Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  Twenty years after playing for Jud, I rediscovered close up his precarious balance of calm and catastrophe. At Iowa’s Carver–Hawkeye arena, Jud’s Michigan State Spartans, then in first place in the Big Ten, were being overrun by the fast-breaking, seemingly undisciplined hometown Hawkeyes. The noise was at ear-damage level. Managers quickly set out folding chairs for a time-out huddle. Sweating and exhausted, the starters watched Jud pound his fist into his hand, as if it were a gavel calling this game to order. But his voice was exact and even, laying out strategy and offering encouragement, and all those fine players at Michigan State—Steve Smith, Mike Peplowski, Kirk Manns, Eric Snow, Shawn Respert, some all-American, some all–Big Ten—all those players listened.

  I listened too. I remember how it felt. In the sixties I played for Jud and Marv Harshman at Washington State University. For more than twenty years, I have replayed those seasons over and over, the violence and pain and discipline and humor and anger, the wins and, of course, the losses. It was a classic education without books, corporal and exhausting. Sometimes I regret being so myopic during those turbulent years from 1964 to 1968. On campus, students protested, breaking from convention and authority and the war. I remember in 1968 feeling defensive about my letterman’s jacket. “Establishment,” someone sneered. “I’m cold,” was my half-hearted response. The memories are complex and ambivalent, and then as simple as the ball in hand, the echo of its bouncing in an empty gym. Years later, as I sat behind the Michigan State bench, the memories drew close. I was family again, and from the first row could speak, with practice now, of family matters.

  When I wrote Jud to tell him I was going to school in Iowa City and to ask if I could get tickets to the Michigan State game, he wrote back to say there would be tickets for me as long as I didn’t root for those sons-a-bitches. When I picked the tickets up at will-call, they read “row 2, courtside.” The usher pointed down the steps. The long descent felt nostalgic. Before sixteen thousand Iowa fans, we found our seats directly behind Jud. Beneath the lights, the game was intimate again, the floor crowded and tense. I had forgotten how much happens in so small a space, and how, Macbeth-like, the hand and mind act as one. I could hear the conversations again between the players themselves, clipped, single-word information—left, right, switch, mine, my fault—all directed to honing the moment to a simple edge, your two points and their absolute denial. And audible through the roar, the one voice the players on the floor heard was Jud’s song verismo, full of signals, melancholy, directions, spleen, admonishments, and finally praise.

  It’s the praise I remember seeking. If I screwed up, I felt that I had let the coaches down, that this game meant everything to them. Returning to the bench, I knew I would hear about my failure in a mix of analysis and despair. If I did well, the encouragement would be there. Once when our Washington State team played the University of Washington at Hec Edmundson Pavilion, I heard two words spoken clearly in a crowd of ten thousand and the noisy rush of the game. Guarded by Jay Bond, Washington’s center, whose strategy was to front me at my low-post position, leaning with his right arm folded against me and his left in front waving in the passing lane, I kept trying to move farther out so that our guard Lenny Allen at the top of the key could pass me the ball. Jay Bond kept inching farther and more aggressively in front. I would move out and so would he. Finally, I made a sudden move toward the ball, Lenny Allen pump-faked, Jay Bond scrambled to front, and I changed direction with two quick steps toward the basket, leaving Jay Bond all by himself. It was a backdoor, a classic move, though a rare event in my repertoire; Lenny laid the pass in just so, and all I had to do was rise and drop the ball in. All timing and a wonderful pass. As I ran under the basket and back down court, I heard Jud say, “Nice move.” Ten thousand voices, and one clear in its weight and authority. The basket was worth two points, and praise I have never forgotten.

  It took a long time to earn that praise. Gangly, awkward, and eager to play, I was recruited out of Wilson High School in Tacoma by Marv Harshman, the head basketball coach at Washington State, who explained in his handwritten letters how badly the Cougars needed me. The center position would be mine when I was a sophomore. I could get a fifth-year stipend if needed. They would throw in a pair of contact lenses. They were building the basketball program, and I could play a crucial role. He called me a “student-athlete.” My parents were sold, as was I. Signing the letter of intent, I agreed to play for Marv Harshman, a gentleman, an all-American hero at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, and now the head coach at a Pac-8 Division One school. I was ready for the big time.

