During the 1994-1995 NBA season, I attended nearly all of the Seattle SuperSonics' home games; watched on TV nearly all their away games; listened to countless pre- and post-game interviews and call-in shows on the radio; talked to or tried to talk to players, coaches, agents, journalists, fans, my wife; corresponded with members of the Sonics newsgroup on the Internet; read articles and articles and articles. Although I'm a passionate basketball fan and Sonics fan, when I was writing the book I wasn't interested in the game per se—who won, who lost, the minutiae of strategy. I was interested in how the game gets talked about. By the end of the season I'd accumulated hundreds of pages of often utterly illegible notes, the roughest of rough drafts. Over the last three years I transformed those notes into this book—a daily diary which runs the length of one team's long-forgotten season and which is now focused, to the point of obsession, on how white people (including especially myself) think about and talk about black heroes, black scapegoats, black bodies.
What John Edgar Wideman calls "our country's love/hate affair with the black body" can be seen nowhere more clearly than in the National Basketball Association, which is a photo negative of American race relations: strong young black men have some of the power, much of the money, and all of the fun. The NBA is a place where, without ever acknowledging it—and because it's never acknowledged, it's that much more potent and telling—white fans and black players enact and quietly explode virtually every racial issue and tension in the culture at large. Race, the league's taboo topic, is the league's true subject.
Listen:
11.5.94 My initial impression, as I stand next to the Seattle SuperSonics in the locker room an hour before the first game of the season, is that they're twelve utterly unconnected buildings: they convey no sense whatsoever that they're all part of a single city. I'm also struck by the fact that none of the players, tall as they are, seem quite as tall as they're listed in the program, which mythifies them by magnifying them. Staying away from stars, I ask Bill Cartwright, a backup center, whatever happened to Rod Williams, who played with Cartwright at the University of San Francisco nearly twenty years ago and was the best player I ever played against when I played against him in high school. Cartwright says "Hot Rod" was just too damn slow. I ask Byron Houston, a reserve forward, about the Death Gate cycle, a seven-volume science-fiction series of which he is reportedly a devoted fan, and he declines to discuss with me the books' appeal. In the Sonics' media guide, Kendall Gill, the Sonics' shooting-guard, lists "playing in the Illinois high school state tournament" as the highlight of his life. Since the new documentary film Hoop Dreams is about the high-school careers of two basketball players from the south side of Chicago, I ask him if he'd be willing to watch a tape of the movie I've obtained from the distributor, then do a brief interview about his impressions of the film. What's fascinating to me about how Gill says no is he says sure, but his eyes communicate, unmissably: No, of course not, you must be kidding, never, not in a million years. I think I'm trying to be friendly, to treat them as People rather than as Athletes, but what I'm really trying to do, I realize later, is neuter them, make them slow students in the back of my class, put them on equal or lesser footing.
On leave from the professoriat, I'm "covering" (pretending to cover?) the Sonics' 1994-95 season for the Seattle Weekly; a column or two a month is all that's expected of me. I love basketball a lot, have played the game my whole life, been a fan my whole life, and this gig is an opportunity, I hope, to see brilliance up close. When I make my way from the locker room up to the press-row dinner buffet, I convey to my new colleagues my surprise at how chilly the atmosphere in the locker room is, how guarded the players are.
"Wait till they come back from a 1-and-4 road trip in the middle of February," says Glenn Nelson, the Sonics beat writer for the Seattle Times.
Rich Myhre of the Everett Herald instructs me, "You've got to get in and get out with specific questions."
"Otherwise they get suspicious," someone else says. "They think you're trying to steal plays."
"Apparently you're not supposed to just hang out there," I say. "You can't—"
Steve Kelley, a sports columnist for the Seattle Times, says, "The goal becomes: you just want to get out of there and have them not tear your head off."
"I couldn't believe how confrontational it was," I say. "Still, for me it was fun."
"Well," they all say in unison, "you're new."
The Seattle Coliseum is being renovated, so all Sonic home games this season are being played an hour south at the Tacoma Dome—an antiseptic igloo, a terrible building for basketball. Barry Ackerley, a billboard magnate who is the owner of the Sonics and several TV and radio stations, including the Sonics' "flagship station," KJR Sports Radio 950 AM, can't abide the criticism he receives from sportswriters, so as punishment we're sequestered in a crow's nest less than twenty rows from the top of the stadium. The court, at the other end of a pair of binoculars, is barely a rumor. I'm nevertheless giddy to be here, getting stat sheets shoved under my nose every twenty minutes, and if my fellow sportswriters laugh a little at my puppy-dog enthusiasm, I find their Ring Lardner imitations awfully quaint. I've never been able to stand Kendall Gill's air of debonair elegance, and I tell Glenn Nelson how much I liked his recent story in which he wrote that Gill "decided," after three days, that he had a bad back.
Nelson insists he has no idea what I'm talking about and looks at me like I'm nuts. "I forget about a piece the minute I write it," he says.
It's a flat, listless game. Utah, playing its second game in two nights, appears tired. The Sonics shoot miserably. During halftime the Bud Light Daredevils perform gymnastic stunts so that when we drink beer we'll understand that we're doing something adventurous and risky. The Sonics overcome a 10-point deficit by making twice as many free throws as the Jazz. In the last few seconds of the game, with Seattle up by 7, Gary Payton, the Sonics' point guard, is way ahead of everybody else on a breakaway. Instead of laying the ball in himself for an easy two, he throws it between his legs to Gill, who tries a needlessly difficult reverse dunk, which clangs off the rim. An Israeli journalist is sitting next to me in the press box; if I understand him correctly, he's the West Coast correspondent for an Israeli newspaper and his column this month is called "Hi, Seattle." He is absolutely apoplectic over this play by Payton: "It is not professional. It is not done. It could lose the game." He's right, of course, but isn't it obvious that Gary will do almost anything to make himself feel something in this anhedonic auditorium? This is what I adore about him.
At the post-game press conference with Sonics coach George Karl, I'm amazed at the timorous obviousness/obliviousness of the reporters' questions. A TV reporter says, "You knew tonight would be a tough game, didn't you?"
