bjj-sportliterate

by Alessandra Nolan

The season after my father died, the Boston Red Sox won the World Series for the first time since 1918. Being born in Rhode Island and from prudent Irish blood, he was a Red Sox loyalist from childhood on. But I, in what must’ve been a disappointing turn of events for him, was born a Jersey girl with a penchant for being contrary. Thus, I turned out a Yankees fan. So in the games leading to the 2004 World Series, when the Red Sox came back from a three game deficit to defeat my beloved Yankees and then stormed the Cardinals in a straight series win, I felt him smile from beyond the grave. I remember buying a pack of smokes and a Coke Slurpee at the 7-11 when I heard the Sox won. I hadn’t watched a single game of the series. Really, I hardly watched baseball at all. Stepping outside, I looked past the light pollution in my coastal Jersey town and up towards the stars. I imagined my father’s head floating up there, the way they teach you God floats around in Catholic CCD. I pointed a finger towards the sky. Boston, I thought, still sucks. But if a World Series was Chuck Nolan’s dying wish then, Amen, let the curse be undone.

Making that connection was easy. Memorializing is easy. After he died, my father became a mythical creature with a few concise tall tales. I’d recall favorite memories on cue, laughing through stories of him weaving dental floss around the necks of mine and my sister’s Barbie dolls and then hanging them from the ceiling fan. “Barbie suicide” I would parrot, repeating what he called his deed, his apparent punishment for us leaving their naked bodies strewn across the shower floor. There were other easy facts. My dad loved golf. He liked Motown, enjoyed baking pies, smoked like a chimney. He was a Red Sox fan, a Giants fan, a Larry Bird-era basketball fan. These tiny preferences built a laudable memory of a man I hardly knew. For 17 years I loved, cherished and resented my dad for his whole self. In death, I drew him as a stark caricature and carried that with me, remembering what was easy to remember in an attempt to keep the sorrow at bay.

It was only natural then, nine years later, for grief to finally appear. Destruction and regression happened quickly. First, I quit my job. Immediately after, I quit trying to leave the house at all. It was my second November living in North Carolina and being what the blessed folks in these parts know to be a stubborn Yankee, I figured I was destined to melt in this strange autumn heat. I trudged to my graduate classes in sweat-soaked sun dresses, turned down bourbon in lieu of unsweetened iced tea and made no effort to find joy in the quaint and confederate town of Wilmington, North Carolina. I missed my friends, my home, my family and I missed knowing what missing my dad felt like. In the hours outside of class, I moped around the air-conditioned comfort of the one bedroom apartment I shared with my fiancé. On good days, I wrote. Otherwise, I watched TV.

Inside the television, sports stories from my father’s era lived. The Netflix-Gods offered a series of sports documentaries and athlete biographies — every sport and every human condition — Greek tragedies played against the backdrop of infields and metal bleachers. I settled into my couch and barely moved for weeks.

Croot, my fiancé, worked long and late hours. He would return and humor me if I was awake. He’d pick the popcorn out of my hair and answer questions I’d written down about various sports technicalities I was too lazy to look up. Usually though, he’d come home to half-eaten frozen pizzas, a glowing box and a sleeping wife-to-be. Our couch sagged. I felt the pillows soften and redistribute themselves under the weight of my body. Often, I was lulled to sleep by a series of halftime whistles, shot clock buzzers and the sound of a roaring crowd.

The documentary cycle lasted longer than I think both of us expected. I was determined to make it through every sports-related program Netflix had to offer. Within three weeks, I was down to two and saving the best for last. The first: a three hour and 50 minute PBS special on boxer, Jack Johnson. The other: a seemingly lighthearted account of Michael Jordan’s foray in baseball.

In a ritualistic manner, I planned and scheduled the viewings. I would save Jack Johnson’s for last as I placed more value on the historic relevance of its subject matter. I would force Croot to sit through that one with me. But until then, I would watch Michael Jordan’s disastrous attempt at baseball. To prolong the expectancy, I decided to ceremoniously clean. I dragged myself and a vacuum around the house, stripped the couch of cushions and cleaned the crevices of a month’s worth of popcorn and cat fur. I made the bed. I washed some dishes. I scrubbed my hair. And then, I opened a window and unlocked my door. Holding the remote with authority, I pressed play.

The 1994 Jordan baseball debacle, to my father, was nothing more than a publicity stunt. I remember hearing sportscasters lament about the idiocy of the White Sox for giving him a shot. I was in second grade, and a Bulls fan, since the Bulls were a winning team and red seemed an acceptable enough color. Michael’s retirement did little to my 8-year-old psyche. I simply switched teams. The Knicks, after all, had Ewing.