  The next fall, I hadn’t been on campus very long when Coach Harshman introduced me to a slightly balding man who looked like Don Rickles. This was the new freshman basketball coach. I don’t remember Jud saying much. His tone seemed perfunctory, as if he was unsure about me. He asked something about my being in shape and getting ready for the season. What struck me immediately was that the basketball office in Bohler Gym looked no bigger than my room at home, with no window shades and only two desks, one for Harshman and one for Bobo Brayton, the head baseball coach and substitute assistant basketball coach whose favorite expression was “That’s as obvious as a horse turd in a pan of milk.” They borrowed the secretary down the hall in the athletic director’s office. Jud would be replacing Bobo. I wondered if they would share the desk.

  But during the first week of practice, I had larger worries. After the first team meeting, when the coaches explained that basketball was our first priority at Washington State and they weren’t going to let us forget it, the haranguing began. Many of us were freshmen, ex–high school stars, and even Pete, the irascible equipment manager, growled at us. Maybe I wasn’t as ready for college ball as I thought I was. During the first week, I also discovered that Coach Harshman focused mainly on the varsity. As a freshman, I was really playing for Jud. I had never been treated like this before.

  “What the hell is that? Take that damn Wilson High School turnaround stick shot and leave it in your high school drawer,” Jud barked. “There’s no way you can play at Washington State if . . .” and then followed an infinite number of transgressions to complete the sentence. Technical problems rated eyebrow-raising impatience and a short demonstration. More egregious errors, such as lack of hustle and stupid choices, earned serious upbraiding and questions that have no good answer: “When are you going to learn, son? What does it take? What do I have to do?”

  As the year progressed, we learned to take cover. When the whistle shrieked in the middle of a drill, and you heard “No, no, no” or “Please, how many times . . . ,” your first wish was that the scolding wasn’t for you. In the Midwest, tornado sirens get the same effect. Everyone seems torn, looking up to see what’s coming while heading down to the cellar to hide. We would wander to the edge of the court, shuffle, look at our feet, and catch our breath while the chosen one suffered. After a while, we played with a kind of running-scared and oh-no demeanor, which I have seen even on Jud’s Michigan State teams. It’s a your-father-knows-you-broke-the-neighbor’s-window look; all that’s left is the sentence, the long walk back to the bench, or Jud’s bear-like shuffle-walk toward you for an explanation. In a Sports Illustrated article that celebrates his career, Jud admits that “Like Bobby [Knight] I’m a negative coach. I’m always harping on what’s bad rather than praising what’s good. Yes, I’ve hurt some kids, and I’ve been bad for some kids. But one thing I’m always proud of is that our players get coached. And I think most of them get better every year.”

  For the 1964–65 season, the Jud-coached freshman basketball team at Washington State had twenty-two wins and no losses. We were balanced and deep. The highest individual scoring average on the team was twelve points per game, and the entire team average was eighty-two. Freshman games at Bohler Gym in Pullman had always been the opening act for the varsity, the rookies with their hand-me-down uniforms and bad passes playing to empty stands. As the season progressed, however, interes
t in our team began to grow, and at the halfway point we were even getting statewide news coverage. The Tacoma News Tribune noted that “Washington State’s freshmen own the state’s longest collegiate winning streak—eleven straight. The Coubabes beat North Idaho JC 102–61 on Friday night, then came back Saturday to upend Columbia Basin 63–59 to snip the Hawks’ victory string at thirty-seven in a row. Marv Harshman lauded the Coubabe–CBC game as the finest freshman basketball game he’s ever seen. ‘It wasn’t run and shoot. It was just a real basketball game,’ he said.” I would add that it was a real game because of Jud’s coaching. We played with a mix of desperation and pride. We wanted that clean record, and we wanted to stay in Jud’s good graces. By the end of the season, our record and the rumor of the red-faced, hair-tearing, combustible freshman coach named Jud had filled the stands.

