Just a Game

Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we love basketball. We love to play it, and we love to watch other people play it, on TV or in a gymnasium. High school kids, toddlers with a four foot Fisher-Price basket, or the NBA; it doesn’t matter. We love all basketball.

Some people say that basketball as it is played today is too aggressive, too focused on defense, and not focused enough on the art of shooting. But there are just as many people for whom slow, defensive play in basketball is the only moral way of doing things. We at the Blasphemy Blog ask, Why must we make this choice? Why would we want to play only one kind of basketball? They are all beautiful. The important thing is to play basketball if you love basketball, and let everyone else love basketball in their own way.

Basketball is the favorite sport of many different kinds of people, but not the favorite sport of any nation. Both in Atlanta and in Adams County, Indiana, people play it as if there were nothing else to play, but basketball is not the national pastime of the United States and never will be. In Athens, basketball fans fill smoke-filled gyms and beat on bass drums to support their teams, but in Greece at large, as in the rest of Europe, the national pastime is still soccer. Australia produces probably more good basketball players per capita than any other country on earth except the U.S. and Serbia, but no Australian team could draw a tenth as many fans as the Rugby Union Wallabies when the Tri-Nations cup is on the line. Basketball belongs to people, not countries.

Basketball is hard on the knees; all the stopping and swiveling you have to do inevitably does a number on your cartilage. Professional basketball players often get their noses broken, or dislocate their shoulders. And yet, even Manute Bol, one of the most fragile and improbable NBA players ever, still plays in charity games, a laughing forty-something-year-old seven-foot-nine man jacking up three-pointers and shuffling down the court. Basketball hurts, but even when your knees go, you can still take a few shots.

Hemingway was famous for saying that most sports are a hopeless abstraction, because they inevitably involve nothing more than a meaningless action and a ball. The exceptions were auto racing and mountain climbing and boxing. Probably bullfighting, too. Basically, the things you can die at. Hemingway probably did not like basketball. It is very meaningless to run up and down the court again and again, shooting the ball in the basket again and again, and missing half the time. Moreover, basketball’s action is even more meaningless than the action of other sports; in soccer and baseball and hockey and football, scoring points is rarer, and more special. In basketball, if you miss a chance at a shot, you’ll likely get another within a minute’s time, unless the clock runs out. But there will be another game tomorrow, and more chances to take shots at the basket. Basketball is emphatically a game, and is never a matter of life and death.

That is why we love it.