I’m frequently jarred by the mingling of fury, joy, and nerves inside me. Fury: How in the %$&@ is the US still sending weapons to Israel to continue its genocidal siege? Joy: Never in my life has women’s basketball been this thrilling. Nerves: My book! Good grief, is August too far away or too soon? These mixed emotions cohabitate in my brain and heart.
Today’s newsletter is about basketball. For the first time in my lifetime, women’s college games are getting higher viewership numbers than both men’s college and NBA games. Tomorrow, some of the most exciting (and well-marketed) college players of all time are competing in the final four (Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers, Aaliyah Edwards, Kamilla Cardoso), and Sunday, two teams will battle in the finals.
Next month, the WNBA season begins. It’s also reached a new level of entertainment. (For the record, the skill has been there, but the eyes of the world and the media dollars haven’t.) In a future post, I’ll document my thoughts on why it’s taken this long for women’s basketball to get more attention. In the meantime, I wanted to share writing about my relationship to playing the sport as a woman growing older each day but no less rapacious for the pleasures and intimacies of the game. Even if sports aren’t your thing, I hope you’ll read on!
(12)
The first official game I ever played, on the Mt. Tabor Middle School Snapping Turtles, I fouled out.
“Wait,” I whined to the pimpled teen ref from the ground where I was still grappling at the ball, “I only had four fouls. How could I foul out?”
“Two fouls at once,” he wheezed.
I’d taken my mom’s advice to be tough too much to heart, whacking everyone who came near. I sat on the bench and watched a player on my team shoot a jumper from the elbow with two hands. Airball.
(11)
One year later, eighth grade, the first game of a new season. It’s winter again, because basketball season in Oregon always takes place under a roof that’s getting pummeled with aggressive rain. On the first possession, I stole the ball from the point guard and took it to the hoop for a layup. On the second possession, I stole the ball from the point guard again and took it to the hoop for a layup. Four points up. On the third possession, the point guard passed the ball up the court past me, and then, jogging by my side, she clocked me in the face with her elbow so hard that my nose sprung open like a blood hydrant. The latest pimpled teen ref was looking the other way. No whistle. No call.
Lying on the sidelines, the game now sideways, a Ziplock of hard, uneven ice on my nose and blood all over my jersey, I watched my team get destroyed. I couldn’t stop crying.
“It’s not fair,” I wailed at my dad, reclined in the passenger seat on the way home, unable to sit up without my nose starting to bleed again.
I don’t remember if he said anything.
(10)
And there she was—the girl who’d given me a bloody nose—on the first day of try outs in high school, vying for a spot on the same team as I was. We eyed each other suspiciously. And then, a week later, we were teammates on the Grant High School Generals’ freshmen squad. And then we were friends because nothing can bond old enemies faster than new shared enemies: the Lincoln Cardinals, the Benson Techmen, the Cleveland Warriors.
“Should-a been a Gen-er-al,” we’d chant, our voices alternating high and low notes like a tuba. “Should-huh been uh Gen-er-ull,” we’d scream together with all our feral ra-ra spirit.
(9)
By the time I made varsity, my friend had stopped playing and our team had a superstar who could stroke a three with such precision that the sight got me a little high. I spent all season on the bench, watching her shoot rainbows, feeling a crackle of electricity shoot up my spine whenever I heard the crisp “wheep” of the ball flying through the net. I was the back-up for the back-up shooting guard behind her, and every game I bounced in my metal seat impatiently, waiting for the 3 minutes when they both needed a breather. I’d go in and try for steals because that was always my strength. And often, I’d foul.
When we’d lose, sometimes, on the drive home, I would cry inconsolably, even though I’d only played briefly. I was crying for everything I wanted that I couldn’t have, all the minutes that I didn’t play, the threes I bricked, the boys I fantasized about in total secrecy, the tall, thin, hourglass body from the movies I thought I needed. Like a schmalzy song played at just the right moment in a manipulative drama, the final scoreboard had the power to open my tear ducts and empty me out.
