close to the blades. The men could find release for some of the best things in themselves, and of course that included dangerous stuff too. Play not exactly play. No-no-no. Winning and losing cut deep. Very, very deep. Yet ability, a refined repertoire of hoop skill enabling you to win more often than lose, not the thing that gave you a passing or failing grade on the court. The real examination results, the score that counts so much it keeps the play, for all its ferocity, about more than winning or losing, registers inside each player. When you step on or off the court, how do other players look at you and you at them. What name do they call you by, how is the saying of your name inflected. Among the infinitely nuanced possibilities a particular pronunciation might suggest, which one is communicated to you, to others when you’re greeted, when you are picked for a squad, when players talk about you and you’re not around, when they are not around and you talk to yourself about the court, about the game, replaying the action in your mind on that private, private screen at home, at night, in bed, recalling a whole hot afternoon and you have to fill in the slots, the blanks, where your name goes into the imagining. What is it, how is it said.
To Ed Fleming, Wideman would be the respected name of one of the old heads who broke him in and also the name of a kid coming up behind him. Wideman père. Wideman fils. Did he ever have trouble distinguishing us, keeping us straight. Did he concern himself with policing such a fine line. Something he once said to me indicated he didn’t always differentiate. In Great Time what goes round comes round. After hip-checking me blam into the fence just behind the poles and backboard when we were both after a loose ball, or maybe it was when he lifted me off my feet and tossed me a yard or so from the sweet spot I thought l was strong enough to deny him, bodying him away from it for a couple of seconds till he decided to show me that day what he could bring to bear if he really needed a spot as much as I needed him out of it, Ed Fleming whispered words to this effect: Your daddy was extra rough on me, and boy, I’m sure gonna return the favor. Gonna give you a hard row to hoe, son, and don’t start crybabying or calling fouls neither, not today, youngblood. If you can’t stand the heat, get out the kitchen.
So Ed Fleming’s hoop war with my father not over in one generation. He revisited it through me. Hard truths imprinted on Edgar Wideman’s will and flesh by some anonymous bunch of old guys hooping, then imprinted by my father on Ed Fleming, coming home to roost in my bruised feelings and meat, in the knobby-boned body I prayed daily would hurry up and get padded by muscle like Ed Fleming’s.
What my father had reaped and sown would sprout up again when the weather turned warm enough for outdoor runs to commence at Homewood court. The game, its lore and lessons. For instance, Never forget—not where you came from nor what’s coming up behind you, a lesson concretely applied when you’re dribbling the ball, leading a fast break attack on the opponent’s basket, when it’s a matter of peripheral vision, of the Janus look backward and forward so you’re aware of who’s in front of you and behind, also mapping 360 degrees all the other players’ positi
ons on the court, the kaleidoscoping shifts, the evolving opportunities and hazards your rush to the hoop engenders. More abstractly applied, the lesson reminds you to take seriously your place in time, in tradition, within the community of players. Ed Fleming and the other vets teaching me to take my time, no matter the speed I’m traveling. Teaching me to be, not to underreach or overreach myself. Either way you cheated the game, cheated your name, the name in progress, the unfolding narrative, told and retold, backward, forward, sideways, inside out, of who you would turn out to be as you played.
I learned, among other things, to recognize and be grateful for a helping hand, learned it might not be exactly the kind of hand I thought I wanted, maybe it would be a rough hand, a bitter pill, but I was learning to appreciate different hands on their different terms. Above all learning not to be so intent on moving forward I turned my back on the ones behind who might need my hand or have one to offer.
Learned about time as I was learning the game. Because the game is time. Not time out from the real business of life. Not simply play time. Time. Like good gospel music, the game brings time, tells time, announces the good news that there is Great Time beyond clock time and this superabundance, this sphere where you can be larger than you are, belongs to nobody. It’s too vast. Everlasting. Elsewhere. Yet you can go there. It’s in your hands. White people nor nobody else owns it. It’s waiting for you to claim it. The game conjures Great Time, gives it and takes it away. Clock time, linear time irrelevant while the game’s on—two teams might battle fifteen minutes to complete a run or twice as long or till dark hides the court forever if neither side pushes ahead by two baskets in a deuce (win by two) contest. The game trumps time, supersedes it. Good hoop, like good rhythm-and-blues music, alerts you to what’s always there, abiding, presiding, master of ceremonies ready to empower your spirit and body, the beat lurking, dancing in all things whether you’re conscious of its presence or not. Great Time your chance to be. To get down. Out. To do it right. Right on time. The game, again like gospel music, propagates rhythm, a flow and go, a back beat you can tune into so time’s lonely, featureless stretch feels as charged, as sensuous, as accessible a medium as wind or water. You don’t really own game time, but the fit feels so close to perfect you can’t help believing on occasion it belongs to you.
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