Mavericks, as the twelve of you sit before me on the dressing room benches in your white sleeveless V-neck uniforms with the purple numbers and trim, knees bouncing, ponytails bobbing, gum snapping in excited anxiety, dreadfully ready to take the floor
of the Tacoma Dome for the state championship game against the South Valley Wildcats from Yakima, time-trapped mortals, perhaps two of you bleeding and one perhaps three worrisome weeks late, about to plunge, in wild hope and fear, into an entropy-defying
time out of time that you yourselves will create, refusing to accept the universe as it appears, from your mundane macroscopic perspective, to be (cooling, changing), and what you, even in your tender teenage years, appear to be (changing, dying), and equally
unsatisfied with, not knowing what to do with, what I think is closer to the truth, the physicist's quantum alternative, an unseen microscopic reality of a ceaseless swarming of quanta in a web of relations in which nothing is but what is not, objects
and space and time being the constructs of your ignorance, the reason why there is something rather than nothing the result of your inability to see that the universe is, ultimately, process, a dance of molecules, what are called things nothing more than long
events, a stone a complex vibration of quantum fields that holds itself in equilibrium before disintegrating, a person a network of cells in a web of chemical processes and social relations, time not a smooth flowing from past to present to future but a relative
measure of the fitful passing of heat from warmer bodies to cooler ones, a fluctuation of discrete jumps in which one event can actually occur both before and after another event, pointils that from your distant point of view you blur together and perceive
as order becoming disorder, not conceding even for a nano-second that the world needs to be understood in its becoming, how things happen, rather than in its being, how things are, insisting for example that an earth amenable to life must have been designed
for you because you exist rather than that you exist because earth is amenable to life, insisting that time is one-directional and fraught with emotion, believing keenly that death is woeful loss, not merely a disintegration of an equilibrium, an undoing of
homeostasis, convinced that your hearts are ticking time bombs, rebelliously yearning for clarity, order, purpose, immortality, for the madness of art, for your own sakes, Mavericks, throw yourselves gallantly into this glorious game tonight, cause each intense
moment to matter, shape spacetime with your now choreographed, now improvised, particles and waves of movement, bend it with your pace of play, your extra passes, your ball reversals, your post entries, your screens, your cuts, your stop-and-go dribbles, speed
it up with your fastbreaks, retard it with your delay game, even bring it to a halt with your timeouts, and prevent those South Valley girls from shaping it their way with your defensive pressure, give them no space or time to execute, swarm them, climb into
their bras, deny dribble penetration, bump cutters off their routes, cut off passing lanes and angles, jump-switch, trap, harass the ball with your predatory hands, dive for it when it's knocked loose, contest any shot, box out boisterously when it's released,
explode for the rebound, turn game-time into time as you long for it to be, not just a winding down to death but motion made distinguished use of in a space where anticipation, imagination, deftness, agility, strength, effort, and courage bring exaltation,
at-one your bodies with the motion of the universe by rehearsing its rhythm and balance in your own joyful, quark-like spurting and stotting and gliding and bumping, become one with it by exploiting its laws even as you yearn to defy those laws, to outpace
the speed of light, to escape the clutches of gravity, to expunge the enervation of entropy and gloriously transcend your human limitations. Go now, and become your ideal selves, he might, upon late-life reflection, have said.
Liz Ann returned
the paper to him and smiled, her crooked left incisor angling leftward jauntily.
"Good thing you didn't," she said, "or we would have been too puzzled to compete."
She stared eastward into the cerulean. A warm Sunday afternoon
in July. Amid a dozen other, younger, lolling beer drinkers in pairs or fours, the males in shorts and tees, most of the females in torn denim short shorts and halter tops, the old man and Liz Ann sat side by side in slatted Adirondack chairs in the
umbrellaed courtyard of 190 Sunset at Salish Crossing, embosked from the acre of cars in the asphalt parking lot by densely planted concrete flower beds bursting with the orange-red-yellow beaming faces of nasturtiums, the tight raspberry-apricot buds
of Tropicana tree roses, and the white asterisks of jasmine, all climbing libidinously up and around a yellow-green fullness of leafy dwarf vine maples and Japanese maples. Summer in Edmonds--this year, exceptional even in this age of climate change,
wanton sprees of multiple 85-degree days engorged with sunshine from 5:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., a gracing, if such intentionality were possible, of the Bowl and its denizens, who bathed in the glory of warmth and light, ripeness being, for the moment, all.
The old man, having weathered the eras of jean shorts and cargo shorts and plaid shorts, wore simple plain black cotton shorts that stopped an inch above his knees and an untucked, collared, blue -white checked shirt that hid most of his neck wattles.
Liz Ann had on light blue jeans and a black tank top that revealed, on her substantial upper arm, just below her left shoulder, the vertical black and white tattoo of a domino.
"The tattoo new?"
"Yes. I finally decided to get
some ink. I've always liked the sleek look and feel of dominoes."
"And the one pip?"
