Basketball

by Alexander Wolff

  Jud set the play up. Kessler bounced on his toes as if he were ready for the starting gun. I got into position, anticipating the break. Standing beneath the basket, Jud blew the whistle. The ball went from one forward to the point guard, who caught it, and Kessler was simply gone. I don’t remember if he went right or left, but I spun around just in time to hear Jud’s whistle, strident and prolonged. “There’s no way, son, you’re going to stop anybody, standing around flatfooted. Jesus, move your feet.” He had taken two steps toward me and then turned back. “Again, please.” Most of the team had wandered some, hands on their hips, looking at the floor or the empty stands, trying to stay out of the mix, but Kessler had stayed in position, ready to go. I was the first-string center, the big shot. I was supposed to make this play.

  Back now. With the whistle, the ball went from forward to point guard, who passed; Kessler jack-stepped me left—I fell for it—and then bounced right, buzz cut, elbows, and knees zipping by in a blur. I didn’t even have time to grab his jersey. Jud’s whistle reached a new octave. Here he was, red-faced in front of me. I backed up. Jud followed, hands out, demanding, “What the hell are you doing? Are you going to get this right today?” Out of the side of my eye, I could see Kessler grinning. Everyone else found something else to look at. This was the dreaded inquisition, Jud’s auto-da-fé, and I was the heretic, singled out and guilty of slow feet and fatigue and a timid heart.

  My final mistake, a response to embarrassment and a bruised ego, was to cheat—Kessler having won the moment and being anxious, I could see, to win the next. “Let’s get it right this time,” Jud said, and blew the whistle. Forward to point guard, who passed just as Kessler tried to jack-step again; I met him with a forearm shiver just beneath his armpit and punched, driving up and out so his upper body stayed put while his feet kept going up. Horizontal before he landed with a “whump” on his back on the floor, Kessler never got to the other side of the key. Vindicated and stupid, I didn’t help him up.

  Jud erupted, his whistle boiling over in the middle of a face as red as I had ever seen. He shuffle-trotted out toward me, fists clenched and head down, bull-like. Embarrassed and frustrated before, now I was scared, backing up as he got to me. I don’t remember what he said for the ringing in my ears. I do remember my peripheral vision closing down as if his anger had grabbed at my shirt. My mouth was open, but I couldn’t breathe. And then, bang, bang, he started with his index finger pounding on my chest, once, twice . . . “Don’t you ever—”

  At the third bang, I broke ranks.

  The telling takes far longer than my blocking his right arm away with my left hand and stepping with my left foot toward him, cocking my right fist so I could deliver the punch with authority. “Keep your fucking hands off me,” I said, quicker than the instant, a slur muddled by fear and anger. I was pushed into a corner and snapping. He took two quick steps back and dropped his whistle, and in that moment we both stood on intolerant ground, far beyond any diagram, watching each other.

  Until Coach Harshman stepped in.

  “Now, now,” he said, as if we were boys in a schoolyard. “We have a game to get ready for.” The pontiff had spoken. Harshman, the final authority, refocused our energies on the abstract and holy. Jud was pit boss and teacher, but it was Harshman’s team.

  Jud and I didn’t talk for the rest of the practice. That evening and all the next day, I agonized over what had happened. Fairy tales have this as the defining moment. The final breaking away. Conflict leads to self-sufficiency and independence. Jack cuts the beanstalk down. A mythological son strikes down his father when they meet anonymously, face-to-face on the road. I had never been so defiant of nor as violent with an authority figure. I was immediately lonely. Should I quit the team, or was I already off? Independent for a day, I wanted back in the fold. But that seemed impossible.

  The next day, in language as sweet as a good play, Jud fixed it. After the boundaries had been overstepped and the tolerances squeezed down to zero, the first thing he said to me was, “Mind if I throw you a few passes?” I heard him behind me as I warmed up early before practice, by myself, at a far-corner basket in Bohler Gym.

  “Sure,” I said, turning and bouncing the ball to him to get ready for the “ready, shoot” drill.

  “That is,” he said, “if you don’t hit me in the mouth.”