Another reporter asks, "Were you nervous?"
The crucial shots of the game were three 3-pointers by Seattle's reserve center Sam Perkins, and someone says, "Sam's threes were big, weren't they?"
I try to go to the head of the class by asking something at least fairly specific: "Did you consciously try to call quicker timeouts tonight than you did last year?" Last year it drove me crazy how long Karl would wait before calling a timeout when the other team was on a roll.
"Conscientiously?" Karl says. "No, not conscientiously."
Later, Karl says, "Any time you play Utah, I call it a smart game. You're going up against Stockton [the only white superstar in the NBA], who makes great decisions all the time."
During the press conference, a young black man stands just outside the ring of reporters, leaning against a wall where I've placed my briefcase on the floor (I want both hands free to write notes and hold a microphone). His hand is just a few inches from my briefcase. At one point I find myself checking over my shoulder to make sure my briefcase is still there. At the end of the press conference he goes up and greets Karl, who gives him a hug, and then I feel, oh, just a little bit worse.
Just outside the Jazz locker room, a solidly built black man pushing an aluminum walker introduces himself to Stockton.
"You probably don't remember me, do you?" the man says.
"No," Stockton says.
"When we were seniors at Gonzaga [University, in Spokane], I was playing football and broke my neck and you played in a benefit game for me. I was really honored that you would do that and that's why I came here tonight to see you."
Stockton understands what he has heard to be a tribute rather than an expression of gratitude, so rather than say, "You're welcome," he says, "Thank you." After a pause, he adds, "It's good to see you're doing good."
"I'm doing better," the man says. "You didn't remember me at first, did you?"
"No, I was struggling a little there at first," Stockton says.
"But you remember now?" the man says eagerly.
"I do," Stockton says. "That goes back a long ways."
"Twelve years."
They pose together, briefly, for a photo.
When I come home, flush with all this new semi-insider gossip, my wife, Laurie, startles me by saying that during the first couple of months of my sabbatical, when I was home all the time, there had been "no energy in the house" and how grateful she is that I'm finally doing something "purposeful" in public. One can forget this or disguise it or pretend it isn't so, but really the sexiest thing a husband can do is go out and return with news of the world.
11.6.94 On the phone, Mike Kahn, the Sonics beat writer for the Tacoma News Tribune, is entertaining me with a long, rambling monologue about the limitless megalomania of professional athletes, until I commit the faux pas of asking whether he thinks "racial payback of some kind" is a factor in the contempt with which Kahn says most NBA players treat sportswriters, e.g., blowing off interview appointments a dozen times in a row. Just a little too abruptly, it seems to me, he says no.
11.7.94 In its NBA Preview issue, Sports Illustrated says, "The Seattle SuperSonic marketing department, apparently taking its cue from the trash-talking denizens of that team's locker room, is offering four customized ticket packages. Each features at least one game against a marquee rival of the Sonics, the NBA's most impudent team. Fans can take their pick from the 'Scottie Who?' plan; the 'Get Your Tickets Before Every Jerk in Portland Does' plan; the 'If I See Another Thing with Shaq on It, I'm Gonna Barf' plan; and the ever-popular 'Barkley Sucks' plan."
I take a curious pride in Sports Illustrated's calling the Sonics the "NBA's most impudent team," because the ruling ethos of Seattle is forlorn apology for the animal impulses. According to a political talk-show host, "Seattle is almost an entirely different market than the rest of the country. There's a very polite approach here. In other cities, callers get much more acerbic. People here are civilized. You don't have to be abrasive or rude or say things in a boisterous, loud way to make your point." A cheerleader at the University of Washington named Robb Weller, who is now a game-show host, is credited with having started the Wave. In his review of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, the drama critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer explained that he left at intermission because he can't waste his time anymore on theater that glamorizes dysfunctional families and alcoholism. When I castigated a carpenter for using the phrase "Jew-me-down," he returned later that evening to beg my forgiveness, and the next week he mailed me a mea culpa and a rebate. An editorial in the Post-Intelligencer argued that the authors of a Harvard Law Review parody of a murdered law professor's work should have been severely disciplined, and concluded: "The First Amendment simply cannot extend to expression which diminishes another's self-esteem." Kenny G. is from Seattle. "Louie, Louie" is often on the verge of being named the state song. When the Seattle Times published a front-page photograph of Kurt Cobain's dead body after his suicide, the executive editor wrote an interminable column about how the picture was not in fact sensationalistic (it wasn't). Seattleites use their seat belts more, return lost wallets more often, and recycle their trash more than people in any other city. Once a year, for twenty-four hours, thousands of people gather in the Kingdome to Visualize World Peace. In one of her weekly columns in the Seattle Times, psychologist Jennifer James explained that "women used to be attracted to big men because they could bring home meat and defend us against marauders," but "women are less likely to be battered by small partners," so she encouraged her readers to "reverse the current genetic trend and save the universe" by marrying "thoughtful little people." When people don't give money to beggars, they frequently say, "Sorry—no change today." When a restaurant closed, it put a sign in the window that said, "After twenty years of service to the community, we regret to inform our customers that we will be closed indefinitely"—twenty years of service. The Republican (losing) candidate for Mayor is the man who invented the Happy Face. . . .
And what I love about the Supes, of course, is that they are not like this at all. So what does that make them? What does that make me in relation to them?
Speaking to reporters after practice, Karl says, "I bet I'm out of here [the NBA] in a few years, coaching somewhere else: college, back in Europe, maybe the CBA [the Continental Basketball Association, the NBA's minor league, in which Karl coached several years ago]." A few days ago he said, "Coaches used to get rewards out of teaching, building the team, understanding character, and developing leadership. Now it doesn't seem like the little things of basketball are that important to many people. They're very important to coaches. We know the keys to success, but players don't understand them, and they don't want to hear about them. 'Discipline,' 'commitment,' 'trust'--all those great words. They seem to have lost a little glory to the player. The players are so individualistic. The idea of a team isn't even in their thought process. They look at the team as their servant. The individuality factor is in our game because of money. A player's day is like a businessman's now: practice from ten to twelve, a meeting with a stockbroker at one, a meeting with TNT at two, dinner with his TV show host at four. It's made coaching into managing, and the best managers aren't coaches. Coaches are teachers and leaders." Before the season had begun, he had defined what the season is going to be about; it is going to be about: all those great words.
