I have always bristled at the idea that writing is inherently brave. To me, this feels like what writers say when they’re out of ideas, or they’re feeling beaten down. Calling yourself courageous in the face of adversity that everyone else is also up against seems self-defeating, and I have always been drawn to writers who can’t be bothered to wallow. Not because writing isn’t hard (it is), but because the joy of it outweighs the difficulty, most of the time. The same can be said of basketball. I know I’m not alone when I say I’m getting tired of professional athletes lamenting the burden of getting paid to play the funnest game in the world every day of their lives.

Walt Whitman. Russell Westbrook. James Baldwin. Michael Jordan. What do these players and writers have in common? They bark at the world before it can beat them down, and won’t entertain the notion that they don’t have a right to do what they’re doing. Not for a second. Of course, they have a little something extra called absurd talent, which makes their brazen confidence a lot more reasonable. But I’ve come to believe that this ability to claim your right to boldly exist in a creative or athletic space is half of talent anyway.

James Baldwin was a boy preacher with superb verbal gifts before he became a celebrated writer, but no one personally put him on the fast track to writing Go To Tell It On the Mountain because he could turn a phrase in Sunday school. Jordan was famously cut from his high school team (though this bit of lore is less compelling when you learn he was cut from the varsity team as a freshman before he hit puberty.) Walt Whitman dropped out of school at eleven (eleven!) to self-educate himself in printing and journalism. Russell Westbrook, who retired from the NBA last week, was under-recruited out of high school despite possessing Bo Jackson-esque athleticism and the emotional intensity of Raphael the red the ninja turtle.

The point isn’t necessarily that these people recognized their own greatness before everyone else, but that they recognized their right to pursue it, and did.

What’s my point with all of this? Well, let’s just say my confidence has been tested recently. I don’t mean on the court—that’s nothing new. One good thing about pickup is that it tries your confidence literally every time you play. Some days, you may show up feeling ambivalent or insecure in your ability as a player, and the game demands you put these thoughts away as quickly as possible. Ideally, you can transform them into positive, confident belief, but that doesn’t happen on a dime. That’s where consistency really matters—in building a reservoir of self-esteem that doesn’t burn off as soon as you go 0 for 6 from deep and turn the ball over four times in a single game.

Basketball is practice—practice for being better at the game, for one, but also for navigating the treacherous internal and external terrain known as your life. The game offers a stable arena to build and sustain confidence—which is always more mental than physical—over time. I can then employ that internal machinery to work through different conundrums of confidence in the parts of my life that really matter: writing, career, relationships, etc.

Wellness dudes — which I’m aware I very well may be — advise regulating your nervous system through things like cold plunges, endurance training, and getting punched in the face. The idea being that extreme physical discomfort trains the nervous system so it knows what to do when shit hits the fan outside of the gym or sauna. There’s a mental side of this, I’m sure, but the limit of these methods is that the only thing they’re really training you for is more physical confrontation. This is why a guy like Jonah Hill, who has apparently gotten into Jiu-Jitsu lately, can’t stop talking about how easily he could beat up the other guys in the coffee shop. Which, no he can’t. The great triumph of most modern “training” is that it makes you feel physically tough in environments where there’s no earthly need to be.

I digress. A few posts ago, I revealed I’d been working on a larger project which had grown out of this newsletter. There had always been a loose idea for a book bouncing around in the back of my head when I started TPJ, but it wasn’t until I was contacted by a “literary agent” that I felt it was time to hammer out a concept, and to write some of the book. I already believed in the validity of a book about the emotional and spiritual aspects of playing basketball, told from the perspective of an average Joe hooper, but the vote of confidence from a “literary professional” was all it took for me to dive in and start writing. You can probably guess why I put this in quotes, but I’m still raw enough from this fraudulent encounter to need the buffer of language to soften the blow of what actually happened.

That’s right. I’ve been scammed.

Or nearly scammed, because I didn’t lose any money to a person who posed as three different publishing professionals—an editor, an agent, and an “editorial consultant—to encourage me, over the course of two months, to produce a book proposal. How did they pull this off? A heady combination of AI, which they used to produce responses to both my emails and my writing, and my own frustrating but justifiable need for validation from other professionals.

Here’s what happened: I was contacted by this person posing as a real, verifiable editor from a publishing house who claimed to be interested in projects from new writers. Feeling I had nothing to lose, I responded with enthusiasm. Their response matched my energy. They were impressed, and passed me along to a trusted literary agent. This agent—excuse me, this fucker—asked if I had a book in the works. I took this as an opportunity to flesh out a concept based on this newsletter — not a pickup journal, but a story-driven and well-researched book about the emotional, psychological, and spiritual side of basketball. The heart, mind, and soul of the game, as I put it in the proposal I would eventually write. I was off to the races.

After I submitted the finished proposal, they connected me with an “editorial consultant” who could help take the proposal to its maximum, sellable potential—for a price. This is when the whole ruse fell apart, because even though I did in fact briefly put my confidence in this person, it took less than 24 hours to realize they didn’t know what the hell they were talking about, which directly contradicted every experience I’ve had with professional editors, who are usually extremely diligent and thoughtful people.

I know now that the entire process was mediated by AI. Every email, from the first inquiry to their very last, in which they politely begged me on their hands and knees not to inform the customer service team of their preferred payment platform of their scam, was written by AI. It’s when they used it to handle the actual manuscript, and not just our correspondence, that it became undeniable. It’s hard not to see it now, and I’m frustrated I didn’t scrutinize their responses, push for a phone call, or verify their just-off email domains sooner.

But we all know now that AI’s greatest strength is its ability to lull you into a stupor with sycophantic flattery. Since I couldn’t see the chatbot spitting out responses in a browser, I took all of this as professional cordiality, and, above all, as confirmation of what I already believed: that my stuff was good.

Because here’s the thing. I know what it feels like to not fully believe in your writing— to know when a concept isn’t quite there, or that you’re not the person to write it. Cultivating a competent inner-critic is half of becoming a decent writer anyway – but not all. The other half, I think, is nurturing, even championing, the voice that says you are hot shit.

Whitman, Westbrook, Jordan, and James Baldwin would have never done what they did if they allowed their inner-critic to win the day. I’m not comparing myself to these people, just pointing out that to make anything in this world, you have to fight for your right to do it. Validation helps, but it can just as easily lead you astray. In this case, I now have the head-spinning task of sorting how a scammer impersonating a literary professional provided some, but not all, of the fuel to start a project that I genuinely believe in. It will take some time to separate the real from the artificial in all of this. The truth is that I wouldn’t have been able to write an entire proposal, complete with sample chapters, a structural outline, and full list of comparable titles, if I didn’t legitimately believe in the book. So, joke’s on them. Kind of.

Until now, the letters A and I have never appeared capitalized next to each other in this newsletter. I imagine that is part of its appeal. I write about basketball because it’s real, physical, and utterly human. Aside from consuming massive amounts of energy, the irony of the growing influence of AI is that it still has very little power over the physical world. That will probably change, and this scam is yet another example of how pathetic and pointless the application of most generative AI actually is. Scamming is all it’s good for, and hacks celebrate its rise because they can finally outsource their doltish imaginations to something that may help them turn a profit.

So what does any of this have to do with basketball, and with the great writers and players named above? From the beginning, this newsletter has been a way to claim my right to write about something that conventional editorial thinking would suggest I have no business doing. I have no background as either a sports writer or a serious basketball player. For many years of my career, I’ve mostly stayed in my lane. I’ve written about art, and teaching, and spirituality, and a few other things I have some direct experience with in the world. It’s also been a way to claim my rightful place on the court, joyfully, without apologizing or wishing away the difficult parts of that journey. (3-point shooting remains my great struggle. In this, Russell Westbrick and I are kin.)

But writing about basketball over the last year has broken something wide open for me: in a world where artificial intelligence is cannibalizing centuries-worth of human knowledge and wisdom to produce content without any actual regard for the lived experiences of human beings, writers have a responsibility to write as authentically and bombastically about the world as we can while we still have the mental faculties and publishing platforms to do so.

And not only that. As AI claims authority on every known subject and experience in the world, we can and should write about whatever we want. The validation I received from a phony AI literary agent, and the subsequent fallout that came when I realized it was fake, proved what I should have known all along: you don’t need anyone’s permission to write whatever the hell you want. The Author is already dead. You’re the Author now.

Say what you will about Russell Westbrook. He was an electric but wildly erratic player, whose explosive confidence was jet fuel for both his greatest strengths and his undeniable flaws. When he played for the Nuggets in 2024-25, I watched with my hands partially covering my eyes. But one thing you never heard him do was complain about playing basketball, even though it clearly caused him an incredible amount of distress. Playing the game with everything you have is painful. But for Russ, the joy outweighed the pain.

From Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

I know I am solid and sound,

To me the converging objects of the universe perpetually flow,

All are written to me, and I must get what the writing means.

I know I am deathless,

I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by a carpenter’s compass,

I know I shall not pass like a child’s carlacue cut with a burnt stick at night.

I know I am august,

I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood,

I see that the elementary laws never apologize,

(I reckon I behave no prouder than the level I plant my house by, after all.)

I exist as I am, that is enough,

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware I sit content.

After I realized I’d been scammed, I took a few days off from pickup and from thinking about this whole project. When I came back to the court late last week the game was there, flowing freely as ever. Late in a close game, I pulled up for 3 on a fast break and yelled FUCK YEAH at the top of my lungs when it rattled through. I missed the next five or six. Whitman and Westbrook would have been proud.

Basketball, like writing, forces you to believe in your divinely given right to ball out with everything you have, and to remember that despite your limitations and failures and mistakes, all of this, every jump shot and human sentence and blade of grass, is just a game.

Gg.

-Paul

It was the best of runs, it was the worst of runs.

This is how basketball has felt for me lately — either totally up or totally down. It’s not that I’m playing all that poorly, other than a 3-point shooting slump that continues almost unabated. I attribute some of this shooting downturn to a few intense weeks of long-distance biking that culminated in a 115-mile, single-day ride on the gorgeous Trail of the Coeur D’Alenes, through a region of Western Idaho that is currently on fire, sadly. Long-haul biking hunches me over too much, leading to tightness in my hips and shoulders that is detrimental for a shooter already prone to jerkiness. This is too bad, because I love biking nearly as much as I love basketball, if not more.

But my shooting performance isn’t what I’m talking about here. It’s more that the games have been either harmonious, nearly to the point of being boring, or contentious. I won’t get into the specifics of each game, but I’ll focus on a couple guys who seem to represent opposite poles on the basketball spectrum. In terms of age, they’re both on the far end, but in their disposition and approach to the game, they couldn’t be farther apart.

I’ve come to believe that playing pickup into later adulthood is all about finding balance — physically, emotionally, and psychologically. I don’t want to suggest that either of these guys have been unsuccessful in doing that, because they’re both still playing past the age of 60. But lately, they’ve both been at or near the center of some of the issues that have emerged in these contentious games. For some context, the next oldest hooper in this run is about 45, while the rest of us are between 30 and 40.

Here’s a quick profile of the Old Heads in question. I’m calling them by their actual names because I’m certain they don’t know about Substack and will never see this.

Unc 1: Bryan

Bryan is a good-natured and solidly built gentleman hooper in his early 70s. He’s retired, and when he’s healthy, plays with close to 100% consistency in the M,W,F noon-day game. Picture Alan Alda in basketball shorts. For reasons unclear, Bryan sometimes decides to play without his shirt on, even though the Denver rec centers forbid this. An employee has intervened to tell Bryan to put his shirt back on more than once, and each time, Bryan reacts like this is new information. It’s entirely possible that he legitimately forgot this rule, so I won’t hold it against him.

You can imagine there was a time when he was a natural and limber athlete, but those years are far behind him. To be frank but hopefully not rude, Bryan simply doesn’t have the mobility to play with guys thirty-five years his junior. That said, we all respect his effort and attitude.

Early in Friday’s run, Bryan lost control of his momentum, stumbled forward, and fell into the wall. He caught himself before he made contact with his head, but he still fell and needed help to his feet. It could have been a lot worse, but it turns out this was the second time in two weeks Bryan took a similar spill.

