by Scott F. Parker
1.
After months of emailing with the Timberwolves PR office to schedule today’s meeting, here I am at the team practice facility underneath the Target Center in downtown Minneapolis. When I signed in at the registration desk I was directed “down the stairs, toward the back. Can’t miss it.” I missed it. With the gym’s shades pulled down to keep media and passersby from ogling and disrupting, the black rectangles blocking the windows look like the screens between me and someone’s PowerPoint presentation, not the dividers between the normal everyday outside world and the glamorous mystique of professional basketball. Though the door is locked, there is a noticeable absence of spectacle. I keep thinking the scene surrounding Kobe Bryant and the Lakers must be much sillier, and that if this were the 1990s Chicago Bulls there’s no way I’d be the only reporter here.
Hoping to make out some players, I peek through the cracks on the edges of the blinds, but all I can see is someone’s sweatpant’d shins standing still. Anxious about being late, I’m twenty minutes early. I sit on a bench outside the gym door and wait to see someone I recognize. It’s my first time as “media,” doing a profile for the University of Oregon alumni magazine, so I’m trying to look like media. I’ve worn khaki pants and a shirt with buttons. (Although, now that I think about it more, do sports journalists wear pink shirts? And what about pink socks? At least I’d make Craig Sager proud.) The first person after me to try to go into the gym is an athletic-looking guy, whose air of strained responsibility, more than his height, reveals him as a non-player. He turns out to be a team trainer, and once he decides knocking won’t get him in (he’s lost his key somewhere) takes out his phone and tries to call someone inside. After sending a series of calls straight to voicemail and electing to just wait for practice to end, he’s happy to talk with me about the team. Some of the guys, he tells me, are hard workers who show up every day eager to put in their time. Other guys are lazy and whine about any extra work they need to do. Because the guys who are difficult to work with are often good enough that people with something to gain are willing to put up with their immaturity, it’s the latter group the trainer spends most of his time with. He tells me this in the unimpressed tone of someone saying, “I didn’t make the world the way it is, but I know how it works.” I get the impression that it’s nice for him to be able to condescend personally to such rich and famous young men, implying that without him “working them out” these elite athletes would turn into out-of-shape washups before the next game tips off. Am I making this trainer sound smug? I don’t mean to. He’s just telling me—with a lot of honesty—what his job is. Who wouldn’t play up the importance of his job to the “media”?
I tell him I’m there to interview Luke Ridnour, who went to my college and once borrowed a pencil from me for a sociology test. “Luke is great,” he says. I can tell already he’s grown accustomed to speaking in the platitudes of professional athletics, but it’s clear that he means what he says about Luke, even though Luke is in the hard-working camp of players who the team does not assign to the trainer for mandatory workouts and he doesn’t know him as well as some of the other guys. He knows I know, who “other guys” refers to here and doesn’t bother to name names. It’s the young guys with “attitude” and “a sense of entitlement” and “a lack of discipline” that it sounds like really live up to their reputations that he mostly works with. And maybe they would be washups without his and others’ constant doting.
But I’m here to talk to Luke. Luke is the team’s starting point guard. He came over from the Milwaukee Bucks this season as a free agent and outplayed the younger (and oft-injured) Johnny Flynn for the starting job. At 30, and in his eighth season after three years of college, Luke is the oldest player on this young team. And he’s no washup. Lasting eight years in the league, most of that time as a starter, is no small accomplishment. He hasn’t lived up to the expectations of some who thought he’d be an elite NBA point guard, the next Steve Nash. But he did play with USA basketball in 2006. He was invited to the NBA skills competition in ’05. He has been good enough to get Amar’e Stoudemire to publicly campaign for him to be the new point guard in New York. I take a moment to review what I know about him: raised in Blaine, Washington; good enough that I heard about him as a high school player while I was in high school five hours south in Portland; three-year starter for the Oregon Ducks; winner of many awards and much praise; not all that academically motivated as a student; a kind and thoughtful person; great ball skills; flair of a performer; not at all interested in celebrity; Christian. And the questions I plan to ask him: When did you know you were good? How do you adjust to going from standout player in high school and college to capable but unremarkable professional? How do you keep sane amidst all this hoopla? What do you make of an interview like this? Why are you doing it? What, if anything, do you hope to get out of it? All variations of my one real question: What’s it like to be you? I’m curious about all NBA guys, but Luke is especially compelling, as our lives feel (to me) somewhat connected. I’m a month older than he, an inch shorter, have a similar body shape, and play the same position (at a much lower level of proficiency, it goes without saying) in basketball. Later, when he tells me nothing feels better than running in the open floor and making the crucial pass that sets up someone else’s score, I’ll have that special feeling of validation that comes when someone you respect tells you something you already know.
