Rhythm and Soul: NBA Life and Meaning

Rhythm and Soul: NBA Life and Meaning

This week has made a lot of us think a bit more about things.

It certainly has me. I listen, I watch, I observe, I think. I like to write. So here I am.

Kobe Bryant tragically and suddenly died last Sunday. Along with his daughter and friends of the Bryant family, fathers and mothers and children. Tonight the Lakers--his former team--will play for the first time since then. Six days ago. They postponed their mid-week game against the Clippers for obvious reasons. I will probably watch that game against Portland.

For people who know me, I watch a lot of basketball. It may seem obsessive to many, I understand, but watching the best (in the NBA or Olympics),  or the elite (like at the college level), or the high schoolers, or my sons or my colleagues with whom I play, does things for me.

It is a bit like music, which can be compared to many things.

Music is art, art is expression, expression is freedom, freedom is life.

Do you like some type of art? Most people do.

I love books. I love stories. I love some film and television, I adore some music and dance. I love faith, and knowledge, and understanding.

I love efficiency, and saving, or conserving, and I love principles like generosity, kindness, community, justice, fair play, good sportsmanship, curiosity, interest.

I love my family, my parents, my siblings, my extended family, my wife, my children, my community, my nation, my planet.

I love certain sports, and playing them is fun, but watching some, to me is like listening to jazz.

Now, I am no grand connoisseur of jazz. But, I know that there are absolute connoisseurs and lovers of it, and I get that. A day or a week without jazz for them might be bereft of much joy or pleasure.

For me, sports, in particular basketball, is like the pleasure, the art, the expression, the community, of jazz. Other sports are like other forms or music and art and their respective communities, but for me basketball, and the quintessence of it, the National Basketball Association, is like a few of these thoughts I had throughout the week:

• Demi-gods
• Overcoming
• Upward struggle
• Community
• Work
• Value

There are other things and elements that might encapsulate the game of basketball and how I interact with it, but I will let those six points stand up to my assessments and your scrutiny.

1) Demi-gods.

When you are little, like five years-old, and and there are giants like Kent Benson that walk into your mom and dad's store, and his head almost touches the ceiling, and everyone remarks on how big he is, and how famous and important he is, and you realize that during the cold months into the spring the entire town of grown ups and big people care so much about Benson, the near seven foot behemoth "All-American" (whatever that is), and his team and their coach at the giant indoor arena where they play on the edge of campus where your mom visits her friends in the Relief Society, which she refers to jokingly as the "Mormon ghetto", Assembly Hall, close to the side of town where all those families and kids like the Kings with their nine red headed freckled children crammed into the seventh or tenth floor student housing apartment because of the thing called "I.U.", a university, school for big smart people, that those crazy big basketball players represent the school, and that that same team called "Hoosiers" and their loud coach happen to go to places like Philadelphia and beat Michigan and win the national championship, it can all seem bigger than life.

What is that all about? What are they all screaming about? I understand why they sing the national anthem, we love our country, and we love our church bishop the opera singer Roy Samuelsen, with his rich booming voice, and his three big boy children who are pretty cool, too.

Do they play basketball? They do! I, at this younger age, played some soccer, and a little baseball... AND I swam, taking lessons to learn most the strokes. And, I played with Star Wars figures, and I played war, and tag, and make-up games using my imagination to create fictitious scenarios. What was real, was so far away. Was the round ball what was real? Or did it merely toy artistically with the truth of reality?

Basketball, I could bounce it, this faux leather toy, sure, but this sport of running and jumping and shooting and passing was far away from me, like chess or pole vaulting or throwing a javelin or hurtling down a bob sled ramp. It was beyond me as a little one.

By fourth grade I learned that I was missing out. I was not paying attention to IU going back to Philadelphia and winning the national championship! Again! My best sports recess buddy Lance Allen did take advantage of it all, frolicking with the thousands of students in the frosty March night.

This was March Madness! And IU, my home town school, were the dudes!

This time, instead of Viking Nordic gargantuan Kent Benson, huge, fierce and blonde like Thor or some other mythic god, the big man on campus was a rather normal sized Isaih Thomas. He was small for the sport but he loomed large across the courts and the imagination. And he had the smile of a beneficent ruler or god. But also like a kid. He was a big kid in a big man's world.

