Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  Auburn played a fast-paced game but Bobby Buisson controlled the tempo and action of everything the War Eagles did. His bursts toward the basket were rabbit-swift and I started to give him some room. In the first five minutes, Bobby had proven that he could drive the lane better than I could, an accolade I did not hand out often, and always grudgingly. So I played off of him, giving him some daylight to maneuver, and hoping he would take the opportunity for jump shots. He radiated with all the dangers of the penetrator, the kind that loves to kill defenses by attacking the dead center of their engines.

  “Get in his face, Conroy!” Coach Thompson yelled over the noise of the crowd, but I had all I could handle with this kid. I was a Southern Conference guard trying to hold my own with a Southeastern Conference guard, and the difference was glaringly apparent. Bobby took in the whole floor in a glance, and he got the ball to the player who was open with crisp, split-second passes that landed in his teammates’ hands soft as biscuits, and at that exact moment they were ready to shoot.

  Bill Zinsky scored his first college goal on a short jumper he took after grabbing a long rebound. Thirty seconds later Bridges hit a long jump shot, pulling up while trailing on a fast break, his body already glistening with sweat from the frantic pace.

  “Slow it down,” Mel Thompson commanded. As he shouted this, Bobby Buisson swarmed all over me, his arms snake-striking all around me, trying to flick the ball away, but Bobby was operating too close, and I passed him in a flash. We raced for the basket, he closing the gap slowly with every step we took, as Auburn’s center, Quick, slipped off of Danny Mohr to intercept my drive. I do not remember if Bobby fouled me or Quick or if it was Tom Perry, but whoever fouled me did it hard and made sure I did not score on the play.

  I stood on the free throw line, made a sign of the cross because it irritated the Protestant boys I played against, and threw up my underhanded free throw and scored my first point of the season. When I made the next free throw, the buzzer sounded and Tee Hooper came in to replace me at guard. My role as The Citadel’s starting point guard had lasted five full minutes, and we were tied 10–10 with Auburn University. The Green Weenies all stood and cheered as I took my place at the end of the bench, trying to hide my shame over having been pulled from the game so early. “I told you not to shoot, Conroy,” Coach Thompson said.

  I simply did not think I could endure one more season of riding the bench and watching a game that I loved more than anything in the world pass me by. My mediocrity at the game of basketball festered in me, tumored my normally buoyant spirit, tortured me into a kind of resigned submission as I considered the humiliation of spending my last season as a reserve guard. But I was not the kind of boy who would allow himself to fret or mope—that had not been my training. My teammates required my loyalty and enthusiastic championing of their play. And for the night of December 2, 1966, I was their captain, their leader on and off the floor, and I knew the power and necessity of being a team player.

  So I fought the colossal disappointment of being replaced by a far more talented sophomore and got on with the business of cheering the Blue Team to victory. As Green Weenies, we never got to play much because in Mel Thompson’s theories of coaching, you put your best athletes on the floor and let them win your basketball games with their superior skills. My coach did not believe in resting his best players because he never once asked to rest in his career as a center for North Carolina State. Fatigue was a form of moral cowardice to Mel, and all of his players understood that.

  When Tee took my place, Bobby Buisson started to guard John DeBrosse, and the taller of the Auburn guards, Alex Howell, took on the rangy Hooper. Only when I returned to the bench did I realize how small Auburn’s forwards were.

  “Hell, we’re bigger than those guys,” I said.

  “You ain’t bigger than anybody, duck butt,” Bob Cauthen said.

  With six minutes left in the half, Danny Mohr, who was in the middle of playing a terrific game, hit three straight turnaround jump shots to pull The Citadel within three points. Taking a pass from Bridges, Tee left his man in the dust and flew through the entire Auburn team to make a beautiful, twisting layup against the glass. His layup narrowed Auburn’s lead to one. Then Auburn got serious, and Bobby Buisson spent the rest of the night teaching me the great secrets of playing point guard. Watching him was like seeing Manolete demonstrate the proper use of the muleta to a Spanish boy maddened by the desire to face the great bulls in his own “suit of lights.” In Bobby Buisson, I had found what I had been looking for my whole life.