"Means I'm odd, I'm queer. But I do like what, in your contorted way, you're getting at, in that paper. I assume it's for your story?
The ultimate existential dread that spawned the artistic motives for why we played. Whether they grew out of our macroscopic view or the physicist's microscopic view, whether we saw entropy as death or change, whether we had, most of us, been coaxed
to see life as Christian comedy or, maybe one or two of us, secular transcendent tragedy, or, none of us, absurd chaos, we all yearned, none more so than our coach I dare say, both to exploit and to reverse-engineer the laws of the universe, to remake life
according to our heart's desire, frail humans seeking to become autonomous controllers, creators."
They sipped their pints of Brackett's Landing IPA, alcohol content 8%, one of Brittany's and Justin's Harbor Square brews. The Old Man held
the fruity hops in his mouth for a few seconds while four single anomalous flavors played in succession on his tongue and palate and then resounded as a chord in his nose when he swallowed and exhaled. Orange! That was one of the noms. And
pineapple! Lime, yes. With a dash of pepper? And was that last thing a hint of banana? Or butterscotch? The ale was like a rainbow popsicle, exotic treat of his youth, Mrs. Bienz poking her sausage-roll curls deep into the freezer
chest at her Confectionary to find one for him in exchange for a nickel. As with prose, as with jazz pianists, so with beer and wine: the old man enjoyed all styles, from spare to rococo, but was most delighted by the bold, the gaudy, the peacockian.
The clean, crisp malt of a simple lager, the sturdy chocolate of a stout or porter, would certainly be welcome on his tongue--but not quite as delightedly so as the sparkle of this IPA.
"Sorry to drift off for a second, Liz Ann. Was I moaning?
I'm just enjoying this ale in this sun so much."
"It is good," she said. "But in a frou-frou kind of way? Kind of busy, kind of frilly? Or is that the lez in Liz coming out?"
"Not at all! Well-put. Frou-frou
is apt. And I'm wallowing in it unashamedly. An old New Critic who just wants the text, not the background, I'm skeptical of the concept of terroir, the romantic blood-and-soil fiction that a wine conveys an expression of the ground and
climate from which it came, as if you could taste the very limestone or chalk or schist or clay or rainfall or sunshine that conditioned its provenance when actually what you taste is the winemaker's more or less artful concoction from the sugar and tannin
and acidity in the grapes that grew in that particular terroir, and no way this brew we're drinking, made from hops and barley grown in eastern Washington and malt and yeast from who knows where, expresses Harbor Square, whose terroir is
asphalt on a bed of clay, but damned if it doesn't perfectly match the giddiness I feel on these rare summer days in Brackett's Landing when we are briefly freed from our gray oppressive regimen of clouds and clamminess. A big fruit-forward jammy
wine like a cheap Bogle red blend, $7.95 at Costco, can cheer me in the same way, leaping on me like an exuberant young Saint Bernard, shaking his body against me, rubbing his head on my crotch, licking my hand, demanding attention, saying love me."
"Okay,
if that's the way you're going to go, all smiles and similes, I'd say that chugging this ale is like being showered with colorful confetti or glittering pixie dust. A happy quaff for this occasion, agreed, but I need something sterner, more reticent,
more disciplined, for my daily drink. You know, Coach," she teased, "replicable studies have shown that as we age, our ability to taste diminishes, it takes stronger and stronger stimuli to impress us, more spices, more exotic flavors."
"Maybe
so, but I swear that if this ale had existed at the time, I'd have had about three schooners of it after we won that championship game."
"Oh, really? So what did you do? After you grabbed me from behind in a bear hug and said
'Liz Ann Mann, I love you!' and we all galumphed up and down the court and hugged each other over and over and you talked to the newspaper reporters and we cut down the nets and were presented that huge trophy and the band serenaded us with the alma mater
and we sat for team and individual pictures, our parents all firing away with their Konicas and their Polaroids, and then mingled on the floor for half an hour with families and friends, all of us already so unbelievably drunk with the pleasure of triumph
after achieving the ultimate--I mean, state champs! I was staggering and swaggering on that for weeks--and went back to the locker room for your final speech, in which you thanked us for all we had given you and said how much you admired our courage
and how proud of us you were for coming back to win?"
"Well, my wife and Coach Baylor and his wife gathered up our team's bag of basketballs and the first-aid kit and the scorebook and the statistics and the video that our managers had produced for
us, and I lugged the trophy, and we headed for our car, which was sitting lonely in that vast empty parking lot at 10:00 p.m., then drove back to 13 Coins in Seattle for a late-night pasta (I had the tortellini with thyme) and Schramsberg Brut."
"So
you were drinking the stars?"
"I was so high emotionally already that it certainly felt like it. I do like the twinkle in the mouth that champagne produces, but the twinkle attracts so much of my attention, it's so amusing, that I can't
concentrate on the other values of the wine. Give me a rich, oaky, buttery (yes, I said it) chardonnay in preference to its bubbly counterpart most any day. But two bottles of champagne were certainly called for that night, and Bill Baylor wouldn't
hear of anything else. And Diane and Charlene loved it. What about you?"