Later in the run, on the sideline, another player, Chet, voiced his concern.

“I get that he wants to play,” Chet says, out of earshot from Bryan. “But at some point you gotta realize you might hurt yourself.”

“It’s definitely risky to try and play at this pace,” I say, half-agreeing.

“Not only that,” Chet continues, “it’s four on five out here. There’s other sports to play with people your age. Go play golf or pickleball.”

Chet’s not wrong about the mismatch. If Bryan is on your team in an otherwise evenly contested game, you’re probably not winning — and by extension, you’re not staying on the court. But this assessment seems harsh, and I hope there are other ways to accommodate a guy like Bryan without exiling him to pickleball.

For one, I happen to know there’s a twice-weekly 55 and over run at the rec center one neighborhood over from this one. In fact, I’ve actually seen those guys approach Bryan and ask him to join their game when we ended up at that court for scheduling reasons. But he hasn’t joined them. This leads me to conclude that Bryan doesn’t want to play with other geezers — as is his right.

Despite his easygoing energy, it’s not unlikely that pride is a factor here, which brings us back to square one. It always is. But because he keeps showing up with a good attitude, I’m inclined to say we let Bryan do his thing until he decides it’s time to join the League of Uncs.

Unc 2: Lex

Lex is around 60 and still has an impressive amount of game. He’s short, short-tempered, and strong in the way that guys of his stature and generation often are. He reminds me simultaneously of Ed Harris and a handful of hardass coaches I encountered in a variety of sports from the age of 10 onwards. I’ve never directly heard Lex say “Semper fi”, but I would not be surprised to learn he served in one branch of the military or another.

Like Bryan, Lex’s mobility is limited, but the key difference between them is that Lex is an excellent shooter. From 3, he easily shoots over 50%, which is impressive for a player of any age. His defense consists primarily of whacking you as hard as he can when you step foot in the paint, only to throw up his hands and holler in disbelief when you call the foul. He’s crafty with the ball, but craftier in how he can manipulate disputes to his advantage. Like the coaches of my youth, his greatest psychological asset is also his greatest weakness: he will never admit when he is wrong.

Lex and I have gotten into it a few times, mostly because games were tight and we were on opposite teams. It happens. But this Friday, Lex and I were on the same team. I was playing rather well aside from the aforementioned shooting slump. I missed my first five 3s, then finally hit one to break the skid. Lex was shooting well but hardly doing anything else besides grumbling at his teammates for their mistakes. As I’ve mentioned before, this bothers me. As far as contributions, I thought both of us were helping the team win.

In the final game to 21, I pull up for a wide open three. It leaves my hand awkwardly, and before it can clank off the back of the rim, I hear Lex howl in dismay. I suppose he was open too.

As soon as I miss, I start sprinting back on D. Lex throws up his trademark ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, leaving me to pick up both his and my own guy on a 2-man fast break. They score, and I yell something along the lines of “Get your old ass back on defense, Lex!” minus the ageist adjective. I slam the ball against the wall. Back on the other end, I continue: “It’s a wide open shot. I’m gonna take it.”

“You’re O for 25,” Lex hollers back without missing a beat. “Stop shooting.”

“I made one,” I fire back, protesting too much.

“No you didn’t.”

“Yes I did, asshole.”

“You didn’t,” he doubles down. “So stop shooting.”

“We’re on the same team,” I say, changing tack. I try a new one: “Dickhead.”

The adrenaline from our exchange fires me up enough to score the next six points on layups straight to the basket. From an even tie at the halfway mark, we end the game on 9 straight unanswered points. Lex hits the winning 3 off one leg and does, I kid you not, a little jig.

I avoid his dap and retreat to the other side of the bench. As I’m taking off my shoes, Lex gives me five without acknowledging I called him both an ass and a dick. I appreciate this, though I still resent his antagonism. Clearly, he doesn’t care. Which, in a way, I also appreciate.

What Bryan and Lex have in common is that both of them have earned the right, as anyone of their age largely has, to not care what other people think of them. Bryan doesn’t care that many people think he’s too old for our game. Lex doesn’t care that he reminds us of the authority figures who gave us hell as teenagers.

At any age, you’ve got to fight for your right to hoop. I’m sure Bryan and Lex have very different life stories. But they’re still a part of this one — the story of the game.

GG.

-Paul

July 20th, 2026. 12 p.m.

Today, I got into it with a guy, Jonny, who’s been getting on my nerves for a couple weeks. I’ve played with Jonny for about a year, and until recently, we’ve never had an issue. He usually keeps to himself and is not typically aggressive. Also, he’s about three inches shorter than me — which is relevant, I swear. As one of the smallest guys on the court, Jonny usually has to do everything in his power to not get pushed around by bigger guys. As a small to medium-sized player myself, I sympathize with his predicament.

So, I’ve been experiencing something with him recently that has never really happened before: he’s playing me like I’m a Big Man. A center, even. If you know me, you know that I am not. However, I do take pride in the fact that I play bigger than I am, as the phrase goes. I’ve never been a very good outside shooter, so I’ve built my scoring game from the rim outward. I have a fairly deep bag of post moves, footwork, and finishing angles built on using my lack of length — and my strength relative to that length — to my advantage. So, when I play against smaller players, like Jonny, I can usually body them pretty good on both offense and defense.

I had a span of games about a month ago where I was scoring more easily than at almost any point in my pickup career, and it just so happened that many of those points came against Jonny. We were matched up a lot, and I realized early on that I could score on him fairly easily. So, I took advantage and posted him up or took him to the rim as much as possible. Barbecue chicken alert. Fish fry at the church social. Free cheese.

I’m bragging, but I’m also trying to point out that in basketball, one-on-one matchups are a mysterious but hugely significant thing. There are just some people whose physical attributes, skillset, and personality get the best of yours. For me, that person is Ken, who I have described at length in this publication. As I type this, I’m realizing I just might be Jonny’s Ken. Meaning, I might be the guy who is uniquely frustrating for him to play against, and when he does, he brings an extra spiteful, little brother energy to the matchup.

After a string of big games at Jonny’s expense, I noticed one day a couple weeks ago that he was all of a sudden playing extremely physical defense against me. First it was a couple forearm shivers to my lower back in the post. Then a few two-hand pushes while leaping for rebounds. Then a hard shoulder into me as I went up for a fast-break layup. I didn’t say anything that day, or the next when the same thing happened again. But after the second day, I asked myself on the drive home: what do I do with this guy?

I’m not usually the one in this position. I also suffer from chronic chip-on-shoulder syndrome. Usually, I’m the one who has to let bigger guys know they can’t push me around. And sometimes, I go too far. I rarely, if ever, have to deal with someone working out their short king hangups on me. At 5’10’’, I consider myself an ally, even a comrade, to all short kings. Jonny, it seems, has rebuffed my largesse.

In basketball, things like this tend to come to head before dissipating on their own. So, if Jonny started any of this funny business today, I knew I had to say something or it would continue to happen, delaying the inevitable breaking point. We avoided each other for most of the day, but when we ended up guarding each other in the final game, the foolery continued apace.

I’ve already described too much of the physical minutiae of what was going on, so I’ll try to depict it another way.

Imagine the three stooges, minus one. Curly, who is bald, is trying to put a cake in the oven. Moe doesn’t like the way he’s doing it and keeps whacking him on the back of the head. Curly doesn’t notice or care at first because he’s too busy with the cake, which makes Moe more enraged. Moe grabs a wooden spoon and thwacks Curly harder on the head, and Curly hollers at him to knock it off. Miffed, Moe takes the spoon and jabs Curly in the ribs, causing him to wheel around, grab the spoon, and poke Moe in the gut. They grumble and bicker forth. Simultaneously, both stooges grab an egg from the carton and smash it on the other’s head. Meanwhile, the unattended cake catches fire in the oven.

My attempts to call Jonny out for his illegal, hands-first defense were met with contempt and denial. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am frustrated, both at him for doubling down and escalating the situation, and at myself for not seeing this coming and handling it better. I wish I could say I rose above Jonny’s antagonism and that it didn’t affect my performance, but it did. The most embarrassing thing about our altercation, which took place over the course of just the final game, was that it made both of us completely useless to our teams in the process. We burnt the cake. I did pick up a couple ugly buckets, but that’s about it. Then, I hit Jonny with a spin move of complete non-violence, wheeling around him entirely so he couldn’t make contact even if he tried, only to miss the wide open layup. That one hurt worse than any of his previous stiff arms.

Last week I described a moment a few years ago where I became so frustrated with the constant sparring and ego-jousting in basketball that I felt like my only option was to quit. I wouldn’t say I felt like quitting today, but with the continuation of my shooting slump and yet another petty scuffle to process, I’ll quote the great thespian Danny Glover: I’m getting too old for this shit.

Ebbs and flows, peaks and valleys. Peacetime and wartime. I would prefer a basketball game without these ugly battles, just like I would prefer a world without war.

Later in the day, I noticed a strange soreness in my left calf which worsened overnight. With all the hamstring and calf and achilles injuries currently plaguing the NBA, there’s a compelling discussion going on about the psychosomatic aspect of soft tissue injuries. Aaron Gordon has talked openly about this. I’m not saying there’s a direct correlation, but it’s certainly possible that my body is sending me a distress signal of some kind.

My sore calf, coupled with the frustration I feel after this skirmish, are saying that I don’t have it in me to field a new rival. No more wars foreign or domestic. I suspect, or at least I hope, that Jonny will cool off after this. Neither of us have the resources. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place.

The stooges don’t fight because they have to, but because they want to. And brother, I just want to hoop.

Gg.

-Paul

So, aside from a couple games where I once again got overly frustrated with my teammates and barked at them in a way that I wasn’t super proud of (though we did win those games after I started yelling, so who’s to say), the runs have been fairly uneventful. But that’s not to say I haven’t been writing about basketball. In fact, I’m pretty deep into a larger, more ambitious writing project about the spirituality of hoops, among other things. Discerning readers may have already been able to sniff this out. For now, I won’t say more than that.

But I will offer a little preview. This is an excerpt from a longer piece where I dig deeper into this idea of basketball as spiritual practice. I’d love to know what you think — are you into this? Even if not, that’s clearly never stopped me from writing before, so you can be honest. Really. Leave a comment down below if you’d like.

Here’s the excerpt:

. . . .

If our basketball journey begins with our desire to make the shot, it continues when we learn to love the miss. The grit, the grind, the go fuck yourself of it all. You will often hear professional players refer to this as falling in love with the “process.” Steph Curry, the greatest shooter to ever touch a basketball, not to mention the greatest point guard, uses this language often. But if you’re not a professional athlete, it can seem opaque and inaccessible. When Steph refers to a process, it conjures the image of countless hours alone in the gym, of 1000 jumpers a day, of hyperbaric chambers and the best physical therapy money can buy. When you see what people like Curry can do on a nightly basis, this “process” can seem only like the rarified territory of the Olympian and NBA Champion. I’m not a professional athlete. Why would I want to train like one? Who has the time?

Modern fitness and self-improvement culture falls silent when confronted with this question. What is the point of personal optimization, of training like a pro, of “Mamba Mentality”, of advanced hydration and greater hip mobility and six-pack abs when you work at H&R Block? The fitness industry and its black hole of diet and training trends, which turn over more frequently than Draymond Green turns over the ball, exploit the insecurities of regular people by convincing them that physical and personal optimization are the key not only to health, but success, upward mobility, and ultimately, to happiness. Training like a professional athlete is worth it because it can make you more like them, or at least more like what we imagine them to be, which is fundamentally happier, richer, and more successful human beings.

This is a lie, of course, and self-aware stars like Steph Curry will be the first to tell you there is nothing innate about their greatness. Nor is there anything magical or elite about the process.

Basketball isn’t immune to the malign influence of fitness culture, but one reason you don’t see as many basketball fitness influencers is because it doesn’t lend itself as easily to the cult of optimization. It’s hard to get people to buy supplements and programs because progress in basketball is notoriously hard to quantify. More so, you don’t need elaborate methods of algorithmic, puritanical coercion to convince people to play basketball. Why? Because it’s fun. By the same token, basketball doesn’t seem like a very good channel for self-improvement, so the self-improvement industry has left it largely unscathed. This is a wonderful thing.