  In the realms of college basketball, the entire concept of the point guard was a new and developing one. I had heard the phrase used in my first summer at Camp Wahoo, but the necessity of having a guard who directed the offense and distributed the ball to the big men and the shooting guard (also a new concept) was gradually spreading around the theorists and innovators who created new wrinkles in offensive patterns and strategies. I could see that the five men on my team now on the court were, by far, the five best athletes The Citadel could field on any given night. Mohr, at center; Bridges and Zinsky at forward; DeBrosse and Hooper at guard—any one of these men was fully capable of scoring twenty points in any given game. Though it would take me four or five games to realize this, my team had one great, transparent flaw in its makeup: it lacked a point guard, a Bobby Buisson. Though John DeBrosse looked like a point guard, he was deficient when it came to possessing the proper temperament of the position. John was a shooter, pure and simple.

  All five players on the court for my team were either scorers or shooters. There was not a passer among them. Bobby Buisson would begin to cut our hearts out in the second half. His utter joy in getting the ball to his hustling teammates was a besotted, almost maniacal thing. He was guarding DeBrosse so closely that Johnny was having difficulty establishing his game. Buisson was quicker, faster, and stronger than either me or DeBrosse—Auburn led by seven at the half, 50–43.

  In the second half, with me and the rest of the Green Weenies in agonized witness, my Citadel team fell apart. The unraveling began with the opening tip-off. Our defense, never strong, simply collapsed under the full fury of the Auburn fast break. Auburn seemed to score on every possession. My team looked exhausted, spent, and beaten down by forces they did not seem to understand. After ten minutes, Auburn led 81–59. What had been a close and fiercely fought game turned quickly into a rout. It got so bad that Coach Thompson put me back in. Playing a desperate catch-up game, I drove the lane and scored my first 2-pointer of the season. Immediately Tee Hooper came back into the game.

  “I told you not to shoot, Conroy,” Mel Thompson shouted as I headed for the bench.

  “Sorry, Coach,” I said, noting that I had made the shot in question.

  “That’s your problem, Conroy,” he said. “You’re always sorry.”

  My team did not congeal as a team for the rest of the evening. Each time one of us made a move with the ball, it seemed individual, selfish, and unrelated to the other four players on the court, while Auburn was assassin-like in its delicious execution of its offense. They were a much better basketball team and much better coached, playing with brio, freshness, and unquenchable zeal.

  I studied Buisson, dissecting his game and trying to steal as much as I could from him and graft his talents onto my own. First, I saw how much Buisson wanted to be there for his teammates, the joyfulness he took in delivering a pass to an open player and the gratitude they felt toward him for his childlike magnanimity. I basked in the bracing aura of his indomitable confidence. He flashed like a buccaneer across both ends of the court, brash, swashbuckling, all the elixirs of being fully alive and in control sparking off him as his team finished the joy of taking my team to the cleaners. The final score was an unbelievable 105–83.

  But ah! There were bright spots for the Bulldogs. As the News and Courier sports editor Evan Bussey would write the next morning, “Danny Mohr, The Citadel pivot man, again proved to be old Mr. Depend
able in the scoring column. The 6-6 senior scored 20 points and at one stretch in the first half was about the only one holding the Citadel Bulldogs in the game. Sophomore Bill Zinsky got 16 points in his first varsity game and proved to be the best the Cadets had on the boards. He had nine rebounds.

  “Doug Bridges had 15 points, DeBrosse 8, and Tee Hooper in a most impressive debut had 11.”

  I followed the rest of Bobby Buisson’s career closely. He proved to be as good as I thought. His nickname was “Bweets,” and Adolph Rupp was quoted as saying that Buisson was “one of the finest defensive players we’ve ever seen.”

  I agree.

  Bobby Buisson. Wherever you are. I was an eyewitness to your mastery, the tender wizardry you brought to my home gym. I dedicated the rest of my year remaking myself in your image. It was an honor to take the court against you. I was no match for you and for that I apologize. But I took some things from your game that would hold me in good stead.

