Restatement

Wow, that basketball post from yesterday was a mess. I changed directions about three times there. Maybe it's because I almost fell asleep on the bus home from work, so I was actually more alert later on, when I wrote about coy vampires. Anyway, I was trying to communicate, in the end, a few different things, which I'll do much more briefly this time around:

(1) You should read The Last Shot. Everyone should read it. It's a fantastic book, and if you're not interested in basketball just pretend it's about something else you're not interested in but willing to read a compelling and well written book about. It's reporting on events that happened, now, almost twenty years ago, but like its logical companion piece Hoop Dreams (aka the only three hour documentary I watched twice in one day because I was so blown away by it), all that's changed is that rap is more integrated into the mainstream and hairstyles are different. Since the NBA instituted its deplorable age limit, the situation is exactly the same. Except that people are getting paid a lot more now, and the sneaker-sponsored AAU summer league teams are possibly more influential now (though the sneaker market itself is shrinking; I don't know yet what this portends).

(2) I don't know why I went on about Marbury - not someone I spend much time thinking about, NBA-wise - except that, especially as viewed by reading The Last Shot and The Jump at the same time, he is a fascinating figure. I suppose I was trying to complicate the kneejerk reaction towards a particular kind of athlete by saying that his context and upbringing account for a lot of what makes him difficult to like today; if he didn't have those negative qualities, he might well have gotten lost before making it as an NBA player, instead of getting lost after making millions of dollars. Plus I accidentally stumbled into something else: in The Last Shot, one heartbreaking refrain is that parents and educators alike continually wonder if there's something specially wrong with their neighborhood: why, when Lincoln High has been a dominant force in the Public School Athletic League for years, had it never sent an athlete to a Division 1 program? Why do they all struggle to make the 700 on their SATs? The average background for an NBA All-Star is probably something like "poor and disadvantaged but not hopeless." Coney Island at the time of The Last Shot was hopeless. The extra hurdles and damages incurred for a talented athlete to survive Coney Island vs. a rough neighborhood in Oakland in the same time period may account for a lot of the difference between Stephon Marbury and Gary Payton.

(3) One of the main reasons why I was spurred to try and write that post is because I was trying to articulate why, beyond my pure love of the game, I find basketball so engrossing: more than any other sport, the matrix of social issues that surround pro basketball is to my way of thinking indicative and relevant to a lot of things going on socially in America at large. (Or, alternatively, the social issues relevant to basketball are the ones I'm interested in.) The whole system of basketball education, development, and recruitment for - as ultimate goal - the pro game is broken, corrupt, exploitative, and, as I said in the prior post, fetid, rotten, ill. But that's not just of interest to basketball; the System here is an extension, and expression, of the Larger System affecting America overall, and by understanding the exceptional specifics of this instance we find ourselves having larger discussions about race, class, education, social justice, and, to get broad and sentimental, what we want from our public figures and what we want for our children.

Who Did You Think He Would Be?

(I know my small readership doesn't give a shit about basketball. The Finals are over! Your hometown team won! What's left to say? Well, I have like 2.5 basketball posts left in me, at least until the Olympics start, if I decide to write about the Olympics. Hopefully whatever I come up with basketball-wise here and in the near future will be a little more general interest.)

I somewhat accidentally started re-reading The Last Shot, by Darcy Frey (a freelance journalist who also wrote the article which inspired the movie Pushing Tin) the other day, and am unspurprisingly engrossed in it again. It's easily the best book I've ever read about basketball - though there are some other avowed classics I should check out, at least one out of print - and for human interest and literary quality absolutely crushes The Jump, its logical prose companion piece. The Jump is about Sebastian Telfair, of Coney Island and Lincoln High School, and follows him during his senior year of high school (class of '04) as he navigates the college recruitment process while simultaneously weighing the option to jump to the NBA, which he does. Telfair goes late in the lottery and the book closes on a high note that's probably well earned: Telfair has done extremely well for himself and, I hope, for his family, even though he's been an unmitigated disappointment thus far as a professional basketball player. My criticism of The Jump - which I read a few years ago and might be remembering unfairly - is that it treated the overwhelmingly rank and fetid bullshit people like Telfair need to go through for the one in a million shot at escaping Coney Island as a series of hurdles an aspiring kid could conquer, rather than the manifestations of a broken system that stifles and chokes everyone but the one player in a thousand who gets a shot at pro ball.

