(From Ron Wolfe for the Arkansas Democrat Gazette Online)
It’s too soon to tell whether the president’s signature basketball suit of gray T-shirt and black sweat pants will set a fashion trend – or whether the White House bowling alley (Richard Nixon was a bowler) will give way to a hoop court, where Obama and Rush Limbaugh could settle their differences with a little one-on-one. Guess who wins.
Ten-year-old Vivian Boe plays for the Lady Tigers basketball team at Little Rock’s Calvary Baptist Church in the Heights. She has a clear idea of what everybody needs to know these days – how to understand the game.
There’s offense, she says, “making the goal.” There’s defense, “making sure they don’t.” And there’s back to the game.
Vivian loves to play. Some people share her enthusiasm, some don’t. Basketball is for giraffes, Ogden Gnash said. “I liked the choreography, but I didn’t care for the costumes” is how Broadway dancer Tommy Tune reviewed a game.
But times have changed like a turnover (a pastry in the kitchen, but a reverse of fortunes in basketball). Everybody shares at least the same basketball-playing president.
Barack Obama is a basketball shooter, gunner, a tickler of the twine from way back – in fact, a “wily player of pickup basketball,” according to The New York Times.
Obama’s lean frame of 6 feet 1 1 /2 inches gives him the look of a basketball player even behind the big desk in the Oval Office. His high-school ability on the court is documented on YouTube.com (search for “classic Obama basketball”). He played basketball to clear his head about running for president – and basketball the day of his election. His secretary of education is another net man, Arne Duncan.
Basketball used to be a story for the savvy sports pages. Now, it’s general news, and people don’t always know what to make of it.
The Times’ report on Obama’s pickup game, for example, calls time-out in midparagraph to define “pickup.” Otherwise, some readers might think of a double espresso, a cheap date or a small truck. Pickup basketball is a random version of the game, it says, with “unspoken rules, no referee and lots of elbows.”
“Basketball is the new golf,” is the latest catch phrase. It rebounded off the Internet, into the stands and out of the sports arena. “New golf” is a political statement as much as one about which kind of ball to give the president for his birthday, Aug. 4.
Golf is the traditional White House preference, ever since 300-pound President William Howard Taft teed off in 1909 – the choice of golfing presidents from Dwight D. Eisenhower to George H.W. Bush to Arkansan Bill Clinton. Golf implies a style of executive management based on the game that Mark Twain called “a good walk spoiled.” Golfers dress casually, look relaxed, get somebody else to help carry the load, and it’s the perfect game for hush-hush conversations. Golf makes even sports announcers whisper.
Basketball – the new golf – is something else. Basketball superstar Michael Jordan discovered the difference when he took up golf. The amazing slam-dunker found out there’s no advantage to standing 6 feet 6 inches off the ground in a game where the ball has to roll in.
“If my jump shot isn’t falling, I go to the layup,” he said. In golf, “you can’t do that.”
GRANDE CONFUSION
Basketball comes with a new language to parse out, even more confusing than Starbucks’. In basketball, tall means tall. Shaquille O’Neal is 7 feet 1 inch tall. In Starbucks, “tall” means short, and O’Neal is a venti.
Obama’s administration is little more than a month old, and the job already has given him other kinds of skunks, sewers, rejections, penalties, clutches, bonuses and give-and-go’s – besides those in basketball – to worry about.
(But things could be worse. If candidate John Kerry had won the presidency, in 2004, then a book on windsurfing would be required reading, and the new terms to learn would be gybe, luff tube, boom, battens, skeg, apparent wind, ketchup stain ….)
It’s too soon to tell whether the president’s signature basketball suit of gray T-shirt and black sweat pants will set a fashion trend – or whether the White House bowling alley (Richard Nixon was a bowler) will give way to a hoop court, where Obama and Rush Limbaugh could settle their differences with a little one-on-one. Guess who wins.
But it’s clear that anyone who wants to feel on common terms with the new president has got to know enough about basketball to talk the talk, if not walk the -
Tweeet! The referee’s whistle signals a violation: walking.
- if not play the game, or as Dave Barry wrote: “I haven’t been able to slam-dunk the basketball for the past five years. Or, for the previous 38 years before that, either.”
Where to start? Where else?
The beginning, among the beginners.
TOE THE LINE
A physical education teacher, James Naismith, invented basketball in 1891. He taught at the School for Christian Workers (now Springfield College) in Springfield, Mass. New Englanders tended to sit like cold globs of maple syrup through the long winter, and Naismith’s boss told him to come up with some kind of indoor game that would keep the students on their tippy-toes.