When Stephen Curry says he’s fallen back in love with the process, there’s another word that comes to mind: practice. I know what you’re thinking: We’re talkin’ about practice?! Not practice in the Iversonian sense, but in the way that many others refer to having a fill in the blank practice: a meditation practice, a painting practice, a hula hoop practice. You don’t often hear athletes use the word practice in this way, in part because it sounds kind of pretentious, more in the lexicon of a tote bag and farmer’s market aficionado than your typical hooper. It’s a more spiritual usage, which also might scare many away for a number of justifiable reasons. I can see a very familiar type of player reading this, and if they’ve made it this far, muttering “It’s not that deep, bro,” a common refrain among young players when the game suddenly gets too serious.

Up to a point, I’d completely agree with them. Hoopers who have been immersed in the game and schooled in its culture are already well over halfway there in developing their own basketball practice — or a physical and spiritual practice of basketball — in their pure and uncomplicated love for the game. Basketball is already so much fun in itself that it doesn’t have to pretend to be something else — something too deep — to merit commitment. It doesn’t need to be mystified to be appealing. It takes practitioners of other disciplines years of learning and unlearning to reach the state of natural, easy enjoyment that many basketball players can reach just by lacing up their shoes and playing for an hour at the local rec.

On the other hand, I suspect that the archetypal nonchalant hooper is only half as chill as they seem, in the same way that the most mindful-looking yogis are often gordian knots of anxiety.

After all, it’s the pure hooper who invented the phrase ball is life. It’s the pure hooper who, in the same breath, declares that basketball is both not that serious and the most important thing in the world. And they’re absolutely right. Basketball is nothing and everything. It’s the ball going in the hoop and not. It’s not that deep, and it’s life itself.

I realized I was in too deep about five years ago, during an early morning game that seemed typical in that I was playing like crap. I’d been in a slump, not just on the court but in several arenas: emotional, romantic, and professional. I was teaching high school English and used basketball mostly as a distraction from the fact I didn’t want to be a teacher anymore. My dating life resembled my 3-point jumper: erratic and lacking follow through.

I wouldn’t have called the game a “practice” then, because I didn’t believe I was a good enough player to admit I was taking it seriously. But I was. I was playing three or four times a week, sometimes for upwards of three hours at a time. Playing poorly could ruin my whole day, even the next one. And since I played poorly — or believed I played poorly, which is the same thing — more than half the time, basketball was ruining several of my days per week. But it was the only part of my life where I didn’t have to think about anything else, where I could feel and listen to my body, where I could be, if only for a moment, somewhat free.

I was getting locked up on D by a guy who always had my number. This was his first mistake. Needing a bucket, I crossed over to my left and drove sloppily to the hoop. I had him beat by a step but felt him close behind, so instead of going straight up for a lefty layup, I stopped and pump faked hard. It worked and he leapt for the fake, but instead of flying by, he threw his leg out — to block the shot with his foot, presumably? — and crashed into me.

His shin hit me just below the neck and we clambered to the floor in a heap, his body sprawled on top of mine. I heard him grumble “My bad” as he climbed off me, but I was too angry to take it in. I stood up and whipped the ball as hard as I could at him. It missed his head by a foot, hit the wall, and rocketed back at me. “Fuck, man!” I yelled as I narrowly dodged the basketball I’d just thrown.

I was stunned by the force of the contact, but not enough to justify this reaction. I’d seen other guys blow up like this many times, but it had been years since I’d been the one to explode. I thought I was past this. On the court, it’s easy to tell when someone is a ticking bomb, just like it’s easy to spot the guy in the bar who’s looking for a reason to fight. The awkward, silent reaction of the other players to my outburst made one thing clear: I was the bomb. I walked off the court to gather myself, then finished the game in a fog of embarrassment.

After the game, one of the nicer guys (Ray) offered a consoling dap. “You good, bro?” he said with genuine concern. It’s not that deep.

“I’m good,” I said.

I sat on the floor for half an hour after the game pretending to stretch as the morning crew trickled out to go back to their lives. Life doesn’t offer as many moments of clarity as it probably should. But basketball does.

And here was mine: I had to quit playing.

. . . .

That’s all for now. Needless to say, I didn’t quit. I played this morning and scored just 3 points. Miraculously, it didn’t ruin my day.

Gg.

-Paul

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Thursday, June 11th, 2026.

In my time playing hoops, I’ve noticed that the ethics of teammate-hood vary more from game to game and place to place than nearly any aspect of pickup beyond the gameplay itself, which is different literally every time you step on the court. What I mean by teammate-hood, a word I just made up, is simply how different players understand and approach being on a team with other people, most of whom you just met.

For some, a teammate is nothing more than a warm body orbiting yours who is constantly doing annoying things like dribbling or shooting the ball. For others, a teammate is a temporary means to an end, that end being winning the game. This is the most common and logical approach, given you likely won’t see most of the people you play with until the next time you play at the same time again, or at all. In my pickup career, I’ve had as many one-off teammates who I played with for exactly one run and have never seen again in my life, as I’ve had recurring teammates, if not more.

And this is where I may be somewhat strange compared to many others in my teammate ethic: I think it’s very fun and kind of cool in a “strangers on a train” sort of way to ball out with somebody for exactly one hour and never see them again. I still vividly recall one epic morning at Carla Madison a couple years ago where I had an amazing chemistry with an extremely athletic dude who wore low top Chuck Taylors and kept making perfect cuts around the hoop, and I kept finding him in small, rapidly closing passing windows, and vice versa. He scored much more than I did, but I will never forget that at one point, on a fast break, he threw me what I can only describe as a mini-lob, forcing me to leap as high as I could (22 inches at most) at full speed, catch the ball, and lay it off the glass in the same leaping motion. Never in my life has anyone dared throw me an alley-oop, albeit one that reached its pinnacle a foot and a half below the rim. We won every game that day, dapped up briefly, and never saw each other again. He might as well have been a friendly basketball ghost. I wish him the best.

But not everybody really cares that much about this spontaneous basketball chemistry that sometimes happens on a random Saturday morning. It would be crazy to go around seeking that experience all the time, because it’s actually pretty rare. It makes a lot more sense to be laissez-faire about the whole thing. And yet, I’ve come to believe pretty strongly that you get out what you put into basketball, like most things. If you come to the court for a quick hit for your ego, you’re likely to see everything your teammates do as a confirmation of that intention. If they suck and you lose, that’s a reflection on them, not you. In a twisted way, the more they stink up the joint, the better you look.

Without patting myself on the back here, I’ll say that I try, and often fail, to view my teammates in a different light—as potential basketball kin, if only for a moment. Like I said, the most likely scenario is something in the middle, which is fine.

But sometimes you get something uniquely offputting, which is someone whose toxicity towards your teammates is bad enough that it’s making your team worse.

It was a slow build. It started with a few loud critiques from Teammate A towards me about cutting in the wrong place, which, maybe I was. But after a game we narrowly won, Teammate A started passive aggressively yelling (this is possible on a basketball court, don’t ask me how) at another guy, Teammate B, every time he squared up to take an open shot. Teammate B is not an especially good shooter, but he’s not terrible either, and like pretty much all of us, you can tell his shooting success is highly dependent on his confidence while taking the shot. This is true with everyone except pure, true shooters, whose delusional confidence is a key part of what makes them good shooters in the first place.

For the rest of us, believing in the shot—especially if it’s a 3—while you take it greatly increases the already low odds you are going to make it. On the other hand, not believing puts those odds to almost zero. So, in that brief second when you are starting to load an open and critically important shot—maybe a game winner—there is nothing in the world worse than hearing a teammate yell:

“Don’t shoot that!”

That’s exactly what Teammate A shouted at Teammate B as he squared up for a wide open, game-winning 3. I must point out: we only needed a 2 to win. But an open look is an open look. And there were no other viable scoring options available.

And what do you know? He bricked it. There was a scramble for the rebound, which we somehow recovered and put in through the scrum. We won. And yet, I felt what had just occurred was a violation of basic teammate-hood, no matter which sect you belong to.

“Don’t tell your own teammate not to shoot,” I said to teammate A, more forcefully than I intended. He looked at me, puzzled.

“I didn’t say that,” he said, defensive, though he did say that. “I told him not to shoot a 3.”

“Exactly,” I said. “It’s wide open. Let him have it.”

Further banter ensues. I was more escalated than I should have been, I’ll admit. It occurred to me in that moment that I was probably projecting my own code too strongly onto other people, something I’ve been trying not to do in both life and hoops lately—not always successfully. I’m trying not to expect other people to know my rules. So, I let it rest, and the games went on.

In our last game, we’re down 12-13, going to 15. A great, high intensity game. I don’t remember exactly how I ended up with the ball, but before I know it I’m streaking down the court. We need a 3 to win. I hadn’t shot very well all morning, but I’m not in my head about that because there’s no time to be. By the end of an exhausting run, there’s usually not a lot going on up there—which can be either a good or bad thing. Since you’re not overthinking, you might take a courageous but ill-advised shot you wouldn’t otherwise take. You’re playing free, but might also be playing dumb.

I have a lane to the hoop for a layup. If I take the easy 2, we still have to get back on defense, get a stop, and score again. So, I pull up from 3. I hear nothing as I load the shot and let it rip. Sometimes you know the instant it leaves your hand if it’s going in—but this time, I can’t tell. It knicks the inside of the rim, rattles, and falls through.

“Game, bitch!” I yell, louder than I intend. I’ve never said this phrase in my adult life, let alone shouted it at the top of my lungs.

Daps ensue. Teammate A comes over.

“That’s to no one in particular,” I say, thinking he’s about to reopen our dispute.

“Or for everyone,” he says. We laugh.

“I don’t usually shoot that,” I say, though I’m not sure why.

“You should start,” says teammate A.

Sometimes, a petty dispute with a teammate can lead to a permanent rift. Perhaps our egos are more easily wounded, our personal codes more brittle, when there’s nothing at stake. But sometimes those conflicts disrupt our internal script just enough that we snap into another state of mind—one that is more attuned to the strange frequencies of the people around us.

If there’s a true code of teammate-hood in pickup basketball, I haven’t found it yet. It’s certainly not written down anywhere, because if it were, it wouldn’t be a very good one.

You can’t talk or preach your way to chemistry. You can only listen for it. Hooper, you have to listen.

GG.

-Paul

Everything started off great. We found an empty court next to the Breckenridge recreation center with soft, painted concrete and two forgiving, regulation rims. Overlooking the court were the Rocky Mountains, the jagged tips of which were still frosted with the snow of late spring. A blissful 70 degrees with passing clouds to shade the court and keep our aging bodies cool.

There were a perfect 10 of us. Two from Seattle, where we used to play pickup at the LA Fitness in Ballard and a church game down in Rainier Beach. One from California, where we ran track and cross country in college. Another from Montana, a fisherman who was there when another player called me “a sensitive motherfucker”, after I told him to get the fuck out of my face. Three from Chicago (one by way of Ohio), where we played in driveways, parks, school gyms, and under the Blue Line near the apartment in Lincoln Park. One from Denver who I’d never played with before but have watched countless Nuggets games alongside in bars across the city. And one more, my brother and the best man in my upcoming wedding, who was never particularly into playing basketball but displayed an easy stroke on the court today that suggests he may have inherited the elusive gene that makes shooting easier for him than it is for everyone else, including me.

It was the Bachelor Party Pickup Run, and it was perfect until it wasn’t.

We started with a quick game of knockout to get loose, and also so I could get a sense of everyone’s comfort with shooting and handling the ball before dividing us into teams. It had been a while since any of us had played together, some as many as ten years. None of us were ever serious basketball players, let alone very good ones, and yet there was a time when at least a quarter, maybe even a half, of the time I spent with each of them was on a basketball court somewhere — between college semesters or teaching classes or after work at shitty jobs.