But now, at 26, I sit crying for the Michael Jordan of 1993-94. The documentary paints his baseball attempt as an epic battle. Athletic egotism had nothing to do with it. Listen, pleads the Sports Illustrated journalist who initially wrote that Michael was ruining baseball; this is a tale of a loving son. He’s sorry for writing that original story now. Spellbound, I sob, becoming too involved in the story of Michael as a grief-stricken child, who upon losing his father loses his will to play basketball. In his loss, he gains the desire to pick up a baseball bat. Baseball, we learn, was his father’s dream for him.

The documentary opens with a crime scene. Cameras flash signs of 74 West and the I-95 ramps in Lumberton, NC. That, I acknowledge, is where I am. Lumberton is just over an hour away in a part of North Carolina that I’ve never been to, but that seems so close now. The director’s voiceover tells the story of James Jordan’s murder. Travelling from Wilmington to Charlotte one night, Mr. Jordan allegedly pulled over to rest just south of Lumberton. According to highly debatable court testimony, Mr. Jordan was victim to a random theft. The perpetrators shot him in his sleep, dumped his body in a South Carolina swamp and took his $43,000 cherry-red Lexus. A fisherman found the body, though it was so badly decomposed that at the time of its discovery, no one knew it was him. He was hastily cremated before being identified — apparently standard practice for strange bodies found on the South Carolina side of Gum Swamp Creek. Two weeks later, a comparison between his dental records and impressions taken by the South Carolina authorities confirmed his identity.

With the documentary paused on the still frame of the funeral, I call Croot to relay my new knowledge.

“Oh?” he replies, distracted, when I finish going through the facts. He is not nearly as excited as I want him to be. “Yeah,” he responds to my silence. “I think I remember that story now.”

“Oh.” I feel a little deflated. I feel as though I was maybe the only person who knew the whole story of Michael Jordan’s father. Or at least, the only person who earned a right to know. “Did you know it happened around here?”

He tells me he thinks he remembers hearing something about it and it occurs to me that he was holding onto highly sensitive information that should’ve been shared. I resist the urge to tell him so. I’m sitting upright, eyes still fastened to the television. On the screen, Michael Jordan wears Ray Bans.

“Okay, babe. I gotta get back to work. I’ll see-“

“Oh, and um, Croot.” I inhale and pause. “Mr. Jordan. His gravesite is like 40 minutes from here.” I’ve pressed play again. I watch Michael and the other pallbearers carry a casket out the church’s front door. I assume the casket contains his father’s ashes. If not, I assume the casket certainly houses his father’s spirit.

“I think we should go.”

We hang up after our “I love you’s” and “see you soon’s.” He assures me he’s game for the gravesite adventure and so I print directions from Wilmington to the burial site in Teachey. Just the idea of visiting the grave is delightful to me. I come to think of the trip as a means to seek closure. In class the next day, I tell some of my more sports-savvy friends about Mr. Jordan’s location. I tell them I want to bring an Ouija board to get help with my March Madness bracket and ask his spirit about Oklahoma City’s chances for the season. Some laugh. A few look concerned.

For years during which my father was both alive and dead, I operated under the assumption that he would’ve preferred me to be a boy. He had three girls, but I was the daughter charged with playing sports and eating Triscuits with him during Sunday night football. In childhood, I pleased him by executing a white girl’s version of a layup and by resisting the temptation to pick flowers during recreational soccer games. By high school, I was a decent enough tennis player to make the varsity team as a freshman. My father was smitten. I was more interested in the post-practice activities; long hours spent at the track smoking cigarettes in my tennis skirt and drinking beers with the boys from detention. Oblivious and clearly deluded, my father invited scouts from D-1 schools to see me play. Two weeks to season’s end, I stopped showing up at practice. Shortly after, I stopped going to school. By that time, my Dad and I were only talking through shouting. He was disappointed. He shouted words like “potential” and “promise” and “wasted talent.”

I spent most of my 15th year sleeping in a cocoon of clothes on my bed that I never bothered to put away. One rare day, when I was away from my nest, my father — drunk and annoyed by the mess — decided to rip apart the content of my dresser drawers. He tossed desk drawers too, broke perfume bottles. Tiny glass animal figurines — shattered. Old youth soccer trophies were snapped in two. I held the two pieces of a broken giraffe and stared at my bare wall. Mere days later, a fight between us grew cold and loud. Something animal growled inside me and I lunged toward him, arms flailing. His fist stopped me. I felt the slow lumps of his four knuckles against my right temple. We were both stunned submissive.

