Steel Nets and the Vampire LeBate.

jaybate 1.0

Oct 28, 2015 11:33 PM #1

@drgnslayr

On another thread we swapped short reminiscences of the playground, something we have done before.

Damn its fun to get old with someone. :-)

Hell, yeah, the playground!!!!

I feel like we are the oldest living survivors of the US Civil War when we write about this now.

I suspect your experience with the playground was much more conventional and so relevant than mine. Mine, like so much of my life, was out of step with my times and idiosyncratic.

Seriously, there ought to be some national monument to playground basketball. I don't really care which part of the country its in, so long as its on, or beside, a real asphalt court with real chain link fence and real metal posts, backboards and chain nets that young men once played for pride on.

One court needs to be preserved intact on the National Register of Historic Places, not for the sake of that particular court, or the greats that played there, but for the sake of all the courts and all the kids that grew up on them, and for the sake of all the adults that saved their sanities and in my case, my life, on them.

As I age, I increasingly think the real seeds of integration were sewn on these courts. These courts were often NOT integrated early on I have heard. They were places where kids of segregated neighborhoods played only against other kids like themselves. But in time, that intrinsic human need to test one self out in the world lead these neighborhood kids to go seek out other tests, other teams to beat, on other playground courts. Early on the kids went to play like kind kids--poor black kids sought out and played poor black kids from other poor black neighborhoods, and poor Irish kids searched out poor Irish kids from other Irish neighborhoods. But then they started searching out Jewish kids, and Italian kids, and Polish kids, and so on. For a long time the suburban kids were afraid to go to the inner cities and play, both for the beating they might take on the court but more for the one they might take to and from the court--afraid for the parent’s car that would be stripped by the time they got back to the car.

But the desire to play, to prove one's self at the game over time overruled the fears. And little by little the kids began to come to the courts where the best players tended to be. And it was really on these courts where the mere possibility of integrating a generation of Americans emerged. People have to want to integrate. There has to be something fun, or exciting, or otherwise worth integrating to do. Music was that way and many went looking for new kinds of music and it helped lay the sound track for a integration. But sports are action, and competition, and not just kissing' and dancing and do-wop harmonizing on a street corner around a barrel of burning trash in February.

Sports are another, a next step that must be taken to meaningful integration. They are not the last step. They are the first one of substance in my opinion. The first one that really lays the foundation for being able to think we can work and make money together, and in competition, and not have to kill each other over the scraps.

People have to interact just enough to know they are the same, only different, not JUST different. They have to say, "it ain't right. I don't understand a lot of their shit, but it ain't right that they can't play. I've played with them. I know what they can do. It ain't right."

It ain't right spoken without first hand experience is a platitude.

It ain't right spoken with experience is a value judgement with a conscience.

It ain't right spoken from experience is one of the most powerful and culture changing phrases that exist.

Children have just as many prejudices and fears as adults, maybe more, but they have less experience that makes them think nothing can change. They also have a great need to prove themselves. They do most things for pride and for fun. Getting paid much is beyond their imaginations most of the time. Their pay is proving they can equal or beat someone, or some team, that people tell them can't be equalled or beaten; that are too good. Oh, yeah? Well, let's go see about that; that is what a kid thinks, at least some of the bold ones.

Of course, a lot of the kids never go past the talking stage. But there are a few young lions that are really looking' to let this life force loose on someone and see who is the best. And there is another group that are just looking for someone to hang with that is as monomaniacal as they are; that care as much about this game as they do. They go figuring they WILL get the snot beaten out of them at first, but they want to be accepted and they want to learn the game from persons that care about it as much as they do.

It was about Love and Pride IMHO.

You loved the game.

And you just wanted to be proud of something--yourself, your pals, your game, where you came from, whatever.

At school they told you you weren't this and you weren't that and you did this wrong and you did that wrong. Eventually they expelled you, or graduated you with such poor grades no one had any hope for you. You weren't good enough to make the team, or you made it but you weren't the star, or you were the star, but you wanted to play the guys who were the real legends of the play grounds cause even the pros talked about them once in a great while in some high low-brow article by Frank Deford, or Rick Telander article buried in the back of SI, if anyone got you to read it.

I was part of the fraidy cats, when I was in high school.

I didn't go to the asphalt courts in the inner city.

Too chicken.

And when my game dead ended after high school, I remember looking around and thinking if I had gone to those playgrounds, I might have made it another level, even just to some crappy small college.

But I didn't.

And so I went to KU and I started playing pickup and intramural ball and I started running into ringers, usually the black teams, and I realized this was a different way of playing and I didn't mind the rule breaking and getting roughed up after awhile.

So I joined a city league team in Lawrence thinking I would be safe enough, and of course I quickly got punched out in a game, and thought about quitting, but then decided, fuck this, I can hit, I grew up fighting my older brother, I can take this, if that's what it takes. And I began to take pride in letting my finger nails grow and scratching the shit out guys, and talking some trash, not much, but a little. I could run and jump a little. Not much but a little. And I could shoot off the forward drive, and I was quick left to baseline off a fake right. And I really liked to body on defense. And I didn’t mind squaring off, if it weren’t going to be too one sided, or if I wasn’t going to get gang banged. And I had played enough football that I didn't mind taking shots...or giving them.

And then I got serious with a girl and serious about school and I stopped going to city league.

And then I really got away from the game.

And then grad school.

And it was a really good one and so I had to work night and day to barely make it through.

No ball.

