The World Is Always Coming to an End by Carlo Rotella

Author:Carlo Rotella
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

EQUIPMENT FOR LIVING

BALL

For most players, pickup basketball is all about offensive virtuosity—expressive improvisation within a community of individuals, each vying to put the ball in the basket but also subsuming that urge to the cooperative beauty of the team game. For me, though, when I played in South Shore and across the greater South Side in my teens, it was all about spoiling my opponent’s virtuosity. I appeared to be a model citizen of the jazzy little commonwealth of the pickup team because I performed needful tasks that other players, fixated on the universally acknowledged priority of racking up points, didn’t feel like doing. In addition to playing defense on my man with irksome persistence, I passed the ball to teammates with care and sensitivity, boxed out and rebounded, fetched loose balls, tipped away opponents’ passes, and ran the court on every possession. But my motives were selfish and uncivic: I was, at best, agnostic about the greater good of my teammates; at worst, hostilely indifferent to it. My basketball self, a bad person masquerading as a good neighbor, only incidentally made his teammates’ lives better by making opponents’ worse. Other than wanting to win so that I could stay on the court, I didn’t give a rat’s ass about my team.

Intent on holding my own by dragging my man down to my level, I regarded offense as wildly overrated, mere slavishness posing as inspiration, a company man’s sorry campaign to make Employee of the Month. But defense, inherently soulful and underrated, was the serious business of denying your enemies their heart’s desire, which was to visit woe upon you. Defense was burglar bars on the windows of your bungalow, looking out for yourself and letting the neighbors do whatever they had to do to look out for themselves. If they wanted to pool resources and cooperate, all the better, but you had to be ready for any such arrangement to break down into a state of everyone for himself.

*

I try to expect the best of people, not because I’m particularly optimistic or forgiving but because I believe that others respond to what you ask of them. So I make a policy of treating readers, students, colleagues, friends, family, neighbors—human beings in general—as if they’re capable, observant, basically decent, willing to entertain complexity, and inclined to rise to the occasion, all to encourage them to conform to those expectations. But as a kid, I learned to do the opposite on the basketball court. Think of it as a very specific kind of neighborhood effects, showing up in my ball-playing habits and psyche. Because I hung out with serious players who tended to get me into games with stiffer competition than my modest abilities rated, I was obliged to cultivate the specialized skill of playing with and especially against one’s betters, a skill that’s not identical to being good at basketball. I had to get by when matched man-to-man against an opponent who could outscore me so badly that it would obviously be my fault if my team lost.

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