But before we meet, I must wait for practice to end. While I go through my notes, the other media arrive in small groups. They’re a bunch of guys who look like journalists straight from wardrobe. Carrying familiar and worn pocket-sized Steno pads and guts they don’t yet fully believe in, they walk in their ill-fitting jackets through what has become routine: rolling in just in time to bullshit with one another for a few minutes before asking those standby hard hitters: “Tell me about last night’s game.” “What are you thinking about tomorrow’s opponent?” Younger guys, some as young as college newspaper reporters, I suspect, have cameras instead of pads. Full-sized mics like you see on the news swing in every hand gesture. All these guys look as casual and unimpressed with this as I’m trying to look in my pink socks. And they are all guys. No women. I affect an athletic posture and pretend like Luke is an old friend I’m waiting to see. It’s only due to some technicality that I’m forced to wait out here, with the media. But it’s cool. I’m cool. Really.
As I’m standing athletically and coolly around, a PR guy emerges from the practice gym and asks each of us “media” who we’re here to talk to. The pros say Coach Rambis and Kevin Love (who recently set the NBA record for consecutive games with a double-double). A few—why not?—say Michael Beasely, who is talented, controversial, and often not far from a good story. Reaching me, the unfamiliar, casually athletic and cool, pink-shirted young man, he says, “Are you the Oregon guy? We’ll try to get you some time with Luke.”
In the gym, practice is wrapping up. Martell Webster leads a series of one-on-one games. They play to one. Winner stays. These guys are taller than you’d think. You expect them to be tall, sure, but this is really tall. They seem to disprove everything I know from personal experience. When I see guys this tall at the gym they are universally uncoordinated and play awkward post basketball, hoping for an easy putback. But these guys are tall and dribble and shoot as well as anyone. Martell Webster, for one, appears in person as if he were designed for basketball: perfectly proportioned, strong, quick, and agile. But he plays one-on-one without strategy, making moves without aim, hoping to out-quick and out-athletic his opponent and get open. He wins one game by making a difficult turnaround shot. I can’t help but thinking that even a guy like Kobe who specializes in making difficult turnarounds wouldn’t rely on one in this situation. He’d just use his technical craft to get an easy shot. But Webster lacks the patience for that. He makes four moves at once, and ends up confusing himself more than the defender, who quickly becomes the offensive player.
Beasely is here too, pulling his shorts up around his groin for some reason. He has spandex on underneath, like everyone did in the ’90s. His legs are perplexingly thin, and he like everyone is disorientingly tall. He shoots gently from just outside the court’s sideline, makes it, and then lies down on the floor. Webster says, “Beas, let’s go.” Beas makes noises, indicating, No, he prefers the floor and is tired. Webster is disappointed in his guys, no one wants to play anymore. They make their way over to the far side of the gym where there is a small lobby, tables, chairs, fridge. They pull out drinks. Millions of dollars a year and free sports drinks. You can tell by the ease with which they take the drinks it would never occur to them to pay for these. It’s nearly impossible to even imagine them knowing where their wallets are. These are the gods of our era, and they will never be troubled by the likes of a dollar or a bottle of Gatorade.
On the far end of the court, Bill Laimbeer is working with Nicoli Pekovich on some post moves. I catch a butterfly in my stomach seeing Laimbeer close up. Suddenly I’m eight years old and he’s the mythic villain from television. Ditto to a lesser extent Rambis. These were formative players in my earliest tracking of the NBA. Both played on teams I hated, teams that kept my beloved Blazers from their much-deserved title. I’m intimidated by them in a way I’m not intimidated by the players or the other coaches. Speaking of Rambis, there he is off to my right, surrounded by media. He’s sitting in a chair against a black rectangle spotted with Timberwolves logos. This is the one section of the wall that isn’t gym white. It will make for an imposing image when it’s broadcast on TV tonight, but in context it makes for a wimpy, slapdash display. I drift over to listen. One reporter asks, “What about last night’s game?” And every other reporter acts like this is very interesting and will be a breaking story to his readers/listeners/viewers and shoves his microphone in close.