And then I find myself in my career in Los Angeles with everyone snorting coke and doing the all night floating club circuit in the warehouses south of downtown and after a year of it I look at myself in the mirror and I don't see me anymore. I see a vampire. I see this pale piece of shit that knows every joint and every underground arts and farts music hell hole and that knows all the bartenders with pierced titties and tongues and can get by the bouncers at most of the clubs, but what I really see is what I grew to call the Vampire LeBate.

I don't see the kid I was. I don't see the young go getter I was as a Yuppie. I don't see the ambitious brainiac some called me. I don't see the love of anything, or the pride. I see a day time life of learning high stakes bidness in the fast lane and a night time of Le Bate—the Vampire. I am in my late 20s. In the day time I meet famous actors. I meet famous painters. I meet business big shots. I sit in Chavez Ravine in box seats two boxes away from a white haired Cary Grant in thick, black Foster Grants and a fat Elizabeth Taylor. But at night I am the Vampire LeBate. I live LA what Anne Rice fantasized in New Orleans. There was no there there. There was LA LA Land day and LA LA Land night. I didn't even know any real multi-generation Los Angelenos. I didn't even know a real Californian when I met them. It was just bidness day, and the living dead at night and Melrose Avenue or the Strip in between.

Basketball saved me from a lot of trouble when I was a kid, even if I were one of the fraidy cats. It kept me from drugs and it kept me from petty theft and it kept me from disappearing at an early age up the snatch of the first sunrise I met.

But basketball saved my life when I was in my late 20s. The Vampire LeBate was facing the precipice: he was ripe for a designer drug, he had money, he had access, he had the pad, he had the women, he had the wheels, he had emptiness, the hollow, the sense of accomplishment of things he did not love, of things that killed more and more of him, of things that regenerated only bigger and bigger emptiness.

The Vampire LeBate looked in the mirror one morning in the City of Angels. He fallen into an apartment in the Miracle Mile off La Brea. He was afraid he would never feel anything again, never love anything again, not in that simple pure way of love. Not the way he loved the frozen net in his family's backyard court on a January Saturday morning in Kansas City, when he threw a hand painted, crimson and blue Wilson rubber basketball underhand up through the glistening frozen net and watched the ball push it upwards through the orange rim and it stayed standing inverted, in perfect, joyful gravity defying absurdity, until the kid that the Vampire LeBate once was caught the ball, stepped back several steps and launched a set shot that banked off the back board, and knocked the icy net back down through the rim to normal. And he played till his hands were too cold to feel the ball anymore and he came in and got his hot chocolate from his mom, who was not yet addicted to valium.

That's what I remembered looking in that mirror in the Miracle Mile. I didn't remember any awards. I didn't remember any degrees. I didn't remember any lays. I didn't even remember any friends or family. I didn't remember Kennedy being assassinated. Or Bobby. Or King. I didn't remember a movie. Or Bob Dylan. Or Marvin Gaye. Or Springsteen. Or the Beatles. Or John Prine. I didn't remember a teacher, or a professor. I remembered that frozen net on the snowy morning.

And at that moment I knew I either had to go play basketball, or that frozen net was going to become my Rosebud. You remember Rosebud from Citizen Kane; Rosebud was Charles Foster Kane's snow sled from his childhood that he loved more than anything and that he kept among the things his great wealth had allowed him to collect but that he never used again. As he is dying, he whispers Rosebud and the whole movie is about a reporter trying to figure out among other things who or what Rosebud was. Kane was unloved. He spent his whole life trying to make people love him. But he failed. Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz were careful to leave why he failed open ended--to let each of us decide why he failed despite all his wealth to find happiness.

I had studied the movie some time before, when I was trying to learn to write screen plays (something I failed at by the way) in my spare time as the Vampire LeBate. I was quite certain that Kane failed to find happiness because, after not being loved by his family, he never learned how to love himself. How could he? He had no model. He learned instead how to be narcissistic--to be always pushing himself front and center into the void of his feeling and to further accomplishments. He was a talented person and so he could accomplish a lot. But if he didn't love himself enough to go do what he loved, well, then he was doomed never to find happiness of any lasting kind.

As the Vampire LeBate looked into the mirror in the Miracle Mile, it became strikingly clear. Either he had to go play basketball that moment, or he was going to never find happiness. It was that simple. Play or die unhappy.

I had not played basketball for many years at that time. I did not even know where to go really to find a game. I was jogging some then and I had jogged past a YMCA a few times and I recalled they had an indoor court, but when I went there the court was closed.

Next, I recalled that I had played paddle ball on an outdoor court--a wall with a couple side walls really--south of the Santa Monica freeway. South of the Ten as we used to call it, where things got poor and a little rough in a hurry. I had gone there with women I had gotten to know in the clubs--you know the type, black everything, a few tats, lived somewhere out between Venice and Culver City east of the 405 now, a weird pair of chicks that had wanted to play paddle ball for kicks late at night when they were out of their minds on whatever they were on. The Vampire LeBate was not even trying for a threesome. He was just lonely. This court that I had been to many months before was somewhere south of the 10 and so I drove there in shorts, a t-shirt and some jogging shoes. I didn't even have a ball. It was a Saturday morning--one of those awesomely beautiful crisp Saturdays in what passes for winter in LA where you can see the San Gabriels when you are up on the 10 and practically count pine needles on trees on the peaks beyond the downtown skyline from 30 miles away. Awesome morning! Maybe the most beautiful morning of my life. I got to the court I remembered. It was part of a school yard and there was graffiti everywhere. Chain link fencing. Poor neighborhoods are different in LA. They don't look so intimidating as in the Midwest and East, even though in some ways they are more dangerous because the police are never near to anything and its flat and hard to run and hide anywhere.

