Fadeaway Jump Shot
Having taught the essay a number of times, I’ve fallen into a semesterly routine of examples I use to illustrate her point outside the realm of writing. You won’t be a great singer based on your impersonation of Adele, I tell them. Nor was I great basketball player because I practiced taking a fadeaway jump shot I’d fashioned after Michael Jordan’s.
Muscle memory is a funny thing. I haven’t actually taken a Jordan-esque shot in over a decade. I only remember actually playing basketball a small handful of times in the last fifteen years, and what I remember of these experiences was how poor my cardio had grown and how rusty all my basketball-specific coordination had gotten—perhaps most of all, consciously avoiding anything so showy as a special shot built to imitate one of the all-time-greats.
Still, the muscle memory. When I raise my hands around a make-believe basketball in front of that room of eighteen- and nineteen-year-old students, I instinctively leap back for the shot designed to fire over the outstretched arm of a defender, trying to block the shot.
The reality of my fadeaway was that I so rarely used it for practical purposes. When I used it in a game, I was usually the tallest player on the court, rendering such a move impractical. Usually, I shot the fadeaway outside the context of a game. Look at that objectively, and it's little less absurd than doing so from the front of the classroom, with no ball at all.
*
I always recall the wisdom passed on by my friend’s father who had played high school ball, and was briefly recruited to play at the collegiate level. He told anyone who’d listen that the fadeaway was a fool’s shot—to move away from the rim rather than toward the rebound, despite knowing that, on a statistical basis, most contested jump shots would miss.
He singled out Knicks center Patrick Ewing, saying that if he’d been Ewing’s college coach, the legendary John Thompson, he’d have punched Ewing in the head the first time he did it, and told him never to take that shot again.
*
My basketball education was fragmented.
I never played for a team, never had a formal teacher who knew much better than I did. I played in driveways and at playgrounds. I watched NBA games, with a particular focus on the Sunday NBA on NBC broadcasts.
I read voraciously. Magazines. Sam Smith’s The Jordan Rules. Autobiographies by Wilt Chamberlain, Pat Riley, and Dennis Rodman. Any book the public library or used bookstore in town allowed me to get my hands on--usually offering few-page profiles of popular players of yesteryear. Full entries about NBA seasons from the Encyclopedia Brittanica “yearbooks” my parents had collected throughout the 1980s, I think for educational purposes, though I scarcely recall using them for school purposes.
I played a lot of NBA Jam.
I cobbled together a piecemeal understanding of basketball that privileged superstars and history, lending the sport a sense of myth making that I suppose it was predisposed to, but I was much slower to pick up the fundamentals like the defining skill sets of the core positions, or the mechanics of how to run plays more complicated than a pick-and-roll.
*
I discovered Hang Time. A Saved by the Bell knock-off inspired by a surge in NBA popularity for kids like me. It aired on Saturday mornings and I started watching in a late-mid-90s period when my basketball obsession peaked.
More than liking the show, I recall a brief period when I wished my life were the show. The trappings of being on the basketball team were appealing, sure, but more so to have a crew of faithful friends as committed to the game as I was, to get into hijinks that would be resolved within the twenty minute run-time of an episode. The mix of boys and girls (Amber Barretto is a celebrity crush I forgot I’d had until I started writing this post, and checked the show's IMDb page).
*
My infatuation with Hang Time only ran so long. The show was only good enough to hold out idealism for it for so long, besides which casting changes like the head basketball coach being portrayed by decorated former NBA star Reggie Theus and then, less sensibly, NFL legend Dick Butkus started to wear.
Still, I think there was more than a little Hang Time that infused my first novel, Free Throw, a melodramatic high school romance centered on an aspiring basketball player—a book I’d self-publish coming out of high school, and a book I’d largely regret having put out into the world years later, recognizing its many contrivances, derivations, and over-arching limitations.
*
It’s funny how the game can pass you by. Enough years pass not playing, and you lose a feel for the game. Enough years not watching, and you can hardly recognize any of the players anymore—just those few who transcend the game to become part of pop culture.
In grad school, a friend whose fandom had peaked in a similar period as mine invited anyone who was interested to join him at a bar to watch the Golden State Warriors win their seventy-third game of the season, toppling the record I’d seen the Bulls achieve in 1996.
I balked, rejecting this step toward erasing a defining story written in our youth.
He countered that this was a chance to watch a new story getting written.
He was probably right.
I still didn’t go.
*
But after grad school, on a cross country road trip, I started writing prose poems about basketball players as a way of writing in the shortest spurts, a way of keeping the poetic impulse I’d rediscovered over the two preceding years alive.
They’d become a chapbook called Distance Traveled.
I got that friend from grad school to write a blurb.
*
A different friend texted me the day Kobe Bryant died.
He texted about how Bryant had been a huge part of our childhood.
I wasn’t so sure.
Because Bryant hadn’t been drafted into the NBA, and thusly entered into our consciousness until our teenage years. Because I’d generally felt he was overrated. Because, particularly in the more recent wake of MeToo, I wasn’t so sure he should remembered more as a basketball legend and family man than he was a credibly accused rapist.
For all my hesitations, I was still sad.
Because Bryant was a great basketball player, who’d bridged eras, from when I was a fervent fan of the game, to an era long past that. Wasn’t there something to be said for not only greatness, then, but longevity. Because for all of the elements I questioned about him, his loyalty to basketball, at the least, had so exceeded my own?
*
Bryant lost a daughter in that helicopter crash, too.
Vanessa Bryant lost the both of them.
I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.
It’s enough to make you pray. *
“Ball” was among my son’s first words. An easy word to say. An easy concept to access with balls among those toys around him from the very beginning.
My mother-in-law bought him a small-scale, big-rimmed plastic basketball hoop for his second birthday.
I took no small pleasure in watching him dunk the ball and laugh.
For though I’ve missed more Super Bowls than I’ve watched in my lifetime and never really learned to throw a spiral, and though I never could hit a baseball, and I don’t know a thing about hockey or soccer or golf or tennis or—
I know something about basketball.
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