Isaih. Such a Biblically significant name.

From the projects of Chicago to cutting down the NCAA nets while Cool and the Gang serenaded: "We Are Family!". I got all my sisters and me!

Yes! Exultation and delight! 

These demi-gods of my hometown went on from Indiana University, where they brought home national championship honors, banners, and acclaim, and they went forth to even more stardom and fame in...

The N.B.A. The best of the best. They came from Yugoslavia, from Russia, Lithuania, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, Congo, Nigeria, China... Big and small, long and thick, they came to the be the best among the best.

So when Isaih was weaving his magic and personality and incredible will across the cities of America in the 1980s against the likes of super huge personalities like Dr. J, Julius Erving, Moses Malone, Maurice Cheeks, Ralph Sampson, Akeem Olajuwon, and greater still Magic Johnson, James Worthy, Kareem Abdul- Jabbar, Larry Bird, Kevin McHale, Robert Parrish, and on and on...

When I turned 15 I was hooked. I stayed up late watching Chris Mullin, Eric "Sleepy Floyd", amazing cross-over specialist Tim Hardaway out in a place called Golden State, the crazy gunners of Denver like Danny Schayes, Mike Adams, Fat Lever, Kiki Vandeweghe, and this is without mentioning the greatness of the Utah Jazz, the Mavericks, the other Rockets and Spurs and Suns and all over... Dominique Wilkins and Glenn Doc Rivers and the others of the entire land. The Bucks and the Knicks and my home state Pacers... Oh, and returning back to the West, the fabulous Supersonic with Xavier McDaniel, Tom Chambers, and Dale Ellis...

The Pistons, the Bad Boys, with first Isaih but close behind Dumars and the Microwave Vinnie Johnson, Laimbeer and Spider Salley and the Worm Dennis Rodman. Poetry and force, night in and night out.

It was a dreamland of the gods, and they played throughout waking and sleeping hours.

Before the Internet or really powerful computers, or even that much televising of the games, the newspapers and magazines chronicled the lore, divvied up in stats and figures, that I could pour over for hours.  

Most individual points averaged, most assists, most rebounds, most blocked shots, most steals, most turnovers, most three pointers made, most trivectas attempted, most of this, the least of that. Team shooting percentage, regular field goals, three-pointers, foul shots...

And it just so happened that one of the the premier early statisticians of sports stats was none other than the academic demi-god Jeff Sagarin, of yours truly, Indiana University! In B-town, Bloomington, my native streets!

He was ours! He would make sense of the March Madness, figuring out how little Villanova could take down the monstrous Georgetown Hoyas. Yes, Patrick Ewing, the modern goliath, was brought down by the little David, also known as Cinderella. 

This was the great game of war and chess made simple under the krieg lights and booming sound systems of arenas and stadiums across the breadth and width of our great nation. And the world loved it, too. From Europe to Asia to Africa to the southern hemisphere, the game was beloved.

Our gods and demi-gods strutted across the hard wood and painted lines, and sought heavenly access.

No one died; no one even bled, usually; we all lived to tell the tale of how that victory, the ultimate goal of all shooters and dribblers and blockers was won.

Individuals loomed large, of course, but at the bottom of it all basketball was a team game, a team sport and not about the one self, and each demi-god needed his troops of every fashion to help him arrive at his thrown. And there were always fans, such as us hysterical ones of the heartland of Indiana. The team coaches also made their way above the fray of the sweat and hurry and bounding energy of these endless waves of troops and their pieces...

How can I end this tale of the first epic of basketball that I love, and how the players and pageantry and the jazzy godliness of the NBA captured my heart and imagination?

 I don't know. Maybe you had to be there.

Maybe you had to listen to that first time that Louie riffed his trumpet, or Dizzie or Miles blew their horn, or Ella, or Lena, swelled a chord, or pick your jazz artist of choice with their master stroke, or maybe Duke Ellington and his exquisite oeuvre: in that first time you paid attention, the first time you witnessed and took it in, that amazing jazz, a spellbound feeling, for the the first time, for you, a neophyte and unsuspecting observer:  you realized that he or she really wailed.

The essence of the work spoke to you.