  Those players who made the transition to the varsity team indeed got better the next year. Out of sixteen freshman players, six made the varsity team, but several of the best players on the freshman team decided not to play at all. Some dropped out of school for academic reasons. Others decided they couldn’t survive another year of Jud. “How do you put up with all that yelling at you?” someone asked. I remember saying that I tried to listen to what he had to say but not necessarily how he said it, that he had good things to teach. I was young and deferential. It was 1965, and on campus, ROTC was still a major. Cadets wore their uniforms to class and in the evenings saluted officer upperclassmen at a soda joint called “The Coug,” where the Stones and Buffalo Springfield played on the jukebox, and fifty years’ worth of names were carved into the wooden booths.

  Shawn Respert, who played for Michigan State, has said that Jud is a great shooting coach. Yes, I agree. Many times Jud walked over to me as I was warming up before practice and said, “Go ahead, shoot a couple.” I would turn and shoot a jump shot from fifteen feet, and then another and another until he said, “OK, I see.” Then he explained what I was doing and where I might change the shot—an adjustment here or there: hand on top of the ball, or elbow in and stop the ball. “This is a shot, not a throw,” he would say. Or, “Turn and square up. Use your legs. Follow through.” I remember how easily he seemed to analyze what I was doing, spot my problems in rhythm and form, and offer up a solution. A prosodist of the jump shot, he explained what I might look for—how the ball should spin slowly backward, how it should die on the rim when it hits, how a good shot hesitates in the net, falls through, hits the floor, and bounces back to you. “Ready, shoot” is the drill we would run and run. He passed the ball, and I caught it and set up in a shooting position, right hand behind and up on the ball, left hand supporting, elbow in, eyes on the basket, wait, wait, wait . . . “Shoot,” he called, never quite when I expected it—shot opportunities and choices never the same twice, the theory goes—but the setup, the shot, the rhythm, the follow-through, these stay the same, practiced over and over until shooting is second nature.

  Although his patience was suspect, Jud’s motives never seemed in doubt. He wanted to win and he wanted us to be better basketball players. The outcome of the game mattered to him, but the more I played for Jud, the more I realized that how we reached that outcome mattered just as much. “Do what you can do. Leave the freelancing at home! Where in hell did that come from? That’s not your shot! Play the game we practiced.” Each season I understood more how playing well meant balancing control and enthusiasm, how the discipline in practice showed in the games, and how focus during the game was a learned skill. If we were asleep on the floor, Jud provided a wake-up. Ironically, it’s as if his strategy was meant to drive his players away from him and completely into the moment. The choice was either total concentration on the game or a bench-side critique with Jud.

  Many factors provide tension in a game—the crowd, the opposing team, the fear of losing—but Jud provided the means, the reason, and the urgency. He was conductor, expert guide, ally, and scold. An event both of character and outcome, each game meant more to him than we could imagine. A national champion handball player who coached high school basketball as vigorously as college, who arranged his married life around a basketball schedule, who never in my recollection missed a practice or a game, this was a man whose life was competition. “Why don’t you hang around the gym more?” he asked me one day. I didn’t understand then what he was asking. The gym was where he lived. And it wasn’t until in the locker room after one home game against California, when he called me a “hot dog” and an “embarrassment” for my mouthing off to the officials, for kicking the ball away, and for my self-righteous prima-donna antics, that I realized what Jud meant by playing well. It didn’t seem to matter that their center, Bob Presley, kept barking in my ear that he was going to kick my honky mother-fuckin’ ass, or that I scored over thirty points. We won the game, but I had lost something in Jud’s eyes. When I was back in my own room with the door locked, alone and fighting back tears, I realized how painful it was not to be in Jud’s good graces. He was a father, I think now, or perhaps my very own Orwellian headmaster, “goading, threatening, exhorting, sometimes joking, very occasionally praising, but always prodding away at one’s mind to keep it up to the right pitch of concentration, as one might keep a sleepy person awake by sticking pins into him.”