The Vampire LeBate didn't care that morning. He needed to play a game of ball to save his life. Maybe not even play a game. Just shoot some buckets. In LA south of the 10 it was just the very edge of the bad neighborhoods that then got drastically worse for 20-30 miles of South Central and Baldwin Park (the Park was an island of sorts where the beginnings of a Black middle class was emerging). There were never big crowds playing in the transitional areas, just a few. The big crowds of kids playing were deep in South Central I had heard, and there were in door courts that were supposed to be crowded in those days, too. Boys clubs where guys like Jim Brown walked around in African garb and tried to talk kids out of gang life dramatized in movies like Dennis Hopper’s “Colors.” Yeah, Dennis was from Dodge. But the Vampire LeBate had no intention of going down there and getting his ass kicked somewhere before he even got to iron and chain net.

In the transitional neighborhoods, there were always a few kids on the playground courts shooting around. I had noticed that much in my driving around LA that previous year. That was all the Vampire LeBate wanted, or needed. Just someone to be there with a ball willing to let a vampire shoot a couple, so as not to die whispering "basketball." My ambition was very circumscribed. I was looking to save myself, nothing more.

When I walked out on the court there were just two kids and two adults. Each pair were on opposite ends. One pair—the kids—was Hispanic. One pair—the adults—was black. I had dated a Hispanic woman recently for a few weeks, which was the Vampire LeBate's idea of a long term relationship at the time. I opted for the Hispanic kids, who seemed more likely to stick me with a knife, but less likely to want to than the big black dudes. i had learned in the clubs that a lot of black men at that time were armed, or kept heat in the car for special occasions. I could run from a knife, not a bullet.

“Hola!”

It is strange how one thinks at times like these.

So: I walked up and rebounded a few and passed them the ball so they could shoot without retrieving their own rebounds. They eyed me suspiciously for a time, then suspicion yielded to some taunting ridicule in Spanish I did not understand. But based on my interactions with my Hispanic girl friend of two weeks I decided these were ordinary taunts and not menacing.

I was touching a ball. I was under metal nets. I was on an asphalt court. Not only was I not dead, I could feel something.

Shortly a couple white guys showed up. These were guys somewhat like me. They were not vampires, but they were Yuppies as we were called in those days trying to shake off the hangover and office cubicle numbness of a week of pushing paper by breaking a sweat on a Saturday morning. I could relate to them, but felt a strange rush of wishing they weren't there. The Vampire LeBate felt more in common with the Hispanic kids who probably had never seen the inside of a cubicle except maybe at a police station. They were there for the same reason the Vampire LeBate was there; they had no where else to go and nothing else to do. They were there, because it felt good and because it wasn't home. They were there because they liked to shoot around. One had a wonky shot that would have made Cole Aldrich’s J look like Jerry West’s, while the other had decent form. Obviously neither one had ever played organized ball. They had the untamed, idiosyncratic movements of a playground player. One had a crucifix on a neck chain hanging outside his strapped t-shirt. The other had a t-shirt with some logo I didn't recognize--the kind you pick up cheap in a thrift store and don't care what the logo is. This kid also had a goatee and a faded pork pie hat and sun glasses. The only thing I knew for sure was they weren't pro baseball caps, which in those days was a signal of gang membership. KC Royals caps equalled Killer Crypts, etc. Neither were the black adults at the other end of the court. The level of racial diversity on the court I guessed was typical for this transitional neighborhood at that time.

Hispanic guys, even kids, at least in those days, had a different way of testing you, of making you feel like you might not be good enough. They were always smiling at you. At first it seemed friendly; then you realized they were actually laughing at you politely. It was the Hispanic equivalent of a black guy looking at you cool and shaking his head, or kind of looking past you and indicating you ain't shit.

The Vampire LeBate strangely liked this. He liked that no one was being totally disingenuous, as they routinely were at work. Nor were they totally living out fantasy lives in the night, as they were in the clubs. Out on the asphalt, it was vaguely like it had been when the Vampire LeBate had still been alive and gone hunting with his father and his friends. There was unprocessed manhood out here on the asphalt among the Hispanic kids, who had thin beards, but were not men, just machismitos, or whatever the Spanish diminutive was.

And when the brothers were finally engaged by the two white professionals to play a little game, and the brothers got done shakin' their heads and smiling like they were gonna mop the pencil necks and get back to shooting around, a couple more Hispanic guys showed up and said, "Hey, why don't we have a real game here?" So: the Vampire LeBate quickly finds himself on Club Taco playing Team Salt and Pepper with two black men that seemed to know how to play and two pencil necks that had great cardio but were not going to be hard to guard, even as long as I had been away from the game.

Out on the asphalt, no one asks how long its been since you picked up a basketball in the sense of wanting to know,only as a taunt. I was the tallest on my team, so I got the taller of the two black guys. The guy outweighed me by 40 pounds. He looked kind of like Snacks after a week or so on Jenny Craig, not six months. The mofo backed me down like I was a feather stuck to his boxers and jumped a little and shot it in. He rolled his eyes and we ran to the other end. I realized I was in serious oxygen starvation the first trip.

