To Eleven by Ones

Moments

For Christmas my wife gave me Bill Simmons' recently published Book of Basketball, a massive, frequently hilarious and fascinating (if typo-riddled) tome on the history of the NBA.  (Simmons has a website to which you can send errors - factual, typographic, whatever -  and he will post them.)  (Also, if you've never read him on ESPN.com, here's one of his "mailbags", which just falls short of a Nooner on the Best-Ways-To-Spend-Your-Lunch-Hour hall of fame.)  (Also, if you get hooked and you're not careful, Simmons' affinity for hyperbole, tangents, pop-culture references, links, footnotes, lists, informal speech, parentheses, and sexual innuendo will infect your own prose. Just sayin'.)  I've been asking for this book since September, dropping hints like Ralphie Parker, and so far it's more than met my expectations.  His chapter on Wilt vs. Russell is epic.  (Although he's not going out on a limb, his case for Russell is still informative and funny as he systematically dismantles any notions about Russell's offensive mediocrity or Chamberlain's inferior supporting cast.)  At some point Simmons devotes a long chapter to ranking the top 75 or 100 NBA players of all time, and apparently - I haven't gotten there yet - this Pyramid of Legends and its accompanying arguments contains many unusual valuations and omissions.   I'm looking forward to getting to these rankings.

Ranking is a wonderful and universal pastime, is it not?  If there's more than two of something, we rank them.  And we'll do it over and over again.  We rank and re-rank movies, movie sequels, bowl games, Beatles albums, girlfriends, boyfriends, holidays (since 1991 my buddy Dave has never strayed from his "Halloween, no contest! No contest!" declaration), Dickens stories, candy bars, gymnastic floor routines, teachers, cars, meals, presidents, quarterbacks.  My wife and I like to name the Best Burger/Taco/Barbecue in Town, and we also regularly conduct a  HighLight-and-Lowlight-of-the-Day breakdown.  (Then there's our favorite: Best Day of the Week.)  Sociologists could say it satisfies our need for an orderly universe, or that our identity depends on a perceived sense of taste/values, or I don't know what.  But often when I'm sitting there in traffic or in that little room in the house or talking with a high school friend I'll take one of these topics and put it to the test again: "Exorcist, Alien, Shining, Exorcist III - bear with me, hear me out, no, it's truly scary, the one with George C. Scott, I'm sending it to you on Amazon, no, it's a classic, totally underrated, THEN Silence of the Lambs. THEN The Ring" or "her, her, her, HER, her..wait, no, HER then her..." or "Snickers, Kit Kat, Twix, Butterfinger, and then Milky Way I guess..." or you get the idea.

Today we will launch the first of a series of interactive ranking sessions, and, given the theme of this site, the debut subject will be Top 3 Basketball Moments that You Watched.  You can draw from any game you ever witnessed live or on TV, and you can define Memorable however you want.  Merely something that's always stayed with you, that's still there in vivid color.  Obviously, there's no contesting your choices, as these are your memories, and you need not justify their existence.  We're doing this for the stories.  So start up your retrospect-mobiles, go deep in the archives, and describe to us whatever comes first into your noggin.  Mine go like this...

1) The Adrian Dantley and Vinnie Johnson Collision.  In 1987 the Detroit Pistons were poised to win Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals against the intolerable Celtics at Boston Garden when these two workhorses smashed heads diving for a loose ball in the paint.  It was an unnatural catastrophe, a punch in the gut from the universe, a jarring rend in reality as The Microwave sat dazed on the floor whilst Dantley lay beside him, cold.  Older guys, or guys with health concerns - say, James Edwards and Rick Mahorn - might understandably go down, but not physical specimens like Vinnie and Adrian Dantley.  And you couldn't say, "Get Up!" because it was obvious that these guys' brains were literally out of order.  It was also the second calamity to befall Detroit in this series. (The Bird steal of Game 5 haunts the chambers of memory and might have occupied this number 1 spot except for this collision's devastating finality and physical casualty.)  This is not a victory, nor a basket, nor a basketball play per se, but it is nonetheless seared in the mind for all time.  You say "memorable moment" and I respond "VJ and AD go down."  

2) Michigan destroys Indiana 83-52 for the Big Ten title.  In 1986 I watched this one live in our family's den on a Saturday afternoon, and then again thirty more times on videotape.  This was a field day for the Wolverines.  The way I remember it, Roy Tarpley, Butch Wade, Richard Relford, Gary Grant, Glen Rice, Robert Henderson, Antoine Joubert, Guarde Thompson, and even twelfth-man Steve Stoiko all grabbed 14 offensive rebounds, nabbed 6 steals, and scored 14 points each in this route.  It was the final home game for Michigan's vaunted seniors, and Brent Musburger gave that fact, and numerous other aspects of the game, his inimitable brand of reverence.  ("Tarpley, they call him the vacuum cleaner, steps up to the line.  What a magnificent finale for this Senior Captain.  And he hits 'em both.  There'll be plenty of Bolivian marching powder on Packard tonight, Keith!") Indiana's best performer was an unlikely-looking guy off the bench named Todd Jadlow.      