The other criticism is that Telfair isn't the most interesting guy in the book; his cousin is. His cousin was also in The Last Shot, which follows three seniors and one freshman on the Lincoln High basketball team during the 1991-1992 academic year. All of them have, in varying degrees, the basketball skills to at least earn a scholarship to a four year institution and maybe go pro. Without spoiling the book's heartbreaking afterward, this is what happened to the three seniors: one dropped out of junior college and as of 2004 is scraping by but actively pursuing his non-basketball related passions; one suffered a horrible car accident in the middle of his college career and is now physically and mentally disabled, working as a plumber and maintenance man; one is dead, a possible suicide. And the freshman? He's the most interesting character in The Jump, maybe the most interesting character in The Last Shot, Sebastian Telfair's cousin: Stephon Marbury. Multiple NBA All-Star, 20 points and 8 assists per game for his career (possibly still only the second man in league history with those marks, but I'm not going to check), over $100 million in gross lifetime earnings from basketball, let alone his endorsements.

Marbury is a shadow at the edges of The Jump, the cousin who made it, the model to follow, and yet a bitter and inscrutable man seemingly jealous of his cousin's impending success, also tagged with the label of someone who hasn't done enough to help those he left behind in Coney Island. Marbury's the closest thing to an enigma in The Last Shot as well; the preternaturally talented freshman who walks onto a team of extremely talented seniors and is, instantly, on their level if not better. He is, perhaps unintentionally, constantly marked and written as The Other in the book: he gets treated differently by the coaches, the other players kid on the square by saying things like, "Here comes Stephon, future of the neighborhood," and he himself is at fourteen astoundingly arrogant and aloof. On the other hand, people have known about his basketball ability since he was SIX YEARS OLD. What you need to know about Stephon Marbury is that he is the fourth and last Marbury brother who played basketball at Lincoln High and was considered a future pro, but he's the only one that made it (the others weren't able to either go pro or get a degree). The final hope of a storied family, into which all the weight of his brothers' failures has been poured, by his parents, his family, his neighborhood. What you need to know about Stephon Marbury is that a school custodian stopped him in the halls and told him, "Don't fuck up like your brothers." Marbury's father refuses to cooperate with Frey unless he gets paid. Burned by the supposed failures of three sons, he watches the development of his last hope with ferocity and a small-minded solipsism that, Frey eventually concedes, may be the most rational response to the world with which he's been presented. Marbury pére accuses Frey of buying the kids off in the same way college coaches are constantly slipping favors and cash and promises of more to come under the table, and in the moment of accusation he sounds like a fool and a pathetic man - "At the Seven-Eleven in Gettysburg: I saw you buying them slushies!...And now I suppose you want me to think you did it because you're just a nice guy. Oh, come on!"

Oh, come on indeed, Mr. Marbury. And yet: "having spent several months with Stephon, I am beginning to wonder how he and his father are supposed to act. The entire basketball establishment has been trying to buy Stephon for years." The Marbury response is to assume that they're being used and shamelessly demand that they get their in turn. If you want to make money off of me, you'll give me mine first. If I'm going to be used and exploited and then dropped when convenient like all these other kids, then I will have no shame in demanding my cut of the pie. And who can blame them, really?

This post has taken a more Marbury-centric turn than I intended, so I'm going to stay true to that. Originally I was going to focus more on college recruiting, but a single passage suffices to encapsulate the rotten heart of all this. Rollie Massimino, then the coach at Villanova, makes his pitch to one of Lincoln High's seniors by stressing the importance of family, the close relationships he has with his players, their mutual trust, etc. ad nauseam. Lincoln's coach, daringly, cuts through the bullshit for a minute: "But all you coaches are looking to move."

