Hoop Dreams

I'd like to talk about basketball, because if you knew me in real life that's the last thing you'd probably expect me to obsess over, sports-wise (well, that and NASCAR, golf, or hunting. Oh, and fishing, bowling, or spelunking). But, it turns out that I am kinda a hoops geek. The answer eludes me as much as it does you.

I think there's something to the dual nature of the sport (glory-hogging individuality and team-oriented selflessness) that appeals to me, or the sides of me that would be attracted to either side of that coin. Unlike in football, you can see the players mask-less and helmet-less, and unlike in baseball there's no clear hierarchy unless you're paying attention (and to be honest, I usually am not. I couldn't tell you what a point guard is in the NBA). And it's not that I even enjoy watching hoops on the telly; apart from the Finals, I can't really sit through an entire regular-season game. But put a book about the sport down in front of me, and I'm entranced from cover to cover.

Weird, huh?

Right about now, it would be appropriate to reveal that, somewhere buried in the depths of my stillborn computer, there lies a manuscript (only a few pages, nothing much beyond a few false starts) of mixed fiction/autobiography entitled "The Loneliness of the Trash-Can Basketball All-Star." If I ever get my computer fixed, or another computer, I'm not sure if I'll use the same set-up or title (because like I said, false starts). But I am quite obsessed with throwing items of trash (usually rolled-up paper towels or empty soda bottles) into trash cans in a manner that suggests Michael Jordan...if Michael Jordan were under six feet, white, kinda pudgy, and near-sighted.

My romance with basketball is not a contemporary one; not for me the Lin-sanity of last season (though I did push the "like" button on the Facebook Jeremy Lin app because I'm a sucker for online crazes). No, I prefer the hardscrabble days of West and Wilt, Russell and those eleven championship rings, and Jordan in his greatness. I've read books about all of the following, as well as Bill Simmons' simply-titled "Book of Basketball" (which I recommend as a great primer on the history of professional hoops), and books about the college game. In fact, right now I'm on a quixotic mission to track down a copy of "The Open Man," Dave DeBusschere's diary of the 1970 Knicks championship season, simply because I saw it mentioned in "When the Garden Was Eden" (an excellent book about that same Knicks team of the Seventies). I don't even have a dog in the NBA professional fight (though the idea that LeBron now has a ring with Miami is galling, to be sure).

Basketball will never be my favorite sport (baseball, which I also love to read about) or second-favorite (football, college and pro). But it is the one that, when I'm daydreaming or remembering climactic scenes from the Michael J. Fox verison of Teen Wolf, I could see myself playing, albeit minus the lycanthropic transformations mid-court. Okay, maybe a little of that sneaks in, but only after I've been fouled. Basketball on the page fascinates me as few other things do, and I'll be damned if I can explain it. But it is a beautiful game to read about, that's for sure.