"Don't let it be forgot
That once there was a spot,
For one brief, shining moment
That was known as Camelot."
--from the 1960 production of the lerner and Lowe musical "Camelot" directed by Moss Hart and starring Julie Andrews and Richard Burton
What made me think of these words now applied mostly to the JFK era?
(Does anyone under 30 even remember the initials now?)
It was a quote by Ed Obannon cited in a recent post by our host: approx. The quote went like this:
"These rules have been in place for a hundred years and there has been no change. Times have changed, the economy has changed, the players themselves have changed, the salaries of the coaches have changed. Everything has changed except for how a player is compensated. And whether [they're paid] while they're in school, or whether it's once their eligibility is up, that part of the game has to change."
I agree with Ed that that part of the game has to change.
And I agree with approx that OBannon's quote had implications…
KU Basketball is the living myth. It goes on so long as KU administrators, coaches, players and fans live it, rather than become seduced by marketing hype and digital simulation into believing it, or worshipping it, or reducing it to the thin veneer that is human logic, or regarding it as an art form, or otherwise crucifying it on the altar of the mind and its abstractions of logic, faith and fantasy and fanaticism.
KU basketball is mind AND body. It is lived. It does what living myth, and only living myth can do: it bridges the desiccating duality. It arcs Lawrencian across the gap. It is lived by us from our first encounters with it. It is lived by us in our decade by decade changes of POV in life. It is lived by us as we die.
All talk of it that does not arise out of living it is mere meaning--not living.
The living myth of KU basketball appears to be the only living myth left in America. It is therefore not only deeply important to us, but perhaps down the road may someday offer some cultural and archaeological significance to anthropologists trying to understand the varieties of human experience in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
The living myth is not James Naismith, or Phog Allen, or Larry Brown, or Roy Williams, or Bill Self, or whomever will follow the remarkable Self one day. It is not Naismith Court, nor Allen Field House, nor the decibel levels, nor the light shows, nor the coaching salaries, nor the OADs, nor the TADs, nor the four year players, nor the walk ons, nor the players that return, nor the reporters that grapple with tradeoffs between access and authenticity, nor the broadcasters that shape bettor's expectations, nor the bloggers, nor the board rats, nor "The Legacy," nor Petro Shoecos, nor Big Gaming, nor the titles, nor the championships, not the total wins, nor any cluster of legendary players, nor anything else you can point to and praise, or loath.
The living myth is the thing beyond words that courses through all of the above. It is the game lived by everyone year after year, since James Naismith put up the first basket on Mt. Oread and called boys in physical education onto a floor and whistled the start of play that has never stopped since.
The living myth is the capillary action in the tree of the game that draws up a portion of our life forces as a sap that makes the tree grow inspite of ourselves.
The living myth IS.
The Obannon suit against the NCAA, and judgement finding players were denied billions made off their likenesses, does not kill the living myth, does not end it. Only we can end it.
But it does change the greatest game ever invented--the game the living myth is embedded in; and that will have consequences.
But it is the game that will change.
And probably forever.
OREADIAN BASKETS
Not every man has baskets at his house
in red October, at crisp-passed Forrestmas.
Oreadian baskets, rim safron, only bright--
brightening the daytime torchlike with the saffron spectra of
Saturnian
rings,
ringed and torchlike, with the blaze of brightness spread orange
down rounding eyelets, hooked, threaded with white net of
chilled day
white-diamond net and the saffron- brightness, Buddhism's
bright-orange phase,
Mercury lamps, burning white blue,
giving off lightness, blue whiteness, as a farm yard's or play
ground’s lamps give off
light,
lead me then, lead me the way.
Reach me a basket, give me a rim
let me guide my shot through the white, blue light of this saffron
iron, arc the shadows and tenement stairs,
where white is darkened on blueness.even where Carmen Jones
went, just now, from the crisped October
to the sightless realm where lightness was awake upon the rim
and Dorothy Dandridge herself is but a voice
or a lightness, an invisible brightness--in the deeper white blue
of the saffron rim, and pierced with the passion of inviolate
circumference,
among the splendor of lamps of lightness, shedding darkness on the
leather ball and rim.
...
The game will never be the way it was again.
But it will be some way.
And that it will be is, finally, all that matters.
(Note: Oreadian Baskets is a gentle riff on "Bavarian Gentians" by D. H. Lawrence, which I first heard read by a rare and beloved KU Professor Thomas O'Donnell, who died too young, at 57, in 1996 without my knowledge for quite some time and so my grief has been delayed. And that poem you read so beautifully, and not The Road Not Taken," has made all the difference. RIP)
