A Basketball Jones
by Maureen Stanton
One winter not long after my boyfriend, Steve, died, I became a basketball fan, or I should say, I became a fan again. My initial enthusiasm for basketball was inculcated in me by my father, a Celtics fan. My father is first-generation Boston Irish, his parents off the boat from County Galway, peasant Irish (not the “two toilet” class, he says). The Celtics, their name itself, the cloverleaf and leprechaun logo — this was my father’s home team. I remember my father explaining the rules, which were different from the “girls” basketball we played in school, in which guards could travel only half the court. The archaic “girls” rules were abolished in 1970 when I was in fourth grade, the same year that Fisher Elementary decreed it acceptable for girls to wear pants to school. I didn’t know who was responsible for these changes, but to my 10-year-old self, they seemed sudden and life-altering. I remember the thrill of wearing pants on a weekday, how it felt transgressive, as did crossing the half-court line for the first time.
In my family, we had enough kids for a starting line-up of a basketball team, with two subs. My four sisters and two brothers were uninterested in sports or too young respectively, and so for a while fandom was a way to claim my father. For my tenth birthday, my father bought tickets to a Celtics game at the Boston Gardens. Before the game he took me out for my favorite dinner, steamed clams. I hadn’t known one could eat steamed clams in the winter; I’d eaten them only at summer clambakes sponsored by my father’s employers, Sylvania (like our television) and later, Polaroid (like our camera). That night at a small diner in Dedham, Massachusetts my father asked if I’d had enough to eat. A midden of empty shells on the plate before me, I nodded politely, though I remember feeling hungry still, and embarrassed by my appetite, which might have been greed. I remember wishing I could sit in that restaurant all night eating steamed clams drenched in butter and talking to my father.
After dinner, we drove to Boston Gardens, parked, and found our seats. I was thrilled with the sheer size of the arena, the buzz of the crowd, excited that I would watch my hero in person, John Havlicek. I recall my father explaining how the parquet floor was somehow removed when the Bruins hockey team played; I marveled that there was ice — an entirely different landscape — hidden underneath the wood panels, as transformative a phenomenon as the shift from dresses to pants, from half-court to full. Of the game itself, I recall little. I can’t even remember if the Celtics won or lost. I’m sure if they won, my father and I would have reveled in the victory on the drive home, and if they had lost, we would have reviled the injustice, either way bonded in our devotion to the team. Reveled or reviled — one letter changes everything, as can one point in a game; destiny can pivot on the smallest change. Maybe I fell asleep on the ride home, for it was a “long” 40-minute drive to our hometown. The details are lost, but I’ll never forget that night because it is the only time in my childhood that I recall having my father all to myself.
*
In the 1988/89 NBA playoffs, the Detroit Pistons squared off against the Celtics in the semifinals. I rooted for the Pistons, against my past, my childhood. I was surprised that my allegiance had shifted. I’d moved to Michigan to be with Steve, but even after five years residing there, I still felt like an easterner, a Bostonian. I never called myself a Michiganian, or even worse, a Michigander, like some goosey state bird. I maintained my New England snobbishness even as I grew to love Michigan, its vast space, down-homey country fairs, and the best swimming of my life. I swam in Lake Superior off Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in October, skinny-dipped in Lake Michigan’s turquoise water off North Manitou Island on a beach that was utterly uninhabited, and again, slipped into Superior’s icy bath on a hundred-degree day after hiking Isle Royale, a dot of land in the greatest of lakes. I fell in love with Steve quickly, six weeks, and I decided to move to Michigan with him. (We’d met in New York, where we both worked temporary jobs.) Immediately upon my arrival in his home state, Steve took me to a pristine spot on Lake Michigan — a national forest with a little trafficked beach — and I fell in love with the whole state then. Steve and Michigan — Steve was Michigan for me, the reason for being there, for staying.
The Pistons were Michigan, too, and that first winter after I’d moved into a new house in a new city to take a new job, a year that was defined by grieving for Steve who had died of cancer at aged thirty-one, I became obsessed with the Pistons. I don’t know what prompted me to watch a game, to become involved with this team of strangers playing a game that hadn’t interested me for a decade. I only remember being enraptured, a sudden onset of fandom like catching the flu. I fell for the Pistons.