“The invention of basketball was not an accident,” Naismith said. “It was developed to meet a need. Those boys simply would not play ‘Drop the Handkerchief.’”
He thought up a game to be played with soccer balls and a couple of boxes, but he couldn’t find any boxes. Instead, he attached a peach basket to the balcony railing at either end of the school gymnasium.
Had he found the boxes he wanted, he might have invented boxball. Good thing he didn’t. Boxes encourage people to pack. Basketball came to stay.
The game evolved bigger, taller, faster, more technical, more glittery with its star names and nicknames from Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain and Earvin “Magic” Johnson to Allen Iverson and Kobe Bryant of morecourts-than-one fame. Some of the game’s players and coaches become such experts, they turn around and write books for know-nothings.
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Basketball is by the New York Knickerbockers legend Walt “Clyde” – “Mr. Cool” – “The Prince of Madison Square Garden” Frazier, and Basketball for Dummies is by former Notre Dame Coach Richard “Digger” Phelps.
“You need a basket,” according to Phelps’ years of experience. “And a ball.”
Here’s how the two go together:
“To win, you’ve got to put the ball in the macrame.” – Terry McGuire.
“The only difference between a good shot and a bad shot is if it goes in or not.” – Charles Barkley.
AS A RULE
Basketball might have a little more to it, but the Lady Tigers’ assistant coach and part-time referee in the church league, Steve Whisnant, is reluctant to drop a load of rules on his team of third- and fourth-graders.
“We don’t want to make it so complicated that we take the fun part out of it,” Whisnant says.
Besides, he admits, “I’m still learning.”
Whisnant’s 8-year-old daughter, Skylar, and his 5-year-old twin girls, Mackenzie and Sydney, play in the church league. His incentive to understand the game is one of the duties of fatherhood.
He likes it, but he would be out there with a whistle on a string around his neck, anyway, like it or not. He does his best to referee some of the games in which his daughters aren’t playing.
The littlest hoopsters “don’t have a lot of skills yet,” the ref says, “so they’re just out there running around with the ball.”
A year or two older, “those boys are fast,” he says. “I’m trying to call, but I miss a lot.”
Lucky for him, the referees generally aren’t very strict. If they blew the whistle on every infraction, Whisnant says, the game would be nothing but violations and free throws.
“We learn about walking and double dribbling,” he says, “and they do a lot of that.”
Free throws seldom reach the basket, anyway.
FREE-FOR-ALL
The game is more demanding on the professional level – and trickier still on the political.
Political analysts study each president’s choice of sport as a way to judge the man’s character. Kennedy: sailing. Reagan: horsemanship. George W. Bush: bicycle riding.
The Internet turned President Bush’s bicycling into a game called “Stay the Course,” in which “you must face a series of domestic and foreign policy obstacles. Your goal is to choose the proper course … and avoid crashing your bike.”
Obama’s basketball sets a different challenge. Pickup basketball, for example – the game of “lots of elbows” – ow-w! – is apt to go according to the loose rule of “No harm, no foul.” Nobody hurt enough to call an ambulance, that is, no reason to quit playing. “No death, no foul,” some say. “No autopsy, no foul.” No bailout, no foul? No missile launch, no foul? All of a sudden, every American has a whistle around his neck.
NICETIES ON THE COURT
Basketball is like Vivian says: You try to score. You try to keep the other side from scoring. And then, yes, there is a little more to it:
A double dribble “is when you stop and start again,” she says.
Off the court, Vivian likes to read. In reading, it’s OK to start a book, put it down, start again – but not so in basketball.
You can’t just walk off with the ball, either: That’s walking (or traveling). You’re supposed to dribble. Bounce the ball as you go, or the referee calls a violation (nicely in a church game), and the other team gets the ball.
Guarding the other team “is when you get in front of them and make sure there is no way they can shoot the ball,” teammate Jaclyn Pugh, 9, says.
Being guarded is when “someone stands in front of you, and it’s kind of hard to make a goal.”
The trick is to block your opponent without contact. No hitting, no grabbing: That’s a foul, and the ref gives the other player a free throw.
A free throw is when “there’s a line you have to stand behind, and you have to try to get [the ball] in,” says Cate Hollingsworth, 8, of the Tigers’ rival, the Lady Eagles.
Most basketball players like a free throw, but Cate says it’s nowhere near the best part of the game.
The best part, she says, “is the friends you get to meet.”
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