  After showering, I walked in darkness behind the barracks on Plebe Walk, trying to control my shame. A second-stringer and a senior, I said, torturing myself. My season was already slipping away, and it had just started. In agony I made my way across the length of the campus alone, doomed to be a spectator while my life as an athlete went flashing past me on the fly.

  Shame, I felt, the purest shame.

  Steve Rushin

  In his commencement address to Marquette’s class of 2007, Steve Rushin (b. 1966) recalled that, at his own graduation from the same school nearly two decades earlier, he and his classmates had heard from Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. “Inspired by his example,” Rushin said, “I vowed then and there that I too would pursue a career that allowed me to spend all day in a robe.” And so he has, writing long and short to equal effect for Sports Illustrated, as well as authoring books that include a novel, a memoir, and a travelogue, all marked by a sophisticated wit and childlike joy at getting lost in the language. He was as adept at delivering one-liners as 2,000-liners, and wrote magisterial surveys of sports and American life that took up swaths of SI’s fortieth- and sixtieth-anniversary issues. Rushin filed offbeat features on arctic golf and roller coasters, which helps explain his appearances in three different series under the Houghton Mifflin Best American writing umbrella—sports, travel, and magazine. But it was also for his consistency and knack for calling out the absurd as a columnist that the National Sports Media Association in 2006 named Rushin its National Sportswriter of the Year. Basketball is an abiding presence in his life, for better or for worse: his wife is the Hall of Famer, NCAA champion, and Olympic gold medalist Rebecca Lobo. In this, one of scores of 800-word amuse bouches he filed for SI, Rushin boils down to a sweet reduction the argument for the game as belief system.

  I Believe in B-ball

  HOCKEY PLAYERS, among all athletes, have the coolest way of entering a game, hopping over the boards with one hand, like Steve McQueen getting into a convertible. But basketball is forever, and so players are often made to genuflect in front of the scorer’s table for a moment before stepping onto the court, as if entering a house of worship. Which, in a manner of speaking, they are.

  For one is baptized into basketball not with water but confetti (conferred on the head by Curly Neal). And one believes in basketball, as one believes in the Bible and in all those names that are common to both: Moses and Isiah and Jordan. . . .

  Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden and so—eventually—were the Celtics, and sometime in between I became a believer, and this is my profession of faith:

  I believe in Artis Gilmore, whose wife is named—as God is my witness—Enola Gay.

  I believe in new hightops, always evocative of Christmas morning, for you get to open a large box, remove the crinkly paper stuffed into the toes and—before wearing them for the first time—inhale deeply from each sneaker as if from an airplane oxygen mask. (It’s what wine connoisseurs call “nosing the bouquet” and works for Pumas as well as pinot noirs.)

  I believe in tearaway warmup suits, which make the wearer feel—when summoned from the bench—like Clark Kent, ripping off his business suit to reveal the S on his chest.

  I believe a team’s fortunes can always be foretold—not from the length of its lifelines but from the integrity of its layup lines.

  I believe in God Shammgod and Alaa Abdelnaby and James (Buddha) Edwards (and in Black Jesus, Earl Monroe’s nickname long before it was the Pearl).

  I believe in accordion-style bleachers that push back to expose, after a game, car keys and quarters and paper cups, which sound like a gunshot when stomped on just right. (And always, stuck to the floor, the forlorn strands of molting pom-poms.)

  I believe—now more than ever, in this time of global disharmony—in World B. Free and Majestic Mapp. And that control of the planet’s contested regions might be better determined by a simple, alternating possession arrow.

  I believe that 300 basketballs dribbled simultaneously by eight-year-old basketball campers sound like buffalo thundering across the plains. And inspire even greater awe.

  I believe that two high school janitors pushing twin dust mops at halftime can be every bit as hypnotic as dueling Zambonis.

  I believe that any sucker can wear a $40,000 gold necklace as thick as a bridge cable when the only necklace worth wearing in basketball is a nylon net that costs $9.99. (But—and here’s the point—it can’t be bought.)

  I’m a believer in Lafayette Lever and regret never having covered him, for if I had, my first sentence about him would have been, “There must be 50 ways to love your Lever.”