On offense, the Hispanic guys whipped the ball around without really making inroads to the basket. There is a lot of posturing with their game, as there is with everyone's on a playground, but they differ from white and black players, or at least did back then, because their sense of machismo almost made the posturing and taunting more important than trying to beat you for a bucket. Now, I know, these guys were just grab ass guys, not the kind that were good that I played later on in my stint on the playgrounds, but there is some of this even in great Hispanic players. I believe it derives from the Catholicism of their culture. Catholicism is all inclusive. No matter what you do, no matter how you sin, you still have to go to communion and be apart of the order. No one is ever really outside of a Catholic culture, they are just higher or lower on the social pecking order. Even the government is under the Catholic church in Latin Catholic cultures, even if not officially. The Catholic Church is forever, so progress does not mean what it means to more protestant, or Judaic ordered cultures. In any case, my guys on Team Taco liked to jitter bug and talk to their opponent, as much as they liked to put it on the deck and go. Team Salt and Pepper had to beat them bad a few times before they got serious. So: the net effect of this Machismo was to spot the other team a couple basket lead. Back down the court, and Snacks Lite is backing me down again, only this time he is positioning me to go through me, not over me. So: as he starts his drop step into me leading with a shoulder and forearm I knock the ball loose and dribble it the length of the court and lay it up and listen to the chains. I am feeling ALIVE! We come down the court, the brother clocks me with an elbow as he passes it to his long pal who dunks. Now I mean a real elbow in the nose. I mean eyes watering, stem wound, and, you know, the white guys, they can't stand their noses being pasted kind of elbow. Back down the court again, one of the Hispanic guys drives on Snacks Lite's face and hook passes to his pal who elevates in the weirdest, most contorted jump the Vampire LeBate has ever seen and he rattles a hard layup in. Back at the other end, the tall black guy dribbles at the Hispanic guy encouraging him out, and then blows by him and flushes one that leaves the rim vibrating and the backboard wavering, before the ball practically embeds in the asphalt.

I am in awe.

I am in awe maybe for the first time in years.

Movie stars and $50 Million dollar developments did not leave me in awe. Meeting rockers in clubs did not leave me in awe. That f-ing dunk left me in awe.

Not just jaw dropping awe at some LA tail that is XTremely well tended and giving off heat radiation like the waves coming off a hot desert road on the way to Palm Springs, but real awe to the core in the moment that I am participating in, not just wishing I could have some of.

In that moment, the Vampire LeBate left and never returned.

In that moment, I became a basketball fan again, and I played basketball, and I thought about the game I loved, and I talked the game again, and though I only played regularly another two years, I never stopped talking about the game and watching and learning it and knowing that it was part of the elixir of life that made me alive.

T.S. Eliot has a great line in The Waste Land. Whatever else it is about, its about a guy, sometimes Eliot, sometimes Tiresias, sometimes god only knows who, stuck in rising cultural wasteland of London with a crazy woman, and a lot of crazy characters, trying to make sense of life after the carnage of the Great War.

"If there were water, and no rock..." Eliot writes.

He keeps repeating variations of the line.

It conveys his thirst and the hardness of a world where there is not water, nothing regenerative, just crazy women and crazy characters and a culture torn asunder--wreckage one is futilely trying to transform into shelter, food, and some sex. Remember: T.S. was a good midwestern kid from St. Louis with a Harvard education and a cultural inferiority complex about his home country trying at once to escape its vulgarities and also redeem them by proving that the unwashed colonials could exceed the haggard mother country by becoming even better at being British than the British. He was a foolish young man, as we all are when young, but one helluva poet, which we all aren’t, young or old.

Understand I was in a sadly comic way just like T.S.. I had left behind my good midwestern roots and was determined to prove that I could be come more superciliously superficial than the supercilious superficial Southern Californians that I thought I understood but did not then grasp the depths of.

Before that mirror moment my version was:

"If there were ball, and no concrete…”

There is more concrete in Southern California than anywhere else in America. It was in a way a fulfillment of my youth to come to Southern California. I grew up in Tom’s Town formed by the concrete of Municipal Auditorium, of the Kansas City Power and Light Tower, of the WWI Memorial, of the Nelson, of Brush Creek and so on. I grew up in a concrete, art deco and red tiled Castillian oasis on grass—a horizontal city with a little high rise node on a hill before Los Angeles was such. Once Kansas City was Westport in America, then Los Angeles was. How could I NOT retrace the migration? How could I not go to Los Angeles to become more Los Angeleno than Los Angelenos. My arrival there seems as inevitable to me now looking back in a way, as it back then seemed utterly random. I was the master of my destiny, not the puppet at the string’s end of it. HA!

How could I possibly have randomly arrived there? No way. It was the concrete and the western most-ness of Los Angeles and its high low-culture that it and Kansas City shared that made me come. Everything invented from whole cloth in both places in less than a century. No past European legacy worth noting further back. None. Just raw nature and an annihilated aboriginal ur-legacy people liked to talk about the pot shards of, but not the genocide that left only the pot shards and a few town names.

I had come there to prove that the great unwashed masses of midwesterners could be more superciliously superficial in and about high low-culture than the Los Angelenos. And I had succeeded impressively in barely a year.

But for a long time I did not know even to say it--to say what I did not have there.

That is real hell.

To not even know what you need that you lack.

That was what had transformed me inexorably into the Vampire LeBate at the mirror.

“Basketball” he whispered, like Charles Foster Kane.

But LeBate is long gone, and good riddance to him.

drgnslayr

Oct 29, 2015 12:54 PM #2

@jaybate-1.0

"I suspect your experience with the playground was much more conventional and so relevant than mine. Mine, like so much of my life, was out of step with my times and idiosyncratic."