Ultimately, my parents did what you would do to a bad puppy — at 16, they sent me away to obedience school. Time apart mended wounds, but we were strangers when we talked. For the six-month period of peace before the brain-tumor-removal-gone-wrong, we talked on the phone about Tiger Woods and Sammy Sosa. We chatted lightly about cross-country season, our genetic predisposition to weak ankles. At the end of seven minutes or so, the line would grow quiet. I would wrap the phone cord around my finger over and over until he would cough vaguely and with relief, hand the phone to my mother.

After the surgery, as he lay dying for a month in a hospital bed, we talked about my upcoming basketball season. He never let the phone go during those conversations and I didn’t mind. I’d wrap the cord around my arms and listen to him breathing into the receiver. The morphine drip worked on him, as it does many tough men, and he was loose enough to speak his love and say his goodbyes. I responded appropriately, but couldn’t bring myself to believe in his love or his death. In my first basketball game immediately after he passed, I fouled out hard within the first seven minutes.

Croot and I set a date. We didn’t have a date for our wedding, but we set a date to visit Mr. Jordan’s grave. We scheduled our trip for a Saturday morning in December, bright and early, before Croot’s work. We would visit. With every day I crossed off the calendar, Croot tried to understand. He asked the question I dreaded: why? He asked it over and over.

“It’s not like he’s not really famous or anything.”

I told him I just needed to. “To get a feeling,” I’d say. Really, I had adopted Mr. Jordan as my surrogate, southern father.

I read more about Mr. Jordan’s murder. I read about conspiracy theories, mishandling of evidence, the blame the media put on Michael’s gambling. It was all old news. One of his alleged killers sought an appeal and thought he would walk out a free man. He claims only to have been a part of the robbery, not the killing. He’s still in jail. I made a mental note to ask Mr. Jordan about his attackers when we go.

Mr. Jordan’s grave is at Rockfish African Methodist Episcopal Church cemetery in Teachey, North Carolina. We venture inland, down route 40 West. Leaving Wilmington, we pass route 74, the highway Mr. Jordan was driving on when he was shot. I begin to ask Croot if we would have a better chance at finding his spirit if we go to the crime scene instead, but stop myself. I have directions to the grave and feel uneasy enough already venturing out of Wilmington — into what I can only assume is deliverance country — with New Jersey plates. We don’t need to risk getting lost.

Croot drives, talking at length about the coastal resort he works at. They have two parrots there, Gabby and Abby. The birds love him. He tells me about guests and his boss and how busy they are for the slow season. I fixate on the birds and the fact that they’re male parrots with female names. Gabby is slightly neurotic and has plucked out most of his colorful feathers leaving tufts of gray regrowth in their place. I tell him I think the bird is going through a gender identity crisis. I threaten to set them free. Croot sighs.

We travel in neutral silence then for a long time. The air is 40, but the sun is hot. Croot keeps opening and closing the window. We pass some road kill — a gray mangled, decapitated mess. I strain for the opportunity to stare at the mounds of pink insides spilling out of what was his neck. His blood is water splashed from a fountain, shiny and reflective on the hot pavement.

“I think that was a coyote.” Croot says.

“Hm…” I say

He rolls the window down, lets the air out.

We exit into the town of Wallace. It’s a rundown, nothing town with a landscape similar to any mid-American place. We pass a gas station, a five and dime, rows of rainbow-colored trailer homes, the dump. Just out of town, we drive past abandoned farm homes with crumbling foundations. Something in me has always loved the bones of houses. I look at them like modern day ruins. My favorite of this lot is a dilapidated two-story beauty with land for miles and boots by the mailbox. The porch is collapsed and every window but one is burst into jagged glass fireworks. Grass grows through the wheelchair ramp leading to the front screen door. On the lawn, three decent looking vehicles are parked in varying positions. A clothesline with clean sheets hangs out back. It’s inhabited. A skeleton house with a family inside; a true oddity.

I navigate us down a road I suspect was just recently paved and into the empty parking lot of the church. In the documentary, the funeral procession poured from the church’s front doors with Michael Jordan at the lead. The video footage captured him in a suit and dark sunglasses. Mourners gathered at the bottom of the church’s stairs. Today, there is not a soul for miles. The announcement board has no words posted. Croot reads the lengthy name of the church aloud. I stare at my palms. He parks, I feel, too close to the road and I ask him to reverse to hide the car and the license plates against the church’s side wall.

