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On
basketball
A few weeks ago Wang Zhizhi became the first Chinese
to play basketball in the NBA. He has not seen much time on the
court since he joined the Dallas
Mavericks in April, but he is now among the greatest basketball
players in the world, and this attests not only to his own great
abilities, but also to China's possibilities. For basketball is
not only a team effort, but a collective cultural effort. My own
experiences as a basketball player and coach in America suggested
the
same truth to me about basketball.
In the 1980s and '90s, I coached basketball at
a tiny college in Maine, northeast of Boston. Most years our team
was not very good, but from time to time
we played particularly well, and then we felt great.
Once, our center -- a 6-foot 3-inch guy with legs
like little oak trees -- held New England Division III´s
leading scorer (who was averaging 29 points per game)
to 13 points, and we beat his team, another small college in our
area. A year later,
one of our forwards, not quite 6 feet tall but with an uncanny
nose for where the ball
was heading, led all the Division III colleges in the United States
in rebounding for
several weeks.
But those moments were infrequent. Our players had
all learned good basketball
skills on their high school teams, but none of them had the remotest
chance of becoming professional athletes. We never scheduled games
with Division I teams like the University of Maine, not to mention
big-time teams like Duke or Boston College. They would have run
us off the court in three minutes. Instead we took long van rides
to New Hampshire and Vermont, played against other small private
colleges over a weekend, and then drove back, five- and six-hour
drives.
It was not much fun to drive 300 miles only to lose
by 15, 20, 30 points. But we
kept doing it, the coaches and players, week after week from November
to February, year after year. We practiced five times a week in
our beat-up old gym. (I once heard an opposing player refer to
it as "Noah´s ark.") We taught players how to
let their hands follow through after shooting the ball, how to
back into another player to clear space to get a rebound. We also
taught them to play "help-side defense," which was difficult
because our players were mostly not very fleet of foot and preferred
to stay in one spot on the floor. It was hard work. Along the
way a few players quit the team. Some dropped out of school. But
amazingly, even at such a small school we found replacements for
them.
What kept it all going?
Well, the answer is deceptively simple: We loved
basketball. We loved it so much
that we kept doing it through good times and terrible. I remember
one particularly terrible night when we drove to the nearby town
of Augusta to play. We had lost five games in a row, and we knew
we stood a good chance of beating the Augusta team, which had
only seven players and whose best player was nursing a sprained
ankle. We came onto their court full of confidence -- overconfident.
I was uneasy as our players laughed and joked during warm-ups.
Then the game began, and the fun ended. Augusta beat us by 32
points. We all, players and coaches, sat silently during the 45-minute
van ride home. I remember thinking to myself,
"This isn´t worth it. It´s too painful, too disappointing."
And yet two nights later we gathered for our next
practice. Some players growled
and groused, but we practiced -- hard. That weekend we beat by
3 points a team we had expected to lose to, holding them off with
excellent help-side defense in the last four minutes.
"What thou lovest well remains," wrote
the modern American poet Ezra Pound, "the
rest is dross."
The greatest basketball player of all time, Michael
Jordan, played for the greatest
philosopher-coach of all time, Phil Jackson, and their team, the
Chicago Bulls, sometimes discussed the meaning of basketball.
In one discussion it was suggested that basketball is a metaphor
for life. After more talk, it was decided that in fact, life is
a metaphor for basketball. In the 1980s and '90s, Jackson´s,
Jordan´s, Larry Bird´s, Magic Johnson´s love
of basketball transcended everything else, including the desire
for money, and they drove American basketball through a golden
age during that time. At a tiny college in Maine, we followed
their lead, in our own small way, not for money but for love,
and won a lot along the way.
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