Here now is the PR guy, who says, “Luke’s on his way. We’ll set you up over here,” directing me across the court, where Laimbeer can’t help but notice me walk past Pekovich, to a table and two folding chairs set up along the baseline. Luke is coming from the lobby area with a Gatorade and meets me there. We’re introduced, we sit. I tell him I’m very happy to be writing about him because I went to UO with him and have followed his career. He’s soft spoken and polite and seem sincerely appreciative of my interest. I do not tell him I bought his Seattle jersey and used to wear it when I played pickup games in Korea. He’s wearing warm-up pants and a T-shirt, but it’s obvious from his forearms that he’s much stronger than he appears on TV. Also much stronger than he was in sociology class ten years ago. He remains smaller and lighter than any of his teammates, but his scrawniness has more substance to it now. Still, if you didn’t know Luke was an NBA player you’d never think it to look at him. He looks like one of the generically athletic guys you went to college with. Which is essentially who he is, except he’s wildly coordinated and creative with his body. I notice we have the same buzzed haircut, and I wonder for a second how he ended up on that side of the tape recorder and I on this side?
We are who we are, though, and I start with my questions. “How was having your dad as your coach impactful on your development as a player?” “Why did you choose Oregon?” I get the sense he has prepared remarks after hearing these questions so many times before. He too knows the clichéd language of the professional athlete meant to give the impression of conveying information while being essentially vacuous. I don’t blame him for this. I suspect in his shoes I’d say the most boring things I could to limit reporters’ interest and protect myself from public attention. But I want to convince him I’m the one to open up to, because I’m the one who gets it, gets that inside the character of the white point guard from the small town in Washington is a real person, who feels things relating to professional basketball and this improbable life he’s living. But even if we took sociology together, I’m not here to be his friend. I’m here to get him to give me a good quote. Ugh. I didn’t realize how hard this would be for me. I need to ask better questions. I try his family. He slows here, says he wants to keep his family private, then offers more answer than he really needs to. Then, after, he asks me not to write about what he says, and I tell him I won’t. I try to get him to describe what he likes about basketball and he starts to animate: “I just love to play basketball, to see people have freedom to play and run. That freedom, when a team gets to run up and down and play fast, I love that. I hope fans see how much I enjoy the game. And I really enjoy competition.” He’s open and almost eager to talk basketball once I get beyond surface questions. The other subject he’s comfortable on is religion, and he keeps directing the conversation there. It’s a big part of his outlook on life. It brings him peace, he says, and I take him at his word because he’s one of the most peaceful dudes I’ve ever talked to.
The PR guy reappears and says time is up. I’ve had my twenty minutes. I ask for two more. Luke doesn’t seem put out by the request, he seems more curious about what else there could be to talk about. PR guy says, “Okay, two minutes.” A janitor arrives at the table and sweeps a table full of half-full plastic bottles into the trash. “No recycling?” I should have asked Luke. How many bottles go to the trash in the course of an NBA season? And why? But I’m preoccupied by my time running out (maybe this is part of an explanation of why I’m a writer not an athlete) and floundering. I ask about friendship in the NBA and get more clichés. I want to ask about race in the NBA and whether he remembers a high school rival named Brandon Brooks who I played with in middle school and was temporarily a local legend,1 but I don’t know how to fit that into my story and there isn’t time for a detour. Finally, I ask if he, as one of the NBA’s best free throw shooters, has a routine at the line. Charmingly, he’s unaware of his percentage or that he’s in the top ten in the league in the category. It turns out he does have a routine and that no one has asked him about it before. I have the bit I need for my story and I have the connection I wanted to make. “I bounce the ball three times, saying ‘I love you, Jesus’ on each bounce. Then I shoot it.” And with that, the PR guy is back to say “Luke’s time is up.” We shake hands and I’m guided toward the door.
Before leaving, I look on the court. Pekovich is being put through drills by the trainer I met earlier. He’s to move laterally along the sideline touch-passing the ball with the trainer. He’s more or less doing it, but he’s frightfully uncoordinated for a professional athlete. I wish I were tall and strong right now. Of course, I’d rather be my size and have Luke’s skills, but I’d settle for Pekovich’s size and strength if that would keep me in the gym.
2.