I'm not sure what relevance my playground experience is... I do like to "go there" and flashback to the "hood old days." Actually, the time period where I played "inner city" playground ball was a tough time to do it for me. I'm of mixed ethnicity, and back then, mixed races seemed to get everyone's "short stick." During the time when I was playing on courts that were mostly African-American there were race riots happening everywhere, including at my schools. On several occasions our entire school was maced. The police would come in and turn a bad situation worse by turning the entire school into a war zone.

I always felt the biggest issue was segregation. People living apart didn't give anyone different a chance. And that worked the same on both sides. I like people of all colors, so it hurt me to deal with people that didn't want to mix. That alone felt like the fuel to create hatred.

Playing playground ball required patience and control and a big dose of self-determination and fearlessness. You were going to be tested and it would take a long time before you developed real "street cred." Guys would hit and push and try to control you through their physicality. There was something very primitive about it. You had to learn to take a physical shot while you were attempting your shot. It was gonna come, and it did. I grew to enjoy the contact. Contact became "home." So when I see all these suits changing our game into a non-contact sport I see the game ending. But the suit people want to do business... and there is a lot more money in keeping players healthy and performing aerial acrobats to be replayed millions of times (for profit) instead of having guys "tough it out" and make their drives to the hole one of survival and triumph instead of just the triumph part. I can't say I know the direction basketball is going to take and whether or not the viewing public will buy into it. Maybe it is for the best, but I know what I know, and that all comes from my experiences. I enjoy the high flying games of guys like Wigs. But I was always attracted to the game inside, where big guys battle for position. Moses Malone battling in the post. Aerial acrobatics are great, but by themselves it doesn't seem like a sport anymore. It seems like ballet. And if I want to watch ballet I will go to the ballet.

Frank Mason is our stereotypical playground baller. Frank is Timex. He "takes a licking and keeps on ticking." When you see a guy like Frank, that gets hammered and still gets his shot off with a good chance of still scoring, you know you found a street baller. Look how far he has come by being tough. I'm going to weep when he leaves Kansas. I'm also going to weep this year if the NCAA turns D1 into a powder puff game.

Dr. Naismith invented the game, and players took it to a certain level. It was street ball that lifted it to the high platform it is on today. Even the aerial acrobatics... all playground moves. All moves proving who is "king of the courts." All part of the primitive part of determining leadership roles, street cred and who survives and comes out on top. Now the suit people want to remove the playground influences from the game. They are playing games with the natural balance of yin and yang... where ugliness meets beauty and together they create the important drama of the game.

Basketball should be more than a game. It should be entertaining (if it wants to thrive). But to thrive it needs to do more than only keep the fan bases watching their own teams. For many years the NBA was something special. It was at the peak of dramatic effect. It had ugliness and beauty mixing at high levels. Teams would come in to Detroit for a game and leave in body bags. At that time Detroit represented the ugliness, and they did it well. And they showed the world that ugly could win, too. During that period basketball really was a microcosm of the world we live in. There was a path for success, even for the ugly.

That is all leaving the sport. It's all just becoming a media event now. Hollywood. Basketball players making crazy money and mixing with Hollywood personalities. And Drake (don't get me started with Cal). The attempt to gloss over the stripping of the primitive aspects of basketball to make it Hollywood. Yippeeee.

Look at the fall out. Lamar Odom. He should have stayed on the courts instead of being in courts. Spun out of control. Blew a gasket on his soul. Lost because he lives in a world of the eclectic. His only ground was basketball.

Ready for another season of NBA basketball? How many times, between the whistles, will the focus be here -

Lamar Odom's Kidneys Aren't Functioning Correctly ↗

This is the drama trade-off because the game is in tatters.

Suits have answers.

Spin up the game.

More points. Quantity over quality.

They have missed the boat because they didn't grow up playing playground. The real drama that attracts fans is the ugliness meeting the beauty. The ugliness that marketeers see as the problem. Take contact out and have more spectacular dunks. More highlights. What kind of highlight will it be when there is no longer a risk of getting jacked? Why is a ball necessary? Why not just put on leotards and learn pirouettes?

I grew up with a different definition of "sport." It isn't a sport if there is no chance of death or horrific injury. I know that concept is outdated. I know it isn't PC. But it represents the primitive side of reality. We will always be animals. We face risks every day. That is the drama of life and basketball has always weaved through the fabric of life.

drgnslayr

Oct 29, 2015 12:55 PM #3

@jaybate-1.0

“I suspect your experience with the playground was much more conventional and so relevant than mine. Mine, like so much of my life, was out of step with my times and idiosyncratic.”

I’m not sure what relevance my playground experience is… I do like to “go there” and flashback to the “hood old days.” Actually, the time period where I played “inner city” playground ball was a tough time to do it for me. I’m of mixed ethnicity, and back then, mixed races seemed to get everyone’s “short stick.” During the time when I was playing on courts that were mostly African-American there were race riots happening everywhere, including at my schools. On several occasions our entire school was maced. The police would come in and turn a bad situation worse by turning the entire school into a war zone.

I always felt the biggest issue was segregation. People living apart didn’t give anyone different a chance. And that worked the same on both sides. I like people of all colors, so it hurt me to deal with people that didn’t want to mix. That alone felt like the fuel to create hatred.

