Basketball: the Beautiful Struggle

It's a March afternoon at Rainbow Beach. Trees are still leafless and lifeless, the grass is worn and patchy, the sky a dreary gray. A cold wind blows from the lake and scatters leftover trash. The beach is deserted, save for a few seagulls and the languid surf that laps at the shore.

There is nothing here to suggest what the future will bring: dozens of children running for the sand, the smoky aroma of barbecue, perhaps a softball game or two.

But the gloomy picture is broken up by the bounce. The steady bounce.

The steady, rhythmic bounce of a basketball on the asphalt. The clank of the rim as a shot goes awry and every once in a while, the soft swish of the worn nets as the roundball drops through the hoop.

Amidst a forlorn urban landscape, there is beauty, some small piece of paradise.

There is beauty in this blacktop.

America's pastime

Sports is a business. We all know it. I talked about how I accepted that fact long ago in my last post. Professional sports is an economically-driven vehicle where the primary focus is making money for someone. Not the entertainment, but the money.

Even so, all these sports we watch on television are games at heart. The Olympics were born from a simple footrace. Soccer was birthed in the mountains of South America. Baseball started in open fields and became famous in the alleyways of New York.

All those sports have their own special qualities. Every sport is born from the idea of human sacrifice and exertion, the idea that something has to be given up for something to be gained. Every sport says, "you must push yourself to win, to gain victory."

But no sport is more resonant with the human condition today than basketball. Especially for Americans.
Wordless poetry

In 1891, Dr. James Naismith hung a pair of peach baskets at opposite ends of a YMCA gymnasium in Connecticut, and basketball was born. About the same time, Scott Joplin's ragtime music was moving across the country, paving the way for the earliest forms of jazz.

Unlike the more traditional forms of music, where melody was even and rigid, jazz broke the norm. Time was out of sync to the casual listener and melodies were short riffs that could be thrown from instrument to instrument. Ragtime and jazz were an affront to American traditional society that was used to classical, folk and other "sit back and relax" forms of music.

Basketball, while it started slowly, took the same route. The game was played much the same way until 1954, when the shot clock was introduced to the NBA. Soon, basketball evolved from teams sitting on the ball for an entire half to a fast-paced, wildly rhythmic game that took fans from their chairs at home to their feet in the stands.

It stands to reason that just as jazz is recognized as the only truly American musical style, basketball is the only truly American sport. While you need a lot of equipment and space to play baseball (and, in a related way, classical music), basketball needs a ball, a hoop (or a milk crate) and two people who want to play. Basketball players and jazz musicians operate with a similar style: at once frenetic and languid, moving in abrupt starts and stops, improvising through planes that make sense to them and only to us once the end result is reached.

It's not enough to say these things. Basketball is a visual sport, and must be seen to be appreciated, just as jazz must be heard to be fully realized. For there are artists in both genres that we will never have the chance to appreciate in person ever again: Elgin Baylor, John Havlicek, Bill Russell, Earl Monroe. Kareem, Pete Maravich (the greatest pre-MJ player to wear #23), George Gervin. Magic and Bird, Hakeem Olajuwon, Michael Jordan. Compare them to Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Dexter Coleman, Thelonius Monk, Max Roach, Buddy Rich, Jaco Pastorius.

All these men crafted art without brushes, prose without words, poetry in pure motion.

The beautiful struggle

Baseball has long been called "America's pastime". But basketball is the child of Americans, from Indiana to New York, from Los Angeles to Boston, from Chicago to Phoenix. The cities, the suburbs, the towns, the rural pastures—it's hard to find a place without a basketball hoop in the driveway or on the garage.

Why does basketball resonate with us? Because that simple act of trying to put an 18-inch sphere through a 36-inch hoop is a great reminder of our own personal struggles. We have a small window of opportunity to aim for, and though there maybe obstacles in our path at any given time, usually the greatest force acting against us is ourselves. Just as we may shoot baskets for hours and miss many more than we take, often we miss more opportunities than we make good on.

But just as it's inifinitely satisfying when we do finally succeed in life, it's just as sweet as when we finally drain that jump shot. Those kids at Rainbow Beach know, even as the sky dims to black, the wind blows harder and the rain starts to fall.

There is beauty in this blacktop.

JS