Tonight, on Seinfeld, George says, "You know, if it's not about sports, I find it very hard to concentrate."
Jerry says, "You're not very bright, are you?"
George says, "No, I'm not. I would like to be. But I'm not."
Though I laugh, this stings: I used to read Proust, and now the crucial texts for me appear to be almost exclusively box scores and the accompanying articles.
11.8.94 In a packet of promotional material I receive about Hoop Dreams, the press release says: "Basketball has, over the past fifteen years, become America's most high-profile (and profitable) sport. Once culturally invisible, the NBA has become one of the decade's top international marketing successes, with this year's finals telecast in over one hundred nations around the world. The game has consciously made an effort to embrace the high-powered aggressive stylings of the `street' game as played in America's inner cities, promoting the dominating, in-your-face approach of superstars like Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley." The press release trumpets the fact that these two realms—marketing success, the street game—exist in happy symbiosis; the movie demonstrates over and over that they don't. At the end of Hoop Dreams, William Gates, one of the two players whom the film has focused on, stops in to say goodbye to his dictatorial high school coach and says, "[At Marquette University] I'm going into communications, so when you start asking for a donation, I'll know the right way to turn you down."
On my way to a doctor's appointment, the East African cabbie says the most popular sport in East Africa is basketball. On my way back, the Israeli cabbie says the most popular sport in Israel is basketball.
On KJR, sports-talk radio nearly twenty-four hours a day and as such an endlessly interesting essay on the rough patch of weather we white males understand ourselves to be going through right now, a caller named Keith, from Everett, says, "I know sometimes we all have a tendency to overstatisticize; I don't know if that's a word or not, but—"
Mike Gastineau, sports talk-show host, says, "It should be. I kinda like it. It sounds like: `I went to the doctor and he needed to statisticize me.'"
Keith: "You just be sure to remind him to use a glove when he does that, okay, Gas Man?"
Gas Man: "I hear you."
The Sonics' small-forward Detlef Schrempf's new tattoo is a 3" x 3" design over his heart: an eagle, a lake, a forest, a sun, mountains. "Each symbol stands for something," Schrempf explains. He was born and raised in Leverkusen, West Germany, though he attended high school in central Washington and played college ball for the University of Washington. "It's something I wanted to keep for the rest of my life. It shows some things that I believe in. It has more to do with inner strength. If I do have some doubt about certain things, I can look at myself and get the reassurance of what I believe in." He also says, "I'm not a trash-talker. It's important for us [the Sonics] not to have that label. Trash-talking can only hurt you. It can never help you, with the referees, the crowd, anything. You can't take away the vocal part of Gary [Payton]'s game. But there is a positive way of doing it. Instead of directing it toward the opposing bench, he can talk to himself or his teammates." Schrempf is such a Seattleite: nature is the one true source; impolite conversation is bad for you.
The San Diego Union-Tribune reports that Shawn Kemp, the Sonics' star power-forward—a month ago, at the time of his contract extension and in reference to the trade that nearly sent him to Chicago in exchange for Scottie Pippen—said, "We cleared the water under the table.'" What he actually said was: "It was going to be hard for me to come in here and worry about the trade and try to play ball. It's water underneath the table. It's over with." In either case, it's not all that fascinating a statement, and the only reason the San Diego Union-Tribune is reprinting it now, a month later, is to share a little unspoken joke with its readers regarding the fact that Shawn Kemp can't even keep his clichés straight: it's "cleared away the brush"; it's "water under the bridge"; it's "cards on the table."
11.9.94 At nine a.m., when, as instructed, I call the Sonics' director of media relations, Cheri White, to confirm my press credential for tonight's game against Sacramento, she informs me that "effective immediately," all reporters from "in-state weeklies"—a subset that includes, at most, half a dozen newspapers—will now be banned from the Sonics' locker room before and after games. Furthermore, there is no room for me in press row for tonight's game against the Sacramento Kings. Apparently, I erred by showing up in the locker room before and after the first game (the literary critic Roger Sale, who teaches with me in the English department at the University of Washington, had been covering the Sonics for the Seattle Weekly for the past twenty years and had never done this); the locker room is now said to be "too crowded." In September, I had approached the Sonics about spending the year with the team in order to write a book about them. My meeting with George Karl and Cheri White went well enough that they gave my project the go-ahead, but a week later someone higher up (Barry Ackerley? the general manager Wally Walker?) said no, citing a need to "eliminate distractions." One of the reasons they felt a need to eliminate distractions was that a writer traveled with the team last year, when the Sonics imploded, and I now hear that his book on the 1993-94 season is being published this coming March. Hoping to get galley proofs of the book, I call up the publisher, where a former student happens to be editing the book. I'm a little taken aback at how patronizing he is to me: he mentions titles of books about basketball I should read, professes his "admiration" for the region of the country in which I now happen to be living. What has he ever done, I wonder; what has he ever accomplished that he feels he can condescend to me?—which, of course, is exactly how athletes feel about sportswriters.
Standing in line at Safeway, I spot a Sporting News 1994-95 Pro Basketball Yearbook featuring Gary Payton on the cover. Inside is a long profile of Payton in which he says, regarding his tendency to talk trash, "I have to play that way. That's the way I grew up. That's what hypes me to play basketball. If I wasn't like that, I'd be another player just coming on the court. The emotion gets me hyper."
To the Safeway checker's question of "Paper or plastic?" the customer in front of me replies, "No thanks. I'm trying to save the forest." He then walks proudly out of the store, cradling nearly a dozen items in his arms. This sort of self-righteousness is commonplace here. It's gotten so bad that I find myself making it a point of perverse honor—in direct contradiction of local custom, and inevitably greeted with outright derision from my fellow pedestrians—to jaywalk if at all possible.