Playing playground ball required patience and control and a big dose of self-determination and fearlessness. You were going to be tested and it would take a long time before you developed real “street cred.” Guys would hit and push and try to control you through their physicality. There was something very primitive about it. You had to learn to take a physical shot while you were attempting your shot. It was gonna come, and it did. I grew to enjoy the contact. Contact became “home.” So when I see all these suits changing our game into a non-contact sport I see the game ending. But the suit people want to do business… and there is a lot more money in keeping players healthy and performing aerial acrobats to be replayed millions of times (for profit) instead of having guys “tough it out” and make their drives to the hole one of survival and triumph instead of just the triumph part. I can’t say I know the direction basketball is going to take and whether or not the viewing public will buy into it. Maybe it is for the best, but I know what I know, and that all comes from my experiences. I enjoy the high flying games of guys like Wigs. But I was always attracted to the game inside, where big guys battle for position. Moses Malone battling in the post. Aerial acrobatics are great, but by themselves it doesn’t seem like a sport anymore. It seems like ballet. And if I want to watch ballet I will go to the ballet.

Frank Mason is our stereotypical playground baller. Frank is Timex. He “takes a licking and keeps on ticking.” When you see a guy like Frank, that gets hammered and still gets his shot off with a good chance of still scoring, you know you found a street baller. Look how far he has come by being tough. I’m going to weep when he leaves Kansas. I’m also going to weep this year if the NCAA turns D1 into a powder puff game.

Dr. Naismith invented the game, and players took it to a certain level. It was street ball that lifted it to the high platform it is on today. Even the aerial acrobatics… all playground moves. All moves proving who is “king of the courts.” All part of the primitive part of determining leadership roles, street cred and who survives and comes out on top. Now the suit people want to remove the playground influences from the game. They are playing games with the natural balance of yin and yang… where ugliness meets beauty and together they create the important drama of the game.

That is all leaving the sport. It’s all just becoming a media event now. Hollywood. Basketball players making crazy money and mixing with Hollywood personalities. And Drake (don’t get me started with Cal). The attempt to gloss over the stripping of the primitive aspects of basketball to make it Hollywood. Yippeeee.

Ready for another season of NBA basketball? How many times, between the whistles, will the focus be here -

Lamar Odom’s Kidneys Aren’t Functioning Correctly ↗

This is the drama trade-off because the game is in tatters.

Suits have answers.

Spin up the game.

More points. Quantity over quality.

They have missed the boat because they didn’t grow up playing playground. The real drama that attracts fans is the ugliness meeting the beauty. The ugliness that marketeers see as the problem. Take contact out and have more spectacular dunks. More highlights. What kind of highlight will it be when there is no longer a risk of getting jacked? Why is a ball necessary? Why not just put on leotards and learn pirouettes?

I grew up with a different definition of “sport.” It isn’t a sport if there is no chance of death or horrific injury. I know that concept is outdated. I know it isn’t PC. But it represents the primitive side of reality. We will always be animals. We face risks every day. That is the drama of life and basketball has always weaved through the fabric of life.

jaybate 1.0

Oct 29, 2015 04:41 PM #4

@drgnslayr

PHOF

Serious historians and social commentators on sport in culture that will eventually tell the story of how sport transformed into what it is becoming need to copy and paste your post for inclusion in their research on paleo sport. Yours is the purest explanation of the attraction and meaning of the playground game that I have ever read.

Cultures, as I often remark, have life cycles.

Professor Wylie Sypher, an art historian, who wrote the Four Phases of the Renaissance Style, was one of the great minds of American Arts and Letters. If you want to understand your subculture, you have to understand the culture you and it are subordinated within--not the facts of it, but the historical dynamics of it. Without this knowledge, a person is driving down a dark road with nothing but headlights--with no map of the journey one is embarked upon.

You, @drgnslayr, must read the Four Phases of Renaissance Style. It will be painfully boring to you at times, because you have probably not spent a lot of your time studying the art and literature that he uses as his archaeological subject matter for finding and characterizing the phasing of cultures. The essential importance of his book is that it maps the X and Y and Z axes of a culture in renaissance along a time axis.

Most realms of human ecology (culture) experience millenia of incremental evolution and then a few brief centuries of renaissance. The reasons for it are common sensical and rooted in the accrual of knowledge and experience on the one hand, and on the other hand that accrual over time coming into contact with sharply expanded and sharply different spatial contexts and relationships. Once you read Sypher's book, and learn what to look for as indicators of culture, you can begin to map that culture and locate one's self within its phasing.

Why should the business man with the alias @drgnslayr take time out of gardening and operating his business to learn about the phasing of renaissance culture?

Because @drgnslayr is a person who grew up and matured through a remarkable period of time in sport that both changed culture and that is now being changed by culture.

And he has an insight into what the culture of sport was and awareness of what sport is losing, but not yet a strong sense of what the change really means and where it may be going and why?

But you are very close.

And because of your mixed ethnicity you have a very, very useful point of view from which to tell this story, or history, if you can find yourself and your time on a cultural time axis.

All popular activities that emerge eventually become politicized and weaponized for top down control of the people of a culture by its private oligarchy sooner or later.

It is the Tao of complex culture.

All the redemptive knowledge of history focuses not on how an ordinary person can live through this never ending process of being a target of control as one pursues one's own agenda.

Sport is a popular activity that emerges inevitably in most cultures.

It becomes politicized and weaponized for use on the people sooner or later.

The politicizing and weaponizing of it invariably accelerate during renaissances .

Renaissances evidence certain commonality of life cycle phasing.

Sport is one realm of viewing and knowing a renaissance.

Arts and letters, painting/sculpture, and music and science are not the only realms worth studying.