One night in December, our star fouled out during overtime, and somehow I was put in at the very end to finish out the game. Three points down with a minute left to play. I stole the ball from the point guard, took it to the hoop for a layup, and made it. One point down. On the second possession, I stole the ball from the point guard again and took it to the hoop for a layup, but she fouled me, and I missed. Whistle. I went to the line with a few seconds of the game left. If I made one free throw, we’d tie and go into double overtime. If I made both, we’d win. If I made zero, we’d lose.
A stinky aroma of anxiety seeped from my armpits as I dribbled the ball at the free throw line trying to calm my nerves. First shot good. Tie game. I tried to keep a stony face, to not look at my teammates on the sidelines or my dad in the stands. Second shot. It arched high, good rotation, good alignment. And… it was good! We won by a point.
The very next game, I was back on the bench like it’d never happened, like I’d never been so clutch. And had I ever been so clutch? Are you ever sated when you make the shot? I’ve always needed one more.
(8)
Alas, team sports! That great misery for people who dislike father figures screaming in their faces. In school, many kids come out of team sports scarred and humiliated. Militant competition rules the day.
I’m a rare example of what happens when that’s not the case. Sports—and basketball specifically—have been a refuge for me, which is unusual because I’m an unlikely hooper, an odd fit for the sport given my paltry height, middling twitch muscle reflex time, on-again off-again relationship to competitiveness, inability to rubberneck when players get hurt (in fact nausea at all injuries), and sketchy knees/ankles/calves/ass/handles/jump shot/free throw/layup/three.
Off the court, in school, I was a book nerd: glasses, saliva-y mouth, my sentences too long, too nuanced, too particular. On the court, I was tentative, clumsy, and overeager. But I loved basketball with an intensity I couldn’t rationalize. Not that I practiced a lot or ran through plays in my mind. It was more an extension of how I understood myself. I carried a Rasheed Wallace lunch box to school and kept an Arvydas Sabonis bobble head doll on my desk. Loving basketball made me feel like myself and no one else, even as it tied me to people orbiting far away from me. Sitting in class, ink stains on my shirt, pushing my glasses up my nose, people thought they knew me, but everyone had it wrong. I was gonna be a baller.
And I became a baller, not because anything about me really changed. Two decades later, having never even considered trying out for a college team, I’m still playing regularly. What is it about this game that won’t let me quit?
(7)
A few months ago, I was standing behind a plastic folding table at the end of a grocery aisle, tongs in hand, dishing up sample cups of the noodles my business makes and sells. On this particular afternoon, a woman approached me from the side with a shy look.
It’s common for people to feel uncomfortable when you’re offering them free food. I’d also thought I was alone, so I was doing squats, calf raises, side lunges, anything to feel less constrained. But I could tell she had something else on her mind.
“Um, are you Lola?” she asked tentatively.
“Hi!” I responded as warmly as I could, curious how this stranger knew my name. “I am.”
“I think my husband plays basketball with you.” She said his name as if it were a secret password that might open a portal between us. I beamed.
“I love him,” I said—not usually the first sentence I’d say to someone’s wife. But her nervous expression melted into a grin.
I’ve been playing basketball with her husband since my brother invited me to join a weekly pick-up game when I was a teen. I call him the Manu Ginóbili of our crew because he looks a little like the famous Argentinian: tall, lanky, dark hair, eyes set a little deeply, long nose. He plays like him too. He’s a shooting guard, with clean decisive strides to the hoop, a smooth shot, and the ability to surprise. He’s clutch exactly when you need him to be. Once, he even blocked someone from behind—one of my favorite Manu Ginóbili tricks!
I wanted to tell his wife all about him, but then, she’s his wife, so in theory she already knows. But does she know him the way our group does? How could she?
(6)
“I want to write an essay about basketball and intimacy,” I told my brother, Zak, over beers after pick-up a week later. I’d been mulling over my encounter at the grocery store and my ongoing commitment to the game over all these years.
“Nice!” my brother responded, between swallows. “I mean, whose balls haven’t I tickled!”
“Ha! That’s not what I meant,” I responded.