  “No,” I said, “as long as you don’t pound me in the chest if I make a mistake.”

  “Sounds fair to me,” was all he said.

  I have learned over the years that I am not the only player to have threatened a swing at Jud. Rumor has it that one of Jud’s West Valley High players connected with a right cross, and Jud’s response after he got up from the floor was, “That’s the most heart you’ve shown all day.” It seems in character. That a player-coach relationship would break down and even turn violent is no surprise. Coaches, from high school to professional, pressure their players, set goals, and make demands. Players need a coach to convince them the pain they are going through is worthwhile. There is a fine line here between push and shove. When that line is obliterated, it is the coach’s job to redraw it. That’s what Jud did. He took charge, and we all moved on.

  When I was a senior, Pete the equipment manager finally talked to me. After three years of machinations and trials and seventy-four games, I felt as if I had earned respect from the coaches and my teammates, and could watch at the far end of the court the new freshmen squirm and grimace under their first year with Jud. Despite such seniority, the pressure was always on, though the tolerances had been discovered and respected both ways, coach and player.

  Perhaps what tempered Jud’s maniacal intensity for the game was that he seemed capable of perspective, whether through humor, self-parody, or simply by looking the other way. Sports Illustrated explains that “Heathcote . . . has a warmth about him, an awkward, gruff-uncle charm. He is most comfortable when turning the needle inward, and unlike Knight, he is incapable of taking himself seriously.” True, there are many examples of Jud’s self-deprecating humor. “Sooner or later, the game makes fools of us all,” he has been quoted as saying. “And I guess I’m living proof.” And I remember his being able to poke fun at himself—the time on a road trip, for example, he backed the car over his own suitcases. For thirty miles no one dared speak until someone said from the back seat, “They were easier to get in the trunk.” Even Jud had to laugh. Or the time we finally beat Oregon State at Corvallis in the season’s next-to-last game and spent the night in downtown Portland at the Benson Hotel. Dick Vandervoort, the trainer, gave us each five dollars to get something to eat. Then we were on our own in downtown Portland late on a Saturday night. I don’t know whose idea it was to spend our five bucks at the topless nightclub three blocks north of the Benson, but six of us, four of whom were starters, headed for the night life, dressed in our crimson blazers with the Cougar insignias. We might as well have been wearing overalls and straw hats, as obvious as we were spread out in the front row, our five dollars spent on the two-drink minimum, the glasses weeping on the miniature tables. In blue light and with fine timing before us on stage, Fatima of the Nile rotated her tassels in opposite directions.

  We were near deep hypnosis when the door opened and in walked Dick Vandervoort, Coach Harshman, and Jud. They took pains not to trip over us as they walked back behind us into the dark. No one turned to look. As the tassels slowed and we froze, out the door filed Dick Vandervoort, Coach Harshman, and then Jud, who turned to us, one hand on the door, and said, “This isn’t the place we thought it was.” The next day was a 250-mile trip from Portland to Pullman—a long, silent car ride home.

  It’s simply not true, however, that Jud is “incapable of taking himself seriously.” None of his players worked for Jud’s sense of humor. To see the look on his face when the Spartans won the national championship in 1979, or his despair in 1990 when Georgia Tech’s Kenny Anderson tied the game on an unwhistled, after-the-buzzer shot, a game Georgia Tech then won in overt
ime, is to see a coach for whom the game means everything. Lear couldn’t have looked more tragic. Basketball was always first. Opinions, one-liners, wit, green blazers, and a bad hairstyle notwithstanding, the forty minutes on the court is serious business indeed.

  Watching Michigan State practice on one of their visits to Iowa City, I realized that Jud’s teams have always been a reflection of his character—serious, playful, and urgent. There was Jud on the floor at the end of practice, trying to face guard Shawn Respert, who moved left and right and called for the ball. “Mismatch, mismatch,” Respert yelled, laughing. How true, both ways. Jud was sixty-four with a bad knee, but Respert played Jud’s game.