The parking lot backs up to 12 old, old grave stones; the kind that look like Halloween decorations that could fall over with a cold breath. I walk over them to the newer section, glancing from memorial to memorial. In the graveyard, the sun seems to touch everything. We look pale in this exposing light. I don’t take my eyes off the ground. Most graves have bouquets of fake flowers placed at the head. At the tree line, green plastic stems poke out from a pile of real, brown leaves — a makeshift grave for polyester blossoms.

“Everyone here is named Wallace.” Croot announces.

He’s walking through the old section still. The air is thick with the smell of decomposition. I try to reason that it’s just trash — the humid smell of the south without orange blossoms — but I swear it’s coming from the ground. I stop, briefly, at what looks like a misplaced, unfinished piece of sidewalk. The name James Jr. Jefferson scrawled by hand — the words carved out by someone’s finger.

Since we planned our trip to the grave, I’ve been daydreaming about introducing my father’s floating head to Mr. Jordan’s floating head. I’ve been imagining how pleased my father will be to meet him. Being here now, it feels all wrong. I’m not a stupid person. I recognize the connection I’ve been artificially trying to forge. In the unsettling weeks of homesickness and despair, I looked for comfort in the arms of a connection I was never able to foster with my late father. I wonder though, in attempting to resurrect our connections to the dead, are we — the living — merely distracting ourselves from the suffering we feel at the pit of our own mortality?

I think of a dear friend who at 18, suffered from kidney failure, faced death and by the grace of God received a transplant. When he told me about it, I asked if it still affected his life now, nearly seven years later. I was wondering about his general health, the technicalities of the procedure, and the lifespan of an alien organ. Instead he told me about the night terrors he has — of waking up in from a deep sleep to the sound of his own screams.

“From the memory of pain?” I asked

“No, not at all.” He explained, “From being so close to dying.”

His answer stunned me. He lived on the edge, in a limbo between life and death, in constant physical pain. And yet what rattles his subconscious still, nearly 10 years later, is the memory of his proximity to death. I think of my father’s labored breathing — the hollow rise and fall of his collapsing chest after we pulled the plug. It went on for an hour.

Could he see the other side? I asked. No. He said in the moments he thought he was slipping away, he saw nothing. I wonder about the fairytales I’ve told myself — heaven, God, floating spirit-heads, life after death. I’ve honored my father by trying to please a spirit that may or may not be there. Michael Jordan played baseball. I watch documentaries. Someone cared enough about James Jr. Jefferson to stick their finger in wet cement and mark his grave. And for what?

My memory of my father was nothing more than a myth. I wove imaginings of happy times spent together, made calculated lists of his dreams and goals for me from thin strands of idealized memories. And when, nine years later, I sought to make yet another flimsy connection, reaching out to a headstone and gravesite of a sports legend’s relative — thinking in a stream: sports, story, myth, father, expectations, grief — and was left dissatisfied with the outcome, there was no denying that this grief was not the fabricated kind I’d been using to compensate all these years, but the grief for a man I could no longer construct, whose figures and likes and memories were so few that there was no longer any new stories to tell. I was grieving now, not for the death of the father I knew, but for a father I imagined and never even had. The real man rests in a grave I haven’t visited in nine years.

I watch Croot’s thin legs maneuver around the graves. He takes delicate steps, careful not to disturb anything. He looks back at me with the everything sun shining over his head and smiles. I tell him I’ve found Mr. Jordan’s grave, though it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

“Well this is it.”

We stare down. It’s a concrete twin bed cut in half and buried shallowly. Mr. Jordan’s fake carnations are a faded, Technicolor red. For many moments we don’t say anything. I fold my hands together in front of my stomach because I don’t know what else to do with them and they glue themselves to each other. I can see myself in the reflection of his mirrored grave cover. I look at the grave, then at myself, then around the yard, and back again at my own sunlit reflection mangled in the fiberglass. My head and neck float around the perimeter of the body length monument as I shuffle around his resting place, taking desperate inventory. Beside my reflection, I can see shadows of twisted, leafless trees far above me. I stop and settle at a spot directly above his nameplate. It is a concrete square, in light gray, and rests on top of where his shins would be, if there was a body down there. James R. Jordan, it reads. And just underneath: 1936-1993.