Which is why, in Seattle the Good, I so love Gary Payton. He's not really bad, he's only pretend-bad—I know that—but he allows me to fantasize about being bad. In "The Joy of Yap," an article about the Sonics that appeared in Esquire six months ago, Payton said, "I'm just the bad link in the whole thang. I'm the fucked-up crew. The mothers don't like me, but they gotta have me, man. I'm the Problem Child—that's what I am."
In the parking lot, when I punch the car-alarm off, I inadvertently aim it directly at a black man with dreadlocks who is sitting in a car directly behind mine and looking right at me. As I leave the parking lot, he turns his thumb and index finger into a gun, winks, and shoots me in the head—which complicates things a little.
Adding Deputy District Attorney Christopher Darden to the prosecution team in the O.J. Simpson case, L.A. District Attorney Gil Garcetti acknowledges, "could very easily backfire. There could be a juror who says, 'Are you just bringing him on just because he's black?' The answer is obviously no." I'm struck by the fact that in all matters of human communication, when someone makes a point of announcing that something isn't so, it often means that it in fact is so; in matters of human communication relating to race, when someone makes a point of announcing that something isn't so, it means almost without exception that it in fact is so. It's Garcetti's repetition of the word "just"—"Are you just bringing him on just because he's black? "—that gives the game away.
For the Sacramento game I buy from Ticketmaster the best seat available, which is about fifty yards closer to the court than the press box is. An hour and a half before the game, Karl, wearing sweats, scrimmages with his second-string players. He's laughing and happy, throwing elbows, shoving, fouling. Walking back to the locker room, he's besieged by a dozen black kids seeking autographs, and their initial excitement quickly dissipates as the frightened—harried?—joylessness on his face keeps them at a remove. The kids say nothing as he signs. Karl says nothing as he signs.
Nearly all the head coaches are white; nearly all the refs are white; nearly all the fans are white; nearly all the reporters are white; nearly all the broadcasters are white (except for former players, who serve as "color commentators"); nearly all the owners are white; nearly all the players are black. Unable to find my seat, I approach an official-looking and officially-dressed young black man, whom I believe to be the usher. He levels me with a look and says, "I'm not no usher."
Before the game starts, I look through my binoculars at the fans in the front few rows: the women dress Catch Me-Fuck Me; beauty doesn't get to be with beauty: beauty marries money; paper covers rock.
When the players come onto the court for their pre-game warm-ups, the music on the P.A. system changes abruptly from Garth Brooks to Snoop Doggy Dogg (Payton's rap god).
Bobby Hurley, Sacramento's 6', 160-pound back-up point guard, the only white player on the Kings, was nearly killed in a car crash last year; after an enormous amount of rehab, he is now nearly completely recovered. Hundreds of articles have been written about his return from the near-dead, and tonight he receives a loud ovation when he enters the game. He doesn't play many minutes and he plays without distinction, quickly committing a couple of turnovers, making a couple of good passes, hitting a shot or two. To my eyes, the King players diss him a little; he's a cute mascot sitting at the end of the bench.
Payton gets his first technical foul in the first quarter when, after knocking over the Kings' Mitch Richmond, he stands over Richmond and briefly stares at him. In the third quarter, during a jump ball, Payton seems to taunt a Kings player, and since this is his second technical foul of the game, he's ejected. Kemp escorts him off the floor; on his way to the locker room, Payton kicks over a chair.
The Sonics are worse than any team I've ever seen at making good ball-fakes. When Gill fakes a pass or Kemp fakes a shot, my daughter, Natalie—one-and-a-half—wouldn't fall for the fake. When back-up point guard Nate McMillan passes to someone, he always makes sure to look directly at him. The Sonics seem to feel that pretending to do something and then not doing it is sort of an unmanly thing to do.
Almost without exception, the Sonics are extraordinary athletes with relatively limited basketball skills. This is the kind of player Karl loves to have on his team—"greyhounds, " he calls them—but then he complains that they don't play good fundamental basketball. The Sonics have no half-court offense, no outside shooters, no "go-to guy" (a player to rely upon in crucial situations). "My philosophy is simple," Karl recently explained. "Play harder and more intense and more aggressive for forty-eight minutes than any other team in the NBA. To do that, you need defensive principles and depth of talent. It's a hell of a philosophy. It's a fun philosophy."
The Sonics are one of the two or three deepest teams in the league. Tonight they almost do wear out Sacramento, as they wore out Utah in the first game, but Karl loves to make the game about "rotation," and as a result of his perpetual substitutions, the Sonics have no rhythm on the court. The Kings, by contrast, are in sync, in a groove, are much more energetic, have "younger legs," are having a blast out there; Sacramento wins.
In the parking lot after the game, directly in front of me, a black girl and a fifty-year-old white man bump into each other. The man says, "Excuse me." The girl says, "I hope so."
11.10.94 After practice, Payton, speaking to reporters, claims that he was thrown out of the game last night for speaking to one of his own teammates. "They[the referees]'ve got to understand who we're talking to. They're gonna try to make an example out of us. We're the known ones—me, Dennis Rodman, Charles [Barkley]; we're all gonna be focal points. Every ref is gonna say, `We got Payton tonight; watch out for this, watch out for that.' They can call what they want to call; I'm not going to stop what I'm doing [talking trash]. That's my ballgame." Shortly after Payton was drafted by the Sonics in 1990, he told a Seattle reporter, "My brother and father were always telling me not to back down to anybody. That's where I got my verbal game, because I always had to talk to the older guys and prove myself to them." Last year, he said, "If someone says something to me, I'm going to yap. If something happens, and I feel like I'm going to talk, I'm just going to talk."
Karl says, "I don't think there's any question that there's a group of five or six players who probably have been laid out very strongly. Gary and I talked about it before the first game. The NBA doesn't want taunting to be abused or cause problems."
Rod Thorn, vice-president of operations for the NBA, says, "We don't want taunting. If you're going to taunt somebody, you're going to get a technical foul. If you get another, you'll be kicked out of the game. When you embarrass or disrespect another player, it could lead to altercations. It's also a terrible image to all the kids out there who watch the game and try to emulate our athletes."