  So did we all. I would like to think I took from my four years a sense of form and rhythm, of creative tension, the ability to concentrate, the need to get things right, and a friendship that has lasted years beyond my eligibility. In 1986 when Headlong, my first book of poems, was published, I sent a copy to Jud. He wrote back, “Thanks so much for your book of poems. This is the first of many you will be famous for some day and I will be able to say ‘I knew him when.’ I do hope sooner or later you will be able to figure out one that rhymes. Remember, you can always start, ‘Roses are red, Violets are Blue’ and go from there. I do plan to study them all and maybe sooner or later it will make me a smarter basketball coach.” He ended his letter by saying, “I am looking forward to seeing you February 6. Count on four tickets as usual as we need all the support we can get.”

  I wrote back to thank him for the tickets and to say I wasn’t sure if my poems would make him a smarter basketball coach, but I knew playing basketball for him had certainly made me a better poet. My legs are gone, but my memory hasn’t dimmed. Michigan State won by a point that evening on a three-point shot at the buzzer, picked up their water bottles and towels, and escaped to East Lansing before the Iowa crowd had a chance to sit back down. As the gym emptied out, I sat and waited, thinking of my divided loyalties. An Iowa alum now, I live in Iowa City and follow the Hawkeye basketball team, but here I was sitting all evening in a row of green sweaters, rooting for Michigan State. No, I was rooting for Jud. Ever since I left Washington State University, left home in effect, I have been loyal to Marv Harshman and Jud. They helped me grow up. And even though I don’t play basketball much anymore, preferring the humility of tennis after a day of words, I still hear their voices. They have left me something parental, a kind of conscience that speaks from courtside, saying in reference to whatever I do or make, “Too much here or not enough there,” or “Effort, please, effort,” or “Terrific”—followed always by “try again.”

  FreeDarko

  During its six-year run as an idiosyncratic NBA website, FreeDarko.com (2006–2011) attracted enough of a following to give birth to two books, The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac (2008), in which this study of Tim Duncan appeared, and The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History (2010). Both volumes came larded with illustrations, charts, and boxes, including a sidebar to the Duncan essay that showed how the lifetime stats of the San Antonio Spurs’ center track the Fibonacci Sequence, the numerical pattern found in seashells, pinecones, and other representations of the natural world. Adam Waytz (b. 1980), a University of Chicago grad student in social psychology who would go on to become a professor at Northwestern, contributed the Duncan piece under the nom de blog Dr. Lawyer IndianChief. It’s typical of most FreeDarko posts in that it features no reporting to speak of; as counterpoint to Duncan’s opacity, it lets analysis and allusion rush into the void. But that was the point of the site. As regular contributor Jason Johnson said, FreeDarko served up “music criticism from a bizarre universe where basketball actually is jazz.” Waytz stays true to the site’s founding tenet of valuing player above team, overlooking how Duncan tortured his beloved hometown Minnesota Timberwolves so he might appreciate the impassive Spur an sich. As with many FreeDarko contributions, there’s a determination not only to connect the spectator to the player, but also the game to the wider world. Co-founder Nathaniel Friedman, aka Bethlehem Shoals, pulled the plug after realizing that, as he put it, “the comments section was probably a better read than some of the posts”—a sign, if ever there were one, that FreeDarko’s work was both inspirational and done.

  from

  The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac

  TIM DUNCAN: MECHANICAL GOTHIC

  TIM DUNCAN proves that absence of style can be style in and of itself, a paradox that defines his daily actions and decisions. Duncan is a figure seemingly birthed from Mount Rushmore’s granite façade, yet his movement is fluid. He faces up to his opponents with the saucer-like eyes of a German shepherd, yet with his empty stare he intimidates all who face him. Duncan hails from the Virgin Islands, a location that should evoke images of relaxation and respite, yet Duncan’s citizenship status instead elicits a bothersome uncertainty, as no one actually knows what the Virgin Islands are. Duncan’s off-court obsession with video gaming, his apparent introversion, and his Wayne Brady–as–Milhouse vocal tone convey an overall tenor of erudite boredom. Nonetheless, all who have faced him hold unbounded respect for him, because so many have met their fate by his hand.