“Strange.” It’s the first words either of us has spoken since we found him. I untangle my palms from one another and point down at exposed handles on the left side of the grave cover. “Those are supposed to be buried, right?” I’m barely audible. Croot crosses the grave.                             “Ground must’ve settled.” He whispers too loud in my direction. Crouching down, I brush some pine needles and a prickly burr away. The reflective plastic isn’t as cold as I expected it to be, just slightly warmed, slightly unsettling and so I stand. With the ground so soft, I think I can feel myself sinking.

“Okay” I announce, breathless.

“Okay.” Croot agrees. He snaps a few pictures as I charge towards the car. I call orders for him to get a picture of the concrete slab with the handwritten name. I don’t know why exactly, the words just come out of my mouth. When Croot settles into the driver’s seat he looks over at me. He looks as though he can’t contain himself, as though a thought has just occurred to him that must be let out.

“I wonder when the last time Michael Jordan was here,” he bursts like a star struck 10 year old. I shake my head and shape my lips into something of a smile. I love him. I can’t handle my own brooding at that moment. I will myself to lighten up, but pulling out of the parking lot I can’t shake the feeling that we’ve been disrespectful somehow. Mr. Jordan, after all, is not my father.

Miles from the graveyard, I see my inhabited skeleton house again.

“Slow down,” I tell Croot who slows just enough to view the home in a single mind’s frame. I study its rotting wood, crooked shutters. I’m sure it was once a color, but now it is just the color of dust. On the second story, the only intact window is now fully raised, open wide. There’s a curtain hanging in that window space, ivory with age, but wholly intact; it is a beautiful antique lace. It flaps in and out, the wind tossing it across the windowpane until, for a single moment, it stays billowing inward. A pocket of air pushes in toward the middle of the room. The fabric on either side of the window adheres to the sill, capturing a semi-circle of outside air. The trapped wind reminds me of my father’s final inhalation; the swollen breath inside his risen chest. I feel Croot looking at me and turn to meet his eyes in the rearview mirror. When I look back at the house, the curtain snaps back tight against the window frame.

Alessandra Nolan earned her MFA at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. She is now freezing in Ithaca, New York, where she works as an assistant editor at Momentum Media Sports Publishing. She has received honors from Gulf Coast and recently completed artist residencies at Norton Island and Wildacres. Although she should be spending her time finishing her book (a memoir about her experience in a controversial therapeutic boarding school), she requests that anyone who’d like to discuss sports documentaries ad nauseam, please contact her.

by Michael W. Cox

It was August and I was dribbling a ball alone on the asphalt, settling into a zone where none might reach me, though I wanted to be reached—wanted someone to step inside that cage and challenge me to a game. I had just finished a construction job—my very first job, ever—and saved a little money for my freshman year at WVU, which would start in 15 days. Nixon had resigned on TV the day before, sweaty lip and all, and my father had died a few months before that, wasted by a thing that had invaded his gut and worked its way up into his brain. I was into being orphaned—half, anyway. It got me points somehow, explained away my sullen moods and made me mysterious to the pretty blondes I knew but wished I knew better.

My leather ball sounded good on the court, but the city park lay empty, just me at mid-day inside a tall cage. I hit my jump shot, 12 feet, then a quick fake and fadeaway, same spot. Anyone might see, I knew, so I styled and profiled and dazzled no one with a hook shot that made the net whisper my name. Or someone called my name, maybe, and I looked up toward the railroad tracks and saw a boy who’d graduated high school with me stumbling my way, down the gravel incline to where I was making leather do fantastic things. The boy hurried across the scrabbly grass and stepped inside the fenced court.

“You’ve got to help me,” he said. “I just busted jail.”

He wore a thin blue T-shirt, gray pants that were too big, grass-stained shoes, and I can still see the look on his face some 30 years after the fact, this boy who’d shared my homeroom 180 days a year the previous four. He was in trouble with the police, and I hadn’t even known. He was vague about what he’d done, and I can’t remember the vagaries now anyway. Something bad—a robbery, a housebreaking—but nothing awful, like a rape or killing or manslaughter.

“You broke out of jail?” I said, trying to get my mouth around the word. I couldn’t really imagine what his nights in jail had been like, the days, the routine, though I’d dribbled my ball past that jailhouse a million times when I had been younger and lived in a different part of town. The jail lay between my house and the ball court, and nothing, not the leering eyes or cursing words of an inmate out a window, nor the thrown rocks of the feral children who lived at the bend in the dogleg beyond, could keep me from my date and those hours spent worshipping unto the chain net.