"Most of us rode back to Seattle with our parents and met at Farrell's for burgers and ice cream--still following the school district's Athletic Code, you know--no
smoking, no drinking, no drugs. But the next night, Saturday night, we all went to a celebration kegger at a big house in Woodway Park and got wasted. Brenda, your heady, crafty point guard, was falling-down drunk. We had to carry her to
the car to get her home."
"Was this a one-off?"
"The falling-down part, yes. The drinking, no."
"For all of you?"
"For most of us. For most of the athletes of both genders in all of the high schools in the District in
all of the sports. A small number smoked cigarettes, a small number used marijuana, but probably 75%, at least by the time they were juniors and seniors and going to weekend parties, drank. It was the thing to do."
"So I assumed, actually.
Over the years, the principal would occasionally get a report of a player drinking and we would call her in to question her. When we got an admission, we would suspend her from the team for the season, as per the Athletic Code. And I myself caught
a couple of girls smoking, one at Harbor Square Athletic Club, just tossing a butt away after getting out of her car, gym bag in hand, going in for a workout as I happened to be jogging by, another with cigarette between fingers ordering fries at McDonald's
at Westgate when I stopped by for a diet Coke. But I always figured that we--the Superintendent, the Athletic Director, the principals, the coaches--were deluding ourselves. Everyone agreed that kids should not smoke, drink, or use drugs,
and most wanted to believe that the athletes bearing the school colors on the fields and in the gyms were sterling exemplars of asceticism and probity, eschewing alcohol and sex, but in fact they were sterling exemplars of real teenagers experimenting
with new pleasures while demonstrating competence and in some cases excellence in athletics and academics."
"Well, yes, we had priorities, we had goals, we were under control. Of course, mistakes were made. As you surmised, Miranda, our
shooting guard, was three worrisome weeks late and pregnant on the day we won the championship. But when the pregnancy was confirmed, she and her boy friend, very sensibly I thought, agreed that they didn't want to marry each other, and she chose to
carry the baby to term and give it up for adoption."
"Yeah, I remember that tempestuous Miranda once came into the training room in her practice shorts before one of our evening practices, climbed onto a table to have me tape her chronically sore ankle,
sat back, spread her legs so she could hang the bad ankle over the edge of the table, and in the process unwittingly sent me a whiff of the aroma of female sexual arousal. She had obviously just been with her boyfriend. And she had a great practice!
Full of energy and concentration, really into it."
"Sure! One of the values of participating in athletics is that you learn to compartmentalize. I loved my classes, I loved basketball, I wanted to be a great student, a great
player, and I also enjoyed a weekend party."
"And what did the game mean to you? Did you think of yourself as an artist making order out of chaos with the material of your own body?"
"Not at the time, but later, yes. As a little girl
I always liked using my body--running, jumping rope, tumbling, climbing on the Jungle Gym. In third grade I started playing Youth Club basketball for mostly social reasons--my friends were doing it. I found that the games interested and pleased
my parents, especially my dad, who had played in high school. He attached a backboard and hoop to the shake roof of our garage and we'd play on the driveway, dribbling and shooting layups. I was impressed with the way he could dribble behind his
back and shoot jump shots. He gave me some pointers but didn't really push me. Of course none of us girls had any skills to begin with, and our games were a chaos of turnovers, with final scores like 8 to 6, but I began to see that with my strength
and coordination I was one of the better ones out there, I scored a basket almost every game, and my dad was always so excited when I did. Looking back now, I realize that it felt good to throw my body around in competition, do something physical, assert
myself and achieve a tiny bit of dominance. I have since come to realize that I was unconsciously reveling in the chemical rushes elicited by a myriad of electrical impulses passing between my contracting muscles, my moving joints, and my brain.
"The next summer I went to the Youth Club's basketball day camp with Brenda, played on the driveway with my dad, and began to get better. Within a couple of years I was playing in two leagues, Youth Club in Edmonds and Little Dribblers in Lynnwood,
and going to day camps, and then in middle school I started going away to week-long camps at WWU in Bellingham and PLU near Tacoma. As my skills developed, I began to feel proud of my body, to control it and take control with it, to gain sensual pleasure
in moving gracefully, pivoting and sliding, jumping explosively, banging into other bodies, the bracing pain of a minor collision and the satisfaction that you gave at least as good as you got, even masochistically welcoming the hot sting of a floor
burn and the hyper-ventilated flaming of the lungs, the sucking and gasping, after several whistleless trips up and down the court. My Youth Club coach used to keep a paper bag in his pocket for me to breathe in when I pushed too hard. I loved
being put to the test, showing what I could get my body to do, it was an end in itself, although of course I loved winning and loved being an integral part of a team, loved being part of the Maplewood Mavericks, loved being part of that championship season."
"Loved scoring the winning basket as the final buzzer went off?"
"Well, yes, there was that!"