But of course, Zak was teasing at something real. Basketball involves a lot of touching. It’s also filled with over-the-top sexual innuendoes: backdoor penetration, strong moves to the hole, take it to the rim, double dribble. The list goes on and on. You may never have touched someone’s ball(s), but you’ve definitely shot it in his face. Isn’t there a little intimacy in sharing this salacious language and the physical closeness it describes? But I’d been thinking about something less cheeky: how playing with people teaches you things about them that even their lovers may never know.
Since Zak first invited me, I’ve been playing pick-up basketball every Tuesday with a group called the Friendship Basketball Guild. Our game was founded by a collection of librarians and musicians who loved the sport but didn’t have a lot of skills. It was intended as a welcoming space without the intense competitiveness and aggression that characterized my high school games and so many other pick-up games. Over the years, the skill level rose but the fun-loving spirit remained. Players have come and gone, but a few have stayed for well over a decade. I don’t know everyone’s last names, where they work, or what they do, but I know about their generosity, how they react under pressure, their creativity, when they’re clutch, and when they’re quick to anger.
Something raw and honest is revealed when the body leads, when one can’t think things all the way through rationally and must respond in motion, in sync with four other people in a small space. Secrets are shared, sometimes unknowingly.
(5)
Intimacy. When you search your local library for books on it, as I have, you find many collections about sex and marriage. (A quintessential example: Unfuck your Intimacy: Using Science for Better Relationships, Sex, & Dating.) But intimacy isn’t limited to the bedroom. Many people have experienced the intimacy of friendship, of moments when you sit side by side with a friend and spill out your inner life for them to gather up and hold. Basketball intimacy functions differently than both of those but feels no less real or necessary to me.
So then what do I think intimacy means? Closeness? Shared vulnerability? Revealing your secrets and being honest about your emotions? Willingly showing yourself in the moments you wish others didn’t see?
The thing about basketball (and sex and friendship) is that it’s not just what you learn and then know about other people. It’s what they learn and then know about you.
(4)
Here are some of the raw things I’ve witnessed in our rec games: Players who are constantly frustrated by their teammates and want to blame everything on someone else. Players battling their own demons so profoundly that whenever they make an error, their entire spirit wilts. Players who care so much about winning that they become what I call the “Army of One,” plowing over opponents and forgetting they have teammates. Players who always give up the last shot, even when they’re wide open, even when the clock is ticking, even when it’s their shot.
And here’s the flip side: Players who can see the court as though from an aerial view and give the pass exactly where the shooter wants it. Players who know how to defuse conflict with humor. Players so calm and wise that when they have the ball, they float like a genie with endless wishes to give. Players so clutch at the end of a game their energy infects all their teammates and suddenly everyone is playing at 100.
What does this tell me about them that their sweethearts don’t know? Their coworkers? How do these things translate into their day-to-day lives? Some of these were the same people at their worst and at their best. Some of these are me. It’s incredibly intimate to be seen at your lowest and pettiest and, by the same group, at your most audacious and miraculous.
In pick-up, the stakes are only as high as you believe them to be, which means you’re really playing against, and with, yourself. Winning ceases to be the goal because you’re constantly winning and losing. Instead, you’re playing for something ethereal—a connection to yourself—which is only available through the way you play with others.
(3)
If there’s physical and emotional intimacy, I say there’s also a third kind, what we call chemistry, and it’s the most mysterious! When you feel it, you’re electrified. When you witness it, you grin. It’s those moments of pure, zinging connection: the perfect alley-oop, the back-door pass, the pick and roll, the give and go. Someone sees you for all that you can be, and you see them for all their potential. Together, you each become the fullest expression of yourself. Isn’t that an instantiation of bell hook’s definition of love?!
One can build chemistry overtime, but it’s never guaranteed. Maybe there are two people you’ve played with for years: You have chemistry with one and not the other. That’s how it goes. But also, chemistry can appear with a stranger, someone you’ve never played with before in your life. Suddenly, you’re each attentive to the other. A psychic connection appears out of thin air. You both feel it and operate inside it, relying on intuition, faith, and daring. You’re watching each other’s body language, noting and responding to each other’s energy. It can feel almost romantic, the way they occupy your mind; the way you feel noticed in return.
