The Most Beautiful Game

Brilliant legal theorist, deconstructionist and social critic; that's Stanley Fish. No one ever guests him on talk shows, and I think I've seen him but once on a panel many moons ago, where I was struck by the incisiveness and range of his mind. Add to that he's a really good writer, and you have someone who means business.

When I stumbled upon this essay while perusing his archive at the NYT, I was floored; Fish, the intellectual, the brilliant critic and essayist, shared with me a love for basketball far beyond fan worship of one's home team. Not the nebbish, say, Woody Allen (who happens to be a huge Knicks fan) is, Fish, nonetheless and by his own admission, is anything but athletic, whether in ability or looks.

But that doesn't stop him.

This boy plays. His love for the game - "addiction" by his telling - shines through, and because he's such a good writer, that "hidden dimension" that only players can ever know is revealed, at least hinted at, in mental pictures and feelings. That feeling is, on a "basic" level (for lack of a better term) something at once mysterious and glorious.

[But] for me, playing basketball is above everything - even those times creating art. There's something about synergy, creating with teammates that, when it clicks, is unique. It's the most beautiful game. There's a feeling of connecting to your teammates that, at its best, is like you're plugged in to the universe in a very direct way; it's a transcendent experience far beyond words.

I know it sounds corny and new age-y, but it's a pure experience - thought doesn't enter in. There's only seeing and doing.

Two things stand out from those brief encounters with "the zone": 1) The euphoria it produces is more sublime than anything - you literally desire nothing, and 2) "you" seem to disappear and yet be more present than ever. If that sounds too Tao-ish then tough. This is the limitation of words here aside from meager writing skill.

One time I was talking to a surfer and he was relating how there are certain times when he catches a wave just right, and the feeling that it produces is indescribable. I told him that for athletes, it's called "being in the zone." It doesn't come often and in fact is the rarest bird, but when it does, all you can do is watch and marvel.

Then it flies away.

Branford Marsalis - another big hoop head - likes to make the analogy of how playing in a band is like playing on a basketball team, with everyone with their roles and contributing to the common good. I disagree, and I, like everyone, love music. Sports in general and basketball in particular have that physical release; so does sex, but those feelings are animal-biological. Tantric sex with Raquel Welch when she was 24 may help me there, but until then.... I will give his analogy some props though, because improvisatory jazz and rock have that element in common with basketball, particularly pick up games where there's no strategy much less people who know how to play from the book aspect.

For me it's about "running" (what hoop heads call it) with the boys on a late afternoon when the heat's not as bad and the shadows are long, the promise of cold drinks and devouring food waiting; knowing, somehow, that Mitch will make the cut, seeing him in the periphery, fooling my defender and then getting the pass to him as he lays it up. That feeling is something that has become as branded in me as anything.

In the following essay, Fish waxes poetic about the game we both love in far more eloquent terms than I ever could. He may get his March Madness pick wrong, but then again so did I (Louisville) and aside from that, on the court of the essay, I'm a pick up player - he's Magic Johnson.






March 22, 2009, 10:00 pm

My Life on the Court
I have been playing basketball since I was seven years old. That’s more than 60 years, and as March Madness moves into full swing, I find myself thinking about the game and my addiction to it.

It isn’t skill. I can do two things — shoot from the outside and run. (I don’t get tired.) I dribble as little as possible. I drive to the basket once a decade; I’ve blocked two shots in my entire life, and if white men can’t jump, this white Jewish man really can’t jump. Maybe twice a year my shot is on and I feel I can’t miss. On days like that I think that I’ve finally arrived and can’t wait for the next game. But when game day rolls around again and I get out on the court, I find that I have regressed to my usual level, which is several degrees south of mediocre.

In all these years I have had two triumphs. Once when I was playing on the beach-side courts in Laguna Beach, every shot went in. The other players, black and Latino, started to yell, “Larry Bird, Larry Bird.” I knew it was a joke, but I savored the moment anyway.

Another time, when I was living in Baltimore, I hired a tall young man to remove the leaves from my lawn. When I came back a couple of hours later I found the leaves merely rearranged. I complained and refused to pay. We got into a shouting match, and then I asked, “Do you play basketball?”

“Yes,” he answered, and I said, “There’s a gym up the street; let’s play for it. You win, I pay you; you don’t, I don’t.” He replied, “Are you crazy old man?” (At the time I was in my mid-forties; I hate to imagine what he’d say today.)

We trekked to the gym and I beat him three times by big scores. In the first game he didn’t guard me because he didn’t believe I could do anything, and I hit one long shot after another. In the second game he guarded me too closely, and I went around him. In the third game he didn’t know what to do, and it was all over. The whole thing took less than half an hour, which was good because in another 20 minutes he would have figured out that I had only two moves and that both of them could easily be neutralized by someone taller, stronger and more athletic, all of which he was.