I loved the studied perfection of Joe Dumars, dark as a coffee bean, handsome and quiet. The librarian of the game, he quietly put the ball in the net like shelving a book. In contrast with the big men, Dumars was small and compact, with a stealthy excellence. I recall a free-throw streak during that season; game after game he sunk every foul shot. Dumars was a man I could count on. I admired Isiah Thomas’s intelligence, his easy nature, and Vinnie Johnson’s quiet, working-class talent — unceremoniously Vinnie got the job done. I even grudgingly respected Bill Laimbeer, a giant forward whose lumbering romps down the court seemed labored, a thuggish player with loose elbows. The dignified old-timer James Edwards, Rick Mahorn, Mark Aguirre, John Salley — the Pistons had a deep bench.
But it was Dennis Rodman I loved most. He seemed to me as graceful as Baryshnikov, as springy as Tigger, as mischievous as his namesake, that other Dennis, the “menace.” Rodman had a kind of absurd beauty; he moved with balletic grace, trotting from end to end with uncommon ease. Rodman fairly floated down the court, the expression on his face revealing — it seemed to me — pure joy, glorying in his athleticism, a feast of power and grace and speed, basketball as Bacchanalia. Dennis, a name derived from Dionysus — God of wine and orgies — the name fit.
I rooted hard for the Pistons in the winter of 1988, an underdog team who’d never won an NBA title in their history then. They were a scrappy urban bunch, mostly black players compared to the more white and long-winning Boston franchise. Steve had been an underdog in his bout with adenocarcinoma, a rare, aggressive subtype of the disease that bragged its death count. The doctors had given Steve no chance of living, no odds whatsoever. His cancer, by the time it was discovered, had already spread throughout his body, the vulnerable soft tissue of his liver, the architecture of his bones. The doctors gave him only a ticking clock, a fixed amount of time in which to play out his life — two weeks to two months, their prognosis. No sudden death, but no overtime either.
*
Steve was taller than average, six feet one, lithe and graceful. I never saw him play basketball, though he loved boxing, sparring with a huge canvas bag hung from a beam. He had beautiful biceps, and well-developed pecs and deltoids from working the bag. He loved running, too, and had been on the track team in high school. “We practiced every day after school,” he’d told me as we perused his high school yearbook once shortly after I’d met him. “The coach about killed us.” I imagined Steve running, his wild curly blonde hair matted with sweat, a look of determination on his baby face, which hadn’t changed much in the 10 years since his high school photo. He had reached his full height by 16 and he was all legs. In my mind’s eye, I see him racing through the woods behind his school, past the corn fields of rural southern Michigan on hot afternoons. But he’d quit the track team after one season. I’d asked him why. “I tried as hard as I could,” he’d said, “but when we had a meet, I came in second place.” Second place was good, I thought, but not good enough for Steve. “I’m not going to try that hard and come in second place,” he’d said. I remember admiring his strange reasoning. He would not settle for less; he wanted only the top spot.
*
A year after Steve died, back in my home state of Massachusetts for a visit, I saw Dennis T., my old boyfriend — we were on and off from junior high through my sophomore year in college, but I hadn’t seen him since I was 20. In those eight years he’d been married and then divorced six months later when his wife walked off with someone else. As sometimes happens with old sweethearts, Dennis and I got together. We knew that our fling wouldn’t last, but for a while we took pleasure in each other on those occasions when I flew from Michigan to Massachusetts to visit my family. We’d both experienced loss before we’d turned 30, and so perhaps our affair was a retreat back to childhood, a puppy love that was more comprehensible, familiar. Safe.
Dennis was an athlete, and had earned his bachelor’s degree in sports management at a college in Springfield, Massachusetts, home of the Basketball Hall of Fame. He was a Celtics fan, and so that winter we made a bet on the Pistons-Celtics series. I don’t remember what the payoff was, some token monetary amount. Dennis and I did not have much in common anymore, and we didn’t last much beyond that basketball season, but our affair infused the games with a sense of romance. Somehow my deep sadness about the tragedy of Steve’s life could be ameliorated by a dalliance with an old boyfriend, Dennis T., and by a fantasy crush on a professional basketball player, Dennis R., two Dennises. I could swoon over a sport, over players.