3) Dan Russo scores 14 points in 4 minutes. In December of 1988, on Court 2 of the Covington Middle School gym, 6th-grade teammate Dan Russo checks in and proceeds to run a one-man half-court press and score seven consecutive layups off steals.  We had twenty-something guys on that no-cuts team, and by his third steal nobody was watching Court 1 anymore, and by his fourth steal everybody was hyperventilating.  By the seventh one, we'd lost our minds. And it all happened in the amount of time it'll take to read this paragraph.  Some background on this guy: he was not tall, but was insanely fast and coordinated, played better with his off-hand than most guys did with their strong hand, and was virtually mute.  Also, he ran a 5:30 mile in sixth grade and was apparently some kind of soccer legend.  Dan invited me over a few times that spring and summer and, in silent contests, he'd beat me twelve out of fifteen games.  He was the only kid I knew who needed no Nintendo break, who was content to play hoops for three solid hours.  Once, when it was too icy out, we played the century's most intense hour of door-basketball; it was startling to get the Nerf ball stolen and realize that here, too, he'd give no quarter.  Easily the most competitive guy I'd ever met.  At the same time, he was one of life's Phineous's - the kind of dude who, when some cool-kid spit on his Egyptian buddy Ahmed during lunchtime two-on-two, simply took this kid by the shoulders and spit right back in his face. (No popular-faction retaliation followed: no rumor-igniting, no name-calling, no middle-fingers.  Rare in the socially stratified and recriminating world that was Middle School.)  Well anyway, summer rolled around, and one day as his mom drove me home, she told me that Dan was going to start attending a private school that fall of '89.  And so he did.  And I never heard from him again.  In later years, a guy that went to school with him told me he sustained some injuries in high school, but that he excelled at lacrosse nonetheless.  This person said Dan went to West Point and eventually became an Army Ranger, which would be about right.  Anyway, the 14 points in 4 minutes was just electrifying.

So there's three bball spectating moments out of millions and millions.  It is fun to share those and relive the watching of them.  Do not hesitate to contribute your own here, as To Eleven By Ones aspires to provide readers with eclectic b-ball content from various and sundry sources! 

The Title Component of this Post

We went to Jumpy Gym the other morning with some friends.  None of us had been there before.  It's a large, carpeted space that used to be a grocery store, and for $8 you and your child can romp shoeless in a dozen giant inflatable castles, slides, and moonwalks.  We accompanied Little J up and down several of the slides, and she became independent when she saw a little friend scaling them herself, which illustrated to me the inspiring power of example.  Today's work-jargon would call that "the capacity-growing potential of the peer modeling piece."

Speaking of inspiring, this is our friend Jeff shortly before leaving Jumpy Gym.

I love this.  Shades of Parkour with the attempted ricochet off the wall.  Speaking of Parkour, The Office had a hilarious bit earlier this season.  Check it out.

Except for the phrase "check it out," eliminating all text is the goal here on this site.  Okay now I'm going to show you a hilarious spoof of The Shining trailer.  Check it out.  

Just kidding.  (But seriously look it up some time on Youtube.)

We had a nice turnout of twelve on Sunday.  With the young, new guys unaccountably absent, it was the original Jeff-assembled gang, including a few dudes who had been AWOL for months.  The day was beautiful, and my team had a sweet run of three wins until falling in the last game, 15-14. Randy drained one with his foot on the line, and then Joey's money turnaround bank clinched it. Dammit.  Always like to win that last one, but it was not to be.  Well, it might have been if, at 14-11 us, I'd kept Gil from nailing a three to bring them to 14-13 (we play by ones and twos), but no.  Cue the fangs. Swish.  And so then that pumped up Randy and Joey to finish us off. 

Or you might say: "That grew Randy's capacity and then Joey executed the victory piece."   

Well, time to go here.  I've got to go ahead and complete the lunch strand of the day!

Dr. Pearl

In the 1997 movie Waiting for Guffman, Dr. Allan Pearl (Eugene Levy) says he is somebody who "loves to make people laugh."  He elaborates:

"....I've been doing it since, you know, school.  People ask me, 'You must have been the class clown!' and I tell them 'No, I wasn't.'  But I sat beside the class clown, and I studied him.  And I picked some things up. And I have to say that at parties and family functions I love breaking people up."

On Sunday, I was Dr. Pearl.  On Sunday I was given a gift, an opportunity to learn at close hand from an expert.  Allow me to elaborate.

