Head Games — In Some Deeply Sensuous Way, The Game Inhabits The Player, No Matter Where Or How You Play It
Sunday, April 21, 1996
The Seattle Times.
Terry McDermott
I USED TO PLAY IN a twice-weekly pickup game that included two nationally syndicated cartoonists, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, a Starbucks founder, a software developer, a music-festival promoter and a bunch of other riffraff, mainly journalists.
The game was notable for its bad play and good humor and for the rapidly deteriorating bodies of its players, most of whom were of an age to put away childish expectations – like the idea that you would suddenly develop a jump shot or that Rick Anderson would ever hit the open man.
The game was played in small gyms with hard, close walls. You never had to run too far, or too fast, lest you run out of room and slam into a wall.
There was among the group an addiction to basketball that, when it began to reveal itself, astonished us all. We would admit with embarrassment the degree to which the games had become the focal point of our weeks, our lives.
Writers couldn’t write, lost in drop-step daydreams. Coffee roasters couldn’t roast, carried off on visions of sugar-plum fadeaways. Bound by recollection and anticipation, all else in life was measured by its distance from the previous game or the next one.
Oh, how we suffered for the dreams.
The variety of injuries inflicted by age and lack of skill was remarkable. More remarkable still was the persistence with which people played through them. In the pros, this would be known as playing with pain. For us, it was playing to avoid the pain of not playing.
“Far Side” cartoonist Gary Larson – good middle-range jumper, sneaky enough on defense to be known as The Snake – had knees as brittle as dried flowers. They were beyond surgery. There’s only so much cartilage to remove.
Larson’s wife once told me a story of him coming home after a game. She happened to walk around the corner as he was climbing the stairs to shower. He was crawling.
Gary, she said, are you hurt?
This no doubt seemed a reasonable question. To Larson, it was absurd.
What do you mean? he said.
You’re on your hands and knees, she said.
I do this every Saturday, he said. This is how I get up the stairs after basketball.
Larson said later he had thought nothing of the fact that the pain forced him to crawl.
Doesn’t everybody do that? he asked.
I HAVEN’T played now for five years. I miss it terribly. I have dreams. In them sometimes I move with watery grace. One night some friends say, “You should come play.” The friends are in their 20s.
For a moment, forgetting the knees, the ankles, the shoulder, forgetting I’m 45 years old, I think, “Yes, I should.”
It’s the sheer physical motion that gets you, that stamps itself in memory.
In some deeply sensuous way, the game inhabits the player, no matter where or how you play it, whether it’s the high drama of the NBA playoffs or a rag-tag game at midnight on an outdoor court in Belltown.
As a kid, I’d practice with the high-school team from 3 until 6, run home, refuel, and run downtown to The Hall, a WPA remnant that included a two-cell jail, our city hall – a room with two desks, a file cabinet and a sleeping cop -and the best gym ever built, filled with soft, dust-filtered light, kind rims and a live floor.
At school, there were coaches. At The Hall, there were games.
You might find yourself playing with high-school stars, college studs home for the holidays and 30-year-old bartenders with cigarette packs in their shirt pockets, girlfriends drinking Falstaff out of long-neck bottles on the sidelines.
I remember one time guarding Dickie Fraser. He was a tough left-hander with a good jump shot, and spoiled by it the way that shooters often are. I was younger, smaller, blade-thin, but defensively I was a leech and made him work much harder than he wanted.
No shooter likes to work, at least not for long. Shooters just want to shoot, and when they can’t they grow irritable. It’s a class thing. A jump shooter is an aristocrat, landed gentry. He has certain expectations of an easy life. Rich kids have jump shots. The rest of us learn to drive to the basket because we can’t shoot. We bleed for our points.
What shooters do when they can’t get their shots is back up, until eventually they can get shots but can’t make them. When this happens, you’ve taken them out of their game. You’ve won.
After one stretch of this during which Fraser hardly touched the ball and couldn’t get a shot, he walked the ball up the court with me guarding him closely. As he dribbled with his left hand, he suddenly slapped me very hard across the face with his right.
Even as I tackled him and tried to break his head open on the bleachers, I was laughing. I had won.
Dickie Fraser would have hated Gary Payton.
I mean, if there had been players like Gary Payton where I grew up, I’m sure he would have hated them. There weren’t, then. There aren’t very many now.
I FIRST SAW Gary Payton play when he was a freshman at Oregon State University. He was so scrawny then his head was the thickest part of his body. He was a brash, mouthy city kid whose presence in the deep sticks of Corvallis seemed inexplicable. His coach was Ralph Miller, a craggy-faced old man whose teams played the same strict, patterned style Miller had been teaching for 40 years. Miller’s teams were Miller’s. They belonged to him, not the players.
Basketball is the most uncoachable of games, yet by ratio of coach to player the most coached. NBA teams now have at least three coaches. Some have four, one for every three players.
All basketball coaches, to one degree or another, are lunatic.
My brother is a college coach. He is a mild-mannered, responsible adult, except during games. He once became so incensed with the officiating during a game and so lost in his anger that he accidentally turned a complete backflip while trying to pull himself away from confronting a referee.
He nailed it, too. Nadia Comaneci would have been proud.
At time-outs, coaches sputter and foam at the mouth. They turn colors. No one listens to them. Or if they do, not carefully.
This is not insubordination, but wisdom. Have you ever heard what a coach says during crucial time-outs of big games? It’s gibberish, brought on I suppose by the impossibility of the task, of reducing it to words.
Personally, I hated every coach I ever played for. The thing I hated most was that they were there at all, the simple ineradicable fact of their existence.