After the interview, I go home and write up my notes. Many of my questions went unasked in the rushed visit, but I like what I got. There’s enough here for me to accomplish the goal of describing what it’s like to be Luke Ridnour. My thesis—I’m deciding this will be a piece with a thesis—is that Luke’s mental approach to life and basketball is fundamental to his success as a player. Mostly I think this is about God and how faith allows him to not feel pressure. One of my big claims will be that in claiming to be chosen by God, Luke is actually not arrogant at all but thoroughly humble. Being chosen means his ability is beyond his ultimate control. There’s nothing for him to be prideful about.
This is a good story, I think, but I need some live game observations. I go online and buy a good ticket to an upcoming game. The Timberwolves have a neat program where tickets are priced according to demand. And, despite Kevin Love’s season, no one in this town cares about the Wolves, so when the opposing team is the lowly Sacramento Kings, I’m able to afford a pretty decent seat, midcourt eleventh row. I write to my editor to ask if the magazine will reimburse me. He tells me the team should be giving me tickets and that I need to ask the PR guy who set up the interview. So because I’m a rookie and didn’t think of that I’m out $100.
I get to the arena good and early for the Sacramento game. The team comes out for one of the most perfunctory warm-ups on record. Is this the cause or effect of being the worst team in the conference? Some guys stretching, some guys shooting jumpers, some guys just sitting on the bench. It’s clear stress and pressure are not problems with this group. Beasely is over there in the corner hoisting up ridiculous shots, sending them fifty feet up in the air and watching them fall straight down at the hoop. Most are air balls. One or two hit the rim. Several carom wildly off the backboard and basket standard. No one takes particular notice of Beasely’s routine. Maybe this is his normal pregame routine? When he eventually makes one, he decides he’s had enough warming up and takes a seat on the bench to casually give the impression of a person considering getting around to stretching sooner or later. Meanwhile, there’s Luke working up a sweat sharpening skills that might actually come in handy in a game. He gets a running start at half court, changes directions two or three times, and takes a pull-up jumper from eighteen feet, nailing it in off the back iron. He does about eight of these. Then he shoots a series of short runners with either hand. Then free throws. Then corner threes, a spot from which he’s one of the league’s best shooters. The rest of the Wolves are somewhere in between, effort-wise.
Within a few minutes of the game starting, Beasely is pulled for picking up two early fouls. He shouts, “I’m gonna fuck someone up today,” loudly enough for the lady next to me to hear and repeat for anyone in the section who missed it. This is the highlight of the first half. The Kings are quite bad, the Wolves are worse. Neither team has a chance at the playoffs, and a loss would be to either team’s advantage for improving lottery position in the draft. Halftime is fun because the couple next to me leaves and now I can stretch out a little. The lady to my right kicks over her family-sized trough of soda pop, which spills in her purse and under the feet of the people in front of us. She is extremely embarrassed and expresses her embarrassment by cussing loudly about the lid’s maker’s incompetence. This is more entertaining than the game. It’s too bad for the two who skipped out. Luke makes some nice shots in the third quarter, leading a little comeback. The Kings’ lead is down to . . . who cares . . . it’ll be up to thirty again shortly. The real excitement comes when Luke Ridnour, polite Christian boy from Blaine, Washington, smallest guy on the court, gets into a legitimate NBA scuffle with DeMarcus Cousins. Cousins is about a foot taller and a hundred pounds heavier than Ridnour, but Luke is eager to earn a technical foul. He gets a push in, a little tough guy gesturing. What a great and rare sight it is to see Luke provoked to the point of response. (This is one of only two technicals Luke earns all year. Cousins, by contrast, who is only a rookie, will earn a respectable fourteen technicals, good for fifth in the league.) The rest of the game . . . it really doesn’t matter. Besides the fight and the flood of soda pop in our section, the warm-ups were more interesting than the game. I want behind the scenes. When I get home I email the PR guy and ask for tickets.
3.