The cold snap we experienced last week featured the lowest Central Texas temperatures since 1976 (17 degrees on Friday night), but two days later, by 10:30am, conditions were bball-friendly once again.  The air was still harsh on hands, and breaths were evident, but the cloudless January skies promised a midwinter beauty.  Gil, Randy, and I were there to enjoy it.

The only problem was, nobody else had shown up.  We kept our sweats on, warmed up, stretched out, got shots in.  And waited.  Finally, at 11:30, we decided to play 21.  It was a good hard game, we all shot well.  I tried to remember "Defense!", got some steals, and won on a three. It had been a while, and it felt good. 

 As we were finishing, a fourth guy shows up, loping up out of the woods towards us to say What's Up!  'Twas none other than White Kobe, ball in hand, ready to take people down.  And at that moment I knew I had been given a gift.  An opportunity to go mano a mano with the best of the Sunday players.  With no guys waiting, this was a chance to study him up close, intensely experience his strengths, and discern his weaknesses.  This is an effortless winner, a 26 year-old 6'4 guy whose layups are always at the rim.  A killer shooter.   

Two-on-two would give everybody lots of ball-time, and lots of room to operate.  Somebody's always on the attack, and there's less time to catch your breath.  Every rebound's a scramble.

Randy and I against Gil and the K-meister.  We start, Randy inbounds to me, left wing.  Kobe in my face like a windshield.  This is the real deal.  Alright, summon up all your powers, you're gonna need every backyard move from summer '86 to the present to pull this off.  Let's start with this one: Ball fake left, jab right, go left, go hard, HARD! layup! That's what I'm talking about. Make-it-take-it, we get it again, but I miss a 3 (going for stun here), Gil rebounds now White Kobe's got it outside the arc, jumps...swish.  Now he's got it at the elbow, turns around, leap to get a piece!, no....swish.  Rinse and repeat.

Randy and I lost three in a row to Gil and White Kobe.  I was playing as hard and as well as I could hope to play.  I'm talking about the full repertoire of left hand scoops, up-and-unders, three pointers, foul-line jumpers, full-speed drives.  And on rebounds and defense I was working at late-July-of-'08-level, or even harder, as I figured I couldn't black out in the winter. Randy has a steady 12 foot set-shot about which somebody once said, "Randy, that's why we pay you the big bucks!" and he was indeed draining it when I found him open.  (Just as the Eagle does not swim, Randy does not create.)  (And, I believe this is why I chose him for my teammate: so that I might run the offense.)  (Does it also provide an excuse for a loss, choosing to be the obvious underdog? Might it be a way to avoid the pressure and responsibility to win?  I shudder to think so.) (My friend August says No.  He says you do it for the challenge, for the enhanced triumph of that victory, and to avoid the hollow pride of winning with the more talented team.)  (But then I posit: that is vainglorious, desiring the greater prestige accruing to the underdog winner.  There's greater honor in choosing the most even teams, and admit, "Kobe's better than me, Gil's better than Randy; I'll play with Gil.") (But August might say: screw that, let one feel no compunction about winning, and if it feels better when you're the underdog, bring it on.) (Then I say: if you win, then are you really the underdog? What does it mean to be the less talented team yet win?) (Feel free to weigh in on this hot debate.  All I know for certain is that I thought Randy and I could do it, and it was going to be excellent when we did.)

But I had no answer to Kobe's skill-set.  Downtown 3 pointers: bam.  Catch-and-shoot 15 footers: bam. Turnaround fadeaway from 10 feet: bam bam bam.  Gil hit a few patented corner 3s, and required his usual considerable amount of attention and concern, but White Kobe was scoring most of their points, and they won all three games 11-5, 11-7, 11-9.

We switched teams at this point, and Gil and I played together.  We won.  I blocked a White Kobe shot, and actually burned him to the hole twice.  Gil drained from outside.  God it felt good.  But it was short-lived, as White Kobe was soon saying, "Okay let's do this" while his twinkling eyes and amused expression communicated I'm Not Used to Losing, and I Hope You're Enjoying it Because it's Over.   He proceeded to rip turnarounds on me and he and Randy won 11-7.  Aberration dealt with, order restored.  We three sat on the bench catching our breath as he continued to shoot.

Twenty minutes later I was inhaling a delicious double cheeseburger at a burger stand near our house. The day was gorgeous.  The fries were prodigiously greasy.  I just had my lunch handed to me, so to speak, but I was feeling on top of the world.  In this ruminant moment, I had several thoughts:

1) The name of the game is put the ball in the hole. This is what he does.  He's not a spinning driving dervish.  He just puts the ball in the hole. That's how he wins.