In certain ways, one can know a culture and map its stage BETTER through sport than the rest of the categories I have just mentioned.

Take a look.

You may have something to explore worth writing down, because of your point of view and your experience and your mixed ethnicity about the sport of our time, particularly basketball.

Sport is in a renaissance.

Renaissances are not simple.

They are not all good.

They are fraught with gain and loss.

They are finite.

To know one's own is to find oneself.

To find one's self is to leave a path for others.

Rock Chalk!

jaybate 1.0

Oct 29, 2015 05:08 PM #5

@drgnslayr said:

Quantity over quality.

All cultures achieve power and prosperity through application of vertical hierarchy and horizontal networking in pursuit of rational net benefit through quantification and control of costs and benefits. How they order vertically and horizontally varies based on context and technology within their grasp to use and develop. The beliefs, values and ideologies they embrace vary also based on the practical evolution of what works in their situation. Beliefs, values and ideologies are wetware, if you will.

But all cultures struggle mightily, and are, I suppose, eventually undone by losing a catalyzing and energizing balance between quantity and quality.

Over time, humans keep getting better at quantity. It maybe slow and it may be paved with phenomenally stupid mistakes, but the road to quantity grows ever more sophisticated and skillful along the time axis.

Alas, quality is a chimera.

Quality is not something humans have ever been able to bring under their control.

The only thing humans have been able to do is quantize quality to create an illusion of quality. When we digitize music and movies we are quantifying the qualities of those entertainment arts. And something is invariably lost under the curve of quantification by the calculus in the migration for original human performance, to the analog recording, to the digital version. It is hard even to specify accurately what is lost. But something IS lost.

We actually know what it is lost from analog to digital, but only in an abstract analog (curve)/digital (square) sense. We lose the are under the curve between the two squares that approximate but do not EQUAL the curve. There is a particular quantity of sound lost.

But now try to characterize what is lost between the human performance an the analog recording. Our language and concepts begin to break down for this loss. One can use quantity to approximate it again, but that is simulation. There is some aspect of quality that resides in experiencing reality itself at no degrees of freedom of removal from it; that is all I can even begin to articulate.

We are in the earliest stage of making yet another attempt at quantifying quality in entertainment with Occulus Rift. We have given up simulating quality outside the brain and delivering it into the brain via human sense organs. Now we are going to try to simulate quality inside the brain directly onto the neural nets. Interestingly, we are still not really finding a way to control quality. We are finding a more effective way to fool our senses with control of quantity. We are controlling quantity with agorithmns directly on the neural nets. By doing so, we are creating quantitative (not qualitative) experiences that we literally cannot distinguish from real, unless we forcibly remember and tell ourselves they are not real. But dazzling as the prospect may be, it is still not controlling quality. It is an order of magnitude increase in the illusion of the control of quality.

Orthodox empiricists insist quality is an illusion, of course. They argue that if you cannot measure and quantify something, it does not exist. I am down with that. That's okay. But then the orthodox empiricists have to be down with the idea that human experience by definition operates ALWAYS without complete ability to measure and quantify every quantity that exists and shapes our experience, and so quality is the concept name we give to all that realm as yet still beyond our abilities to measure and quantify. And any orthodox empiricist HAS to concede that at every moment of human history likely greater quantities of universe--from macro to nano--exist beyond our measure and quantification than within it. So: quality is a very, very, VERY empirical phenomenon by definition of empiricism. Quality is that which we often cannot measure and quantify that can nevertheless shape our experience measurably and in quantity.

You are right that the more suits (and scientists, and tradesmen and priests and illuminati and what have you) try to fix a thing, like basketball, or hunger, or health care, or cars, or clothing, the more they resort to control through quantification and while it produces certain effects, it seems only randomly to achieve the qualities we aspire to.

It is an epistemological gap apparently indicative of a gap in human intelligence. We also can't smell like dogs and see like eagles and hear like bats. We can develop the smell sensors and camera lenses and radar tech boasting the levels of acuity and sensitivity of dogs and eagles and bats, but frankly there are apparently certain neural net burn algorithms missing in human beings to actually make deep, intuitive sense of the world through these adaptations.

We got gaps, as Rocky told Adrian.

The potential beauty and elegance is that if we respect our fellow organisms at all scales and work with them rather than against them, we can to some degree fulfill Rocky's wisdom.

"Yo, Adrian, you got gaps, I got gaps, together we get together and fill some gaps."

We must first make those in the game of basketball AWARE of the gaps in quality issue, before we can hope to get together and fill gaps.

But I believe there is a deep human yearning to fill gaps.

And it is the frustration of that yearning that leads so many to displace that yearning into destruction and simple counting.

drgnslayr

Oct 29, 2015 06:28 PM #6

@jaybate-1.0

"Sport is in a renaissance."

I'm starting to think "sports business" is in a renaissance and dragging the actual sports around for the ride.

I like your idea of preserving playground court (or courts) as a piece of history. Not sure how to accomplish that. I'm guessing it would take a specialized construction crew to move it. Even though I would like to see it in the original location, because it is the location that tells the rest of the story, I'm sure big business would want to move it somewhere so that it could be commercialized. One of the difficulties with a capitalist society is doing projects without a revenue stream. It is hard enough to get the original funding, but then there is ongoing maintenance.

Perhaps you should consider writing a book, a historic reference guide, on playground courts. It is your chance to still fulfill the void you suffer from missing out on the experience earlier in your life. The stories you would learn would more than make up for the actual experience because of how much great content is out there just waiting to be captured and preserved permanently. Someone needs to do it. I know I'd wait in line to buy a copy!