Bachelor parties offer an opportunity to revel in your youth with the people you spent it with, maybe even relive it for a little while. And to get drunk. There was plenty of drinking in our earlier days, but there was also a lot of running and goofing around. We’re not that much older now, but it’s that much harder to find the time for pure recreation when your life is moving forward, and fast. It becomes harder to justify jumping up and down with your hands in the air. Why? Why do we ever stop?

That’s rhetorical. I know why. With a firm grip on the rarity of these opportunities, I mandated the pickup game through sheer annoyingness. I applied gentle but direct pressure. Some even brought their basketball shoes, a signal that they were ready to hoop. And hoop we did.

After knockout, a quick round of 3-on-3 games to get the heart and lungs pumping. At 9,500 feet, you lose your wind quickly and almost never get it back. But I was impressed, right away, with the collective fluidity of everyone on the court. No one looked out of place, or nervous, or clueless with the ball, which is more than I can say for some of the regulars in Denver (including me, on occasion). This was a basketball-savvy group. The night before, we’d watched Game 2 of the Finals and fiercely argued the merits of Wemby’s game, debating the difference between earned praise of his dominance vs. speculative adoration for feats that are yet to be accomplished.

After 3s, I split us up into two teams of five and we ran full-court 4s with one sub apiece. It was amazing how quickly the games became competitive. There were screens, fouls, tussles in the paint. There was a surprising amount of pretty jumpers, many of which came from my brother. There were plenty of airballs, turnovers, and smoked layups, many of which came from me. There was trash talk from one person in particular, whose trademark vocality once led me, years before, to commit one of the more embarrassing acts of frustration in my pickup career, which I’ll refer to simply as “The Punt.”

I can’t remember the exact split, but we played something like six games in an hour and twenty minutes. As the author of this journal I reserve the right to say I scored the most points and could have scored more if I hadn’t missed a handful of wide open looks around the rim. I also took the most shots, many of which I wouldn’t have taken were I not the weekend’s special boy. I had not quite a field day from the mid-range, but close. I love middies, as I’ve said many times, but I haven’t been taking very many lately. But in the mountains, I favored my pull-up over anything else, and to my great pleasure, it was falling.

Some evidence:

Everyone brought something to the table. Denver brought muscle down low. Seattle brought court vision, passing, trash talk, and finishing around the rim. California brought lanky on-ball defense and ball handling. Montana brought competence and toughness after splitting his foot on a stick the night before while leaping barefoot into a dirt patch for a frisbee. Chicago brought heart, hustle, and vibes. Ohio brought intelligence and rebounding. My brother shot the lights out in a striped rugby shirt, a cross between Mikal Bridges and Steve from Blue’s Clues.

It was the final game. Chicago vs. West Coast. I played with Chicago. We’d won the first two games and lined up for the final and longest game to 11. Someone said that whoever won this one would win the day. Feeling confident, I agreed.

Before the game began, I noticed my legs felt like noodles and said as much. Everyone breathlessly concurred: we were exhausted. I should have said something about this being the most dangerous game of the day and that everyone should play within their body, but I didn’t want to do talk down. We’re all grown men in charge of our grown bodies.

We were down 4 to 5. I was getting back on defense, heard a scream, and turned around to see one of the Chicago boys running off the court clutching his arm, or his hand, or something. Right away I knew it was bad, because he moved and yelled with the intensity of someone in serious pain. Before he turned around, we thought it was his finger. He’d stuffed his arm into a scrum for the ball that was firmly in control of the strongest guy on the court. The rest of his body kept moving forward without his arm’s consent.

I ran to him, asked him what happened. He turned around, one arm delicately holding the other. There was a small concavity in what once had simply been his “shoulder,” but was now separated cleanly into distinct entities: clavicle and humerus.

“It’s out,” I said. “His shoulder’s fully out.”

It went about the way you would expect from there.

A moment of denial amongst the crew, and a state of calm brought on by adrenaline coursing through the injured. A tableau of feigned help from the college-age lifeguards from inside the rec center, who verbally asked at one point if they were being “tested.” A quick search for a nearby urgent care, a frantic drive, panic and pain setting in, hyperventilation, frenzied searching for the entrance, a locked door, an eternal five-minute drive to the actual facility, more searching, peaking distress, yelling, paperwork, competent medical professionals, pushing a wheelchair to a hospital bed, a doctor, a gesture of resetting, instant relief.

One of the nurses referred to the dislocated shoulder as “the golden injury”, because the relocation puts a person in excruciating pain in a state of sudden, golden bliss. In a way, this was both the worst and best possible injury that could have happened on a weekend like this, since the fix was quick and there’s no lasting damage. But there had been pain, and chaos, and through no one’s fault, it shifted the energy of the weekend.

I also think the Chicago boys would have come back and won that game, but we’ll never know.

No pickup game is perfect. Nor any bachelor party. But in its imperfection—in the contrast between the moments of harmony and chaos—it was true to the spirit of the game, true to the group, true to me.

I like a gritty game. If no one’s yelling in pain or joy or something in between, you didn’t really play.

GG

-Paul

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Statistical postscript

~18 points

- 4/6 wins, one loss by injury forfeit

- 1 wheelchair assist

- 69 high fives

I was reading The Way of Chuang Tzu this morning before hooping. If you aren’t familiar, it’s one of a few foundational texts of Taoism—or Daoism, depending on who you ask—a poetic rendition of the words of the movement’s forefathers, Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu. This edition is an interpretation (but not a direct translation) by Thomas Merton, a Catholic mystic writer who lived as a Trappist monk in Kentucky and loved jazz.

I return to it every few years like a stray dog returning to a house where they know they will be fed. You could say I’ve been a spiritual stray for years now, but this would imply I’m looking for some kind of spiritual home, or an answer. In truth, the leap away from faith was about letting go of the idea that there is any answer at all. Taoism lives in this land of the non-answer.

Lately, I’ve been trying somewhat half-assedly to cultivate more of a spiritual practice around pickup basketball. Pointing out that it’s a non-religious spiritual practice is something only someone raised near or within organized religion feels obligated to do, but alas. This push-pull impulse to explain yourself is exactly the type of self-clarification and identity posturing that the Taoist sages were able to deflate with their pithy little poems and stories, and that’s why I love them now.

At any rate, I’m reading things like this to help me put together something like a “framework” for this pseudo-spiritual pickup practice, even though that sort of structural language doesn’t work in regards to Tao.

Language doesn’t work to describe Tao. That’s the whole non-point!

I’ve been in a good place with pickup for going on a month now. It’s been a notably long time since I’ve gotten into a shouting match, crashed out on the court, or beat myself up in the hours after a run. For the most part, I’ve been loving the game. I know this will change, though, and I’m trying to cultivate a more intentional way of moving through and learning from the ups and downs of the game. This newsletter is part of that journey, if you can believe it.

It is interesting, though, that my last kerfuffles were concurrent with the tumultuous final weeks of the Nuggets’ season. Watching basketball is decidedly not a spiritual practice for me. Since then, I’ve been watching the Thunder vs. Spurs Western Conference Finals with a keen eye on one player in particular: Victor Wembanyama, AKA the world’s tallest Shaolin monk.

That’s a joke, but he did spend two weeks at a Shaolin monastery in China this past offseason. Nikola Jokić, on the other hand, spent much of his offseason playing footy volleyball with neighbor kids in Serbia, admiring pandas, and passionately embracing his horse.

Wemby deserves a lot of credit for this unorthodox method. By all accounts, he seems like an incredibly disciplined and conscientious dude. But the NBA playoffs are a raucous physical and emotional gauntlet that would challenge an actual Shaolin master, let alone a 22 year-old who spent two weeks visiting on summer break.

I have no doubt Wemby will be a great player, maybe one of the greatest ever. But as of now, he looks very much to be 22. The fearless warrior energy he displayed in Game 1 has dimmed next to the glint of Alex Caruso’s shimmering dome. At times, Wemby seems more concerned with punking Chet Holmgren than figuring out how to beat the Thunder, a telltale sign of shaken focus. The monks in the monastery, I’d bet, would be the first to tell him that the journey to spiritual maturity is a long one — and his is only just beginning.

Back to my basketball practice. It’s also worth noting I’ve only played against my rival Ken once in the last month. That isn’t accidental. Making a conscious choice to not play in the early morning runs where we clash is part of this “practice”, in a way. Not everything needs to be a head-to-head challenge. But when I play against Ken, it always is. So for now, I’d rather opt out of playing against him for a little while than force myself to overcome our negative dynamic.

Before yesterday’s mid-day run, I read this in The Way of Chuang Tzu:

Switch out “archer” for “shooter” and the poem’s meaning is identical. There are no brass buckles on the line in pickup, let alone a Larry O’Brien trophy, but the lesson applies. So, my goal in stepping on the court in two long runs this week was to make the best possible choice on every play to help my team win, while detaching myself from the outcome.

As the game intensifies, this becomes increasingly difficult. But if you can manage it, even for a few plays in a row, let alone multiple games, it’s the closest thing to a flow state I’ve ever felt.

Lao Tzu would make a great point guard, perfectly in tune with the needs of the team in every moment.

If someone is open on the wing, he swings the rock. If a lane opens, he drives then kicks, or lays it softly off the glass. Open from deep, he shoots without delay. Whether it falls or doesn’t fall makes no difference to him.

Up it goes. Watch it spin. Splash.

GG.

-Paul

I lived in New York for eight months when I was 24 — which is a sentence approximately 2 million guys from the midwest with degrees from middling colleges have said or typed with great pride. I do so with pride, too, because originality is pretty much off the table in the year 2026. And, I have a story to tell.

I had garnered a 6-month internship at a literary agency on the merits of a book review I’d written for a small magazine in my first year out of college. I found a room in an apartment in southwest Harlem for $300 a month on the community message board for a church I had no intention of attending, and within a week I had moved from my parents’ house in the Chicago suburbs to a fifth floor walkup on the corner of 112th Avenue and Frederick Douglass Boulevard. I thought this was cool, too. Still do.

I didn’t play basketball in New York. In fact, I hadn’t played an organized game of 5-on-5 in three or four years and had little interest in being bad at a new hobby while I was starting my Important Career in Letters. At that age, it seems very important to appear like you’re good at things — to look competent, talented, ambitious, etc.

Since basketball was something I was not very good at, I didn’t want to play. There was too much work to be done, too many experiences to be had — even if I didn’t know what any of those things actually were or where to find them.

Still, a buddy asked me to join him for some pickup in Central Park one late afternoon. I put on running shoes and jogged from my place in Harlem to the courts on the east side of the park. It was the middle of May and everything was blooming. In those 8 months in the city, I was lucky to live just three blocks from the northwest tip of the park, the quietest and in my opinion prettiest part of that strange urban forest. I took the running path through the northern end and wound my way around the Kennedy reservoir to the courts.

The runs were flowing when I arrived. I jumped in and flailed around for the first game or so. I don’t remember much aside from the busted concrete, the high fences surrounding the court, and the chain nets. I do remember realizing that the fitness I’d built up through three years of collegiate track and cross country, and which I’d relied on for any athletic challenge I encountered up to that point, had disappeared. Six months where the bulk of your exercise is walking to the next bar or subway stop will do that.

I’ve said before that for me, the single most important factor in playing basketball well is my cardio. Other people can play well when they’re out of shape, but my game is dependent on staying in balance while in constant motion.

And if my fitness is poor — which it was at this time — I’m also much more likely to hurt myself. You plant a foot wrong because you’re off balance; lose control of your momentum and knock knees with someone; leap for a rebound and throw out your back. Even at 24, I was susceptible to the hazards of lackluster fitness.

That’s how I ended up rolling and spraining an ankle in Central Park. All I remember is that I was sucking wind one second and on my back grabbing my left ankle the next. I know it was my left because I’ve had issues with that one pretty much ever since. I’ve strengthened it enough through rehab and constant play over the last few years that it hasn’t been an issue lately, but I can trace my way back to the sprain in Central Park through a series of turns, twists, and rolls over a seven-year span.

My friend played for another hour while I sat there with my foot swelling inside my Nike Pegasus. I didn’t leave because I knew I would need his help to get out of the park to the nearest bus or subway stop. I remember, too, that he was balling out in a way that really impressed me.

