Basketball, my old friend

I lived in Ireland for a year, and joined what I suppose in America would be called the JV team at a university. I hesitate to dignify it in this way, since naturally I had to move to a country not precisely known for its basketball to make the second team, where I was not a starter. And the truth is, I almost didn’t make the team — after a bad practice or two, I was on my way out the door. But I asked the coach, if I make ten jump shots in a row, can I stick around? I only made eight, but I made my point.

A few years before that, playing in the semifinals of a local league in high school, I hit a 3-pointer to send the game to overtime. A few years after that, in another semifinals game in an intramural league, I fought through a vicious, muscular hangover to hit a 3-pointer to win the game in overtime.

I fondly remember all of these things, obviously. But there’s nothing very special about them. I am 33 and I have played in 33,000 basketball games of every description, leagues, and pickup, and one-on-one and two-on-two and halfcourt and fullcourt and even in space, on a secret mission I cannot disclose. You play long enough, you keep at it, there will come a day when the ball finds you at the right moment and you will do the right thing with it. That’s the beautiful thing. And it goes the other way, too. I remember one really bad game I played. Afterwards someone, trying to be nice, told me that basketball was a hard game, that I’d get the hang of it some time. I was 19, in the best shape of my life, and I’d been playing basketball three or four times a week for years. That’s beautiful, too, in its own painful way.

I still play basketball. Now mostly alone, indoors or out. But shooting hoops connects me to every me who ever shot hoops. A lonely, awkward kid in junior high throwing it up in the backyard under a spotlight, hoping life would get kinder. A rangy, athletic college kid coming into his own. These days, every time I start getting good at basketball again something snaps, crackles, or pops, and I have to start over again, six months later. But I always do. When I need exercise, it’s my favorite way to get it; when I’m working on something, it jumpstarts my brain. My last trip home, my dad told me that he suddenly couldn’t shoot hoops any more because of his shoulder. That gives me 37 more years. I know it wouldn’t be enough.

God, I love basketball. I love it because it’s impossible. And honestly? It’s silly. One can imagine where humanity got the idea to hit things with sticks, and catch the things that were hit; or else to throw a thing, and catch at thing, and tackle a person trying to get away with the thing.  What seriousness we take to the unimaginable task of throwing a ball you can’t even grab in your hand through a hoop suspended, for no reason, ten feet from the ground. It’s a testament to the human capacity to make anything a science, until we came up with Steph Curry, the terminator of throwing things into hoops.

It’s a testament, as well, to the capacity of good science to be art. A man takes off from a dot on the floor, a bouncing sphere invisibly lassoed around his hand in a way that would make Wonder Woman proud. He stops, long before anyone else would, puts one foot in front of the other and fires, and the rim doesn’t even know anything happened. Only the whisper of the net, in a faint breeze. A thing of beauty, and a joy forever.

Basketball is on its way back. Soon the leaves will begin to turn, then basketball. As the season of its absence sputters towards its rest, we have to put up with a lot of things, crass things, silly things. Who doesn’t want to be where they are any more, what is good or bad about what they want, and what is good or bad about who they are. Who should be paid how much, who is paid too much, and who is paid too little. Social media is the medium upon which meritocratic models collide. It’s tiring, after you’ve wandered round it long enough. But at the very least, we all agree, it isn’t basketball. It is almost here, in the dull roar of the social surf, unjust player rankings rushing beneath the boughs of unpopular metrics, surrounded by ringz Twitter, under the watchful eye of Derrick Rose’s last fans. It is coming, it will be here soon. It is reasonable to think we will not make it.

Then again, perhaps we will. Perhaps we will be spared to another season. Perhaps Steph Curry will, and Anthony Davis. Perhaps Blake Griffin will have a happier year, and Gordon Hayward, and Kyrie Irving will dance across this flat earth like god created him to do. Perhaps Jimmy Butler will find a place to stay. I hope he does. And I hope, most of all, that Luka Doncic, the physical embodiment of spring, sets the league on fire. There is time enough, surely for that.

And if there is, then, there will be all the time, all that I spent watching, all that I spent playing –learning how to do what I do, learning how to see what they do. When I squint at the TV, I will see what I always see: all the places I’ve been, all the people I’ve watched it with, all the ways I felt. Remembering what it was like, long ago, when I learned the rhythm of this very strange game, and it began to live for me. If we make it all the way ‘til then, I’ll greet it with open arms. Basketball, my old friend.