There is something deeply erotic about athletes, about sports: the bumping, the shoving, the pure physicality and contact, the strained all-out effort after some euphoric rush. It’s easy to love a player. Dennis Rodman in 1988 was certainly not my first crush on an athlete. When I was 10, I was infatuated with Derek Sanderson, a forward on the Boston Bruins hockey team. My father and I were hockey fans when the Bruins, led by Bobby Orr and Derek Sanderson, won the Stanley Cup in 1970. On the back of my bedroom door I’d hung that famous poster of Bobby Orr virtually flying as he scored the winning overtime goal off a pass from Sanderson. I’d witnessed that moment on television; I felt part of that history.
Derek Sanderson, like Dennis Rodman 20 years later, was the rebellious athlete, his long hair flowing as he raced down the ice, sans helmet. He was the first player in the NHL since the 1940s to sport a moustache, and long sexy sideburns. I took great care with my entry for the “Why I Want to Date Derek Sanderson” contest advertised on television. I dreamed about winning; I thought winning was a real possibility as I earnestly penned my ardor for Derek. I seriously doubt the sponsors of the contest would have allowed a 10-year-old girl on a date with a grown man. Turns out, from the 13,000 or so entries, a 76-year-old grandmother won.
Nearly 20 years later, a decade after Steve had died and years since I’d watched any professional sports, I saw an aged Derek Sanderson on some Boston-based, late-night cable talk show, telling the host about his rehabilitation from drugs and alcohol. He’d been the highest paid athlete in the world in 1972, but years later had wound up sleeping on park benches in New York City. Somehow he pulled his life together, and then toured hundreds of schools with a public service message about drugs and alcohol. I had to squint hard to see the resemblance between this middle-aged, used-up person and the gorgeous young athlete I’d idolized and loved. If the show had advertised a call-in number, I would have phoned Derek Sanderson to say that some of us still loved him, and always would. Heroes, in spite of their downfalls, maybe because of their downfalls, remain heroic to us — in memory anyway.
*
Growing up, I played basketball in the driveway next door with two brothers, Scott and Dennis (the first Dennis in my life). We played Around the World, and two-on-two. Eventually, my father installed a basketball pole and hoop at the top of our driveway. I played endless double-or-nothing rounds with my father, surprising him with my outside sinker, a three-pointer that he’d bet me 25 cents to hit, then double-or-nothing-ed me until I inevitably missed, up to $32 I remember once. I never quit while I was ahead. Was I just plain greedy? Did I think my winning streak would never end?
I started playing basketball on a team in fourth grade, and was the co-captain of an All-Star team in sixth grade. I have a black and white 4″ x 6″ photo of myself and Debbie Looney, the other co-captain, each of us with a palm on the basketball, wearing pinnys like aprons. I was a starting guard in ninth grade, and in tenth grade the women’s basketball coach tried to cajole me into playing, but I had moved to the other side of the social schema in our high school with its sharply divided factions. You had to choose between being a “jock” or a “freak.” Instead of spending afternoons setting picks and running drills in the gym, I was “down the path” getting stoned.
A year or so after Steve died, an acquaintance invited me to a pick-up basketball game at a recreation center in Lansing, Michigan, in the basement of which was an ancient half-gym, like the one in my elementary school, with hissing, spitting radiators that wouldn’t shut off even in summer, and that same stale boiler room smell. I remember wondering as a kid what on earth was being boiled in the boiler room. It smelled like boiled dinner, which my mother used to cook, cabbage and ham and potatoes, the worst dinner of my childhood.
In the first moments of the game, to my embarrassment, basketball knowledge did not come rushing back to me over the span of 13 years since I’d last played. It was, in fact, not like riding a bike, or sex after a period of abstinence. I noted the irony of remembering myself as an adept player, while not remembering how to play the game. I felt adrift on that court, as I did in my life after Steve died, without the skills I needed to maneuver.
The first time I received the ball, I attempted to pivot but instead my legs slid out from under me in my treadless gardening sneakers and I nearly did a split. I froze like this for a second, and then toppled over sideways like a cardboard cutout. I made a few other fumbles, threw the ball to the other team, forgot I had the option of dribbling and had the ball ripped from my hands, until slowly like sun emerging from behind a cloud bank, I warmed up; body memory returned. I intercepted a pass and streaked down the (tiny, yes) court for an easy lay-up.