My pride was wounded as much as my ankle. I couldn’t have said this at the time, but that injury was sort of a physical metaphor for what was happening to me in New York at that moment.

The internship that was supposed to be my gateway into the New York publishing world was coming to an end within a couple weeks, and I didn’t have anything resembling a job lined up. When I talked to people who’d landed entry level positions at publishing houses, they usually referenced multiple internships which eventually led to their full-time job, wherein they were mostly creating spreadsheets.

I’m sorry — internships plural? I was running out of money and ideas about how to make it.

My buddy helped me to the subway and up the stairs of the Frederick Douglass station. That night, I lay on the Ikea couch in the living room with a bag of frozen chicken breasts on my ankle as I watched the Bulls play the Cavaliers in the Eastern Conference Finals. It’s when Derrick Rose banked a game-winner from 3 and did this:

Six weeks later, I flew home to Chicago for a week to recuperate — not from the ankle sprain, but from a bruising month without any promising prospects in New York. I told my friends and roommates that I planned to come back. Within the week I was offered a job at a high school on Chicago’s southwest side. I took it.

This was the right decision, I now see, but I also see it as a choice that put my life on a completely different path. It wasn’t because of the ankle sprain. But it wasn’t not because of the ankle sprain.

That year, I taught 12th-grade writing and completed the second year of an MFA program, writing fiction in the evenings after I finished grading papers. Looking back, the energy and optimism this required astonishes me. Who needs fitness when you have ambition?

I also played pickup with the teachers every Wednesday night in the school gym. I played 1-on-1 with my roommate on an outdoor court under the L train in Lincoln Park. We watched the Bulls and the rest of the league religiously. New York is a very good basketball city. But Chicago is a great one.

I can’t say whether the sprain in Central Park marked the end of one journey or the start of another.

It’s just a twisted ankle. Walk it off.

GG.

-Paul

This morning, I missed an open 3 so horribly it took everything in my power not to cry out in agony. I missed the rim by, without exaggeration, five entire feet. The shot was obscene. Profane. Blasphemous against the basketball gods. And yet, somehow it felt right.

I don’t know if other hoopers have ever felt this, but I have had this eerie, almost mystical feeling before. Let me try to explain. It’s a physical, temporal sensation that happens while taking a jump shot, and it only seems to happen with a perfect make or a terrible miss. You gather the ball, start your shot, and fire. And the whole time, the outcome feels pre-destined. Ordained.

Whether you swish it beautifully or miss it catastrophically, there are these moments in basketball that feel as if they already happened, like déjà vu, or like you’re living through a moment that has already been written in the script of the world. You know the shot’s outcome before it begins. Your body isn’t yours. You are a marionette on wires, moving precisely in the way some unseen master is willing you to move.

I’m neither a physicist (shocker) or a Calvinist, but playing basketball sometimes delivers these moments of destiny. I don’t know how else to put it. I imagine that great players experience them more regularly than the rest of us — usually when they are doing something that looks literally divine. Many of them have described a feeling where their magnificent play feels somehow out of their control — they’re just a vessel. In press conferences, this sounds like typical Christian Athlete-speak. But I wonder if what they’re actually describing, at least physically, is what I’m talking about: the feeling that the shot, or the play — even the entire game — has already happened, and there’s nothing you can do to change the outcome.

The rest of us feel it more when we fuck up so incredibly there is also a divine quality to it. Like, wow. Whatever or whoever powers the universe has a plan, and that plan is to make most of us look as stupid as possible, most of the time.

That’s what this shot felt like. A disaster of immaculate design.

I turned around to run back down the court as soon as the shot left my hands, like Steph Curry turning from a corner a three before he can see it splash through the net. If I were really brave, I would have held my hand in the air with my wrist flipped downward and fingers still outstretched, holding the pose that created this horrific masterpiece like God dangling his bony pointer on Michelangelo’s ceiling. He knew what he was doing. Whether the result is heinous or gorgeous, the creator should revel in their handiwork.

Until that point, the game had been spiraling out of control and, frankly, I had lost focus on trying to make a comeback. Our team was out of sorts for most of the morning. I played with Ray, who I described in an earlier entry as an earnest but frustrating teammate. Today was no exception, and even while we managed to win a few games on some streaky shooting, we never found anything resembling a flow. I started off playing well, making the first four shots of the game with some crafty work in the paint, before my jumper started going sideways.

I didn’t intend to get all theological today. There is probably a neuroscientific explanation for this feeling. Like many of basketball’s greatest mysteries, I think it has something to do with mental focus or the lack thereof. Maybe a perfect shot feels pre-destined because you’re fully focused through its entirety, and total concentration has a way of bending our perception of time. When you hydroplane on the highway, a half-second feels like 20. This is what I mean.

But I can’t explain why a terrible shot feels the same way. Maybe my focus had broken at some point just before the shot, when the game and my frustration spun out of control, and then when I caught the ball, my focus sharpened again — and by then, it was too late. I watched the crash in slow motion.

Or maybe it’s because the story of the game was already written. When you miss a shot this horribly, it confirms what was destined for the day: I am going to play like ass.

Thankfully, it’s just a botched jumper. Only a moment, but a moment I’m glad I allowed myself to feel all the way through. I didn’t shoot again after that. My work there was done.

Gg.

-Paul

But I’ve learned in my short tenure of asking semi-prominent people for interviews that you can’t start equivocating about the pitching process while you’re cornering them in a busy restaurant. Otherwise they’ll flee, just like Spencer did after he agreed to the interview and gave me his manager’s phone number, and the guy listening in on our conversation asked Spencer about the manager’s area code (?)

I like the way Spencer plays the game. He hustled his way into a two-way deal early in the season, then into a full-time contract by the end of the year. If it weren’t for some third quarter heroics in Game 5 of the T-Wolves series, the Nuggets may have been swept by the gentleman’s broom. I hope the interview happens, partly because he seems like a genuinely smart and interesting guy, and because I can tell you readers about the process in this letter.

For now, I’ll tell you about the game today, right before I met Mr. Jones.

Wednesday, May 6th. Noon.

It was a Snow Day in Denver. DPS and the surrounding towns announced school closures yesterday evening, in the thick of the late spring storm, as flakes the size of potato chips blotted the sky. The rec centers remained open today, though, so my crew of adult children schemed to find the gym least likely to be overrun by actual teens. I was skeptical any of the gyms would be that busy, because I’ve become one of those crotchety adults who (sort of) thinks kids don’t go out and do as much anymore. Rather than play in public gyms on their free day off, my guess was that kids would stay home and play online.

But the gym was in fact filled with high schoolers. Most of the guys were annoyed by this, because the kids were taking up the other half of the court. But I was pleasantly surprised to see the kids out and about doing what we used to do on Snow Days. For us, it was because there was nothing else to do. That’s not the case with them, though. (Have you heard of Discord? From my understanding, it’s like AIM but scarier.) To them, hoops at the rec center probably seems pretty basic.

But there they were taking up the whole other half of the court. The only solution was to take over the old fashioned way and challenge them to a game: Grown Men vs. Teenage Boys.

They were reluctant at first, saying they would rather just play 3-on-3 over on their side. They couldn’t have been more than sophomores — hardly the man-children that dressed me down a few weeks ago in our usual game. But the appeal of a full-court game is hard to resist, so they eventually accepted the challenge.

In our first game against the kids, we went up 8-0 right away. As the shortest guy on our unusually tall team, I was guarding the only kid who hadn’t obviously hit puberty yet. As a former late bloomer myself, I gave the kid the respect he deserved by playing him as his age, not his size. Even while playing solid defense, he surprised everyone by hitting a 3 over me without hesitation. When the smallest kid does something cool, it always elicits a big reaction from his friends. I remember and understand this.

I was proud of him. But after that, the little guy wouldn’t score again.

A few of the other kids, however, went on a run of 3-pointers to take the lead. That was all they seemingly knew how to do—swing the ball around the perimeter and shoot from there. When I was their age, nobody tried to shoot 3s that much—we were too busy attempting the Slip n’ Slide. In truth, the game has changed drastically in the last 20 or so years, and playing against an entire team of youngsters drives this home.

After the teens took the lead, all of the 30-45 year-olds realized it was totally possible we could lose. And if we did, we would all have to leave in shame. But the thing about only shooting 3s is that if you don’t make them, you don’t have a chance. See the 2026 Boston Celtics, and this assembly of whippersnappers.

We swung the ball around and got it into the paint for a few easy buckets, unconvincingly asserting our will. A steal here, a rebound and putback there. I scored on a fast break and that’s about it. For as much as we play together, nothing our team put together was very impressive.

We won the game by a mere point. Driven by our brush with defeat by minors, we didn’t lose again.

Pride. What is it good for?

Beating teenagers on their day off from school.

GG.

-Paul

Tuesday, April 28th

Yesterday, one of my teammates, JT, blew up at us for not playing up to his expectations. A few times, actually. The biggest and final outburst came because nobody had crashed the boards for a big rebound but him. He swore at the top of his lungs, punched the mat on the wall under the hoop, then stormed off the court in the middle of a crucial play.

It was the final game of the day (always the most important one, like Game 7 for guys with beer bellies and back problems), and we were tied at game point. He eventually collected himself and came back into the game, which we promptly lost on a deep 3 after a miscommunication on a switch. He stormed off again, this time all the way out of the gym without changing his shoes or exchanging a dap.

If you’ve read this newsletter you know this is a fairly regular occurrence. Guys get pissed at their teammates all the time, myself included. But of all the ways someone can lose their cool on the court, firing verbal shots at your own team is probably the most difficult to process in the moment, or after the fact, whether you were the one getting yelled at by your own teammate or you were the one doing the yelling.

I’ve been on both sides. Experiencing either one could leave a stain on your entire day, even multiple days. As you replay the events in your mind, you’ll be left wondering either “What is wrong with me?” or “What is wrong with him?” Even if you’re justified, turning on your own team rarely leads to anything good. If you haven’t lost already, you probably will soon.

It has not been a peaceful week of basketball in Denver, either for its professional team, the Nuggets, or its rec center warriors.

As a result of their poor collective performance, Denver’s hoopers from Nikola Jokić on down are caught in a storm of frustration and finger-pointing. In the case of the Nuggets, who dropped Games 2-4 of the first round of the playoffs to the dreaded Timberwolves in calamitous fashion, there’s not a single person on the court or the coaching staff who doesn’t bear some responsibility. Except for Aaron Gordon — he gets a pass due to his kleenex-soft hamstring and his beautiful soul.

I have never seen the Joker look as stunned and hollowed out as he did at the end of Game 4. He looked like he’d spent several sleepless nights battling a malevolent wraith who had taken the form of a 7-foot Frenchman called Gobert.

I’m sure there was plenty of finger-pointing in the Nuggets locker room after those losses. I suspect it came to a head after Game 4. On the media side, the shitstorm of blame has been apocalyptic. People are talking about Jokić like his entire “legacy”, whatever that actually means, is suddenly on the line. The walls are closing in on green head coach David Adelman, whose demeanor in recent press conferences resembles that of a bank robber caught in the act of a heist. He’s gonna have to shoot his way out of this one.

During Games 3 and 4, my armchair psychological assessment was that the Nuggets were turning on each other in the face of adversity. After going to Game 5 last night and seeing them rally together for a dominant win behind Joker, I have some hope I was wrong.

In the hours after JT flipped out on us yesterday, the WhatsApp group chat for the pickup run started blowing up. The details aren’t important, but the big takeaway was JT apologizing for his outbursts. He said he’s gone to therapy for this type of thing in other areas of his life, and that he has limited his meltdowns to the court alone. The group rushed in to show their support and to say they weren’t offended by his intensity — which I agreed with. It was a nice show of self-awareness on JT’s part and genuine understanding from everyone else. In my experience, it’s not very common for guys to open up like that, especially after flipping out on the court in a potentially embarrassing way.

But it took a few hours for everyone to get to this point — for everyone to cool off and go through their respective process of reflection. And in our case, there is literally nothing at stake. The only thing that our performance in a pickup game can change is the other guys’ perception of our basketball prowess. That’s literally it.