"We got off to such a terrible start in that game, and I blame myself for that. I think I prepared us on the Xs and Os. We went over
their personnel and their plays and how we were going to defend them, where we would provide help, when we would double-team the post, we knew how we were going to attack their half court and full court defensive pressure, clearing out to prevent traps and
looking for backdoor cuts and give-and-gos and shuffle cuts off of screens. We had it analyzed, but we were not emotionally ready. I had done my task analysis but was too intimidated by the universe to provide you with a bold anticipatory set.
Not only did I not give the pregame speech about entropy and art, I also failed to Henry the Fifth it."
"Band of Mavericks? Once more into their breeches? But that wasn't you. Entropy and the Battle of Agincourt were not topics that
you could comfortably invoke before an audience. Your pregame oratory was long on logos, short on ethos and pathos. You got very calculating and analytical and understated. You seldom breathed fire, seldom pumped
us up. But we figured that was part of the plan. You always said that emotion didn't last but knowledge and technique did. The same was true in our huddles at timeouts. No matter how dire the situation, you would pull a piece of chalk
out of your pocket and start diagramming stuff on the floor as you knelt before us, staying very technical, not ranting and raving. We thought it was because you were keeping your poise."
"It's because I was scared. The chalk was my
prop, it gave me the illusion of control, as if I could diagram my way out of any problems. I've always craved success, wanted to be a maker, a doer, but always entered any stage with fear and trembling at the audacity of my hope. How dare I dare?
I can't breathe, my lungs spasm, I choke in both senses of the word, please let this cup pass from me, constitutionally I'm an underdog, prepared to fail stoically, it's agony to get an early lead, such pressure to hold it, such despair if you don't, I'm at
my toughest, sharpest, when coming from behind, then my heart soars, you hit me in the mouth, okay, good, I deserve it, you're better than I am, you are in tune with the universe and I'm not, but now, goddam it, I'm pissed, and yes, relieved, grateful, thank
you, I'll show you now, I'm gonna fight back, I don't care how fucking good you think you are, I'm capable too, maybe not tuned in but clever enough to exploit the universe in my own wayI Those, Liz Ann, are my notes from underground."
"So interesting
to see this side of you! You're being vulnerable! Opening up! Or are you? I mean, in your 20-year career you won 387 games and lost only 121. You went to State 14 times. You had a first, a second, two thirds, and six other
placements for trophies that are still displayed in the Edmonds-Maplewood gym. Possibly you're conning yourself and trying to con me? When I was playing, we had lots of games where we started strong and stayed strong. Many times we
blew our opponents out. You can't have been scared every game."
"Every game. Well, there was one exception. One season, back in the '70s, Clover Park of Tacoma was killing everybody. We met at State and they blew us out by 50.
I didn't worry a bit going in, and I didn't worry a bit afterwards. I had scouted them and knew there was nothing I could do about it. But with every other game, I felt that winning or losing depended on me, that it was incumbent upon me to find
a way to win with whatever players I had, and that I was a failure if I didn't. So I was a failure 120 times."
"But all those times you were named Coach of the Year by the Seattle Times or the Everett Herald or King TV? That didn't give
you confidence?"
"That only made things worse. My self-imposed expectations kept rising, and my self-confidence kept falling."
"If so, you covered it up well. You always seemed to be in charge. We players always believed
in you. Did you ever get any criticism from parents?"
"Not to my face, although I'm sure there was plenty of ranting out of my ear shot. An anonymous letter one time from someone who said I was playing the wrong people. Wanted his daughter
to get more playing time, no doubt. And, your senior year, one long, anonymous, rambling message on my answering machine after we lost that District playoff game to Anacortes and had to come back through the loser's bracket to get to State."
"Miranda's
mom? I can see that. She voiced opinions about a lot of things."
"But she was right. We fell apart in the second half, and I was responsible. We had gone 20 and 0 in the regular season, won the Western Conference, and bussed
up I-5 to Mt. Vernon and its beautifully maintained old gym--the same one in which I had played in the '50s, with the built-in wooden bleachers and the long foyer with pictures of Bulldog players going back to the '30s--for our first District game, matched
against the lowest seed. The trip was pure nostalgia for me, awash in memories of all those I had taken up Highway 99 with my buddies when playing for Edmonds, that same faux-relaxed joking and chattering among the players until we got to Everett,
then the quieting as Coach Baylor and I moved through the bus to review defensive assignments with certain players, then the setting of the sun and the settling in of silence as we crossed the Stillaguamish River, those special solemn moments of unity, an
unspoken avowal that for 32 minutes of game time we would live and die for each other, in the enchanted realm of the ludic."
"So what happened? They switched defenses and we didn't adjust? Because we were killing them in the first half,
moving the ball, everybody scoring, flying around on defense."