PR guy has set me up with a press pass to the Chicago Bulls game, featuring likely MVP Derrick Rose and the best team in the Eastern Conference. He told me where to park, too, but it’s not clear whether this will be comped or not, so I take the bus. I find the entrance I’ve been instructed to take. It’s connected by walkways to the new Target Field, where the Twins play, and an abyss of downtown office buildings. Throngs of young, professional-looking people are moving in the opposite direction from me, as if fleeing the arena. One hundred other lives I could have pursued. Inside, people everywhere, young fans lining up early, more of the business suits coming and going to the light rail station. Giant posters of players on the walls; Luke strains to appear intimidating. I make my way down a flight of stairs, am directed to the media room. Security finds my name on a list, hands me a pass. I’m in. I’m early, so I have lots of time to kill in the media room before anything gets going. There are a few guys at tables, eating fried food, watching SportsCenter, and bullshitting with one another. I want to do some eavesdropping on these guys, but don’t realize this is what I want to do until I’ve foolishly taken the table closest to the drink machine, three tables over from where they’re seated. I can’t think of a good reason to reposition myself unless I go up to them and say, “Hi, I’m new, can you guys lead me through this,” and that’s just not the kind of thing I want to say here. Time passes, more guys arrive to eat fried food. These sports reporters are on the whole not a very athletic looking bunch. I recognize a couple from the practice a few weeks back. I calculate that these guys do this about fifty times a year (forty-one regular season games, preseason stuff, and when KG was in town the playoffs) and have for who knows how many years. They are far removed from the novelty of this I’m experiencing. I get up to explore. There’s a media room with workstations set up. You can bring your own laptop and plug into an AC source and printer, or if you’re old you can use the station to write on paper. There’s a media department pumping out monstrous stacks of talking points, statistics, recent T-Wolves articles. It’s all very impressive in volume and generic in content. There are loads of articles about Ricky Rubio, who along with Kevin Love is the hope of the organization. His absence casts a dark shadow over the organization’s future. Luke, who is essentially a placeholder for the younger Rubio, is all but ignored in the literature—as he is by the fans. I follow some reporters into a hallway where we wait for Kurt Rambis to come answer questions. He emerges from locker room, is still very tall. You expect these guys to be tall, but you’re always surprised by what tall actually means in person. He does TV first. There’s camera, lighting, the whole bit. As in practice last month, it’s just a backdrop against blank cement designed give off a sense of intimacy. The interviewer has been waiting longer than I have been standing out here. He has makeup on and looks like a middle-aged TV guy is supposed to look. I wonder if he writes his own questions and whether he cares about basketball. The interview is quick and just like what you see on TV. There are no retakes. And the interview isn’t long enough to be edited down to anything but what it is. For once, TV and reality seem to be the same thing, and I find this weirdly disappointing. Now Rambis comes to us, about ten feet from the TV station. No one has any important questions. It’d be kind of awkward, but everyone is too relaxed for there to be any discomfort. Maybe because it’s the end of the season, maybe because everyone’s been through this so many times. It’s just a routine for them, for Rambis. No one cares what anyone says. Finally, someone asks a question. Someone makes a joke that isn’t funny (it has to do with the fact Rambis studied psychology in college and should therefore know how to “handle” Anthony Randolph, who has recently joined the team via trade). They can’t be Rambis, so they want to impress him by knowing his college major. I feel sad. Even in the NBA, adult life is much sadder than you imagine as a kid.
PR guy sees me now with the media but not sticking a mic in Rambis’s face, and asks how I’m doing. After Rambis, they’ll open up the locker room and we can hang out in there and “try to catch Luke.” That sounds good. Inside the locker room, Pekovich lounges in the chair in front of his locker, a cross chained around his neck. He’s got the night off thanks to an injury and is in good spirits. The only player in the room, he’s getting all the media’s attention, which he keeps by doing funny accented impersonations from gangster movies. The cross on his necklace is worth way more money than I make in a year. Other players walk through periodically. There’s a big excitement when Kevin Love appears. He’s returning tonight from a groin injury. The media loves Love. His excellent season is the one thing the team has going for it. But he doesn’t stay long, returning to a back room where we’re not allowed.
The locker room is rich with detritus of NBA life. Goals and strategy for the game are written on white boards on either side of a central TV left running game footage, even though no one is watching. The stuff written down is the same stuff the commentators repeat will repeat for the television audience. It’s full of NBA orthodoxy: who to foul to stop the clock (Kurt Thomas), who not to foul (Rose), reminders to control Rose, play physical, and avoid turnovers. The lockers are open faced, so I can everyone’s stuff. All players have various team paraphernalia hanging, lots of shoes, so many pairs of shoes, iPods stuffed on shelves, a small safe in each unit, street clothes strewn about. Several pairs of boxer shorts at the feet of the lockers. How must this be for them, having us in here, in their space looking at the underwear they wore to the arena? There are between five and twelve of us at any time. I remain because I have nothing to do but talk to Luke. Others have nothing to do at all. Most likely nothing that occurs in this room will impact their stories about tonight. So, they wander and wait. I ask one of the media veterans if he knows what’s in the back rooms besides not us. He says they can get treatment, or hot tub or ice bath, or just watch TV and wait for the game. So we’re all just waiting. Not quite enough to do to fill up the time.