  Throughout his career, Duncan has maintained his role as the NBA’s gatekeeper, yet his term is unlike that of others who held the position before him. Michael Jordan halted the likes of Ewing, Malone, Stockton, and Barkley, denying them championships with a hand in their faces and a dagger in their hearts. Shaquille O’Neal, as Jordan’s successor, towered over the most competent Kings and Nets teams during his reign. Duncan, by contrast, provides no abrupt reaction to an opponent’s push. As Duncan denies scores of aspirants an opportunity at the title, they simply collapse at his feet.

  Duncan entered the NBA after four years of college at Wake Forest. The circumstances were suspicious: An already championship-ready San Antonio Spurs team implodes for one single season—just long enough to attain the first overall pick in the draft and net the stoic young power forward. Because winning came so immediately for Duncan—in his first year he led the Spurs to one of the biggest single-season turnarounds in NBA history—aesthetics became an afterthought to success. This suited the dull and routine mastery that would soon become Duncan’s calling card.

  Duncan has always kept his uniform shorts at an appropriate length. Off the court, he rarely dons a suit and is more likely to be seen in the blandest of Banana Republics or the grayest of sweat suits, giving press conferences unpolluted by slang or foul speech. At his most striking, he resembles an oversized and popular Carnegie Mellon engineering student or a recently bankrupt and divorced stock trader. More often, however, Duncan looks like the most glorious human being ever produced in a factory, pristine and plain faced. He is a monument to bottom lines, permanent but not necessarily memorable.

  With a game founded on a geometrically accurate bank shot and simple three-step footwork in the post, he has become the modest Carhartt coat that blankets a league full of precious metals. In making a defensive stop, Duncan is not feverish or quick footed; he is a concrete wall of disregard for a player’s intention to score. In completing a powerful dunk, Duncan uses an efficiency of motion, rarely jumping higher than necessary, and in speech never emits any proclamation of greatness or dominance. Duncan is known for his dissatisfaction with foul calls, but he generally expresses such angst in a silent widening of his nostrils and eyelids. He is incapable of histrionics. A scholar of psychology and Chinese literature while in college, he confronts the unbridled emotion of his opponents with circumspect reason.

  While other players wind-sprint through the season, Duncan marathons, going deep into the playoffs year after year. While his foes throw their hearts and minds into the thick of competition, Duncan stands at a remove, his every action rich with intent. His brain operates with the dull precision of the TI-83 calculator. Can Duncan feel pain? He has faced his share of knee and foot injuries over the years, yet they have slowed him only as an oil leak slows a robot. Does Dunc
an love? His wife, Amy, a former Wake Forest cheerleader, conveys a forced plastic smile in public appearances, suggesting that not even she knows. Do the concepts of free will or consciousness mean anything to him? If so, he does not experience these capacities as you and I do. Referee Joey Crawford once issued a technical foul to Duncan simply for laughing while on the bench; Crawford more than anything was probably startled at Timmy’s capacity to display human feeling. In his eternal drudgery, Duncan moves forward with a single purpose, as though preprogrammed to achieve the sole end of winning. Cognition, emotion, intention—all are merely incidental to the goal at hand.

  A world champion multiple times over, Tim Duncan is a human trophy, not a flighty canvas of mood and invention: not a winner, just someone who wins games. His first two championships with the Spurs were more attributable to the aging torpedo David Robinson, Duncan’s frontcourt-mate and mentor, than they were to Duncan himself. Although Robinson’s skills were declining at this point, it was his spirit and leadership that carried Duncan and the Spurs unto victory. Duncan’s third championship, which occurred after Robinson’s retirement, lacked any authoritative moment of self-definition—the clutch shooting of Robert Horry and the unstoppable penetration of Tony Parker were as important as Duncan’s geologic whir. The Spurs’ unwatchable 2007 championship was aided by circumstance: questionable refereeing, the Warriors’ first-round upset of the Mavericks (the Spurs’ chief competition), and unwarranted suspensions of players on the Spurs’ Western Conference Finals foes, the Phoenix Suns. However, the Spurs’ eventual victory was not the product of luck or white-hot destiny. These things came to be because of who Tim Duncan is: an automaton of success.