Open Looks: My Life in Basketball
By John Saker
()
About this ebook
Related to Open Looks
Related ebooks
Golden Oldies: Stories of Hockey's Heroes Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Once More Around the Park Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Baseball in San Diego: From the Plaza to the Padres Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGreat Baseball Stories: Ruminations and Nostalgic Reminiscences on Our National Pastime Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBases to Bleachers: A Collection of Personal Baseball Stories from the Stands and Beyond Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Late Innings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Summer Game Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDick Bremer: Game Used: My Life in Stitches With the Minnesota Twins Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Learn Chess from the Greats Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Devil's Snake Curve: A Fan's Notes from Left Field Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBatting Stance Guy: A Love Letter to Baseball Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Roger Angell Baseball Collection: The Summer Game, Five Seasons, and Season Ticket Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/527 Men Out: Baseball's Perfect Games Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWait Till Next Year: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Holy Grail of Hoops: One Fan's Quest to Buy the Original Rules of Basketball Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Baseball Birthright: Chronicles & Connections Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFive Seasons: A Baseball Companion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rockin' Steady: A Guide to Basketball & Cool Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Six Decades of Baseball: A Personal Narrative Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGrassroots Baseball: Where Legends Begin Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSoccer In the Weeds: Bad Hair, Jews, and Chasing the Beautiful Game Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSt. Louis Cardinals Fans' Bucket List Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Last Commissioner: A Baseball Valentine Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCrashing the Borders: How Basketball Won the World and Lost Its Soul at Home Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5It Happens Every Spring: DiMaggio, Mays, the Splendid Splinter, and a Lifetime at the Ballpark Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn Scoring Position: 40 Years of a Baseball Love Affair Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Iceman Experience: Memoir of a Harlem Playground Star Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Divine Nature of Basketball: My Season Inside the Ivy League Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBaseball FAQ: All That's Left to Know About America's Pastime Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5America's Gift to Golf: Herbert Warren Wind on the Masters Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Sports Biographies For You
Birth of The Endless Summer: A Surf Odyssey Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Yes Please Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Straight Shooter: A Memoir of Second Chances and First Takes Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5MOX Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Baseball 100 Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Things That Make White People Uncomfortable Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Wooden on Leadership: How to Create a Winning Organizaion Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Winning Ugly: Mental Warfare in Tennis--Lessons from a Master Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Horse God Built: The Untold Story of Secretariat, the World's Greatest Racehorse Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tiger Woods Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ball Four Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Endure: How to Work Hard, Outlast, and Keep Hammering Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Slash Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Uncommon: Finding Your Path to Significance Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Playing for Keeps: Michael Jordan and the World He Made Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Coach Wooden's Pyramid of Success Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Most Beautiful Thing: The True Story of America's First All-Black High School Rowing Team Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Climb: Tragic Ambitions on Everest Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5When Pride Still Mattered: A Life Of Vince Lombardi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In My Skin: My Life On and Off the Basketball Court Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5LeBron Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Summary of Kobe Bryant's The Mamba Mentality Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Off Balance: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Big Year: A Tale of Man, Nature, and Fowl Obsession Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Related categories
Reviews for Open Looks
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Open Looks - John Saker
Ball
Shooting in the dusk, Montana. Mark Blaszkiewicz
Introduction
Several years ago I played my last game of organised five-on-five basketball. I was part of a team of middle-aged men whose different lives aligned every Tuesday night through this shared pleasure. Our opposition was always younger—much younger—but seldom smarter. It was their legs vs our heads. We would gift them 20 or so points a game because a lot of the time we wouldn’t, or couldn’t, run back on defence. We had to make up for this handicap with a half-court offence based around sharp passing (and, I have to admit, often a height advantage), along with a defence where the tactical foul was raised to an art form. We could make it work, but only for a while. Although we’d once been champions of the B Grade, the law of diminishing returns that applies to all declining jocks saw us gradually slide down the league table as our ages moved in the opposite direction.
By that last game, the pleasure factor was also waning—for me anyway. An old ankle injury made running painful. Worse, I’d joined that subspecies of player I’d always detested: grumpy old pricks who once had a game and can’t let go. Bearing witness to your wilting skills on a weekly basis is to be reminded that death has you in its sights, and what could be more grumpiness-inducing? To co-exist amicably with the game as a mature exponent
I saw I had to recast my relationship with it—I had to stop caring, basically. I could never quite manage to do that.
In my younger years, if I’d gone without playing basketball for a matter of days I’d start feeling bereft. Today, I’m happy enough in my role as passive observer.
The hold it has on me now may be gentler, but my admiration for it still runs deep. From the moment basketball arrived in my life there seemed no end to its generosity. For one, it was so permissive. Every player was allowed to do things, to be inventive. Although it was played in a more confined space than most other games, there was no other in which I felt as free as I did playing basketball. To be effective in exercising that freedom meant practice, lots of it, and that was no imposition. You ran to basketball practices, they were so much fun. This was mostly because there was a competitive element to almost every drill (unlike rugby practice, where a half-hour was usually spent going 15 on none—pure tedium). When there wasn’t competition, there were other compensations, viz. the pacifying symmetry of the five-man weave.