And then there are the thousand other times when I walked off the court either feeling happy not to have embarrassed myself (although I hadn’t done much) or trying to come to terms with the fact that I had indeed embarrassed myself. Whichever it was, I always knew that I would be back.

Why? Why continue to do something I wasn’t any good at nine times out of ten? Well for one thing basketball players are by and large generous. (There are exceptions.) If you’re not very skilled, if you’re old and slow, they will make a place for you in the game. In his recent book “Give and Go: Basketball as a Cultural Practice,” Thomas McLaughlin speaks of the ethical practices that emerge in the course of a game even though no rules have imposed them: “Every time one of the players in our game says to a weak player as he is taking an open shot that he will likely miss ‘Good shot,’ he is weaving the ethical fabric of the game.”

I have often been the beneficiary of that ethical fabric, even when those weaving me into it are perfect strangers. For one of the great things about being a basketball player (or pretending to be one) is that no court is closed to you which is why I always have a basketball in the trunk of my car. You can just show up wherever there is a hoop and a game and you will be included. (This holds also in foreign countries where there may be a language barrier, but never a basketball barrier.)

At Live Oak Park in Berkeley I played with college standouts and with American Basketball Association all-star Lavern Tart. On a famous court in the West Village I played on a team that won every game. It was glorious even though I never touched the ball. In a strict sense I didn’t belong on those courts, but pick-up basketball doesn’t enforce any strict sense and is willing to relax the demands of competition and winning for the sake of extending its pleasures to those whose skills are minimal.

What are those pleasures? They are not, I think, pleasures that point outward to some external good. Rather they are the pleasures of performing (however badly) within the strict parameters of a practice whose goals and rewards are entirely internal. Hans Gumbrecht, in his book “In Praise of Athletic Beauty,” links sports to Kant’s account of the beautiful as the experience of “pure disinterested satisfaction.” It is a satisfaction, Gumbrecht explains, that “has no goal in everyday life” (like virtue, it is its own reward), and he quotes with admiration Olympic swimmer Pablo Morales’s description of the pleasure he feels in competition as “that special feeling of getting lost in focused intensity.”

The marvel is that focused intensity can be achieved even in the act of failure, even by someone who knows what to do but most of the time can’t quite do it. And it is for that intensity — not its object or its goal — that one plays, for in those moments of surrender to the game all one’s troubles, all one’s strivings, all one’s petty irritations fall away. And if, occasionally, you actually do set the hard pick or deliver the perfect pass or make the improbable shot, well, that’s just icing on the cake.

And by the way, my money is on Duke to take it all. A pick from the heart.

Fish Bite

I'm an admirer of Professor Stanley Fish's, and have to post this. It speaks to the way huge corporations now dominate our lives with the bullshit they mete out and get away with on the basis of their power. As a consumer, it's the near-end result of being dominated by the biggest bullies in business history.

At the end of his piece there's a comments section, and I threw up my lot, typos and all, about the bad decision "we've" made in letting corporate America conglomerate down to this unprecedented power. In the above paragraph above (That's a joke for you, Professor Fish), I said, "As a consumer, it's the near-end result of being dominated by the biggest bullies in business history." I said "near-end" for a reason; because what we're currently witnessing in the financial sector is, in one sense, the endgame of huge financial corporations -- benignly called "institutions" by some -- running amok. They, their lobbyists, their armies of lawyers they deploy, and the politicians who are in their back pockets don't care about you, me, us at all, as George Carlin said. That means it's gonna get a lot worse and a lot uglier, for instance, as those "Alt-A" and "option ARM" mortgage loans, approved by the ratings companies, reset.

And I hope you understand that although I think this is the endgame, it means for this phase. What the hell comes next is either one of or a combo of three things, as I see it:

1. A "cooling down period," where auto CEOs will drive hybrids and go on photo ops, then a return to "business as usual" when they feel like it.
2. More conglomeration.
3. A makeover, but not an overhaul. This means that cosmetics will be applied but the basic fundamentals of big capital, distinct and differentiated here from capitalism, will still be there.

There's actually a fourth choice which is true capitalism, which would be a revolution, but that's not going to happen and I wouldn't bet on it. The reason and historical evidence are pretty overwhelming if you ask me, but if you take the example of yet another crisis in our laps, healthcare, there are very good reasons why if I had to bet I'd say that we will never enjoy a single-payer plan. Of course it's money, and I've talked about it before, but succinctly, the healthcare industry's owned by three huge sub-industries: HMOs, pharmaceutical and insurance companies, any of which is a huge presence on the Hill via lobbyists and armies of lawyers. With all three of them acutely interested in maintaining the status quo, forget it, it's like me trying to play Kobe Bryant. So, if I had to bet I'd say it's going to be number three, the cosmetic makeover, which equates to business as usual.