  My antics that evening had earned Jud’s worst criticism: “You’re not thinking.”

  There has always seemed to be a constructive tension between us. Even now. In one letter written a week or so before a 1992 Michigan State–Iowa game, he said, “Again we need all the help we can get in Iowa City; you have four tickets. We’ll be staying at the Holiday Inn. Give me a call or drop by practice as we will be practicing 11:00–12:00 on February 6th. I look forward to seeing you. Maybe you can work on Pep’s stick shot and the roll hook, or has memory and age dimmed your talents with both?” Sitting behind the Michigan State bench during warm-ups for that game, I tried to field a ball that had bounced off the floor, bobbled it slightly, and threw it back out to the players just as Jud walked up. “You could shoot but still can’t catch,” he said, shaking his head. I thought, how typical.

  Ambiguity honed to an art form, his give-and-take language maintained a kind of suspension between reinforcement and criticism, between satisfaction and wanting more. He was pleased, yet hard to please. “So far so good,” he seemed to be saying, “All right as far as it goes.” I remember an awful shot I took once—too far out, a turnout, the stick shot that Jud despised but begrudgingly allowed by the time I was a junior for want of something better—a shot I had no business taking, having decided ahead of time I was due. I sailed back in my fadeaway, twenty feet out, and hoisted the ball toward the basket, the arc high as I heard from the bench, “No, no, what the hell . . . no business . . .” and “nice shot” as the ball fell through.

  No one was immune. “You know better. You’re the best jumper [shooter, defender, ball handler, etc.] on our team, so when are you going to play like it?” Such undercurrents. Such riptides. There were no opportunities to float on what he said. I remember his saying before a practice one day, “I want you to be a great basketball player, not just a good one.” Was it praise or criticism? I still wonder. When I heard Stanley Kunitz say once that he didn’t worry about all the bad poems being written, only about the ones just good enough, I thought of Jud’s high standards and pressure to meet them, his urgent and focused poetics of concentration, thought, rhythm, and movement.

  It was inevitable, I guess, that such a dynamic tension might find its limits. Coaches and players define each other’s roles—a player learns from the coach and plays for him, and the coach sees the results of his work through the performance of his player. Given the pressure and the application of power in such a relationship, the tolerances need to be clearly defined. Some players at Washington State had no tolerance whatsoever for Jud. Others never seemed bothered. When I was a freshman, for example, the seniors of the varsity—Dale Ford, Ted Werner, and a few other players who seemed far older, rou
gher, and wiser than I—listened more to Harshman and less to Jud, unfazed, it seemed, by his tirades. Green and heedless, I tried to stay out of each coach’s line of fire. It was a strategy that worked until my junior year, when the falling-out came.

  On the court, the first string was assigned to defend the “gray” squad in a half-court defense drill. The gray squad had been taught the opponent’s offense, and we were supposed to stop them with our man-to-man defense. I was guarding Dave Kessler, an all-American high hurdler, who was six-foot-six and constructed entirely of elbows, knees, and angles. Obedient and enthusiastic, Kessler, who played the game at two speeds—fidget-in-place or full-ahead—had the dubious distinction on our team of having shot, during games, air balls on three successive layups, the most infamous of which hit the backboard and bounced twenty feet back onto the court. Though he lacked a delicate touch, he was extremely fast and eager to please, sporting, despite the Sixties, a flattop which stood up on its own.

  It was late in the practice. I was tired and needed to sit down. My job was to prevent Kessler, the mock center for the opposing team, from breaking from his low-post position across the key and establishing position on the other side. His movement was predicated on following the ball around the perimeter, forward to point guard to opposite forward. When the ball left the point guard’s hand, Kessler was supposed to break. I was supposed to block him high or low, forcing him high toward the free throw line or low toward the out-of-bounds line under the basket. Then I had to front him to spoil the pass in from the forward. All this meant I had to have an idea where he was going and move quickly enough to get in his way.