When a player signs a letter of intent to attend a certain school, the college's conference requires him to honor that commitment, whether or not the coach who recruited him stays around to honor his commitments. Now that many top coaches are compensated in the high six-figures...they regularly migrate from school to school, shopping for the best deal, unrestricted by the best rules that bind the players.

Massimino's response is to laugh and then seriously note that, when he was younger, he could've promised the player a forty year relationship if he signed with Villanova. Now, in his older years, Massimino can only offer a twenty year guarantee. "Ten years from now, you'll call me to talk things over...Because if you don't ... I'll kick your ass!" Frey observes that the player seems a little unimpressed by the appeal to loyalty, which is a good thing because "it is also a fact that were [he] to join the Villanova family next year, Massimino would be dispensing his help, guidance, and love three thousand miles away, to the players at the University of Las Vegas."

(Sidebar: this matters, not just because of the mendacity and double standards essential to the recruitment process and the treatment of coaches vs. players, but because a different coach with a different attitude may not provide the right opportunity for a player to grow and hopefully [for the talented few] sell themselves as NBA prospects. If you're a 6'8" bruiser and the coach who signs you promises to continue his school's proud tradition of pounding the ball in to the big man, you should be freaking out when he leaves and is replaced by someone known for a run and gun, guard heavy offense.)

This is the barest slice of what gets exposed about the filth involved in basketball development in The Last Shot. So imagine what it takes to rise above all that, to persevere and emerge not just from such a broken system but from the most broken feeder of that system, the basketball-obsessive wastelands of Brooklyn. (Notable that New York is always acclaimed the Basketball Capital of the World, that the city is in particular famed for its point guards, and yet over the past thirty years the Next Great Point Guards from NYC - Rod Strickland, Kenny Anderson, Stephon Marbury, Sebastian Telfair - have all been disappointments at the pro level. Chicago has produced a richer crop of guards in the last thirty years, but the undisputed [I should hope] two best point guards produced in the USA in the last twenty years grew up hooping in Oakland. It's worth noting as well, for the larger point I'm barely articulating in this post, that an off-hand tally in my head has very few of the most successful NBA players coming from the absolute blight of a place that Coney Island c.1990 was; the kids coming from the worst of the worst neighborhoods wind up as role players and troubled All Stars more than they do outright phenomena.)

And now think about Stephon Marbury - "Starbury" - an All Star talent with All Star numbers relentlessly decried as selfish, a loser, a team cancer, someone whose teams have always improved in the year after he left them, someone whose gaudy numbers are hollow. Consider that he's donated heavily to charities. That he's perceptive enough - and concerned enough - about the damaging structural role the sneaker companies play in the filthy machine that he started his own line of bargain priced shoes to try and change the paradigm: put a name bristling with street cred (and Marbury still has that - at this point in his embattled pro career, the only things he may have left are his street cred and his millions) on a $15 sneaker and maybe fewer kids will get beat down or even killed for a pair of Nikes (and maybe the shoe companies will stop being such a force in the recruiting and development process). Consider his character as hazily outlined in The Jump, resentful of his cousin's shining moment in the sun, closed off and isolated from his old neighborhood, from his extended family, possibly from everyone. Trustful of few if any. Always arrogant - how else could he make it out? Always shameless - how else could he make it out? Stephon Marbury made it to the promised land, and possibly for the very reasons he was able to get there he's been unable to truly find a place in it. Surely he's found it wanting. His millions have brought him the ability to walk away from his past, but not much else (other than, you know, all the other things that millions can buy.) Don't feel sorry for Stephon: he's obscenely rich and has become so for playing a game, and he's kind of an unlikeable personality. But when he's held up, as he so often is, to be the poster boy for the spoiled, arrogant, entitled, selfish athlete, remember what was necessary for him and others like him to reach the plateau they've achieved, what personalities they needed to develop to break through their dismal origins. His three most talented classmates wound up broke, disabled, and dead; his three brothers were labeled failures in their own neighborhood. He's a multimillionare because he was more talented and because he was stronger. What kind of strength does a fourteen year old need to batter through all that?