We expect too much out of professional athletes. Not in the way we expect them to perform in their athletic arena — that’s exactly what we should expect of them, and probably the only thing. But what we expect of them in terms of emotional and mental maturity when they don’t perform. For some reason, we expect them to handle the emotions that come with failure faster or more efficiently than the rest of us, even though most of them are under 30 years old. This is why so many of them act like they don’t have any emotions at all — until they melt down on the court for all of us to see or smash their Maserati into a mailbox.

Part of becoming a better athlete is learning the difference between managing emotions and totally ignoring them. In something like the NBA playoffs, the stakes are so high (even if they’re fabricated for entertainment and profit, which of course they are), the first and easiest thing to do when shit hits the fan is blame people around you.

I think this Nuggets team is less mature than we thought they were. That goes for the coach, too. But that’s not a death sentence for a team, in part because maturity doesn’t actually make you better at basketball, and because it comes through experience and reflection. The gauntlet of a 7-game series offers plenty of opportunities for both. If they turned on each other in Games 2-4, they may have reached the point where there’s nobody left to blame. Sometimes exposing your own idiocy is the only way to move forward.

Professional athletes are just human beings with broader shoulders. Part of why I have always loved Nikola Jokić is that he’s so obviously human. So graceful, so frequently flummoxed. So oddly shaped. His humanity showed through a lot this past week, in the same way JT’s showed when he rage quit on his team with the game on the line.

JT turned his blowup into a chance to learn. I have no idea how it will turn out for Jokić and the Nuggets this year. For now, they still have a chance.

Gg.

-Paul

I first started playing pickup in Denver about six years ago, on Saturday mornings at the Carla Madison Recreation Center on Colfax because it was the only gym I knew of and the closest one to my apartment in Capitol Hill. I wasn’t great back then (I’m still not), but I needed a way to clear my head and exhaust my body in between the weeks teaching high school English in Northeast Denver.

In the months shortly after the worst of the pandemic, something about that gritty, dizzying teaching experience left me craving physical confrontation—with a degree of confidence that didn’t quite match my stature as a player.

This dissonance started to become addictive. I liked proving people who didn’t expect much of me on the court wrong, in the same way I wanted to prove a cynical, increasingly stupid world wrong through teaching and writing. Still trying to figure that one out, by the way.

I wanted the smoke, as they say. Most of it, at least.

Playing pickup on Saturday mornings on Colfax felt both idealistic and aggro, like jumping into a sort of sporty mosh pit. Here is where I learned a lot of the unwritten rules of pickup culture I often talk about in this newsletter, most of them without any direct communication or instruction from anyone there at the gym. I just kept showing up and figuring it out. It’s where I grew most of my confidence as a player. Lately I’ve been trying to find that confidence again, and it’s helpful to remember how far I came in those first couple years of playing.

Through the years playing at Carla, I’ve gotten to know a lot of people, some directly and some indirectly. Today, I played with two guys I’ve come to know quite well, for better or worse. Tim and James.

Saturday, April 18th, 10 a.m.

I’ve played with Tim and James more than almost anyone else at Carla Madison. Between the two of them, it has to be over 75 total games. Today, they were there as a pair, intensely warming up together before the run began. On the other half of the court, a group of women and non-binary hoopers were enjoying their scheduled weekly game, which I happen to know took them no small effort to get on Carla’s crowded program calendar.

I ended up on a team with both Tim (who I described in an earlier post as one of Denver’s pickup gatekeepers) and James, who I don’t feel like describing. I’ll let James speak for himself.

They were undoubtedly the two best players in the gym. After some initial confusion regarding teams, I was surprised, even shocked, that Tim willingly picked me up on their team. I guess six years of playing together is long enough to earn even that much respect, which is a little ridiculous when you think about it.

I was glad, sort of, because I knew we’d probably win every game, which meant we wouldn’t have to sit at all and I’d get the best workout in as little time as possible. This is usually my goal on Saturdays because I’m not putting off the workday.

But I was also ambivalent because I know Tim and James aren’t much fun to play with. They know they’re better than everyone else and treat their teammates more like opponents than partners. Miss an open shot or turn the ball over and Tim will throw his hands up, shout something discouraging, and walk up the court like you just kicked the ball and started doing the worm.

James speaks mostly in commands or through body language. His main objective is to win, I think, followed within inches by his objective to score every point himself.

I got my points in the only way that was really possible on the court with guys like this, which is through cutting, rebounding, and fast breaks. Typical Anderson fare. But even though I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and was in fact doing many of the intangible, necessary things quite well, Tim and James still found a way to become annoyed with me. They’re complaint was basically that I was running around too much and bringing my defender too close to their bubbles where they were each trying to iso. Whatever.

Nothing noteworthy happened between Tim, James, and myself today. We did win every game, and that’s exactly why nothing happened. I’ve gotten into it with both of them before, which is part of why we all tend to keep each other at an arm or two’s length. With Tim, it was nothing serious, though he did hold a grudge for several months.

But James and I have a history. If you read my Denverse piece (which I swear I’ll stop talking about as soon as I run out of things that connect to it), James is the guy who provided the most impactful line in the entire essay.

James is the one who called me a Goofy Ass Motherfucker.

That was about a year and a half ago. He said this, I think, because I was acting a bit too much like myself that day—too expressive, too emotive, too…goofy. What can I say? I am goofy. But he didn’t mean it in a good way. The way I heard it, he was trying to cut me down to size, implying I wasn’t a good, cool, or tough enough player to be out on the court with someone like him.

He thought I didn’t want the smoke. But I did.

I also think there was a homophobic undertone to the sneering way he said it. I’m not gay, but I know an insult meant to attack someone’s masculinity when I hear one. It’s part of why I responded by cracking him with an aggressive, shoulder-first screen on the next play, which sent James into a rage that almost spiraled into a full on fight.

I wasn’t totally proud of this altercation at the time. But I am now. I’ll tell you why.

Today, James confirmed what I’d suspected when he called someone near the court the f-slur. It wasn’t directed at anyone on the court, or even one person in particular, from what I could tell. He just shouted it into the air when he saw the curtain that divides the court into two halves descending from the ceiling, signaling that our game was over and that someone ostensibly complained about us playing full court. To James, this was reason enough to call whoever complained that word.

I’d be speculating to conclude he was directing it to the women and non-binary basketball group who were playing on the court before we started at 10. They weren’t present in the gym at the time he said this, but it’s not too far a leap he might have had them in mind. Either way, it doesn’t make it any less despicable who he was directing it towards.

I’m disappointed with myself that I didn’t say anything in the moment. It caught me off guard and I was on my way out. The three or four people around who heard him, including me, exchanged glances before his asinine conservation about the court closing down moved on. I left.

For the record, this was the first time I’ve heard someone say that word in close to a decade playing pickup in games that I would commonly describe as macho, even hyper-macho.

Next time, I’ll say something. For now I’m glad I stuck up for myself when he called me something that wasn’t nearly as bad. I’m glad I’d never heard that worse thing on a court in Denver until today. I’m glad that for the most part, James is an outlier.

I’ve played in Denver’s games long enough to feel some stake in what does and doesn’t fly on the courts. There’s a cultural relativity factor to this I can’t deny. But I don’t live or play ball anywhere else but here, and I feel a responsibility to protect what I think is a pretty open and positive basketball culture, on the whole.

On a lighter note,

Sometimes name-calling can be fun. In between games today, a younger guy I was playing against approached me.

“Hey O.G.”, he said, “Can I tell you something, respectfully?”

First, I love being called O.G. And I appreciate he asked me if he could say something first, which I knew was going to have something to do with my appearance.

"Go for it,” I said.

“You look like a white Ron Harper.”

I laughed out loud. Ron Harper was a role player for the Chicago Bulls in their later championship years. The fact this kid knew who he was at all is evidence that hoop culture and its history are alive and well.

I’ve been compared to a handful of bald NBA players before, usually by virtue only of being bald and white. The resemblance typically ends there.

But I have say, I can see it. Here’s Harp:

Saturday morning stats:

10 points

4 Assists

100 rebounds

3 steals

50 fuck you’s for James and 5 for Tim for good measure

Next time I see James and Tim, it’ll be my turn to keep them off my team. They don’t want to play with a goofy ass motherfucker like me anyway.

gg.

-Paul

April 14th

In last week’s post, I joked that some day I might discover that someone I play pickup with has been documenting the games we play in, offering an account that undermines or validates my recollection of the games. Part of that joke is rooted in my uncertainty about whether this topic (or almost any topic, for that matter) has any relevance or value to anyone beyond a small group of people who already enjoy and support my writing. If that’s you, thank you.

But that little joke came true this week.

A day after I published that, Instagram served up this article from The Denver Post: A hooper’s guide to pickup basketball in Denver. For a second I thought this was a scroll-induced hallucination. The title is eerily similar to the piece I published in Denverse Magazine just three months ago called Ball Is Life: A Dispatch from Denver’s Pickup Basketball Scene. I’m not going to speculate whether this writer — who actually organizes the Tuesday night game I play in and scored, like, 15 points on me last week — had wittingly or unwittingly lifted my idea for his article. His name is Sam and he’s a nice guy and a good hooper.

Even if he had lifted the idea, I think every writer has a right to write about whatever they want as long they write it themselves.

The nature of the two publications tells you almost everything you’d need to know about how the pieces differ. The Denver Post is a newspaper of some repute, and unless you’ve time-traveled to 1998 and have a column, most writers won’t get more than 250 words to talk about something that isn’t hard news or reporting. Denverse is like an upstart New Yorker of Denver, so culture and arts coverage comes first. Even the harder reporting has a sort of personal angle. Needless to say, Denverse is more my speed. (Stay tuned for something fun on that frequency soon…)

Looking back at the timeline now, he did in fact publish the article on the very day (April 7th) when he put 15 on my head, and I published my post with the joke about other writing hoopers the next day. I discovered his article the day after that.

The nature of the articles is totally different, but there is some overlap. One point in his 250-word piece is that it’s taken him years to find the perfect pickup game, which he refers to as “ethical basketball.” I wrote something similar in last week’s post (which I wrote before discovering his) about looking for a “satisfactory” game. He even mentions that basketball was always an antidote for natural nervousness, which is similar to what I said the week before (which I published after he probably started writing his) about how basketball could make life make more sense by making no sense.

So, maybe this just says that this writer and I have a few things in common. Which is cool.

But it also says something about how universal this whole pickup thing is, and that there actually may be an audience for writing about it. I genuinely believe that people who like sports can get tired of only reading and hearing about people who are absurdly, super-humanly great at them.

The irony is that being great at a sport does not make you good at talking about it. There are plenty of exceptions (Phil Jackson’s Sacred Hoops is one of the only books about basketball I’ve ever really enjoyed), but a lot of people would rather hear a good writer or analyst talk about sports than a good athlete. Look no further than the over-saturated market of unlistenable NBA player-podcasts, versus the podcasts from even decent basketball commentators.

Obviously, watching brilliant athletes play sports is superior to reading about sports, regardless of who’s writing. I can’t argue with what commands human attention.

But there’s something to be said for regular people writing emphatically about the things they love to do. I’m glad this writer got a chance to publish this in The Post, and I hope he keeps it up. I hope more people will write about things they love with verve and obsessive attention, rather than not write at all, or only write about things that are considered serious or significant.

As for that convoluted defense of my own account I mentioned last week, here’s a quick account of my game last Tuesday, when the writer Sam cooked me like a hot dog on July 4th.

April 7th. 7 p.m.

As soon as I got to the court I knew I didn’t have it. My body just felt completely off and exhausted. Before I knew it, I was missing easy shots. It felt like I was trying to run in a dream. Sam was hitting all kinds of tough ones. Even while playing terribly, I managed to limit my turnovers. On a rough day like this, limiting turnovers or defensive mistakes becomes my only goal. Because those errors are mental, which I can control even when my body isn’t pulling its weight.

I was playing so poorly that my teammates started to notice and basically stopped giving me the ball. This bothered me, though I understood it. But let the record show: I was not the only one missing shots and I was certainly not the one committing costly turnovers.