New York Knick shooting guard John Starks is quoted in the Seattle Times as saying: "I'm not worried about taunting rules because I don't taunt to nobody." This line, like Kemp's "water under the table" line, is unremarkable except for its odd locution ("taunt to"); otherwise, it, like Kemp's, wouldn't have appeared in print. In other words, under our breath, we're snickering a little at Starks, at Kemp--good-naturedly, though!
In a hurry at the supermarket, I go careening around an aisle with my shopping cart, and when I nearly bump into a checker stocking shelves, he says, with a completely straight face and expression, "Sorry." Is this Northwest irony? If so, it's dry as dirt.
Riding home on the bus with my groceries, I notice two punky kids standing in the gutter, waiting for the light to change in their favor. Instead of just continuing past them—he has plenty of room to drive by—the bus driver makes a particular point of braking, opening his window, informing them that he has the green light, and then driving on.
Four blocks from my house, I'm holding my bag of groceries, standing a foot from the curb, waiting for the light to change. Although the light is with her, the driver screeches to a halt, virtually commanding me—via an exaggerated hand gesture—to cross in front of her. The gesture conveys so much: she's never in a rush, she has no will, no ego; if my self-discipline is that poor, if my needs are that pressing, she'll help me out, she'll assist me. I refuse to go. Instead, I practically scream at her until she eases the car forward, "What are you waiting for? You have the green light. Just go!"
Seattle's passive-aggressiveness intrigues as well as aggravates me; it is a kind of daily riddle.
11.11.94 Payton just won't let the topic die down. On the "Gary Payton Show," broadcast live Monday and Friday mornings at 7:35 on KJR, he says, "You know, that first technical wasn't even necessary. Me and Mitch [Richmond of Sacramento] is real tight. When I looked at Mitch, he was holding his chest, so I asked was he all right and the ref went and called a tech, thinking like I was talkin' to him and it wasn't like that." I love the extremely plosive way Payton always says "that," and I'm curious where this sound comes from, what it alludes to, why it is so mysterious and resonant to me.
In her review in the New York Times of a book about Clarence Thomas's confirmation hearings, Margo Jefferson writes, "Henry Terry, who had been one year behind Thomas at Yale Law School, recalled that Mr. Thomas could sound dignified in the courtroom but `profane, scatological, and graphic' with his pals. 'That's my boy,' said Mr. Terry when Anita Hill offered her testimony. 'That's him talking.' . . . How much of our public life must play hostage to private grudges? On the day he was confirmed, the forty-three-year-old Mr. Thomas told friends he planned to spend the next forty-three years of his life on the Supreme Court because it would take that long to get even. That's our boy." This review is completely about itself--the ethnic identity of the reviewer (Margo Jefferson is black) and the timing of the review (until now, until right now, until today, or so it seems, the word wouldn't have appeared in print in this context, carrying in its train as it does so much blood of American history.)
In regard to coaching pro players when he served as an assistant coach for Dream Team II, the group of NBA All-Stars that won the gold medal in the World Games in Toronto this summer, Providence College coach Pete Gillen says, "It's like, 'Larry Johnson, will you kindly think about rising and getting a rebound?' I don't want to get him mad. He might buy Providence [College] and fire me." The players are de facto owners; the coaches are de facto slaves; it's the history of the country turned upside down.
A fan named Murray posts this message to the Sonics newsgroup on the Internet: "I was in Magnolia Hi-Fi yesterday in Bellevue [an affluent Seattle suburb] and saw Gary Payton. Just for the hell of it I had to ask him if anyone said he looked like Gary Payton. He said they say it all the time. Couldn't help but laugh."
In USA Today the trading-card company Skybox runs a full-page ad with the headline "Make the Trade of a Lifetime." In the 18" x 6" photograph, Shaquille O'Neal is thoroughly bug-eyed, and his tongue is sticking all the way out: he looks exactly like a toad. They couldn't have found a picture of him looking more inhuman if they had painted it themselves. The rest of the ad reads: "Send us your NBA Hoops Foil Wrappers along with a little cash, and we'll give you a limited-edition Shaquille O'Neal press sheet. Here's your chance to make the trade of a lifetime. A few measly wrappers for the ultimate rapper, Shaquille O'Neal. (He's not too shabby a ball player, either.) A limited-edition, 100-card, uncut press sheet featuring Shaquille O'Neal at his rim-rattlin', shot-blockin' best. This larger-than-life tribute to Shaq . . ." It's a tough shtick he's signed on for; larger than life, he's also lesser than life: he's Superman, but he's also a toad. The coupon says, "Yes, this is a limited, one-time only, never-be-seen-again offer. No, you can't buy this press sheet anywhere else. Yes, this is a must-have, suitable-for-framing addition to your collection. No, you can't dunk as hard as Shaquille O'Neal." Which you find unforgivable, and for which the only known cure is: "Yes, please send me my limited-edition Shaquille O'Neal press sheet. I have included a check or money order for $15.50 (this includes shipping and handling) along with my 10 1994 NBA Hoops Series I foil wrappers."
Cheri White, the Sonics' PR director, denies my request for a press credential to the Seattle-Phoenix game: "The press box is full." Someone in the Sonic newsgroup is selling two tickets for tonight's game, so I grab them. My neighbor Richard, a librarian at the University of Washington, and I go together. He complains incessantly about the price of the ticket (the only player he'd pay to see is Michael Jordan, who, conveniently, is retired at the time), about the "skankiness" of the cheerleaders, about the lack of basketball knowledge displayed by the people sitting around us, about the wall-to-wall music, about the incessant promotional activities, about everything, but especially about the Sonics. Shawn Kemp commits too many turnovers; Vincent Askew dribbles the ball too much; Sarunas Marciulionis, who is Lithuanian and in his first year as a Sonic, is a defensive liability; Sam Perkins is too slow: all of Richard's observations are inarguable, but his saying so turns me into a fierce Supes defender. Richard, who plays pickup basketball three times a week at the Y, believes he can shoot better than anyone out there, and the text through which he filters all of the action on the floor is an article in Sports Illustrated which he's recently read, which he's actually brought with him, and which—during a break between the first and second quarters—he insists I read.