Something I never expected at the start was the playful imagination that drove the basketball lexicon. Given my fondness for words, this was a bonus. Metaphor bursts from the game like fruit from a tree. Different shots come clothed in wonderful descriptors—teardrop
, dagger
, alley-oop
, skyhook
—as does the sound of them hitting their mark— swish
, string music
, harmony of the hemp
. Even shots that never look like going in are given their due—airball
, brick
—along with the geography and features of the playing area—elbow
, arc
, lane
, window
, cup
.
Poetry would also gush from commentators: it’s off the boards and through the cords
; he tickles the twine for two
; and my own favourite from Cato Butler (who figures on page 115), the leather sphere drops through the iron orbit
.
Then there is gym rat
—the name for a person so hopelessly infected by the game that he or she hangs out in gyms for hours on end, practising on their own, playing with a passing parade of shorter stay devotees, as permanent a presence as the lines on the floor. Gym rats soak up the game’s smells and sounds, listen intently as others pass on its stories, and shoot the ball—they’re always ready to do that. A gym rat thinks nothing of putting up a couple of hundred j
s a day, maybe topped off with 50 free throws.
My own gym rat years ended when I was 22 and signed a professional contract. The wholesome bond a gym rat has with the game gets rudely roughed up when money enters the picture. Whenever a young sporting pro tells the world about the joy of getting paid for doing what he or she loves, I’m dubious. For me, the transition was not wholly joyous: the start of something I’d wanted was tempered by the passing of a sweetness I never thought I’d lose.
The stories that make up this book were written over the last couple of decades, at different times when the opportunity arose or I felt compelled to write about basketball. Many have America as their backdrop, although I spent only two years playing there.
One memory from those times was entering my college coach’s office for the first time. Behind his desk were rows and rows of books, all written by other coaches. Invited to explore further, I found a reservoir of ideas and philosophies on every aspect of the game. Plays for every possible situation, how a practice should be structured, drills and defences, fast break styles, zone offence principles, the importance of the reverse pivot… the game was dismantled to reveal parts I never knew it had.
These books were emblematic of two things. The first was the givingness of America’s basketball culture. If you knew something, you shared it. You spread your knowledge and your enthusiasm: the game deserved no less. My standing in that office, a Kiwi on a scholarship, was a facet of this open-handedness.
The second was basketball’s power to generate published words. There are so many basketball books in America, penned not only by coaches but also by writer
writers. Non-fiction works about the game by the likes of David Halberstam, Rick Telander and John McPhee have become classics, while novelists like John Updike have woven it into their fiction.
Writing about basketball as a part of life, rather than simply chronicling results and careers, is not commonplace outside America. That’s partly because writing and sport generally have a less inhibited relationship in the US than they do almost everywhere else. And also because the game’s presence as a cultural totem around the world is only about a generation old. My parents never had an opportunity to play or watch basketball. For them it was as exclusively American as Mount Rushmore. That changed as I grew up. Basketball’s global diaspora gained in strength and attitude during the 1960s. The seriousness with which the game was being taken in some countries had no more powerful a symbol than the shock loss by the US to the USSR in the 1972 Olympic gold medal game.
Other countries have now got game
but the basketball muse is taking longer to take hold. This book, I hope, helps redress that imbalance.
Unleashing a hook shot, 1986. Photographer unknown
Tracing the Arc
In my mid teens I discovered something I thought very beautiful. Like a lot of beautiful things in my country, it wasn’t out there on show, soaking up rays of national delight. It was tucked away in a shadowy corner, hidden beneath a rough crust, like a paua shell’s rainbow lining. Getting to it required inside knowledge, or else a lucky stumble.
It was a perfectly executed, sweeping, right-handed hook shot. Inside the corrugated-iron boatshed that passed for a basketball stadium in Wellington for about half a century, I sat becalmed with pleasure as I watched a man roll across the key and, with a willow-branch sweep of his raised arm, catapult the ball towards the hoop. The orange sphere traced a gentle arc before snapping the white net.
God knows what his name was, and I mean that—God probably does know. The guy played for one of those teams of American Christian troubadors who came through in the 1960s and early ’70s, whipping the pants off local teams but—unusually for a visiting sports team—never the local women.
They called themselves Venture for Victory and they were America as approved by the State Department: big-jawed, wide-eyed boys with hair cut short at a time when most young men had severed all ties with hairdressers. They had names such as Randy Pfund and Buddy Gregg. All were white but for one, an exhibit of sorts, an original Chester Williams. We all knew even then, 40-something years ago, that black