"Yes, they went to a match-up zone, which I did not recognize. And the great, shameful irony was that in years past I had employed that very defense and had actually taught it to their
coach, Cathy Lockhart, at a clinic the previous fall! We ran the regular stuff we used against a 2-3 when we should have been back-screening and reversing the ball to Miranda for 3-pointers, and sending multiple cutters through the lane, and working
you and Janelle in a high-low post two-person game against single coverage. But I just choked, panicked, couldn't think clearly, and they came back to tie and then win in overtime. It was entirely my fault. And that wasn't the only time.
There were other games over the years where teams kept changing defenses and I was two or three possessions behind in recognizing the change, so we were in the wrong offense half the time, and twice in state tournament games we got ahead and the opponent threw
a run-and-jump full court press at us, which I read as a zone press, failing to stay calm and mentally step back and analyze coolly, frozen by tension, just sticking with my first impression and never adjusting our offense, hoping for a miracle. Enchanted
realm of the ludic, my ass! Not those nights."
Liz Ann laughed. "Don't be so hard on yourself. You coached 500 games. There were bound to be a few clunkers. For the most part it was enchanted. Anyway, we
proceeded to win all our loser-out games, giving us the District championship, then went on to win three in a row at State."
"But the first one, against Spanaway, we almost lost. Again, my fault. We had a far superior record, we knew that
on paper we were better, and I let you go into the game over-confident, in love with yourselves after winning District and going 23-1 overall. I was scared, as always, but failed to recognize that this time you guys lacked respect for our opponents.
Our pressure man-to-man was listless, we were a step slow, they caught us out of position, they slashed through us, we were preventing nothing. Finally I realized at halftime that we were unprepared mentally to apply pressure and force turnovers.
We had to back off, go to our sagging man-to-man, seal the key, and rely on their poor outside shooting. We barely escaped with the win."
"Yeah, I'd kind of forgotten that. But that's on us as much as it is on you. We were more responsible
for our lack of emotional readiness than you were."
"Maybe so, but it never felt that way to me. We showed again the lack of emotional preparation the next night against Hoquiam in the semi-finals. We're all staying at La Quinta, near
the Dome, so in the afternoon we drive over to the PLU gym, where we have a walk-through and do a little shooting. Our opponents, on the other hand, choose to spend their day lunching and shopping at the South Center Mall. We know exactly what
Hoquiam will do--run the Flex on offense and on defense set up a full-court zone press after scores and fall back into a 2-3 zone. We review all the baseline screens and down-screens in the Flex. We have the pattern down pat, we are ready to anticipate
and get through the screens, and then we get into the game and they run the offense very fast and set physical screens that jar us and open up cutters for layups or short jumpers, just knock the wind out of us. It's all thought and no emotion.
We are timid, we are tentative, we are slow, we are soft, they jump out to a 10-point lead, their crowd is going wild, ours is groaning, I'm stunned, it's all my fault, why can't we stop them, they do the same thing every time. We're all in shock.
Finally, I call time out and shout at you over our band blaring the theme from 'Rocky' to switch all the screens and smother the cutters, my chalk jabbing Xs and Os and arrows and loops and swoops on the floor. It's just enough to get you competing.
You start anticipating and banging and denying, and their coach screams to the refs about fouls not being called, and they're no longer scoring at will, and we begin attacking on offense, now we're not content just to get the ball down the floor against their
press, we get the ball to the middle aggressively and quickly reverse it and look for someone open cutting toward the basket, and we catch them, then gradually pull away."
"So we struggle because we either lack respect for our opponents or we fear our
opponents?"
"Yes."
"And that's your fault? Even after all your preparation?"
"Yes, because in the process of preparing you I infect you with the virus of my own insecurity, my fear of failure, my lack of swagger, my inability to
make the leap from wish to will. I mean, what happens the next night against West Valley in the championship game?"
"La meme damn chose?"
"Oui, la meme damn chose! Again we have our afternoon
walk-through. We know that a large part of their offense is the fastbreak, that we need to have floor balance and sprint back hard any time the ball changes hands, even if we score, because they're inbounding or outletting instantly and pushing the ball
hard every time. We know that in their half-court offense they like to go inside to their All-State post player Michelle Aikens, she's 6'2", college prospect, the UW wants her, she's very strong, has dynamic moves, and if she's doubled and can't get
her shot she kicks the ball out to the player left open by the double team. We know we have to push her out as far as possible, front her if she's low, deny her from the side if she's high, pressure the passers, deny entry passes as much as possible,
and help hard from the weak side when she does get the pass, with the next nearest defender looking to close out fast on the inside-out pass to the open shooter. I repeat all this in my pregame speech. I utter no myth-making remarks about
the ludic or about basketball players as existential rebels or artists shaping spacetime with their bodies, at-oneing themselves with the rhythms of the universe, I am just too damn matter-of-fact, prosaic, I don't dare the poetic, my speech never takes flight,
I fear the fate of Icarus, I can't give myself over emotionally to the occasion, it's too risky, I fear the corny, the sentimental, fear speaking freely, fear playing freely, bleakly fear that the road of excess leads to the hovel of comeuppance, I dream that
the dream is impossible, the stage, the moment, is too big for me, I James Dean it, and again we get overwhelmed in the first quarter, inundated, the score is 15-4, they're throwing baseball passes the length of the floor for layups, they're all over us on
defense, anticipating, tipping balls loose, attacking, playing with élan, Aikens is pivoting right through our double-teams, their fans are roaring their pleasure, full of blood-lust, yelling 'Git along, little dogie,' when I stand up to give
direction, their cheerleaders are sassing us with their green and gold pom-poms, their coach, Mike Gunderson, is up on every one of their possessions, clawing his paws like a wildcat, flapping his arms like an eagle, exhorting them to fly down court, raising
his fists in triumph after every basket, he stalks the sideline, he owns this stage, he's in his element, I am so pissed at that guy--"
"And we are, too, we want to kill those bitches."