The first paragraph says: "Step back in time for a moment, back to the NBA of the late 60's. In your mind's eye you can see Jerry West going up for a jump shot with picture-perfect form. Now it's the 70's, and there's Rick Barry coming off a pick. Move forward to the 80's, and there's Larry Bird casually tossing in three-pointers. Listen closely and you can almost hear the constant flick, flick, flick of the net as these players send the ball through the hoop. . . . It's become increasingly clear that the NBA has entered the Dunk Ages, an era when jamming the ball through the net is far more glamorous than tossing it in from long distance. And while dunking is being elevated, outside shooting is becoming, if not a lost art, at least a fading one." Well, this is getting interesting, I think: the equation of the dunk with darkness; the apotheosizing of Jerry West, Rick Barry, and Larry Bird—probably the three best white players in NBA history.
"Why do you think that is?" I ask. "Why do you think players don't shoot as well as they used to?"
Richard goes into a bizarre shucking-and-jiving routine: "Well, when you go to play ball in the ghet-to, you gots to throw it down, not shoot it."
At halftime, the black man sitting directly in front of us gets up and doesn't return for the second half. I'm half-tempted to run after him and explain that Richard's sentiments aren't my own, but I decide against. At the beginning of the second half, I focus my binoculars on press row, and contrary to Cheri White's claim, it's nowhere near full.
Two of the NBA's new rule-changes—disallowing "hand-checking" (the player guarding the ball is no longer allowed to dig his hand into the ballhandler's waist or back) and moving the three-point line twenty-one inches closer to the basket—help the Sonics and Suns tie an NBA record for combined number of three-point attempts. Phoenix, playing without its two best players—Charles Barkley and Kevin Johnson—spaces the the court better, passes better, and is ahead for most of the evening; Seattle's superior defense just does manage to wear down the outmanned Suns.
After the game, driving home with Richard, I hear Marques Johnson, a former NBA star who is now the Sonics' color commentator, say on the radio: "It seems Gary Payton must have gotten the message from his ejection Wednesday [against Sacramento], because he demonstrated exemplary behavior out there tonight." Johnson, new to the Sonics' broadcast team this year, is making clear that he thinks the NBA rules are just fine and should be followed, i.e., he doesn't want Richard to hate him too much.
When I get home, Laurie asks why I didn't say anything to Richard when he went into his shucking-and-jiving routine, and I don't have an answer.
11.12.94 I pose these questions to Murray in the Sonics newsgroup: "When you said to Gary Payton that he looked like Gary Payton, did he know you were joking? Was it you who couldn't help but laugh or he? Did anything else happen? What was he buying? As you can tell, I'm a huge GP fan."
At the ferry terminal, going to my in-laws for dinner on Bainbridge Island, I watch a black teenager—wearing Air Jordans and a Nike Swoosh cap—selling copies of the Seattle Times to the cars in line. Suddenly, a Doberman barks ferociously at him from the back of a Jeep Cherokee. Air Jordan freezes; the owner doesn't get out of the jeep but calms the dog down, smiling through the window and waving to the kid, telling him not to be scared, everything's okay. Air Jordan changes lanes. It simply would have been a different moment had the newspaper vendor not been black. The flushed embarrassment between the two people wouldn't have included what is to me the unasked but virtually audible question: whom had or hadn't the Doberman been trained to attack? Is this my own racist assumption, though, or am I just reporting what's there? I honestly don't know, which is what confuses and disturbs me.
11.13.94 Murray, from the Sonics newsgroup, replies, "I'm pretty sure Payton knew I was joking. Not sure what he bought because I didn't really want to bother him. I figure he didn't want someone asking him a bunch of questions and he didn't seem too talkative. He was there with a girlfriend (or is he married?)."
Cheri White grants me permission to sit in press row for the game tonight between the Sonics and Clippers. Why, I haven't the faintest; the mystery continues. There's something undeniably erotic to me about the way ma chérie teases and tortures and sometimes rewards. Driving to the game, I listen to "Sonics Rewind" on KJR—the week in review. I hear George Karl protest some more the NBA's stricter enforcement of its rules against trash-talking, then say, "But I'm not going to be a sociologist about it," which is an interesting way to both be and not be a sociologist about it. What I want him to say is: "The new rules are saying, 'Stop your singing out there in the fields.'"
When I arrive at my designated seat in press row for the Sonics-Clippers game, a guy from a radio station is sitting in the seat that has been assigned to me. Much more peremptorily than I ever would have before (I can't help it: I get off on being even the most microscopic part of athletic officialdom), I tell him, "This is my seat," and when he moves over but takes the folding chair with him, I tell him to return the chair, and he obeys. I feel the cheap thrill of dominion.
I find it impossible not to watch Gary Payton; my binoculars are always trained on him. Payton's the only player wearing black shoelaces. He has a shaved head; a thin moustache; a goatee; and an inordinately long, muscular neck, like a brachiosaurus. (In his freshman year at Oregon State, when a University of Oregon male cheerleader called him "Hookhead," Payton took the gum out of his mouth and threw it at him, hitting him in the face.) He wears long baggy shorts and gold earrings—a "G" and a "P." He has a luminous smile, even when he's faking it, and sharp cheekbones; according to Laurie, he's "very handsome, obviously."
In the second quarter, Karl calls out, "Get up, get up," urging his players to pressure the ball at the top of the key. A couple of players move to do this until Payton shouts, "No, no, no," and they all go back to where they were.
A group of young women strut around during halftime. They're not groupies, precisely, or at least most of them aren't, but the explicitness with which they place their wares on display—the self-conscious packaging of their own bodies—is startling to me. The women, showing off their bodies, with dollar signs in their eyes; the players, showing off their bodies, with dollar signs in their eyes—this level of explicitness about bodies and money is weirdly thrilling to me. When I get home and mention this to Laurie, she says that I just never spent any time in singles' bars; apparently, that's how everyone there dresses.