  I believe that jumping off a trampoline, turning a midair somersault, slam-dunking and sticking the landing—while wearing a gorilla suit that’s wearing, in turn, a Phoenix Suns warmup jacket—is enough to qualify you as a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer.

  I believe in Harthorne Wingo, and I believe in Zap the dingo, the Detroit Shock mascot whose costume was stolen from the Palace of Auburn Hills by two men who were caught—one in the dingo head, the other in the dingo feet—drinking in a bar across the street.

  I believe in former Notre Dame guard Leo (Crystal) Klier and former Providence center Jacek (Zippity) Duda and former Iowa State center (What the) Sam Hill.

  I believe in dunking dirty clothes into the hallway hamper and skyhooking—from the shotgun seat—quarters into highway toll baskets. And I believe in finger-rolling heads of lettuce into my shopping cart, even though I have never, in the last 10 years, eaten a piece of lettuce at home.

  I believe I can still hold, in my right hand, a boom box the size of a Samsonite Streamlite while carrying, in my left, a slick rubber ball whose pebble-grain stubble has long before been dribbled away. And that I can do so while riding a 10-speed bike and steering with my knees.

  I believe that the Truth (Drew Gooden) and the Answer (Allen Iverson) are out there, if we will simply follow the bouncing ball.

  I believe that we, the basketball faithful, speak in tongues: the red, wagging tongue of Michael Jordan and the red, wagging tongues of our unlaced Chuck Taylors.

  I believe that Larry Bird’s crooked right index finger—which he raised in triumph before his winning shot fell in the 1988 All-Star Weekend three-point contest—resembles, almost exactly, God’s crooked right index finger, as depicted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

  Which would make sense, if God made man in His image. For I believe, above all, in what G. K. Chesterton wrote, and what Rick Telander echoed in the title of a book: Earth is a task garden. But heaven is a playground.

  James McKean

  That James McKean (b. 1946) would become an elite athlete seemed fore­ordained. He had the bloodlines—an uncle who played football at Washington, an aunt who medaled in swimming at the 1936 Olympics—as well as the size (6'9"), which helped win him a scholarship to play basketball at Washington State. The Cougars for which he started at center for four years—“a group of stable, conservative young men who could have been plowing the
good deep soil of eastern Washington instead of playing ball,” he wrote—faced off against UCLA and Lew Alcindor four times over two of those seasons, and Washington State proved to be the second most successful Pac-8 team during the Bruins’ dynasty. That McKean would become a teacher, decorated poet, and essayist was perhaps less predictable than his athletic success. But over the next decade, while living in Washington’s Tri-Cities area and anchoring an AAU team that at one point won sixty games in a row, he taught at Columbia Basin College. He went on to earn an MFA and an English PhD from Iowa, take a professorship at Mount Mercy College in Cedar Rapids, and, after retirement, remain a regular on the nationwide circuit of writing programs, festivals, and workshops. In this essay from his 2005 collection Home Stand: Growing Up in Sports, McKean recalls a freshman season in Pullman playing for his temperamental and physiognomical opposite, Jud Heathcote, who years later would win an NCAA title at Michigan State. It’s a portrait of a familiar and colorful figure, to be sure. But it’s also an exploration of the player-coach relationship from the inside, overlaid with reconsiderations that the passage of time has a way of inviting. As McKean has put it, “Basketball is easy. Explaining yourself is hard.”

  Playing for Jud

  FROM HIGH in the stands, Jud Heathcote looked tortured, a tragic figure in a grand opera, so self-consumed with sorrow or lamentation or anger that we feared what he might do to himself. His whining was a high tenor screech, and his posture crushed. The stories about him were commonplace enough to approach the mythic—how he slammed a basketball to the floor in anger only to have it bounce straight up and strike him in the nose, hunched over as he was in his half-bear, half-wrestler crouch; how he struck his own head with the heel of his hand in frustration, a kind of audible self-mutilation; how he ripped the top of his socks off in anger, or as some say in the optical illusion of retelling, how he lifted himself off the bench by his socks until the argyle gave way and he fell back into his chair and over. Back and forth, pacing, hands out to plead with the officials, his own players, the very fates themselves. All punctuated by his out-of-tune aria of injustice and bafflement.