"--I call timeout, their band is taunting us with 'More
Than a Feeling,' the South Valley girls are laughing and high-fiving each other, I'm yelling, you can barely hear me, my chalk breaks into two pieces, I'm so angry at myself--"
"And we're just as angry at ourselves--"
"My chemicals are surging
now, I shout 'Get back on defense' and draw vectors showing motion, 'Stop the ball, push out, pressure, deny, double hard, recover, close out, seal, on offense protect the ball, get a step and penetrate with your dribble, ball-side wings go backdoor, point
guard run a give-and-go, weakside wings run your shuffle cuts hard,' and we begin to stem the tide, we're awake, we're aggressive, Miranda pokes the ball loose and goes full-court for a layup, you and Janelle clamp down on Aikens, twice in a row Brenda
passes to you on the wing and runs the give and go, you hit her on the cut, there's no help and she gets layups, you pass and post up, get a return pass, turn and face, dip into your grammar of moves, select a step-through, and score over Aikens, Janelle grabs
a miss by Miranda and puts it back, suddenly it's 15 to 14, and Gunderson calls timeout, his players are looking what-the-hell"--
--"fuck--"
--"at each other, we're exuberant on the sideline, we've actually seized the moment, our band is rocking
'Celebration,' we're exhorting each other to keep up the intensity, and we play even the rest of the half and go into the dressing room with the score 25-24. And what's my mood at this point?"
"Relief?"
"Yes, relief! Relief that we
haven't totally embarrassed ourselves. Relief that we are respectable. That we belong on the same court. That we came back. And what should it have been?"
"Bodacious audaciousness?"
"Yes! The game was ours
to win if only we dared to do so. But I of course was out with my now-shorter piece of chalk, again Xing and Oing. You players were upbeat, spirited, and I proceeded to bring you down with talk of tactics and strategy. I needed to be more
holistic, less analytic, needed to display a swashbuckling persona, needed to connect with your spirits as well as your brains."
"We did start slow again in the second half. But was it your fault?"
"I think so. We're down 39-27 after
five minutes into the third quarter. The South Valley girls have their mojo back. They're slapping hands, they're bouncing on the balls of their feet, their ponytails are flying, Gunderson is raising a claw or slam-dunking a make-believe
ball after every one of their baskets, their fans are screaming 'Sit down, Big Maple!' when I get up to call another timeout so we can rest and regroup. I get the chalk going, but it's all a sham. There's nothing new to add. I say,
'Guys, there's 11 minutes left, plenty of time to come back. We can do it.' But I don't really believe it. Did you believe it?"
"Actually, yes. At least Brenda and I did. But not just because you said it. We had played
against some of those girls at camps and in summer leagues. They were good, but we knew we could compete. We belonged out there. Everything you said about the Xs and Os was right, and we were just frustrated that we were not making it happen."
"Because I was not providing the spark, not inspiring you by stealing a torch of fire from the gods and brandishing it?"
"Only a wee bit. We knew you were inhibited in that way. We knew that you would always try to model grace under pressure.
You could never invoke 'Invictus,' right? Never bring yourself to say that we were the masters of our fate?"
The old man shrugged. "No. Never."
Liz Ann laughed. "Because that's too uncouth for you, both too pretentious
and too plebian, too heavy-handed, too coarse, too vulgar. And yet the concept is so you, isn't it? You don't believe in the existence of an entity that permeates the universe and works upon its human inhabitants, whether it be called
destiny, predestination, divine providence, karma, or kismet."
"No. Fate is simply what happens. Fate is entropy."
"And yet you yourself are all about using the will to heroically exploit the various complex vibrations
of quantum fields that call themselves 'Edmonds' or 'Wayne Adams,' to determine to some extent what happens, to determine fate. All your efforts to train, to rewire your brain, to sort yourself out in your blog, to be a maker, a doer, a controller,
to fashion the essence of your existence, make it clear: in spite of your protestations to the contrary, striving to become the master of your fate is what most absorbs you in life and provides your raison d'être. Coach, it's time to come
out of the closet and admit that in addition to loving mushy French fries and popsicle beers you love 'Invictus' !"
