When I watch basketball, I watch on mute.
I find arena noise too loud, frenetic, scattered, an indoor theme park featuring a professional
sporting event rather than the other way around. I struggle with the volume and artificial screech
of the noise. I struggle being inundated by it. I struggle with its presence during the actual game.
I struggle with the noise of announcers, imposing their hot takes and reactive barks on every
pause, using the same unhelpful, blanket language whenever a player jumps for joy or sighs in
relief or cries in sadness, that “they’re looking pretty emotional there.” (Which emotion?) I
struggle with the barrage of commercials, how advertisers use even-higher volume for their
30-second burps than the game itself. I even struggle more broadly with competition: its
antagonizing nature, its alienating tribalism, its relentless, combative noise.
I might sound like an old man shouting at the clouds. That’s only partly true. I’m not old. I’m 33.
When I watch, I prefer watching the kinetic improv in silence. I’ve always loved hoops. I’ve
always agreed more with quiet.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space,” Victor Frankl reminds us. “In that space is our
power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
I watch, in silence, at home, and am drawn to the blank spaces on a cramped court: how players
create space of which there previously was none, how they briefly maintain space, how they
inhabit these fleeting pockets of space.
“The medium of poetry is the human body not words,” the poet Robert Pinsky reminds us.
“When you’re in a very quiet place, when you’re remembering, when you’re savoring an image,”
the poet Naomi Shihab Nye reminds us, “when you’re allowing your mind calmly to leap from
one thought to another, that’s a poem.”
I watch Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, in particular, the NBA’s least-known superstar, and I see a
mind and body calmly leaping.
Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, or SGA, isn’t as airbound as most. His poetic leaping stays more
lateral. His footwork points, pauses, and deceives. His ball-handling charges, halts, and sells. He
uses on-and-off-ball screens to goad and misdirect. He jabs and fakes with arms, eyes, and hips.
He spins and jerks, collects and lurches, sidesteps and opens new room—clearings, ravines,
pauses between stanzas—between his feet and his defenders’. He doubles-down and attacks the
defenders’ back-footed tumble. He hops back, across the canyon he just formed, for uncontested
jumpers. He glides sideways into different planes, waits for opponents to catch up, then abruptly
crosses them over in the direction from which they just came—as if taunting their momentum, as
if taunting momentum, as if anticipating a younger sibling wanting to join the front of his sled
after trudging through the snow only to take off downhill as soon as they arrive.
There’s no lower-hanging—or less nutritious— fruit than remarking how inarticulate an athlete
sounds. Their words. The vapid message behind those words. Their limited or clunky verbal
leaps from one thought to another. And yet, we don’t expect musicians to dunk, let alone dribble.
We don’t belabor, say, Picasso’s lack of athleticism. And still, I’m not sure we fully appreciate
embodied poetry itself.
His crossover evokes Allen Iverson’s in its assuredness and quick combustion, but there’s more
calm to SGA’s deception, more ease to his shiftiness. His euro-step in the paint—a staggered
one-two, selling the first leap with the right foot only to prance back, across multiple lanes of
traffic, with the left— is like a deer springing out of harm rather than a predator attacking prey
(he’s also a soft-spoken Canadian, not the most forceful demographic).
When I watch SGA, I think of the poet Mikko Harvey’s wonderful essay on D’Angelo Russell:
“Rooting for D’Angelo seems like a vote for art and a vote for imagination and a vote for
whimsy.”
Russell is certainly more flawed than SGA. He throws more reckless passes. He heaves more
hazardous threes. He appears largely uninterested in playing defense. But like Russell, rooting
for SGA—talent aside—seems like a vote for imagination and whimsy, a vote for calmly
leaping, which in itself is such a delightful paradox: is any leaping actually calm, when landing
safely isn’t certain? Can bounding, with force, really happen serenely?
Or is that the point? Is calmly leaping an almost mission statement for any art, performance art or
otherwise, where boldness of action meets patience and presence of being: patience allowing
uncertain plays to unfold, allowing prepared set-pieces to cycle through but ultimately waiting
between defensive stimulus and offensive response, trusting that there will eventually, somehow,
be space, then boldly leaping through it precisely when it arrives.
He creates liminal spaces. Briefly lives in them. And then, those spaces vanish.
“If I feel physically as if the top of my head is taken off,” Emily Dickinson reminds us, “I know
that is poetry.”
My analysis here is purely anecdotal, not backed by data, but I’m convinced every SGA
highlight I see, and am in awe of, every leap that results in a made basket, comes with under 2
seconds remaining on the shot clock. There are 24 seconds on the NBA shot clock, 24 seconds
alloted in an offensive possession for the ball to hit the rim. The Steve Nash Phoenix Suns of the
aughts famously charged their way down the floor, trying to attempt a good shot in “seven
seconds or less.” SGA, in my mind’s eye, is an advertisement for 22 seconds or less. A patient
frenzy. A frenzied patience.
“Silence is the material,” the poet Kaveh Akbar reminds us. “Language is the negative space we
use around it.”