So, too, during timeouts, there isn't anything else to do, so though I feel somewhat guilty about doing this, I inevitably find myself focusing my binoculars on the Sonics Dance Team. To be a pure body like this, to be looked at this way, to be admired and reviled for being so young, so physical, so unabashedly a body . . .
Toward the end of the fourth quarter, newcomer benchwarmer Byron Houston finally enters the game. I'm listening to the game on a Walkman from press row. Dave Harshman, who replaces Marques Johnson as color commentator for about a dozen low-profile games and is a former Sonics assistant coach, says, "We need a nickname for Byron. We don't have one yet. We need to see him in action first, get a sense of his spirit, his rhythm."
Kevin Calabro, the play-by-play broadcaster, says, "Our producer just gave us a nickname for him; we're not going to say it—nothing derogatory, mind you, but we're not going to say it on the air."
Calabro and Harshman are laughing so hard they can't speak.
After a while, Harshman recovers enough to say, "Anatomically correct, though."
I'm dying to know what nickname they've come up with, and given all the recent discussion in the media about Milwaukee Bucks rookie Glenn "Big Dog" Robinson's contract negotiations, I have a mad moment, blessedly brief, when I'm positive I know what it is: "Big Dong." Cf. the Richard Pryor joke: "You ever heard? The niggers had the biggest dicks in the world and they were trying to find a place where they could have their contest, see. And they wasn't no freaks; they didn't want everybody looking. So they were walking around, looking for a secret place. So they were walking across the Golden Gate Bridge and the nigger sees that water and it makes him want to piss, see. One said, 'Man, I got to take a leak.' He pulled his thing out and was pissing. Other nigger pulled his out and took a piss. And one nigger says, 'Goddamn, this water cold.' Other nigger says, 'Yeah, and it's deep, too.'"
The Los Angeles Clippers are much the worst team in the league, but for two-and-a-half quarters the Sonics can't pull away. As usual, the Sonics' bench strength—they regularly use ten players whereas most other teams usually use only seven or eight—wears down the opponent, and Seattle winds up winning easily. Reserve small-forward Vincent Askew scores a career-high twenty points. Since Askew plays the violin, he's nicknamed "The Fiddler"—one would think his nickname might be "The Violinist," but that's simply not the way sports nicknames work—and though fans continually beseech him to play the national anthem before a game sometime, he always figures out a way to avoid doing this, which I admire.
On the post-game show on the radio, a kid calls up and wants to know Gary Payton's stats for the game.
"Is that all you care about—stats?" Calabro asks, pretending to be irritated.
"Only Gary's," the kid squeaks, and instantaneously I get goose bumps: what is it about Gary that moves me so much?
11.14.95 Over the next five nights the Sonics will be playing four games in New Jersey, Boston, Milwaukee, and Indiana. Among players, journalists, and fans, much is made of the difficulty a West Coast team is likely to experience on a trip "back East." Charles Barkley, who grew up in Alabama, played in Philadelphia for a few years, and for the last several years has played in Phoenix, recently quoted approvingly the former Boston Celtic star John Havlicek's observation that players in the West are "softer" than players in the East because Angelenos wake up to sunshine and Bostonians wake up to snowdrifts. It's amazing to me how thoroughly this myth persists throughout all levels of the culture. I grew up on the West Coast, spent most of my adult life on the East Coast, and now live again on the West Coast. I know people from all over, most of them have moved around the country quite a lot, as have most professional athletes; none of the Sonics, for instance, is from the Northwest. I'm not in the habit of judging people according to their softness or toughness, but I've found that whether or not they shovel snow from their sidewalk bears no correlation whatsoever to their intestinal fortitude.
Laurie and I take Natalie for her first swimming lesson, which is not so much a lesson as a way for children, ages one to four, to get used to the water. A few minutes into the lesson, a little black girl cannonballs into the shallow end. Each child is supposed to be accompanied by a parent in the pool, and the girl is actually enrolled in the more advanced class that starts after this class, but the instructor spends virtually the entire half-hour playing with this girl rather than trying to teach any of the other children anything. Laurie and I smolder over the fact that the instructor didn't have the nerve to tell the girl to get out of the pool and wait until it was time for her lesson. Later, when I complain, I'm informed that the girl was accompanied by her grandmother, who can't swim; that the girl has been taking swim lessons from this instructor since she was an infant and was so happy to see the teacher—whom she hadn't seen for six months—that she jumped in the pool; that the instructor decided to let her stay rather than risk creating a ruckus. I feel like a shmuck for having said anything.
A former graduate student of mine is working as "content editor" and liaison between Microsoft and the NBA for a series of CD-ROMs about the NBA. So far he says his instructions from the NBA have been: "Drop Dennis Rodman from the list of one hundred best players. No images of players fighting. No mentions of drug addiction. No backboard smashing in the product. No gangster aesthetic."
I respond to Murray in the Sonics newsgroup: "Payton's married, or at least he was engaged to be married a year or so ago; they have two kids. What impressions if any did you have of the woman he was with?"
Happy day! O happy day! I walk across the street when the light is red. Two teenage girls on the other side of the street follow suit, and as they pass me, they look at me with the purest expressions of gratitude and delight: hey, this is fun; down we slide the slippery slope of moral ambiguity; we're killing our parents next . . .
11.15.94 A plumber installs a new hot-water heater, and while he's wheeling the old one out to his truck, I ask him what he does with it. He says, "Take it back to the shop. These black guys come by for scrap metal. Every now and then I tip them a little something. I saw them today at Burger King, so I bought them each a ninety-nine-cent Whopper."
A woman calls KJR to complain that she brought six children—it's unclear if all six children are hers—to a Sonics promotional event to get Shawn Kemp's autograph. He is the "children's hero, he is their role model," but Kemp shows up late and leaves early, and the kids go home without an autograph and in tears. She says that all the children now hate Shawn Kemp and wish the Sonics had traded him to Chicago for Scottie Pippen.
Murray replies to me: "I only saw her later (she was with him when he was at the counter). I talked to him in the TV section while he was waiting for a clerk. Kind of funny that at first I thought it was a guy—the hair, I guess (I think they call it a fade). Not really my type."