"Never! I will concede that I seek to master, or create, my fate, but in the fell clutch of circumstance I lack that
invincible derring-do, my will, my concentration, fail me. And, theme aside, never will I concede that 'Invictus' is a well-wrought poem. It is pure fustian! I will confess, however, that I'd like to have one more popsicle beer.
Can I get you something?"
"Do Brittany and Justin make a pilsner?"
"I think so."
He took the empty glasses inside and brought back two full ones.
"Try this."
The afternoon remained beautiful, the flowers remained radiant,
the deep sky remained cerulean ("Okay, Perry Como," the old man thought, "I'll give you this one."), the beer garden remained crowded, the men's resonant baritone guffaws and the women's tinkling giggles continuing to express tipsily their joy in the
day.
"How is it?"
"A nice change. Disciplined. Reticent. Neither runny nor chewy, just agreeably firm with a very slight bitter bite."
"And my IPA continues to titillate me. I'm starting to lose my edge. Where
is my self? I'm going all sfumato. My margins are bleeding into this garden, this sky. By the time I finish it, I'll be a pantheist! Good thing I'm walking home, not driving. The exercise will help to sober me--if I can
keep my balance."
"Well, I'm driving out to Seaview, but I'm not concerned. Since I weigh more than you, I can metabolize more alcohol."
"So, where were we?"
"Trying to determine how we were able to win that game. Coach,
we did it by transcending you. We knew we had to be responsible for motivating ourselves. Any failure of will would be our fault, not yours. We all believed in the paradoxical co-existence of fate and free will. We believed that
we had a role to play in achieving our fate, which was flexibly predetermined, had parameters, yes, but they were elastic. It was written in the stars, but we had to fulfill it with our actions. We could become what we were meant to be, champions.
This is quite sensibly how people get through life, Coach. No matter how strait the gate, they believe they will manage to squeeze through. Die? Heaven awaits. Experience adversity? Overcome it. That the South Valley girls thought
the same thing was irrelevant. We compartmentalized. Those chicks were going down!"
"You were amazing from that point on. You found an inner grit that almost brought tears to my eyes. You grimly, methodically stalked
them down. You executed precisely at both ends of the floor. Your defense was aggressive, physical, seamless. You shut off their fastbreak, made them set up, then prevented them from getting the ball inside. They made a few baskets
from outside, but you executed your fundamentals, boxed out, and rebounded all of their misses. Your offense took advantage of their pressure, their gambling, their overcommitting, with backdoors and give-and-goes. You backscreened for easy lobs
to cutters. You were gaining on them, outscoring them at a rate of two to one. They were confused, they were getting hesitant, unsure how to defend us. Our fans were ecstatic, theirs were groaning, Gunderson was on his feet, clasping
his hands together, imploring his team to apply even more pressure, and then with a half-minute left , you slipped the backscreen you had set for Brenda and took her bounce pass to the basket for a layup, with Aikens fouling you from behind for a three-point
play to tie the score at 51. The South Valley girls go into shock. Gunderson calls time out to set up a play. Our band is playing 'Thriller.' In our huddle I pull out the chalk and draw a half-court with a big A in the low post.
"They're gonna go to Aikens," I say. "Push her as high as you can. Deny. If she does get the ball, double hard from the weak side. No matter what happens, if they score or not, call time out when we get the ball back." They bring
the ball up court, swing it to the side, and there's Aikens, making herself big, all ass and elbows, but you've nudged her out a couple of feet so she can't just make a simple power move, and when they float the entry pass over Brenda's outstretched arms,
Janelle comes flying over from her girl on the weakside and tips it free, and in the mass scramble for possession the ball caroms off a South Valley girl and bounces out of bounds at the baseline. Twelve seconds left! Our fans are roaring.
Gunderson pounds a fist into an open hand. You call time out. I diagram a play. They've been pressing man-to-man all game, so we'll have Janelle take the ball out and Brenda and Miranda will back screen you and Christine. You'll turn
and fly down the court and, if you're open, Janelle will hit one of you with a long baseball pass for a game-winning layup. If you're not open, Janelle will pass to Brenda or Miranda and they will push the ball up and get whatever shot they can, with
you and Christine looking to rebound. It turns out you and Christine are not open, because Gunderson switched to a zone press, to guard against a deep pass and to avoid fouling, so Janelle inbounds to Brenda, who weaves her way through passive defense
to our free throw line, where in her hurry she puts up an off-balance shot that bounces off the rim, but you hurl yourself into the air over Aikens and rip the ball down, then go up quickly with a little floater that drops through the net as the buzzer goes
off and bedlam sets in. You gave me a state championship, Liz Ann."
"No more so than you gave us one. We couldn't have done it without that chalk! You were always winning no matter who was on your team. And you had a chance at
another one with a different bunch of girls five years later."
"True. If I hadn't choked it. We were up by 10 with three minutes to go, playing fast and loose, playing with brio, probably the best basketball a team of mine ever
played, and when Walla Walla called timeout in despair and confusion, instead of exhorting my girls to seize the day, I seized up, my heart shriveled, I played not to lose, I drew inward, I wasn't looking to shape spacetime, just hoping not to be swallowed
by a black hole in the next three minutes. I told the team to hold the ball on offense, play keep-away, kill 20 seconds of clock before looking for a shot, told them not to pressure or gamble on defense, above all not to foul, and they lost their edge.