When you’re in a very quiet place. When you’re remembering, when you’re savoring an image,
when you’re allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another, that’s a poem.
I’m struck by the word “remember,” how so many Native American communities hyphenate
re-member, as if to re-mind and re-turn us to the interconnectedness of mind and body, the link
between movement and memory, the metaphysical nature of embodiment, how
re-alignment—through yogic poses—opens up space, and ideas, that might have been blocked,
known but forgotten, re-membered later.
“Those lines of his stun us because they are perfect statements of what we already know,” the
literary critic, Mark Van Doren, wrote of Shakespeare, prolific in the art of re-minding, of
large-scale re-membering.
I wonder how quiet an athlete’s mind really is at work, how much arena noise seeps into their
center, what, if any, images they might be savoring to anchor themselves. The best athletes seem
the most monk-like. Michael Jordan, in The Last Dance, was deemed “a mystic. He was never
anywhere else.”
“While philosophers tend toward the universals, and poets love the particulars, it is the mystics
who teach us how to encompass both,” the mystic Richard Rohr reminds us.
Some particulars: SGA is generously listed at 6’6’’ 195 pounds and looks more wiry ball-boy
than ball-star. He doesn’t possess the weight to overpower the tallest trees nor the height to peer
over those same unmoving Oaks and Redwoods. Among his neighbors in the league’s leading
scorers, SGA is nine inches shorter than Joel Embiid and a speck of a booger next to jacked
moose, Giannis Antetokounmpo. Still, he scores as many points. He attempts a quarter as many
threes as Steph Curry and Luka Dončić. Still, SGA scores as many points. I’m not a
mathematician, but relying almost exclusively on shots that yield two points seems less
efficient—in a league now obsessed with efficiency—than incorporating shots that yield three
points.
There’s a chasm here, a glaring space between how SGA thrives—living in the mid-range, the
unfashionable Long Two, this throwback to the more clogged tops of the key in the ‘80s and
‘90s—and how the rest of the NBA’s elite scorers maneuver. Dončić often creates space by
targeting then bullying smaller defenders, backing them down with his caboose, getting them to
bite on up-fakes. Curry creates space 25 feet from the basket, whizzing around screens, tiring
helpless defenders before burying shots from the parking lot. SGA tap-dances through oncoming
traffic, only to slip into the window of a moving vehicle and take the wheel.
You don’t receive more points for the degree of difficulty of shot-making or creativity in
space-creation, and I’d never downplay Curry’s long-range wizardry, but I feel a certain kinship
with this stylistic anachronism, as I watch loud things in silence: the SGA herky floaters in
rush-hour gridlock after passing up relatively-open threes, the fadeaways a hair in front
of—rarely behind— the three point line, the turnaround post-ups beguiling lumbering giants.
They all go into the net at an historically efficient rate; their existence at all, Basketball
Moneyball would suggest, is an inefficient relic of a bygone era. (Threes and free-throws, the
Brad Pitt character in this basketball sequel would argue. Do they make threes, hit free-throws,
and switch on defense? If not, we don’t want ‘em, I imagine him saying in the year 2024).
My earliest basketball memories: I re-member the Jordan flu game in the ‘97 finals. I re-member
going outside immediately after to take free-throws, in silence, on our Fisher Price hoop. And I
re-member, in game six of the ‘98 finals against Utah, the Bulls spreading the floor, clearing
room at the top of the key for #23, then Jordan burying a 20-foot Long Two with six seconds left
to go up by one. I re-member, even then, at seven, wondering why everyone dwelt on Jordan
pushing off Byron Scott instead of savoring how Jordan created space to begin with: barrelling to
his right, retreating on a dime, crossing back to his left, leaving Scott somewhere near Park City.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head is taken off, I know that is poetry.
I re-member the next day, a dozen first graders chirping about the shot, the shove, its legality,
what constitutes cheating, the refs screwing up, the refs not screwing up, why games never start
on time, why a team in Salt Lake City was named the Jazz, of all things, which confounded a
couple precocious seven-year-olds.
It was too much: combativeness, noise, clutter. I re-member finding some quiet, sitting in the
corner of the room, looking out the window.
Whenever there was noise—too much of it, all at once—from preschool, into elementary, a
teacher would usually respond with one of two sayings: Inside Voices or Noise Pollution.
Inside Voices made me rigid and tight. Clenched, pinched, hot, watched, tensing on and against
the tightrope teetering between Indoor and Outdoor, before, eventually, quieting, softening,
indoors.
Noise Pollution leapt me,
In my mind,
To the same sloping meadow
Of tall grass,
The blades and me
Absorbing the same
Honeyed light—
A glow and warmth
You’d find at 3pm in Massachusetts October
Or Irish July—
On the same slight slope with
The same slight breeze,
The same slight stalks barely leaning.
No people.
No barking.
Nothing heard or seen
Out of frame.
A place I‘d never been.
A sight I’d never seen.
Steps I’d never taken.
But where I returned.
Returned.
Returned.
I recently watched highlights of SGA.
He buried a game-winner.
There was a roar from the OKC crowd.
Or I assume so.
There wasn’t any sound.