But the boy from my school at the ball court—if I remember right, he was in tears, like your drunk uncle might do at the holidays when he looks at you and thinks of all the years you have in front of you, and all the ones he’s already pissed away. You walk away from your drunk uncle, perhaps, just a little bit embarrassed. But there on the court, a wet-eyed jail break in front of me, what move would I make? I wondered. Would I turn, callously, and sink a jump shot and say “tough shit”? Or would I just listen, not knowing what to do?

A train whistle blew up the river. It whistled again far upstream, a coal train with black freight that would makes its way, eventually, to the Ohio, headed for the steel plants up north—Wheeling maybe, Pittsburgh. The B&O was running a lot of coal in those days, more and more of it dug by machines, costing men good jobs and leading them to do bad things, occasionally, like knock off a gas station, sell drugs, or traffic in whores.

The boy babbled something about having just left our homeroom teacher’s house, a man who’d been our coach in high school. He lived down the tracks maybe half a mile from the park. Now there was a man of action, our teacher-coach, but that man had only told the boy to give himself up, to go back to jail, where the boy belonged, rightly, a ward of the county. And then our teacher, our coach, had slammed the door in the poor boy’s face, leaving him to wander, desolate, my way.

“Please,” he said. “Help me. I’m innocent, I swear.”

Those tears again, running down his face, falling down onto what must have been his county-issued shirt.
I’d stayed overnight with this boy once, a few years before. He’d tried to work himself into the starting line-up for the basketball team by cozying up to me, the coach’s favorite. We stayed in a cabin down by a stream, he and I and a few other boys. There might’ve been a bottle of wine involved, but I probably abstained, considering myself religious at the time. At one point that night he took us all down to the creek and jumped in and stayed under for five whole minutes, claiming there was an air pocket up under the tree on the edge of the bank. Apparently he was right, but he spent the rest of that night in the cabin cold, shivering in all his wet clothes.

Standing on the bank of the creek, a friend of his had called him a fool. I couldn’t dispute that, especially when I saw his head emerge, finally, in the flashlight I held for five long minutes. He was prone to try foolish things, like beg the first familiar face he saw for help after busting jail. I felt sorry for him, but the truth was, in the calculus of friendships and kin, he was far, far down the list, not much more than an acquaintance. Someone who quit the team when things didn’t fall his way. Someone who sat in the back of homeroom, yukking it up with one or two boys from up his way, far out in the sticks—pretty country, granted, but another world.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you,” I said. “I don’t even have a car here, if I’m supposed to get you out of town.” I gestured to the empty parking lot over by the restroom. I had no money either—not on me, not needing cash when all I had planned to do was shoot a little ball and lose myself in the game. The boy was beyond my range of assistance, unless I was supposed to lie for him or something—not that I would.

The tears dried up and the boy looked a little wild-eyed, plotting his next move maybe, or trying to think what one thing he could say to get me to help, to drag me out of my zone, but the more I thought about it, the more outrageous I thought it was that he would even approach me in the first place—better if he’d just kept moving along the tracks, eyes straight ahead, leaving me to catch a glimpse of his passing through town as I shot some ball, him in his world, on the run, and me in mine, the clean boundaries of the cage, with its easy rules and conversations.

Just over his shoulder I saw a police car moving down the hill. I was relieved, but I worked hard not to show it. The boy followed my eyes, and turned, and saw.

“Christ,” he said. “Coach called the police.”

It was a deputy car. It rolled slowly toward the cage. The deputy parked and got out and motioned to the boy.
“Shit,” he said.

He walked over to the car. The cop pointed my way, asking the boy who I was, and the boy just shook his head. The cop cuffed him and put him in the backseat and drove away. That was the last time I would see that boy, ever, but I didn’t know that at the time. I watched the deputy car disappear over the crest of the hill. Then I turned my back to the basket, faked right and dribbled left and shot from the side of the key. Soft, no spin, it slipped nicely down the metal net. It didn’t feel the same, even so.

Michael W. Cox has published nonfiction in such venues as New Letters, River Teeth, Kestrel, the St. Petersburg Times, and the New York Times Magazine.

Since its beginnings, Sport Literate has published primarily creative nonfiction, true stories with all the tricks of fiction, including scenes, recreated dialogue, car chases (or not) and more. For more examples of that form, check out the links to some of our favorite magazines below.

Brevity

Crazyhorse

Creative Nonfiction 

Fourth Genre

Massachusetts Review

The Missouri Review 

Prairie Schooner 

Quarterly West

The Sun

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.