2) This guy can be beaten off the dribble.  No mistake about it.  He can be Adrian Dantley'd into submission, I think.

3) He makes the shots he practices.  I've seen him working on his turnaround (for instance, as we three left the court.)  He does it over and over and over, headphones on.  It's not rocket science, but I hadn't thought about working on, say, two specific shots over and over again.  I might choose: baseline and elbow.  Over and over.

4) He's at least 6'4, with considerable reach.  The way to stop him is through quickness and leaps.  Timing, getting as high as you can to get a piece.  All the more reason to keep running sprints and jumping rope.

And if it can't be done, then so be it.  But something tells me it can be.  In Guffman, Eugene Levy's character ends up getting a headlining job at a senior retirement center in Florida, and he experiences fulfillment.  Similarly, by watching Kobe carefully, and taking notes, I think I can eke out some more W's each Sunday.

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Time

It is a frosty night with stars abundant.  We just came in from friends' house down the road, where we sat and visited and ate nuts and kit kats and watched the kids cavort and scamper.  Their little one is nearly a year old, and his preferred mode of transport is crab-walking.  They have a Boston Terrier whose preferred instrument of communication is the tongue.  Jessica shows no concern when the object of this dog's affection is little J, so neither do I. Dogs have been licking babies for all millennia.

Before we came inside, we stood in the darkness and beheld the crystalline wonder overhead.  It never fails to awe, does it.  And it never fails to provoke a Why.  

This Christmas a friend of mine gave me a volume of C.S. Lewis' essays, through which I've working this new year. It seems that Lewis would advise one not to spend too much time searching the firmament for an answer to that Why.  And unless it were for scientific purposes, he would discourage one from pondering them too much at all, especially if the intent were to derive a spiritual feeling.  In "The Screwtape Letters", the elder demon advises his nephew Wormwood to:

 "keep (the human's) mind off the most elementary duties by directing it to the most advanced and spiritual ones.  Aggravate that most useful human characteristic, the horror and neglect of the obvious.  You must bring  him to a condition in which he can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office."  

This passage makes me recall hours spent in college - to choose one era - absorbed in idleness disguised as elevated thought.  To what end a 28-minute library-tower reverie on the Saturday shadows below?  To put off the writing of a paper, that's all.  And, by the way, those weren't reveries.  And shadows were just the first observation.  If we could get a mental audio file, they'd go about like this: "...is that my roommate?....He wants to be a dentist...Look at those girls......hot breath on the window....I'm going to make a baby foot with my hand...." 

And don't get me started on dorm-room music appreciation.  Meddle is indeed a great album*, but is 2am to 3am on a Thursday the best time again for it?  It makes one wonder about certain sects and their prohibitions against music, and is this what they were targeting? And how did they know?  

My own beloved wife, whom I on occasion call The Robot, permits herself idle time.  I'm talking about a high-quality, top-grade vegetable-state.  In the later evening, after she has done more in a day than I manage in most months, Jessica unwinds with an ice-cream, a blanket, and the Discovery channel, and lets a show about midgets/bizarre gardening accidents/septuplets wash over her for an hour.  I'll look at her in the glow of the tube, and I see a ten year-old, her eyes wide with wonder, her mouth curling up at the edges.  She is rebooting, the hard-drive reorganizing.  (I could make my own Discovery Channel show about her. It'd be a reality-challenge show called "A Million Dollars if You Stay in your Pajamas all Weekend." It would show her training with me for weeks beforehand, we'd eat carry-out every night, in one episode she'd break down and make stew when I wasn't watching.)  Understand: she's not the sort of productive person who reports her accomplishments.  It's not a decision for her, not a struggle, and requires no broadcasting.  You won't know unless you ask her.  Some of my teaching buddies and I joke about the impossibility of author Harry Wong's claim that a teacher should every day be able to "get home by 5:00pm, play tennis, and have a cocktail before dinner."  No way, we said.  Except that Jessica used to do just that, from her very first year of teaching. Sometimes through a massive effort/massive neglect I pulled it off, but not every day like she did.  And even though Wong's thirty-something-in-1970s-California visual seemed incongrous with our group of friends, we actually did sometimes play doubles.  And, of course, we often drank margaritas.  Even now, 10 years later, my wife can always go on a date on short notice (provided Auntie Julie's available to sit).  

Kipling exhorts us to "think, but not make thoughts your aim."  From my limited reading of C.S. Lewis so far, I reckon he would endorse that.  He would not discourage contemplation of life's mystery and beauty, but would say let those wonders not obscure more immediate aspirations.  When Jessica gazes from a library-tower window, as it were, you can be certain she has finished the paper.

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* I said Meddle, because that's the album we in the dorm used to listen to most, but if you're going to include a Floyd song here, it may as well be thematically related.  So from Dark Side of the Moon: