This Isn’t A Dream
Early in the summer at my friends Dan and Shannon's apartment, a group of us were drinking and partying on their stoop. This wasn't noteworthy until late in the night one of our friends was having a little too much fun and had probably drank one too many beers, and started being very silly. He was on the top step of the stoop and kept throwing his head back in laughter and hitting the glass pane on the front door with increasingly greater force as the minutes rolled by. Dan told him to stop. And again. And eventually said, angry now, "This isn't a dream! You have to participate!" This made everyone laugh, but he was serious and he was right. There was absolutely no need to risk a trip to the ER and a broken door for anything that was happening. No one was owed this night, it was simply fun, and any debts were to Dan and Shannon for hosting all of us.
I get upset when playing sports, most of all basketball. It's the game I understand best and while I'm almost never the best player on the floor I love it so deeply that I do everything possible to help the team. Need a ballhandler? I'll distribute. Spot-up shooter? I'll be in the corner. Slasher? I'll cut backdoor. Lockdown the other team's best player? Well, let's all at least have fun. I love pickup basketball and it is absolutely infuriating to me. I recall a recent men's league game, where beleaguered facing a halftime deficit I yelled to nobody and everybody all at once, "it CAN'T be just me getting back. I smoke a pack a day I CAN'T be the only one." We lost that game. We shouldn't have. I wasn't happy.
I don't care if my team misses every shot and I don't care if we win or lose. I do however very much care how we get those shots and how we win or lose. Pickup basketball is a meritocracy. If you win, you stay on the court. If you lose, the next team waiting replaces you. It doesn't matter if you're 6'9" or 5'2", it doesn't matter if you're a man or a woman, it doesn't matter if you speak English or Farsi. It is the American ideal played out on blacktop between anyone who wants to participate. Over time you learn about what this means, and you learn that it's Marxian. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." If you can't shoot particularly well, this will be sorted almost immediately and you should keep the ball moving. If you're a great rebounder, park yourself under the basket and corral misses and you will be adored.
It might seem paradoxical to imply that an activity can be both Marxian and meritocratic, but I assure you that closer examination of these two concepts proves that to be untrue. There is something that happens when people aren't performing within their ability. It's a shift in the breeze, the rim shrinks a bit, the ball doesn't bounce quite the same. Shots go up, but they don't fall. Passes slow, and sometimes altogether stop possession by possession. The game, instead of being beautiful and collaborative, becomes desperate and individual. This is upsetting to everyone, eventually. It takes everyone to commit to being a part of it for any of it to work. And it's important that it works, that's why we're all here.
The lionization of professional athletes is probably the worst thing to ever happen to pickup basketball. Everyone wants to make contested jumpers like Kobe, or shoot threes like Steph Curry, or (worst case scenario) dribble like James Harden. This is fair and it is not my job to tell anyone not to have fun and do what they want on the court. But this can also fuck up the game. To what we owe our teammates is an important question to ask ourselves. If you just want to get your shots up, you'd probably not consider this necessary, but if you want to stay on the court, finding the correct answer is imperative. And there's nothing worse than being on the sidelines.
In speaking to the American ideal in his famous Lyceum Address, Abraham Lincoln said, "At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." He understood that in a society that wants success, it will not come from anywhere but collectively within, and that is also where the wellspring of hatred resides. No one can do it alone. Everything good in this country has the stain of collective bloodshed on its shirt, sacrifice for others in every direction. That is how you win. Together.
This isn't a dream. You have to participate.
-Michael Campana