My only redeeming moment for the night was making a tough layup, through a foul, to win the second to last game. Attacking the rim and taking a shot like this required me to put my horrible play in the back of my mind for the moment, and I did. The battle for that night was to stay positive enough to take that shot. It’s probably the worst night of basketball I’ve played in 3 months, but because I wasn’t afraid to take it— and because I made it — it wasn’t that bad.

Sam, the other writer, was on an absolute heater all night. For all I know, it might have been his best night in a while. But I can’t say for sure. That’s his story to tell.

GG.

-Paul

Two weeks ago, I met a new group of guys at one of the rec centers in town where I typically work out on my own. They asked me to play that day, and, sensing that they were a coherent group, I asked about the details of the run. They’d been playing together three days a week for many years at the downtown Denver YMCA, but were displaced when they Y permanently closed a few months ago. Ever since, they’d been looking for the perfect gym to host their standing run, a wandering tribe of aging, nice-guy hoopers, but had struggled with the local rec center network due to its ever-shifting programs that frequently occupy the basketball courts during prime hooping hours.

Anyway, I liked the vibe of this crew right away and joined their group chat. I had been getting the feeling over the last year that I needed to find a less intense run, both in terms of physicality and in the group dynamics. What’s more, this game meets at noon, which I have yet to find anywhere in Denver and feels like a Godsend.

With a handful of significant life events on the near horizon, let’s just say I need to keep the drama of the 6 a.m. pickup community in perspective, and the tendons in my knees intact.

All the stars were aligning for this to be the perfect run. For the first four or five days of playing, it was. Competitive but not aggressive or over-macho games, a solid mix of ages and skill levels that made for a fairly harmonious, dare I say utopian style of pickup basketball.

Until today. Before I even start writing this, I’m going to admit I may come off as less than magnanimous in today’s games. I don’t know for sure because I haven’t processed it yet, and that’s part of what this journal is supposed to be—an honest account of what happened on the court, though obviously skewed by my own limited retelling of events. Maybe some day I’ll discover a parallel newsletter that recounts some of the games I’ve written about, and I’ll have to issue a long and convoluted defense of my version like Jon Krakauer in the later editions of Into Thin Air.

But probably not. So you’ll have to trust me. A few new faces showed up today. I guess one of them is sort of a regular, but from what I could tell he didn’t have the friendliest rapport with the rest of the group. He wasn’t alone—this guy, who appeared to be around 40, 6’4’’, and at least 230 pounds, brought his two grown sons with him as well.

My first thought was: cool. A dad showing his sons what an adult men’s pickup game looks like. Basketball is for everyone, and I welcome this opportunity to share the game with the next generation. After playing driveway hoops for over an hour with my family yesterday, I’ve been feeling warm and fuzzy about the game for a couple weeks now. How sweet of me.

Both of the sons were about as tall as their dad. The first one, who I overheard was home on spring break from college, was built like him. The other one looked to me to be a junior or senior in high school, but he was about 6’ 4’’ and lanky in the way kids who will soon be humungous usually are.

Playing basketball with high school or college-age dudes—and I’m going to say dudes because if you saw one of them, the word “kid” does not seem physically appropriate—can be a mixed bag. If they are serious players, they’re usually very athletic but fairly raw in terms of skill. I find “generation discourse” annoying, but there are several very clear indicators between basketball generations. The current rising crop are, from what I can tell, completely hamstrung by an obsession with iso-ball dribble theory that makes many of them valuable to your team for approximately one out of every 10 possessions, and completely useless for the other nine.

Now I sound exactly like the person I would like not to be, which is a crotchety old traditionalist.

But as the games got going, it became clear there was a specific dynamic at play. I’ll try to describe it. I was guarding the really tall kid. He was a tough assignment. Rangy and quick, but spastic and somewhat uncoordinated. He was flopping his body all around, flailing his head backwards in a way that can lead to bonking heads. He kept attempting a push-off that is very popular with a certain type of NBA guard right now, but he didn’t know how to do it so he was just throwing his forearm in your chest and fully extending to create space. The other one was super strong and tossing his body into people in the paint, a few times while they were in the air. Their dad was fouling heavily, too. All of them were handsy, which seems more acceptable from smaller players but feels stifling and unnecessary from big guys.

But this is part of the game. It seemed like it was just going to be one of those days—over-physical but not worth calling every single thing. The annoying part is that this makes for pretty ugly basketball that almost no one really enjoys. From what I can tell of this new run, it seems like most of the guys are after that elusive but attainable version of pickup—the satisfactory game.

The thing that started to really get to people was this: the dad was calling fouls on other people who were guarding his sons. As in, when I committed a plausible foul on his taller son, the one with that broccoli haircut everyone makes fun of, the dad called the foul on me, while his son merely uttered the sound “bruh.”

This is an absolute non-starter. A pickup commandment. You can not call fouls for other people.

After the second time this happened, I expressed strongly that the kid had to call his own fouls. The dad seemed to agree, at first, and barked to his boy: “Use your voice.”

Go, Dad. Solid parenting. But then, it kept happening. The kid, who was floppy by nature to begin with, started flailing his body around more and more, and his dad kept calling fouls for him.

Everyone was getting fed up with the way Thumper & Sons were fouling everyone on defense themselves, then running their own little family refereeing racket on the other end.

“We’ve got family members calling fouls now?” another guy said.

But due to all being over six three and their whacking people all over the court, they kept winning.

In the second to last game, as I was sitting on the bench trying to stay cool and not yell at a teenager, the best player in the gym made his voice heard. This guy, Ty, had been getting fouled hard all day. A strong athlete and great ball handler, he was getting to the rack often, only to meet hard contact from all sides.

I love it when a person who everyone else respects puts their foot down like this. “This is ridiculous,” he shouted, among other things. Everyone but papa bear and his cubs agreed. He responded with something I literally couldn’t understand because his barking was so deep and incoherent.

Then, after that game, dad approached Ty and suddenly broke into a big smile. “We good?” he said. Oh man. I’ve learned over the years that the fastest glad-hand on the court after a tiff is often the least genuine.

I’m being hard on this guy, I know. They were just doing their thing. That’s what a lot of basketball comes down to—people just doing their thing. But when that “thing” is so clearly at odds with what everyone else wants to do—which in our case is playing hard without hurting or fighting each other—I find the lack of awareness egregious.

This guy was trying to teach some kind of lesson to his big boys about being tough around grown men. I appreciate he was trying to teach them something, but it was unclear what the lesson was besides “Look how fun it is to kick someone’s ass.”

If they were better basketball players it would have been easier to accept getting beat by them. But if they were better basketball players they wouldn’t have had to foul and whine so much.

In the final game, while I was playing defense under the hoop, the college brother set a screen with his knees bent and splayed out, one of which collided with the side of mine and bent it inward. Nothing pisses me off in pickup more than someone doing aggressive shit with their lower body in the paint, because that is how you injure people. People get hurt unintentionally often enough, and funny business with your hips or legs makes it significantly more likely to happen. I had to walk it off for a minute and am still feeling it as I write this.

The next play, the dad called a ticky-tack foul while going to the rim on a guy half his size.

“If you’re playing football out here” I yelled, my frustration finally boiling over, “you can’t call that bullshit.”

“Play better defense,” the kid goes. As a former high school teacher, I’ve heard every illogical comeback you can imagine. So I let this go.

But after I narrowly missed a 12-footer the next play, he yelled “Nice shot!”

Lazy trash talk. I glared at him and tried to laugh it off, probably unconvincingly.

I shouldn’t be affected by the behavior of someone half my age. But basketball brings a lot of things to the present—for me, it brings many athletic moments to the present. Including playing against guys who are dicks. I don’t blame the kid for picking up the energy his dad was putting down. If anything, seeing the two generations play together felt like a microcosm of the toxicity you see in men in other moments in life. It’s all inherited.

But at the end of the day, I’ve seen a lot worse on the court. Daps were still exchanged, but not happily from me. I’m not a fan of the fake nice guy routine between games, but that’s cultural.

I don’t believe basketball reveals character, like all those moralizing coaches would like to believe. At most, it reveals characteristics. But what is often great about pickup is that everyone brings their own agenda and channels it into a game—into the common goal of competing at something.

The shared goal of this family team didn’t align with what everyone else was going for, which was basically a satisfactory game of basketball. They were after something else—something more about their family unit than the game. But nobody got hurt, so it came out fine in the end. They’d probably say they were just trying to win.

Well, congrats. You win.

gg.

-Paul

I started this journal a couple months ago as just that—a journal. Lately I’ve been pushing it a little further, digging into each entry for an insight that feels valuable to people reading who don’t care about pickup basketball—which is to say, almost everyone.

If you can believe it, The Pickup Journal has yet to make waves in the broader pickup basketball online community. That has more to do with the way people consume information about the things they’re interested in than it does about the quality of this newsletter, I think. Most of the time, people would rather watch something about basketball than read about it. Unless, of course, the writing delivers something that other forms of content can’t. And I think this format can offer something valuable.

But I’m also aware that constantly digging for valuable or universal insights is one of the quickest ways to make your writing totally insufferable.

I do think basketball frequently reveals fundamental truths about the world, and offers moving metaphors for many things, and is generally fun to talk about, but I don’t necessarily think it’s any more valuable than any other pursuit, and I don’t think you can always count on it to reveal truths about yourself or about the world.

Without getting too inside baseball (a term which I have never liked, because it’s obscure enough that it commits the mistake it describes), I’m aware I’m skirting the edge of one of my Danger Zones as a writer. It’s the zone of self-righteousness and insight mongering; of constantly turning every little thing into a lesson or an insightful narrative; of always having a point.

In my 20s, I was neck-deep in what I’m going to call insight quicksand. I was working at some weird intersection of publishing, academia, and post-Christian intellectualism (which now bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the Trad movement), and every part of my life was built around creating and navigating different narratives and poignant insights that made people go “hmmm” at literary readings. There were other chemical factors at work, but I can say now that all that narrativizing and insight manufacturing almost drove me crazy. Seriously.

Interestingly, this was around the time I started playing pickup basketball regularly. I played a couple times a week at LA Fitness in running shoes after working out, in between teaching writing classes at a nearby university, working at a trendy bakery, and trying to write a novel.

I was terrible but relentlessly active. At first, I hated how chaotic and difficult it was. How I could play for two hours and not know what the hell just happened—whether I played well (I didn’t), whether I was improving (I was), or whether it was worth it to keep playing (I don’t know). I did know, however, that my body was completely spent after playing, so much so that it slowed down my racing mind, and that despite my confusion, I wanted to play again.

As a person who constantly creates stories in his head, basketball was suddenly the one thing that resisted my powers of narrativization. You could say that’s because basketball is simple—in many ways, it is.

But you could also say it mirrors the complexity, even the chaos, of being alive.

Watch a ball that looks like it’s going in rattle around a rim, float out, and then get tipped by someone’s outstretched thumb to fall perfectly through the net and you will understand. Watch a 50-year-old get hot from deep and suddenly transform into his younger, nimbler self and you will understand. Watch an ankle fold under a bag of flour’s weight and you will understand. Watch Jokić pirouette like a bear who took ballet and find a teammate in the corner without ever seeing him and you will understand.

In this way, basketball saved my life. I’m kidding. That’s one of the ridiculous narrative statements people use to describe something indescribable. Here’s another way of putting it:

By making no sense, basketball made life make more sense.

There I go again, making a point.

Basketball made no sense this week. I thought I was coming out of a shooting slump only to go 0 for 6 from three again on Thursday. I thought I’d put aside my frustration with my rival Ken, only for him to piss me off for the way he set up teams in his favor, as he has been doing lately.

I thought I’d hit a plateau of enjoyment with my different runs, only to meet a new group of nice guys at a separate rec center on Friday who asked me to join their mid-day game that meets three times a week, and to find ample joy in the simplicity, rigor, and rhythm of the game, again.

More on that new run next week.

For now, I’ll sign off without a point.

GG.

-Paul

It was an average week of basketball, in that it was a completely mixed bag of ugly and fun games, missed shots, made shots, high fives, frustrating exchanges, and open cuts. By cuts, I mean that I made a lot of hard cuts to the basket, and also that I cut my right middle finger pad by swiping at the ball and hitting the dribbler’s hand. It quickly started spewing an impressive amount of blood. I probably should have subbed myself out to retrieve a band-aid, but it was a close game and I was desperate for something to go right.