I felt redeemed when after the game my acquaintance asked me to join her city league team. Lansing is a basketball town, birth place of Magic Johnson, East Lansing home to Michigan State’s Big Ten teams. I should have known better. I joined the team, and was invited to another pickup game, this time in a high school gym. On that court, at five feet two inches I was a pygmy among Amazons, tall, strong women who had played college basketball. The gym was huge, a metaphor for how outsized I felt in it; I belonged back in the kiddie gym. Here I was lost among the long torsos and fast hands, the enormous thighs, confidence and aggression you could whiff like perfume, like the fear you could smell on me. I ran up and down the court just outside the pack of players for a few minutes, like swimming in a lap lane by myself next to a game of water polo.
After a short while, I sidelined myself. My teammate was disgusted. “Are you afraid?” she said. I shrugged dumbly. I was. “You are on our team,” she said, as if I should somehow overcome my intimidation and lack of prowess (not to mention lack of height and sheer muscle mass) and get back in the game. To her, playing basketball with the big girls was courage, was bravery. I wanted to tell her that no matter how tough the competition, playing basketball was nothing compared to watching your lover die, but I didn’t. My cowardice on the court muted my tongue.
Our team had no coach or captain, and so during official games, each player put herself into play as she saw fit. I could not substitute for Jackie, the guard who was the star, the top scorer, the lynchpin of the team. She was a gifted player with a jump shot that was a thing of beauty. She had long fake fingernails and what was called “frosted” hair back then, and she was tough and pretty at the same time. She barely spoke to me. The other guard, Lisa, was a short, chunky, bossy woman who was always furious with me for substituting for her, and so inevitably after I was in play for about one minute, she’d signal for me to come out. I couldn’t stand the tension of this situation, and I hated standing around on the sidelines feeling useless. I thought maybe one of the other players might witness Lisa’s unfairness (she was not a better player than I was), but nobody was going to step in and rescue me. It wasn’t about fairness or equity. I’d already learned that life was unfair, a lesson that didn’t sink in during my childhood in spite of my mother’s oft-repeated refrain to my oft-stated lament: “But that’s not fair!” Nobody said life was fair, my mother would say, which was not consoling in any way and still isn’t.
After a few games, I stopped attending altogether. I never officially quit or told anyone why, which was chicken-hearted, or at least immature, but I didn’t need a petty battle at every game. I was still raw from losing Steve, from watching him suffer; I didn’t have any fight left in me, any ability to confront an injustice no matter how slight. I had just emerged from an eight month shadow of numbness and grief following Steve’s death, during which I went to work and home and nowhere else. I didn’t know how to move through space or among people, how to live, how to be. I tried my best to perform my job, and luckily I had autonomy in that first year (my boss frequently out of the office, my coworkers busy with their own projects). Nobody saw me reading the same memo repeatedly, the black print on the white page incomprehensible because my brain had quit for a spell. Nobody noticed me weeping behind my cubicle, or in the parking lot.
*
When I was 11, I won the highest honor bestowed on a fifth grader at Fisher School, the Good Sportsmanship Award. I won because as the captain of an intramural basketball team, I had allowed all of the players equal court time, including Nancy and Marylou Barrett. Nancy had been kept back, so was a head taller than the rest of us, which could have bode well for our team, but she was not athletic. Her feet ducked outward causing her to lurch, her coarse black hair swaying as she keeled down the court. She seemed always about to tip. Marylou was shorter, with the same thick hair but maple-colored, a thatch of bangs across her forehead. In basketball, the Barretts could never catch up with the action, arriving down court just as the play was over.
During each game I offered the Barretts encouragement, patted them on the back after each loss, “Good game, Nancy, Marylou.” It was an “eyewash,” a term Steve and his fellow electricians used for looking busy when the boss came around. When my mother picked me up after the games, the car door was barely shut before I exploded. “They can’t even dribble. Marylou just STANDS there. I threw the ball to Nancy and she passed it right to the other team. They STINK!”
“It’s only a game,” my mother would say.
