Values of the Game (9 page)

Jerry Lucas was another player who understood this aspect of the game. When an opponent shot a free throw, we sometimes signaled a play that called for me to fake a move to the far side of the court and instead receive a pass and take an easy jumper behind a Lucas screen. As I began my move to the other side, Jerry would shout angrily, “Get out of here, Bill! Get the hell to the other side! Go!” My man, hearing this, would retreat a couple of steps in anticipation of my move across court, and then I would quickly step behind the screen for an uncontested shot. Or during a game Jerry and I would converse in gibberish, pretending that we understood each other. “Eee yah see motch eee kah!” I would yell. “Puto rass dee yah!” Lucas would reply. The bewildered defender often would retreat a step, his concentration broken as he tried to anticipate more alternatives than were possible. (What were they saying? It must mean something!) While he was thinking, the ball would go through the basket.

Sometimes it’s imagination that motivates you in the first place. It enables you to dream. At one time or another, every kid who picks up a basketball pictures himself or herself a court star.

The basket in my backyard was put up when I was ten years old. A year later, the wooden poles were replaced by a steel pole and a metal fan-shaped backboard. My parents also laid down a twelve-by-sixteen-foot strip of asphalt and put spotlights on the garage so I could practice after it got dark. I felt like a king, presiding over the Cadillac of backyard courts in our small town. When I was in the fifth and sixth grades, you could find me out there every day after school shooting until dinner. In the winter, I’d wear gloves and a wool hat and two sweatshirts. Occasionally neighborhood kids would join me in a game of H-O-R-S-E. After a while there’d be enough of us to play a half-court game. Because I was taller than the others, we made it a condition of play that I couldn’t shoot any closer than ten feet from the basket. Backyard one-on-one games were where the juices of competition first rose within me. Pride prevented me from calling a foul against my opponent when he pushed me or hacked my arm. Contact led to more contact, but it stopped short of an exchange of blows. Controlling my temper in such circumstances was just one of the lessons I learned in the backyard.

Sometimes my mother would come outdoors to challenge me. Not too long ago, I was looking through an old photo album and came across a picture of her, dark-eyed and beautiful, with her shining brown hair pulled back from her face, sitting with her teammates on the 1927 Herculaneum High School basketball team, of which she and her best friend, “Nooks” Dugan, were the unquestioned stars. Twenty years after her high school triumphs, she still considered herself a player, and she still wanted to win when we played one on one. Once when I was in the seventh grade, she gave me a little push going for the steal, and I pushed her back—whereupon, to my horror, she slipped and cracked her skull on the asphalt. I was petrified, but she got up, just smiled, and called it quits—at least for that day.

I remember the Saturday afternoon in 1958 when the St. Louis Hawks beat the Boston Celtics for the NBA championship. In my mind, I was one of them. I was Bob Pettit shooting the standing jumper, or Cliff Hagan mixing his sweeping hook with reverse layups. Shortly after the game, I went out to the backyard for practice and imagined myself hitting the winning shot. “Four seconds left, three, two—Bradley shoots… it’s good!”

Nothing unique about that. Thousands of kids all over America, on a winter afternoon at the playground, or out behind the barn, or on the driveway, imagine that they will someday score the winning basket, maybe even in the pros. They sense they may be a step too slow, but then who knows for sure? “It’s dropping today…. Only nets…. Time after time…. One more against the board.”
Bong! Swish!
Jumper left…
swish!
Jumper right…
swish!
Left hook…
swish!
“Feel the ball in your hands…. Who does know for sure?… Just keep practicing…. Just keep shooting…. Maybe next year, I’ll be a little taller….”

Inevitably, in those moments of solitary practice, you imagined the voice of your favorite team’s broadcaster. Buddy Blattner covered the St. Louis Hawks, painting vivid word pictures of the game and its players—George “the Bird” Yardley of the Fort Wayne Pistons, Maurice Stokes of Rochester, Sweetwater Clifton of the Knicks, Wilt the Stilt of Philadelphia. Sitting at my desk in my bedroom, I would tune in between, and occasionally during, my various homework assignments. (I sometimes wonder what effect that nonstop crackling play-by-play had on my Latin.) The most famous radio sportscaster of all was Marty Glickman of the New York Knicks, who was also the announcer on the annual Converse All-Star highlights film. More than a few young boys in the fifties fell asleep listening to the transistor under the pillow, lullabied, as the poet Bob Mitchell says, “by the mellifluent tones of the great Marty Glickmanese”:

Imagination looks forward when you’re a ten-year-old shooting in the driveway. When you reach an age at which you can no longer play competitively, you start looking back. Basketball, unlike golf or tennis, is only for the young. Unless you don’t mind popping an Achilles tendon, you should retire from the game by age forty. A few old high school stars go longer, but most play only in their memories. Life’s other tasks take over, and for some, like Rabbit Angstrom in John Updike’s
Rabbit, Run
, there is nothing else in life that has ever quite matched the feeling you had when you were playing the game before the crowd, when you were young and a star. And then you arrive at an age when you relish life in a new and different way. The sense of lost youth is gone—the challenge now is to make the most of the time left to you—and you can more deeply appreciate the role the game has played in your life. It has become more than just memories; it has become almost an essential part of you.

Imagination allows us to escape the predictable. Artists, scientists, poets use the power of imagination every day. For those of us who found it in playing the game, it has shaped our joy in countless ways. It has enriched our experience and allowed us to feel the thrill of fresh creation. It puts us in touch with what most makes us human. Above all, it enables us to see beyond the moment, to transcend our circumstances however dire they appear, and to reply to the common wisdom that says we cannot soar by saying, “Just watch!”