The time window is closing. Every day passes and many of those characters are passing on, and taking their rich cultural experiences with them.

I'm pretty sure you will find a lot more than how the game of basketball evolved through that time period. How about life in general? How about all the hip-hop culture? The Bronx, Queens... all playground court dominant.

Lulufulu

Oct 29, 2015 09:44 PM #7

@jaybate-1.0 That was a great story. I loved reading T.S. Eliot in high school. And, I discovered Anne Rice and the Vampire Lestat when I was a junior in HS looking for something new and scary to read right around this same time. How on earth you managed to link one of my favorite anti heroes, T.S. Eliot and playground basketball is a thing of beauty. Inspiring.

jaybate 1.0

Oct 30, 2015 04:32 AM #8

@Lulufulu

Thx. Not a lot of persons recall what an anti-hero Eliot was early in his recoil from first American culture, and later in his recoil from then contemporary English culture, and finally his recoil from Eastern culture. They understand how committed he was to tradition as the river of literature and the path dependent well spring of the present of poetry, but they forget how deeply he shifted gears on which philosophical and literary traditions he connected back with to deal with the ghastly events of his present--how scathing he was essentially being in his indictments of his own time. After rejecting the American rebellion, he sought out British tradition, but he found it in moral decay, so he turned east. It didn't take. He then had a religious experience--what today might be called being born again--what he called experiencing the still point of the turning world--the time out of time, as he called it, and he embraced the most archaic and by then unconventional and even hostile form of Christianity to the Catholic and Protestant churches of his time--the individual pursuit of sainthood that frankly did more to expose and contrast the flaws of western culture at the time, than had turning to symbolist art and eastern religions. He was IMHO calling the bluff of institutional Christianity by embracing it as the most orthodox Anglican he could possibly manage, and then within that Anglican milieu, insist on a strident pursuit of saintliness.

This is, I believe, why the British came to love and admire him on the one hand and scoff at him as an eccentric colonial wannabe on the other. After being a rebel in their midst for quite some time, he rebelled by taking what they gave him--by his extreme conformity with the letter of their own Anglican Christianity and class system. He seemed to tell them the last third of his life, see, here, you wish to move into a modernity of dehumanizing industrialization and godless empire, but I am going to show you that the life of the saint can be pursued within this as bank clerk with a stick pin and an editor at your very own Faber. Eliot became a supremely Anglican dissident situated in the high culture of Great Britain. As Gandhi rebelled in the face of the British with love and passive resistance, Eliot rebelled in their faces with brilliance and humility and keenly good manners that they could do nothing but snicker at occasionally. But their snickering meant they were snickering at their own highest values--the saintly pursuit of Christian virtue. He was a complicated kid in St. Louis, philosophy student at Harvard, a young avant garde-ist in London before his switch to Anglicanism, and as the astoundingly brilliant poet/editor practicing saintly humility in London after.

The true Eliot is very hard to discover for two reasons.

First, through out his literary career, he embraced a philosophy and aesthetic of the annihilation of the artist to in his art to reveal the work of art as completely as possible. It has roots in the Puritan tradition and it appealed to him in his search of philosophy in college where he found far more sophisticated rationalizations for the annihilation of the artist in his work. Annihilation of the self was a common theme through out his life in which he sought within the various traditions that he explored their views and methods of annihilation of the self. It as some where between his common theme of art and his philosophy of how to break into the feeling of being alive. This left the illusive residual of an artist not seeking to be known himself.

Second, Eliot came a long at a time when America the new world empire was seeking ascendance and primacy and was quite unsutblely asking its scholars to canonize then contemporary American artists into a new murders' row of world art. In short, if America were to go out and take its place of leadership in the world commensurate with its economic power at the time; then it needed great artists to justify its claim of being worthy to rule the world by hegemony and great Navies. So for most of the 20th Century the the American academy was giving him the poetic superstar PR spin and that involved concealing a lot of his warts and imperfections both as a poet and as a person. But he was a great, great poet--one for the ages, though he has entered into the inevitable decline in stature and memory that all great artists pass through before being permanently resurrected for posterity.

So, young Tommie Eliot, who grew up to be Thomas, and then T.S., requires quite a bit of near archaeological digging to recover him from the myths. Where as scholarship on his poetry was usually uncommonly strong, history about him has long been less so.

He is one of the few American poets I can get a great deal from even after many rereads even in the October/November of my life.

Rock Chalk!

drgnslayr

Oct 30, 2015 03:20 PM #9

!Detroit-Shooting-1880x1162.jpg ↗

Found this image listed under "Detroit shooting." I'm guessing it is not referring to a jump shot.

wrwlumpy

Oct 30, 2015 04:47 PM #10

@jaybate-1.0 I've always thought you to be precocious.

jaybate 1.0

Oct 30, 2015 07:06 PM #11

@drgnslayr

Preserving that very one could be a great thing. Detroit had an awesome playground tradition. How about building The National Playground Hall of Fame right there. Gotta be south of 8 Mile somewhere in the emerging urban grasslands of Motown!

jaybate 1.0

Oct 30, 2015 07:09 PM #12

@wrwlumpy

Trying to be precocious about old age. Love the paradox of it. 😄

drgnslayr

Oct 30, 2015 07:33 PM #13

@jaybate-1.0

Yes.... Detroit had an awesome playground tradition. I would start at Highland Park.

!old-bakery-fire-oostjpg-052bd54ea85954b7.jpg ↗