Does chemistry on the court equal chemistry off the court? Not necessarily. Does chemistry on the court thrill and linger long after you’ve slipped off your shoes and walked in the dark under the streetlights to your car? For me it does. For a little while, I feel magnetic, generous, alluring. I feel tangled up with someone else’s spirit.
(2)
Sarah started our women’s team thirteen or so years ago with a few friends who all worked or volunteered at a school garden. They decided to name themselves the Big Worms—a nod to their common love of the red wigglers in the soil and of the movie Friday and its classic antagonist, Big Worm, hair in curlers, cruising up in a hydraulic Spalding-orange drop top.
I joined a year or two later. We’re hilariously small and short, and most of us are shooting guards, so when I call us The Big Worms, I also mean that: a group of undersized hustlers. We play every Monday in a rec league for women, trans men and women, and nonbinary players. A group of us carpools from northeast Portland out to the courts that are invariably deep in the suburbs.
Over the years, we watched Sarah go through graduate school to become an elementary school teacher. We watched PK get a divorce and then fall in love and marry anew. We all went to see SB when she coached the JV team at the high school where she works. We watched Rachael’s daughter grow into a spindly pre-teen, saw Mo through a job doing environmental remediation at the most hazardous sites, cheered as Whit began teaching math at a local college.
Basketball has been our place to let off steam and to show power and aggression when we may have spent the day holding it in. We call out people if they become too physically aggressive or antagonistic because that’s not the culture of our team. But grandstanding and shit talking—all welcome! If not here, then where?
Nell works for a foundation that focuses on kids’ equitable access to the environment. When she applied for her job, I wrote her a letter of recommendation because I knew her boss. But I’d never worked with Nell, so I wrote about how tenacious she is on defense, how unafraid to be physical, how naturally she sees the dynamics of the game and helps her teammates strategize. It was the most honest letter of recommendation I ever wrote.
I dream of playing with the Big Worms and the Friendship Basketball Guild as an old woman, crotchety but deadeye, which requires continuing to push for inclusive, welcoming, supportive spaces to play ball. If my friends and I work to create these uncommon spaces, and if we talk about it, maybe others will realize that they can make them too.
(1)
Last week, the Big Worms were down five points with thirty seconds on the clock. I took a three and got fouled. I’m not a great free-throw shooter, but I buoyed myself thinking back to that high school overtime so many years before. You will make these for your team, I told myself. And I did: One. Two. Three. They beamed at me, these teammates I’ve played with on and off for a decade, with something like: I knew you would, and also, I’m proud of you.
I screamed out, “Full court press!” We matched up, two points down, thirty seconds still on the clock, hungry to impress each other, eager to prove something to ourselves.
Sarah got the steal, as I knew she would. Nell called a timeout, and we headed to the sideline. After Lei drafted a play, we put our hands in the center, as excited for what was known as what was unknown.
“Big Worms on three,” Sarah said. “One, two, three…”
Very nice! I didn't know where you were going with this until the first half was over. Clever organization with the countdown, too. I am not a sports lover -- I almost didn't read the rest of your essay because reading about sports doesn't interest me much. But now I'm impressed by the way you used basketball to express some pretty deep things, including bell hooks' thoughts about love. Yes, I have read her book - in fact, I have two copies.
I’m not a sportsball person at all, but basketball is really the only ball sport I’ve ever played, on our church’s god-awful (pun intended) team in the Greek Orthodox Youth of America “league.” (Basically we traveled up and down the mid-Atlantic to play terrible games by day and have supervised Greek + American dance parties at night.)
And I loved this. I loved the part where the sports-crying lets you get out all the other-crying. (I guess this is how boys/men are all the time.) And…people know people so differently! And…intimacy in more shapes! Finally, I LOVE that your team was named the Snapping Turtles. Would love even more if there are actually snapping turtles on Mt. Tabor??? Somewhere, somehow???
Side note: I had no idea the college women’s games were getting so much fanfare. I was only vaguely aware that the Moda Center messed up the 3-point line for the WNBA championships, lol/not lol. I do wonder, per your comment about players being well-marketed, if this change is due to the change in the Name, Image, Likeness rule. (And, probably/despondently as a result, increased exposure to male eyes and dollars.) Or maybe The Sports Bra is singlehandedly changing the national landscape. :)