Due to health problems arising from a nearly fatal car accident, George Raveling, the second black man ever to become head coach of a major-college basketball team (at Washington State University twenty years ago), resigns from his job as head coach at University of Southern California. In an article about his resignation, he's quoted as having once said: "Where I grew up, we used to steal things that began with 'A'—a television, a radio, a watch." Another article describes him as being "known for his vivaciousness." I've always liked George Raveling, not least because when he was coaching at the University of Iowa in the late '80s, my first novel, Heroes—which is about a white sportswriter's vicarious relationship with a white college basketball player whose goal in life is to become black—was published in paperback, and the owner of a bookstore in Iowa City told me that Raveling loved the book; whenever he visited the store, he'd always buy at least one copy.
I went to graduate school in Iowa City, at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where the most fanatical thing I did, other than write Heroes, was attend University of Iowa basketball games. My closest friend at Iowa, Daniel, liked to say his childhood was about Walt Frazier: every night he would hear his parents screaming at each other in the next room, and he'd just stare at the Knicks game on the little black-and-white TV at the edge of his bed, trying to will himself into "Clyde's" body. In the spring of 1980, when Iowa beat Georgetown to qualify for the Final Four tournament, Daniel and I jumped up and down and cried and hugged each other in a way we wouldn't have dreamed of doing otherwise. A famous writer would come to town to give a reading on the same night as, say, the Iowa-Indiana game, and it wouldn't even occur to us to worry about which event to attend. One of the happiest moments of my life occurred when Daniel, and several other people from the Writers' Workshop, came to the gym to play basketball. I was already on the court: out on the wing on a fast break, I caught the ball, reverse-spun on William Mayfield, who started at forward for the Iowa basketball team, and beat him to the hoop. (Was he dogging it? Who knows? I don't want to know.) Daniel and the other graduate students went absolutely nuts; they all kept saying, "You don't even look like a basketball player!" Glasses, love handles, etc.
That same year Leonard Michaels gave a guest workshop, discussing my (autobiographical) short story, which was about playing on an otherwise all-black junior high school basketball team, and Daniel's (autobiographical) short story, which was about getting held up by a group of black teenagers in a subway car. Michaels explained that racism consists precisely of the impulse to generalize, which in his opinion both of our stories, in their different ways, did. He then asked, "What's this thing going on here, anyway, between Jewish men and black men?" Mock-naive, as if he were unaware that the question itself was a generalization . . .
"You could, you know," Laurie points out, "just obey the traffic laws. Is that even a possibility? I mean, it's kind of a simple solution, don't you think?"
When I'm out and about with Laurie and Natalie, I wait for the green light and cross at the crosswalk, but when I'm walking around by myself, I find it literally impossible not to violate the rules of the road.
On TV I watch the Sonics lose to the Nets in New Jersey. Payton plays only twenty-eight minutes before fouling out, so he's fouled out or been thrown out of two of the five games so far—the two they've lost.
After the game, former Sonic Benoit Benjamin, who had a good game with thirteen points and nine rebounds and whom Karl used to call "lazy," says about Karl: "He'll never win nothing. He's a loser and always will be. I watched them on TV in the playoffs against Denver and I laughed and laughed. I don't like him. He has personal vendettas on players for no reason." Karl does seems to have a weird need for a new villain each season: World B. Free in Cleveland; Joe Barry Carroll in San Francisco (Karl ripped the door off Carroll's locker after he said he didn't think the Warriors could beat the Lakers); Benjamin, Derrick McKey, Dana Barros different years in Seattle.
On the post-game show, Karl tells Calabro: "I'll be honest with you, Kevin." When most people say, "I'll be honest with you," it means they're lying, but in Karl's case it actually means, I think, he's telling the truth. "Since Grg [assistant coach Tim Grgurich] left, our concentration and mental intensity has not been bad, but not at the level we need to play at. I've told all the guys, you know, a key to our basketball team is defense, and a key to our basketball team is intensity. And everybody goes, 'Well, Coach, all coaches say that.' That's not true. I coached a team at Golden State where intensity was not a part of our personality. But this team, for it to play at its top-notch quality, has got to have an attitude. We don't have a bad attitude, but we don't have the big-time attitude that we had last year. I think it's a combination of a lot of stuff—a long training camp, Grg leaving, the rule changes messing with us a little bit. We don't know how aggressively we can play. We've got a long season ahead; we just gotta figure it out."
The first four home games I felt exceedingly disconnected from the game. Was it the drive to Tacoma, the sterility of the Tacoma Dome, the terrible view afforded from the nosebleed section of press row, their uninspired play (out of sync, no communication)? Just watching the games was more fun last year, when the players were holograms to me and my identification was total. My (very brief, very partial) peek behind the curtain this year has eliminated that for me. I want to get my basketball jones back. I want the Supes to convey something amazing to me again. I'm now watching the games with a notepad and a pen in my hand; I can't get truly into it this year; I can't root for them the way I did last year. I thought it was my own failure to connect, but no, I realize with relief when I hear Karl's comments on the post-game show, my distance is their distance: it's their fault.
They were—they are—feeling it, too. They're still not over the psychic wound which was last year's collapse: after winning more games than any other team in the regular season, the Sonics became the first #1 seed in NBA history to be eliminated in the first round of the playoffs by the #8 seed, the Denver Nuggets. Over the last six months there has been too much talk about players who were traded (Dana Barros, Michael Cage, Ricky Pierce) or nearly traded (Kemp, Gill); too much talk about three front-office departures: Bob Whitsitt, Tim Grgurich, and Bob Kloppenburg. Whitsitt, '93-'94 NBA Executive of the Year, left to became general manager of the Portland Trailblazers. Grgurich, who served as buffer between players and Karl, left to become head coach at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. Assistant coach Kloppenburg, who coordinated the defense—too assertively for Karl's liking—got kicked upstairs. The Sonics seem self-conscious to me now in the way a couple does that has broken up but gets back together: unable to feel much anymore after they've talked the fucking thing to death.
Suddenly I'm crazy about George Karl, because he saw what was there and said it.