“The other captains never substitute themselves and Miss Hopkins doesn’t say anything. It’s not fair!” The coach, Miss Hopkins, like God gave the captains free will to manage our teams, as if this were a sociological experiment. I longed with every soft growing bone in my body to pull the Barretts off the court, but I couldn’t do it because it wasn’t fair.
That season, our team — the Marshmallows — lost every game and that about killed me. I remember standing outside of Miss Hopkins’ classroom on Mondays after the rankings were posted, tracing my finger down the list to find my team in last place by even more points than the week before. At the assembly on the last day of school, when I heard my name announced as the winner of the Good Sportsmanship Award, I felt like a fraud. I knew the stinginess of my own heart, knew I did not deserve the honor, as I dazedly made my way to the stage to shake Miss Hopkins’ hand and collect the award: a gold-plated medallion hitched to a triangle of red, white, and blue fabric, resting on a yellow die-cut foam mattress, encased in a black plastic box.
During Steve’s illness in my counselor, Cendra’s, office I vented my resentment toward Steve’s family for their lack of day-to-day help, and at my boss who treated me inconsiderately (she referred to me as her “girl”). I vented my anger at Steve for taking up my life with his death, for needing so much from me in his dying that I had little energy for living. None of this mattered, Cendra said, because I did all I could to help Steve; each day I loved him and cared for him until his last breath. The Catholicism of my upbringing had imbued me with the notion that thoughts were equal to deeds. But Cendra, with her doctorate in philosophy, assured me that I could be petty and selfish in my thoughts, for none of that mattered; it was how you acted that mattered.
*
Steve told me a story once about going for a run in New York. As a union electrician, he’d traveled there from Michigan for work. One night he left his hotel room wearing just his running shorts and a tee-shirt, sneakers. After a while, deep in the trance of the run, he’d become disoriented, completely lost in what looked to be a dangerous neighborhood. He had no money for a cab or phone call, but rather than asking someone for directions or help, he kept running. Night fell and he ran on. I can understand his hesitation to ask for help, the desire to continue on your path no matter how circuitous because forward motion is comforting and convinces us that we are getting somewhere, making progress as opposed to stopping, which is an admission of defeat and invites the unknown. He finally recognized some buildings and through blind persistence and dumb luck stumbled across his hotel. His feet were bleeding from his long, long run, but finally he was home.
When it came time to run for his life, Steve ran fast and hard for months and months. When he decided to stop chemotherapy and radiation and experimental whole-body hypothermia and all the nutritional treatments, he was refusing to settle for second place, a diminished life of nausea and constant pain, or the stupor of narcotics, a reduced existence with limited ability to conduct the daily acts of living — working, cooking, eating, shopping in the grocery store, walking in the park, making love.
Maybe this was why I was so crazy about the Pistons after Steve died, why I was so loyal and steadfast — if temporarily — a fan. I didn’t miss a single game that season. I organized my life around the games, marked them in my calendar, though I had nothing else that might have occupied those evenings. I looked forward to the games eagerly, treating myself to a few beers while I watched. Drinking alone seemed generally pathetic unless I was drinking during a game, which was part of the ritual, savoring one, then another, and then — why not — a third beer. Drinking while watching the Pistons was communal, in camaraderie with the thousands of fans I could see in the bleachers, and the thousands who were at home like me.
Watching the Pistons play, I was completely absorbed in something other than grief. I took refuge in spectatorship, losing myself in the intensity of the games, in the romance of athletic endeavor. I was passionate in fandom, as I had been helping Steve live, researching homeopathic cures, making travel plans to undergo alternative treatments, managing his care and monitoring his health, pushing back against his illness for a year and a half. Back then, I needed the Detroit Pistons, needed to see tall, powerful men performing feats seemingly impossible for the human body, to try with all their might for the only goal that counted, to win. To do it for me.
Maureen Stanton’s book, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money (Penguin), a work of literary journalism that explores the subculture of flea market, antiques, and collecting, was the winner of the 2012 Massachusetts Book Award in nonfiction. Her essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, Crab Orchard Review, Florida Review, The Sun, and other journals and anthologies. Her work has been awarded the Iowa Review Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the American Literary Review prize, a Mary Roberts Rinehart award, and the Thomas J. Hruska Prize from Passages North. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, the Maine Arts Commission fellowship, and has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony. Stanton teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.