Who did you think he would be when he was grown?

Everything Happens To Me

I was typing up something about a guy at work, which inspired the post title, but then I realized that in text form, to people who haven't met him, it'd be utterly boring, so I scrapped it, but kept the post title because I like it despite not at all remembering how the song goes.

I'm currently reading Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, by Mircea Eliade, which is/was a classic text on the subject in the comp religion/mythology field, published almost sixty years ago now in the original French. I gather from Wendy Doniger's forward that the book has fallen into some questionable repute (for one thing, Eliade was more a historian than an anthropologist, and the book is entirely composed of secondary sources, which is something I admit to not knowing when I bought it, but there weren't a lot of lay-scholarly books on shamanism competing with it for shelf space), but while offering some criticisms of her own she defends it as a valuable perspective on the topic and a useful starting place for inquiring minds (like mine, I guess; Doniger is herself not without her contentious critics). Anyway, I'm slogging through it with some interest although I feel like the first three chapters are actually the same chapter over and over.

The reason I bring it up is because of this passage, describing an Inuit shaman named Aua:

Aua summons his two helping spirits with a monotonous song:

Joy, joy,
Joy, joy!
I see a little shore spirit,
A little aua,
I myself am also aua,
The shore spirit's namesake,
Joy, joy!
He repeats this song until he bursts into tears; then he feels a boundless joy.

When I read that I went, roughly, "bu-whua?" He repeats the song until he cries? Why would the song make him cry? I actually get why he would feel a boundless joy after crying because I have, at times, felt something similar, and I guess that was my point of entry here. The thing to bear in mind, I suppose, is that despite modern context making the book's subtitle sound really porny, "archaic techniques of ecstasy," of the ecstatic, is Eliade's take on what constitutes shamanism per se and sets it apart from more generalized mysticism, medicine man, magic type mythology and ritual. The shaman's ability to achieve an ecstatic, transcendent state. So it would make sense that Aua is more capable of moving himself to great emotion than the average person today - or maybe what's elided in Eliade's summary of someone else's field notes is that (speculating) "repeats this song" glosses over something more like "repeats this song ceaselessly for five hours," which would probably be enough to put anyone into a very heightened and delicate emotional state. Of course, "anyone" simply wouldn't do that, would give up after ten or thirty or eighty minutes.

So: a given that the shaman is more willing and by nature of his skills more able than the average person to access extreme emotional conditions - and to do what is necessary to get there. But I also wondered, not for the first time (here we approach the point) whether other cultures and, in other times, our culture (or, if you like, our culture's recent ancestors) were simply more emotive. One common reaction to artistic works from different cultural moments, even relatively recent ones, is to find them somewhat maudlin. Maybe that's a semi-universal (and reciprocal?) response, the inaccessibility of one set of cultural assumptions and experiences to another, so that we're fooling ourselves if we think we can slip seamlessly into the skin of an original audience member. Or maybe our culture is just locked down and colder, emotionally, than the ones which have come before it. In Season Two of Carnivàle, in the episode where Jonesy's leg is healed, he whoops and hollers and does a bunch of abortive little quasi-Irish jigs, kind of dances in a half circle. It's an endearing and kind of loopy expression of elation, but on the episode's commentary track Daniel Knaupf (the show creater) says approvingly that it's a "very 1930s" expression of happiness. My first thought was to say "how the fuck would he know?" and my second was to concede that it's a very 1930s movie expression of same. But maybe it's really authentic: maybe similar scenes in films from that era are descriptive and journalistic rather than more expressionistic and heightened. Maybe merely seventy years ago we danced jigs of joy and wouldn't have found it so strange that a First Nations shaman from Canada made himself weep by singing a little ditty about his shore spirit.