The girls went passive, tried to be too careful, our point guard dribbled a ball off her own foot trying to go nowhere, our best scorer let a pass sail through her hands out of bounds, Walla Walla sensed our passivity, applied insane pressure, bullied us,
bumped us, hacked us, poked the ball loose, got a couple of breakaway layups, we're up by six, we finally get a call from a ref when a defender knocks our point guard down lunging for the ball, we make the free throws, the only points we get in these last
three minutes, but they come right back and knife through us for layups or short uncontested jumpers, the last one coming at the buzzer to give them a one-point win, and my girls come off the floor looking at me with heartbreak, as if they'd let me down, when
really it was the other way around. In the locker room, amid the tears and the sobbing, I apologized for my failure of will. "You guys are probably the best team I've ever had," I said, "and we should have just kept attacking and won going away.
I am so sorry to have held you back when you have given me so much."
"Oh, so sad," Liz Ann said. "But certainly your decision was respectable, defensible. You see it all the time, at every level. Get a lead, milk the clock late in
the game, don't shoot the ball too early, make them foul you, play a prevent defense, don't take chances, don't stop the clock by fouling. And though it doesn't work every time, it often does."
"Yes, but it was the wrong decision for this team.
They needed just to be themselves, play balls-out. I, on the other hand, needed to cling, to hold on to what I had. Their will was to win, my wish was not to lose."
"In that, you were like a lot of other coaches. But, over the years,
didn't you find that defeat has a richness and resonance all its own? As change or entropy often does? Didn't it produce a depth of feeling? Didn't it give you perspective? Didn't it make you better able to sympathize and empathize
with others? Didn't the humbling, paradoxically, lift you up? Didn't the pain, the suffering, teach you to cope, help you to develop inner strength? Didn't the sharing of the agony of defeat create a bond with your players? Weren't
you, all in all, a better person for it?"
"Well, yes, a grudging yes to all those questions. Granted, not to experience loss in life is to be not human. Not to experience loss in life is to be shallow, incomplete. It is to be innocent
of reality. It is to be Adam and Eve before the Fall. It is to be Gautama before he became the Buddha. To experience loss is to gain knowledge, and gaining knowledge is good. That said, there is so much rationalizing going on in the
framing of those questions, so much spin, so much alchemy, so much desperate attempt to turn loss into gain, with even an absurd implication that the more we lose the more we gain. We're having it both ways. If we win, we win. If we lose,
we win. As you say, it's quite sensibly how people get through life. But I would rank such utterances pretty high on my HS/BS quotients. As Mae West and many others are alleged to have said, 'I've been rich and I've been poor, and rich is
better.' I've won and I've lost, and winning is better."
"But not winning all the time. And surely being rich is better only because she had experienced the deprivation of poverty. And winning is better because you have experienced
the torment of defeat. I know you are not one to believe that the tragic and the transcendent inhere in the very fabric of the universe--you made that quite clear when we read Hamlet and Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet in
Lit Classics--but most literary critics do, and as I take my final swig of pilsner and empty this glass, I am tipsy enough to visualize you as a tragic hero seeking greatness but falling short and in the process revealing the glory of what it means to be human."
"I like it! 'The timorous tragedy of Coach Wayne Adams, his fatal flaw a lack of swagger, his epiphanic life showing that a lack of pride goeth before a fall.'"
"Sure, I'd read that. A mash-up of tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.
Besides, it's not like you lost all the time. In fact, you won most of the time. Maybe you shouldn't be crying in your IPA."
"Definitely should not. Am not. Just unwilling, in spite of this enchanting ale, and the resplendence
of the weather, and the deep pleasure I take in your company, to be co-opted by even the most wonderful people."
"Speaking of wonderful people, I need to get back home. Jennifer will be expecting me. She's warming up a fig and gorgonzola
pizza from Epulo, and then we're going to watch something on Netflix."
"Invictus? Hoosiers?"
"Right! No. Carol for the fourth time. We love the texture--the dim lighting, the low camera angles,
the lumbering of the heavy old Packard, the terseness of the storytelling." She tapped the back of his right hand as it rested on the wide arm of the chair. "Thank you for the beer and the talk on this lovely afternoon. Basketball has meant
so much to me."
"And me."
"And has this been therapeutic?"
"We shall see."
[Hey, Coach, I didn't understand one bit of that paper you asked Liz Ann to read! And did you ever stop to consider that all those diagrams you
were making on the floor with your chalk were upside down to your players? Very hard to follow--sometimes I didn't even try! But don't worry, Coach, I was into the game and always gave 100%. Thanks for all your Xs and Os, but I played more
on feeling and instinct. I usually just knew what to do without thinking about it. And if I didn't, that was OK too! Miranda]