They all saw their job as controlling. I saw mine as breaking free.
Miller was exactly the kind of coach I hated most. I thought he and Payton would kill one another. They thrived. And did so because Miller yielded control to Payton. I’ve loved Payton ever since.
AN NBA ARENA IS shot through with manufactured joy and noise, a Disney ride for the adrenaline addict.
The room goes dark, mammoth speakers thunder and moan; the crowd buzzes; spotlights seek and find their targets and the PA rumbles out their names.
This is all before the game starts. It’s packaging, and to the player irrelevant. What matters most to many players is not the game, but their individual games.
What players invariably say when they are displeased with their situation on a team is they are somehow being prevented from “playing my game.”
This can mean a thousand different things, and does. There are as many individual games in the league as there are players. What an individual’s game comes down to is not usually very complicated. It means getting the ball as frequently as he would like at that particular position on the court where the player thinks he is most effective, and where he can make his favorite move.
Payton’s “game” begins not at a spot on the floor, but in his head. His game is attitude.
Payton is not a classic point guard. To play guard in the NBA you must normally be one of two things – a passer or a shooter. Payton is neither.
By professional standards, he’s a poor shooter, which means he should be a passer. But by point guard standards, he is only an average passer. There are arguably two better passers on his own team.
Shooters shoot. Scorers score. Gary Payton works.
He creates the best part of his offense – running the open court – by fighting a war on the defensive end.
At times during games, surrounded by all the flash and hum, Payton seems oblivious, as if he’s back at the corner of Foothill and High in East Oakland, head lolling to the left, a look somewhere between boredom and bewilderment on his thin brown face, flat-footed, weight to one side, arms slack.
He walks around the court with a visual jangle, as if the pieces didn’t all come from the same kit. It’s more of a shuffle, really, with just enough momentum to sustain motion. Bony knees barely bend. Hips lock and unlock with each step. Feet scarcely lose contact with the ground.
Heading nowhere, just hanging.
Then, wham! In an instant he snaps intensely to, febrile, every fiber a live wire tightly wound. He crouches low, hands inches from the wooden floor, cupped, gaze fixed on the eyes of the man with the ball.
Payton is alley-cat quick and strong enough he can at times completely dictate where that man goes, barring him from the spots he desires. He’ll turn him, stop his forward motion, sometimes make him turn his back completely to protect the ball. When this happens, the man is doomed. The double team arrives, a flick of one of those live wires punches the ball free, and a scramble is on.
On the nights when it’s all working, no one beats Payton to these balls. He’s there and gone.
In the open court, the current runs hottest. Shawn Kemp, all legs and leonine grace, fills an outside lane and just past half court, Payton at full speed, without pause or the least sideways glance, lifts the ball off the dribble, a lob thrown one-handed from the hip to open air above the rim and suddenly, from off the screen, there is Kemp, closing, reaching, a catch and a flush.
CONSIDER THE nature of our three national games.
Baseball is an aesthetic, slow and old. All actions occur serially. The pitcher throws. The batter bats. The fielder catches. Baseball players are like pages in a storybook, each waiting its time to be turned.
Football is war. The generals are in charge. All actions occur simultaneously but without spontaneity. Players are gears in a coaching machine.
Basketball, a friend says, is sex. It is personal, one-on-one, tantalizing, full of tension and confrontation and release. Players move simultaneously as in football, but the motions follow at most outlines, not diagrams. Action is unscripted. Players are like tops. The coach winds them up, but once the game starts, he can only start them running and hope they don’t spin out of control.
Payton carries this threat with him at all times, that he’ll explode, lose all discipline. Yet in an important way he is the most disciplined of players, confined by his love of the game. Like pick-up players, he plays to avoid the pain of not playing, too. He has missed only one Sonic game in four years.
The game he missed was last month. He was suspended for a run-in with Orlando’s Joe Wolf. The referees were grim. They looked like escapees from an Irish wake, thick, pale men, breathless and sweating. They sent GP packing, then stood and wiped the sweat from their foreheads with single fingers, as if to deny it was there in any abundance.
Gary Payton doesn’t sweat. He talks. He’s a voluble guy. As Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said: “Gary talks a lot, but he has a lot to talk about.” He jaws with the opponent’s bench. He musses an opposing coach’s tidy hairdo.
I saw the whole Wolf incident. Payton did not head-butt Wolf. Definitely did not. He might ever so slightly have inclined his head in the direction of Wolf’s chin. He was talking. Voluble guys when they talk tend to come a little unstuck. When Payton talks, his head moves.
It’s what he talks with.
Much is made of this habit; trash talk, it’s usually called, when someone doesn’t like it. It is said to be a recent phenomenon, a sign of the decline of civil society.
Al McGuire, who describes himself as the worst player ever to last three seasons in the NBA, did it 40 years ago with his mouth. A coach said, “Al should be sent to Vietnam. He’d talk the Viet Cong into a trance within two weeks.”
He was Gary Payton before Payton was born.
The cliché is that it’s a city game and the talk and attitude and style come from basketball’s city playgrounds. Maybe, but some of the best to ever play came from places like Rocky Mount, Cabin Creek and French Lick.
That’s the point exactly. Basketball has in it the tensions of urban and rural, of elegance and strength, of beauty and beast.
It is a collision of these differences, out of which emerges a display of essential selves. Basketball is transcendent. It is a judgment. It is you.
It is April and I am enthralled. The NBA playoffs start this week. The Sonics are one of the best professional sports teams in the city’s history. Payton is here and loose and free.
Copyright (c) 1996 Seattle Times Company, All Rights Reserved.