Anthony Tolliver comes in, sits, no one says anything to him. I decide I should get some quotes about Luke. I sit down on the stool next to him. No sooner do I do this than I start fearing that the player whose stool I’ve taken will emerge from the back room and I’ll feel like an asshole for invading his space. But Tolliver is warm and inviting when I ask if I can ask some questions about Luke. The story I’m writing has officially become about how Luke’s religion shapes his approach to the game. I tell Tolliver that Luke says he’s in the NBA to “spread the Word.” Does this create conflict with teammates who don’t share his perspective, I wonder. No, everyone is real accepting, he says. Tolliver, it turns out, is fairly close with Luke. “I share Luke’s faith. Other players respect that about us even if they don’t agree with us.” “Luke’s not an outspoken guy, but he goes out of his comfort zone to be more vocal.” There’s a chapel going now (that’s where Luke is, and where Tolliver just came from) that’s open to players from both teams. This is apparently league standard: guys on opposing teams praying together before the game. Can you imagine Kobe in one of these chapels? Me neither. Why do I compare everyone to Kobe? Because he and L.A. seem so far from here in so many ways? And to think the Lakers used to play in Minneapolis.
I find my seat in the press box just off the court’s corner, between the basket and the Timberwolves bench. I’m in the second press row, closest I’ve been to a game. The team has failed to note the name of the magazine I’m writing for and has put only “alumni magazine.” There’s a Belgian guy in the seat next to me. His job is to cover the U.S. (!) for his native paper. He was on the Gulf Coast for the BP oil spill, went to L.A. for this, New York for that. Now he’s in Minnesota to cover the NBA. (!?) Explanation: by scheduling chance, the Wolves face the Bulls, Celtics, and Heat this week, so this guy can cover three playoff favorites from one city. To my left is a loud guy who you can tell lives for this. He’s quick to tell me his situation: he volunteers to do this as a favor for his buddy who has a radio program. He comes to all the games, asks a few questions, rubs elbows, and gets to be close to the action. He knows everyone in the section, greeting all the reporters, calling out to team officials. Just before tipoff, he charms the team doctor into throwing us cough drops, which he has a whole bucket of. It’s not clear why he has so many cough drops. The players don’t have coughs, but they keep sucking down the medicine.
The game starts. There are more fans than there were at the Sacramento game, but it’s still far from full. The main thing I notice sitting so close is how physical the NBA game is, and what an asset it is to have guys with muscles like Rose and Carlos Boozer. Rose, Chicago’s point guard and Luke’s matchup, is stunning from up close, driving hard to the basket and absorbing all sorts of contact. He’s the most athletic guy on the floor, and often ends up on the floor after a collision. It’s a marvel to watch him, and I wonder how long his body will hold up under the stress he puts on it. I pity Luke, who really has no chance, physically.
A fat man comes over and kicks the loud radio guy out of his seat. Radio guy is jovial about this. He took the fat man’s seat because someone else was in his own seat and he knew the fat man would skip the first quarter. Radio guy goes off to investigate his assigned seat. Fat guy carries a plate full of fried food and doesn’t seem overly interested in the game. I try to ask him about Luke. He doesn’t seem much interested in Luke. He likes Rose a lot but can’t remember Jaokim Noah’s name. He simultaneously gives the impression of having been around forever and knowing everything and being old school and knowing nothing about new stuff (which is not worth knowing about). A guy in front of us is happy to see the fat guy. They share jokes throughout the game, scope the stadium for attractive women. A number of big-boobed women seem to walk laps around the court showing off their big boobs and dyed hair. After one such woman passes, the man in front turns to the fat man and says, “Friday. Miami. Insane!” Implication being: these boobs, just the start. A tall, goofy white teenager is friends with the fat man (who is black). He comes over to tell the fat man he got Rose’s autograph on a jersey. Fat man says show me. Goofy white kid leaves, returns with jersey. Fat man is impressed. They talk about pros and cons of selling the jersey on eBay. They decide not to sell. The kid never sells. He has forty or fifty autographed jerseys at home. The kid walks around for a while, shows a few others his jersey, then disappears down the stadium tunnel, never once looking over at the game not fifteen feet away, where Rose is showing exactly why his jersey is so valuable. Not that I’m watching the game all that much. The game is boring. The Wolves are bad, the Bulls are good. That’s all anyone’s story tomorrow needs to say. Luke has a bad game and gets in zero fights.
