The Other Writer
When you discover there actually IS another guy writing about pickup basketball in Denver
April 14th
In last week’s post, I joked that some day I might discover that someone I play pickup with has been documenting the games we play in, offering an account that undermines or validates my recollection of the games. Part of that joke is rooted in my uncertainty about whether this topic (or almost any topic, for that matter) has any relevance or value to anyone beyond a small group of people who already enjoy and support my writing. If that’s you, thank you.
But that little joke came true this week.
A day after I published that, Instagram served up this article from The Denver Post: A hooper’s guide to pickup basketball in Denver. For a second I thought this was a scroll-induced hallucination. The title is eerily similar to the piece I published in Denverse Magazine just three months ago called Ball Is Life: A Dispatch from Denver’s Pickup Basketball Scene. I’m not going to speculate whether this writer — who actually organizes the Tuesday night game I play in and scored, like, 15 points on me last week — had wittingly or unwittingly lifted my idea for his article. His name is Sam and he’s a nice guy and a good hooper.
Even if he had lifted the idea, I think every writer has a right to write about whatever they want as long they write it themselves.
The nature of the two publications tells you almost everything you’d need to know about how the pieces differ. The Denver Post is a newspaper of some repute, and unless you’ve time-traveled to 1998 and have a column, most writers won’t get more than 250 words to talk about something that isn’t hard news or reporting. Denverse is like an upstart New Yorker of Denver, so culture and arts coverage comes first. Even the harder reporting has a sort of personal angle. Needless to say, Denverse is more my speed. (Stay tuned for something fun on that frequency soon…)
Looking back at the timeline now, he did in fact publish the article on the very day (April 7th) when he put 15 on my head, and I published my post with the joke about other writing hoopers the next day. I discovered his article the day after that.
The nature of the articles is totally different, but there is some overlap. One point in his 250-word piece is that it’s taken him years to find the perfect pickup game, which he refers to as “ethical basketball.” I wrote something similar in last week’s post (which I wrote before discovering his) about looking for a “satisfactory” game. He even mentions that basketball was always an antidote for natural nervousness, which is similar to what I said the week before (which I published after he probably started writing his) about how basketball could make life make more sense by making no sense.
So, maybe this just says that this writer and I have a few things in common. Which is cool.
But it also says something about how universal this whole pickup thing is, and that there actually may be an audience for writing about it. I genuinely believe that people who like sports can get tired of only reading and hearing about people who are absurdly, super-humanly great at them.
The irony is that being great at a sport does not make you good at talking about it. There are plenty of exceptions (Phil Jackson’s Sacred Hoops is one of the only books about basketball I’ve ever really enjoyed), but a lot of people would rather hear a good writer or analyst talk about sports than a good athlete. Look no further than the over-saturated market of unlistenable NBA player-podcasts, versus the podcasts from even decent basketball commentators.
Obviously, watching brilliant athletes play sports is superior to reading about sports, regardless of who’s writing. I can’t argue with what commands human attention.
But there’s something to be said for regular people writing emphatically about the things they love to do. I’m glad this writer got a chance to publish this in The Post, and I hope he keeps it up. I hope more people will write about things they love with verve and obsessive attention, rather than not write at all, or only write about things that are considered serious or significant.
As for that convoluted defense of my own account I mentioned last week, here’s a quick account of my game last Tuesday, when the writer Sam cooked me like a hot dog on July 4th.
April 7th. 7 p.m.
As soon as I got to the court I knew I didn’t have it. My body just felt completely off and exhausted. Before I knew it, I was missing easy shots. It felt like I was trying to run in a dream. Sam was hitting all kinds of tough ones. Even while playing terribly, I managed to limit my turnovers. On a rough day like this, limiting turnovers or defensive mistakes becomes my only goal. Because those errors are mental, which I can control even when my body isn’t pulling its weight.
I was playing so poorly that my teammates started to notice and basically stopped giving me the ball. This bothered me, though I understood it. But let the record show: I was not the only one missing shots and I was certainly not the one committing costly turnovers.
My only redeeming moment for the night was making a tough layup, through a foul, to win the second to last game. Attacking the rim and taking a shot like this required me to put my horrible play in the back of my mind for the moment, and I did. The battle for that night was to stay positive enough to take that shot. It’s probably the worst night of basketball I’ve played in 3 months, but because I wasn’t afraid to take it— and because I made it — it wasn’t that bad.
Sam, the other writer, was on an absolute heater all night. For all I know, it might have been his best night in a while. But I can’t say for sure. That’s his story to tell.
GG.
-Paul