The Secret Code of Pickup Basketball

The only immovable object on my weekly calendar is a Sunday-night basketball game. We play in a rented gym in Washington, D.C., usually at a high school, because we’re all conserving cartilage and the local middle schools don’t place much cushioning underneath the hardwood. The game has been running for more than 20 years, but it wasn’t always on Sunday nights, and none of the original players is still around. When people get hurt or move away, they’re replaced like planks on the Ship of Theseus. The continuity of the game is the important thing. It has to stay in motion, but not because anyone is trying to get somewhere. None of our regulars retains any ambition of climbing up to some higher echelon of organized basketball, at least I hope not. That’s part of the game’s magic. The enlivening competitive energies that it summons have no higher purpose. They are entirely internal to the game. Play in earliest childhood has this quality.

In 2015, Nick Rogers, now a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh, conducted an ethnography of a pickup-basketball game. Like an anthropologist who heads