Back to media room after game, guys wait for Rambis to come in and say, “That was a tough loss. Their________ was just too much for our ______________.” Who cares? I go out to the tunnel to wait for the locker room to be opened again. The cheerleaders have already changed clothes and are leaving. They are tiny, petite. Some of them are quite pretty from up close. Some are not. They want to get out of the stadium ASAP, but they also want you to know they’re important and glamorous. They all wear impossibly high heels, most have skirts to show their skinny sculpted legs. Some are casually dressed, some in designer-ish clothes, all made up, all pulling suitcases that weigh as much as they do.
In the locker room, Martell Webster is in black boxer-briefs lying on the ground stretching with a rubber band. He’s played well tonight. His body takes up most of the middle part of the floor, arms and legs spreading tendril-like. And here the reporter is confronted with body. A big black body, very muscular, mostly naked. Most of the basketball bodies are big, and most are black. This one is big, black, and in our faces. The reporters in the room are mostly small, white, and dorky (one is small, black, and dorky). The dorky guys are circumnavigating Webster, jealous of the big strong guys, trying to figure just how much staring they can do with accidentally doing something gay.
Tolliver is wrapped up in a towel and has giant bags of ice taped to his knees. Other guys are wearing nothing but towels or underwear. They all make casual effort to cover their genitals, but that’s about all there is for privacy. Anthony Randolph has a particularly hard time keeping his towel in place. I wait for Luke and play my own internal games with how much staring is appropriate. With nothing to do but wait, it’s hard not to ogle these athletic bodies, which are the bodies all of us non-athletes wish were ours. I think of David Shields writing in Black Planet about having sex with his wife and imagining that he was Gary Payton having sex with his wife. I imagine being Martell Webster and stretching out in my underwear after playing basketball and having a bunch of strangers watch me do it. I feel that lack of privacy and feel deeply conflicted about my place in it. I’m curious, but he’s a guy who would be better off right now if I did not exist. I think about being friendly and talking to him, telling him I was at the game where he scored twenty-four points in a quarter when he was with the Blazers. This will be my opening to tell him I’m from Portland and ask if he misses the Pacific Northwest as much as I do. We will become great friends, and if I ever see him with his shirt off again it will be because we’re swimming together somewhere and I’ll have my shirt off too. Two guys, peers, hanging out at a Minnesota lake. None of this professional gawking. But, no, I don’t approach. I see assistant coach Reggie Theus fully clothed and go ask him about Luke. I know I won’t use it in my story, but I want to talk to someone from my childhood. He describes Luke as “mature” and “a quiet leader on the team. We need his consistency.” He gives me a fist bump and heads to the coach’s room.
When Luke eventually arrives from the showers, he makes eye contact with me and signals me over to his locker. He says, “How’s it going?” I say, “Alright,” eliding so much. “Tough game. How’s it going with you?” “Alright,” eliding so much. He’d rather go home to his family. I’d rather go home to mine (maybe it’d be different if they’d won?). But I have a few factual questions I need answered: What’s the name of this? Where was that? Et cetera. He picks up a pair of crumpled boxers and pulls them on under his towel, which he then drops to the floor. Besides me and Randolph, he’s probably the skinniest person in the room. He dresses quickly. By the time he answers a couple questions he’s fully clothed. This part of his job must be awful. I know how pissed I can be after I lose a pickup game. He just got blown out in front of thousands of people and now has to answer my questions about where he went to church as a kid while he puts on his underwear.
We’re both relieved when I say “that’s all I need. Thanks.” We shake hands and exit quickly.
Scott F. Parker is the author of A Way Home: Oregon Essays and Running After Prefontaine: A Memoir, among other books. His writing about running has appeared previously in Sport Literate as well as online in Runner’s World and Running Times and in the recent book Hood to Coast Memories. He teaches writing at Montana State University and runs when he can in the cow pastures outside Bozeman.
1 He later became the “fan” who threw the lob from the stands for Freddy Jones in the ’04 NBA dunk contest about whom Kenny Smith said, “He needs to be the point guard for some team.”