Anyway, without further ramblings, here's a great deconstructionist speaking plainly about a huge corporation.

Oh, and sorry for the bad title pun, Professor Fish. You've probably heard them all.

From the NY Times Opinion page

December 28, 2008, 10:00 pm
The Return of the Old Grouch

When you live in two places and decamp from one to the other every six months or so, there are any number of things that have to be done. (I know that at least 50 readers will want to rebuke me for complaining about problems only the privileged can have, but perhaps we can agree to get past that.) Closing the house, switching the mail, storing the porch furniture, suspending cable service, draining the pipes. But the one that gives me a headache even before I attempt it is the phone call to AT&T, or, rather, the 20 phone calls to AT&T.

The first obstacle, of course, was getting through to someone. The prompts did not correspond to any of my concerns, but finally, after pressing a number of zeros, I was rewarded with the voice of a live person who said, “With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?”

Visions of Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine the telephone operator danced in my head, but I bit my tongue and made my simple request.

“I’ve been away for some time and my services were reduced. I’d like to have them restored to what they were when I left in June.”

It turned out that this was not possible. Even though I had paid to retain my phone number, I was going to be treated as a new customer, which meant that I would have to answer a bunch of questions and decline services I had never had. After much back and forth I signed up for a package that included voice mail.

I should have quit when I was (somewhat) ahead, but I couldn’t resist returning to the greeting, with its double and ungrammatical “with.” I explained that the second “with” was superfluous, as the second “to” would be if the offending question had been, “to whom am I speaking to?”, or the second “about” if the question had been “about what are you worrying about?”

Somehow that didn’t make much of an impression on her. She said that her instructions were to greet callers in that way and that she would continue to do so. I replied that it was scandalous that a multi-billion-dollar world-wide telecommunication corporation would order its employees to commit an egregious (and comical) grammatical error millions of times a day.

She said, “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

I lost it. It has nothing to do with feelings, I ranted. It is a factual matter as to what is and is not syntactically correct.

She changed the subject by informing me that the social security number I had given when she asked for it was not the number she had on record. I asked her to change it, but she pleaded incapacity: “No, I can’t do that. I’ll connect you to the department where they can.”

That was a promise made subsequently by five other people as I was repeatedly transferred to someone who told me, “No, I can’t do that.” Everyone I talked to assured me that within seconds I would be talking to the right person. My last interlocutor took pity on me, and although he too was not the right person, he knew someone in his division who was and said he would talk to him directly. When he came back, it was to tell me that the social security number on record was in fact the one I had given him. The whole thing had been a wild goose chase.

I was more exasperated than relieved, and I made the mistake of re-raising the “with-whom-do-I-have-the-pleasure-of-speaking-with” matter. He listened and suggested that I make a complaint. You mean call another 800 number, I wailed. No, he replied, I’ll do it for you, just tell me what you want to say. I went through the nature of the error, but when I talked about the unseemliness of a major corporation managing to sound pompous and ignorant at the same time, he interrupted me and said that he would not transmit that kind of language. I thought about pointing out that this was a complaint, not a love letter, but I just gave up.

This epic was not over. When I got to Florida after a three-day drive I found that I didn’t have voice mail. I called and was told that there was no record of my having placed an order. I was assured that the matter would be taken care of in 24 hours. It wasn’t. I called back the next day, but a mechanical voice informed me that there was no service on Sunday. (Don’t people make phone calls on Sundays and pay for them?) Finally, on Monday, I reached someone who assured me that I would have voice mail the next day, and he turned out to be right.

But by that time I was beyond caring. I told him that I had decided to write a column about my AT&T adventures and that, in fairness, I thought I should talk to someone in the corporate structure. He said that he would put me through to the right department, but when someone picked up, she identified herself as “Directories.”

What?, I asked.

I’m in advertising, she replied. We send out telephone directories. Do you want one?

I explained what I was trying to do, and she laughed. I laughed, too, the best moment of the experience.

Every weeknight on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann, who never met an exaggeration he didn’t like, names that day’s “Worst Person in the World” (it’s usually Bill O’Reilly). In the same spirit, I hereby nominate AT&T as the worst company in the world. I admit that my evidence for this judgment is scant and anecdotal, but I stand by it anyway.

About Stanley Fish

Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke University. He is the author of 10 books. His new book on higher education, "Save the World On Your Own Time," has just been published.