I ended up getting speckles of blood on everyone I encountered and all over the floor, so for this week, I can actually say I left my blood and sweat on the court. Plus, I made the shot to win it over my nemesis Ken, so it was worth it.

But I don’t really want to write about those games this week. I want to write about a game from the past.

Basketball, like any activity that stands outside of the flow of our everyday lives, has a way of burning an imprint in the flow of memories. I’ve already talked about getting older in this newsletter, and that will probably continue. I talked to a guy at the court today who is 22 and another who is 30, who said “Jesus!” when I said I’m 35. Of course, it’s all relative. But relative to 22, 35 is old. Lucky for me, I play basketball, which, I contend, keeps me young.

Anytime we talk about aging we’re only a euro-step away from talking about time and how we process it. How it seems to speed up the older and busier we get, and how certain periods of our lives appear to have moved slower or quicker than others. Basketball has a way of slowing down time mostly through the sheer presence of mind and body required to play at all.

What I’m trying to say is that I remember basketball games more clearly than I remember other parts of my life.

Is that normal? I don’t know. Is it good or bad? Don’t care. Since it slows down time, my basketball memories are mostly fresh and vivid. Briefly looking back on them opens up doors to other insights and feelings I may have forgotten from the moments around the games.

So, every now and then, I’m going to write about a pickup game from the past. If you’re looking through the PJ archives at any point, these ones will be titled as Run It Back entries.

Run It Back: June 13th, 2024, 15:00

Lisbon, Portugal.

I was two weeks into a 5-week trip in Europe, heading south after some time in northern Portugal—half of which I spent with friends in the surf town of Peniche, and the other half alone in Porto—to an 8-day stint working for free at a vineyard in exchange for lodging in a large tent with an outdoor shower, produce to cook in the outdoor kitchen, and wine to drink from the previous year’s harvest as the sun went down over the farm.

I had the afternoon and evening in Lisbon to myself before finishing the journey to the vineyard in Aljezur the next day. Normally I would have wandered around a big museum and sat in a café to fill the time, but after a week alone in Porto, something about that seemed lonelier than I could handle.

So I decided to do the least lonely thing I could think of: play basketball.

I searched for a court on google maps and walked a mile or two through 90 degree heat until I found it, half-expecting to find it empty. It was painted all sorts of bright colors and surrounded by a metal cage. But it was a full court with 10-foot rims and to my infinite surprise, it was full of people playing pickup.

I couldn’t tell how old they were or what language they were speaking. The answer was many. And here was the amazing thing. When I walked up, I started by tentatively speaking English and asked if I could play. No one seemed to speak English themselves, but they knew what I was asking. They waved me over and I jumped right in.

I wrote in my Denverse piece that joining a pickup game is like stepping into a river that was flowing before you found it. That’s what this felt like, maybe more than ever before. Soccer is the only other sport that functions like this around the world, as far as I know, but outside of these two games, I don’t know of any other human activity where this happens. Places of worship, maybe, but there are some prerequisites there, and wearing shorts is typically frowned upon.

We played for a couple hours. The rims were four inches thick and netless, and some of the guys playing were really just tall teenagers, it turned out, and they could barely dribble let alone shoot. And that’s fine. Because they wanted to play.

That’s the first and most important rule of pickup, in my view. If you want to play, no matter your skill level, you can. It’s the only prerequisite. If people had turned me away when I first started playing in my early 20’s, I would have used the rejection as an excuse to never come back, and for all I know you would be reading The Pickleball Journal right now. Consider yourself spared.

There were some ballers out there, too. One from Belgium, one from the Netherlands, and one from somewhere in east Africa. The Belgian was about my age, which made me feel less awkward about being there. It was good this happened because I’d been having that thought almost once a day throughout the trip—am I too old for this? Is it getting weird that I’m out here on another aimless trip abroad? Do these international teens find me strange?

These guys had done the same thing I had done and found somewhere to play on a sweltering June afternoon, maybe because they were looking for the same thing I was, which was a simpler reason to speak to people than the ones I could find as a traveler so far.

Basketball simplifies communication. In doing that, it relieves alienation. It makes you feel less lonely, in other words.

The games went on without conflict, except for a few hard fouls from the Dutchman and some of the teenagers. Fouling really is a spectrum, it turns out. My opinion of what is or isn’t a foul is as limited and subjective as anyone else’s.

The Belgian and I realized after a couple games that we were roughly equal in skill and size, so we matched up against each other and split the younger guys, all from probably at least six different countries between them, into even teams. You could tell that some of them had mostly played soccer in their lives. They moved in straight lines rather than curves or cuts around the court. When fast breaks happened, a few seemed to be trying not to go offsides.

One of my teammates was about 6’6’’ and as skinny as a light post. I pointed to the paint under the hoop and told him “Go there.” He followed my order and I lobbed a soft pass to him, which he bobbled and dribbled once before leaping straight up, easily clearing both hands above the rim to drop the ball softly through without touching any metal. He could have dunked but chose not to, which is like choosing— actually, I don’t know what it’s like because I can’t fathom making such a choice.

Basketball is the same everywhere, but half of how we know it in the States is just culture manifesting itself in various dribbling combos. The crossover is an American invention. The game evolves around those movements, which makes each place’s version of the game its own cultural artifact.

Sorry to go all Frankfurt School on your ass. That’s what you might call a Writer’s Crossover.

My contribution as an American from Colorado was playing in hiking shoes that slipped all over the painted court and a white cotton henley t-shirt I sweated through down to my belly button, along with some saucy footwork I learned from watching DeMar DeRozan. My Belgian counterpart, who said his favorite player was Allen Iverson, smoked a cigarette between each game and offered me one when we were finished like it was some kind of smokeable Gatorade.

I partook, felt my knees buckle, then promptly sat down on a bench like I meant to do that. Daps were exchanged. An even larger group showed up at the court to play soccer and the basketball players dispersed like birds from a power line into the city.

I walked back across Lisbon in the sweltering heat, buzzing.

The game doesn’t translate. It has its own language.

GG.

-Paul

Tuesday, March 10th. 7 p.m.

I arrive about 15 minutes early to the school for gifted creative children, which gives me plenty of time to warm up. That is, if I had my own ball or if the equipment closet in the gym wasn’t locked. So, I warm up mostly by stretching and bouncing up and down on each foot, assessing how my body feels in the process.

After about 10 minutes, the physical signs are pointing to: not very good.

Which isn’t surprising—I fought off a small cold over the weekend, which usually knocks out my cardio and my lungs for a solid two weeks. As I start to get my heart rate up, I feel a burn in my throat and at the top of my lungs with each inhale. It’s going to be a rough night, I can tell, but I haven’t exercised hard in five days.

I know it will hurt and I want it to. Because when it hurts, that means my body is sending me rational signals I can hopefully understand and work through, both during the game and in the following days as I ease myself back into shape.

While I’m stretching, one of the guys from the group, Jack, approaches and informs me that he started plyometrics recently and is feeling the effects big time.

“I was jumping up and down onto park benches and stuff,” he says. “Trying to get my legs back. It’s killer.”

I know exactly what he’s talking about and can’t help but wince a little inside. I went through an intense commitment to plyometrics—which I will describe as high intensity intervals of psychotic hopping—a couple years ago.

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It started when I watched a few Instagram videos about dunking after the age of 30, and before I knew it, I was in the park near my house hopping onto benches and doing one-legged jumps in the shape of a star three times a week. It’s one of those things that feels so awkward and difficult you figure it must be doing something.

A few weeks later, while doing alternating split-squat jumps at the park, I threw out my back so violently I had to crouch-walk home, passing a group of teens on the way who probably just figured I had fully shit my shorts.

My thinking, which I now understand was heavily influenced by the crafty editing and punchy voiceover of said videos, was that if I don’t increase my vertical enough to dunk a basketball or at least grab the rim by the age of 35, I never will. But here’s the truth: deep down I knew it wouldn’t work. I’m 5’10’’, which means I’d need to achieve a vert of somewhere around 32 inches to dunk comfortably. As it stands, mine’s around 26, and adding six inches to your vertical at any stage of life other than puberty is basically impossible.

The guy who confessed this to me is about 5’8’’. Now, he didn’t say that he’s trying to increase his vert enough to dunk. But I could tell by the look in his eyes he’s trying to come clean about the fact that he feels like he’s losing his athleticism, and he wants to do something about it.

Maybe he only tells me this because he gets the impression I’m the same type of guy—by which I mean normal but also sort of crazy—who worries he may be unwittingly approaching a cliff. A cliff where the small amount of athleticism he had in the first place, which allowed him to play in semi-competitive games like this, to play sports in high school and maybe even in college, would suddenly and irrevocably disappear like Wile E. Coyote when gravity kicks in and pulls him into a canyon.

I could also conclude, and maybe I’m reaching here, that he tells me this because he thinks I’m doing a decent enough job of maintaining mine.

“How old are you?” I ask.

“33,” he replies. “And I’m feeling it.”

“I know what you mean,” I say. “That’s when I started to feel it.”

Is there something I’m forgetting about that particular age? Or someone?

I’m 35 and feel much better now—more flexible, fit, and bouncy—than when I was hopping one-legged all over the park two years ago. That’s due to a combination of factors. Maybe plyometrics did help in some way, at least in forcing me to stretch on an almost-daily basis after throwing out my back. Truth be told, lifting weights consistently has done more to relieve my back issues—and maintain, even improve, my athleticism—than doing the Instagram Influencer Shuffle. Running, too.

I don’t say this to criticize. This guy, Jack, is a bucket. So he has every right to fight to keep the spring in his step.

But for me, the whole plyometrics thing felt more like a battle against nature than a holistic basketball or fitness regimen, and not just because I got hurt while doing it. It also came from a flawed understanding of what I bring the table as basketball player in the first place. Explosiveness was never a part of my game—quickness, maybe, and speed that mostly derives from stamina—but extending my vertical by a few inches would have done next nothing to improve my game, my longevity, or my overall health.

Anyway, back to tonight. For me, every skilled movement depends on stamina. Especially shooting. If I’m sucking wind or my legs are burning, there will be bricks. So, with the cold, I was gassed and missing anything longer than 12 feet. But when I know the reason why I’m shooting poorly, it’s much easier to handle.

This is where basketball fitness becomes a a self-reinforcing loop—the signals my body sends, both during and after the games, are the ones that matter. Not people on the internet. That goes for me, too, if you’re reading this and are on your own fitness journey of some kind. Don’t listen to me.

It was a slightly below average night. But I consider it a win because I heard and understood what my body was telling me throughout the games, and played within those limits.

lesson learned

The game is the lesson 
the body is the teacher 
Open the doors 
and see 

all the people 

I went 0/6 from 3 and stopped shooting after that. But I made a lot of sweet passes, along with one of the toughest fast break layups I can remember making like, ever, faking a dish before I took off, absorbing contact through my left side as I went up, then scooping the ball as far out with my right hand as I could to lay it high and soft off the glass.

At 33, my body was starting to send me a lot of alarming signals—but they were normal. I misinterpreted them and allowed amateur internet trainers to trade on my insecurity, rather than look for solutions right in front of me.

The last two years of basketball have been about learning to listen to and work with what my body is trying to tell me—in the way I train, play, and recover. In the entire way I approach the game.

Writing this out clarifies one thought more than any other, which is that mobility is a gift, and even modest athleticism is a fancy little bow on top of it. None of it’s guaranteed. None of it will last forever.

GG.

— Paul

Tuesday, Mar 3rd, 7 p.m.

Night game. This is a completely different run than the one I’ve recounted so far in this journal. It’s once a week in the gym of a progressive primary school for creative children out in Aurora.

Despite this, it draws a gruff though generally friendly group of guys. It’s an organized game that runs for two hours with an Evite, a cap at 15 players, and a $5 dollar entry fee.

All of this makes the games competitive and somewhat tense. Not in the ‘tell someone to shut the fuck up’ sort of way, but in an ‘avoid glaring mistakes that might make your team lose’ sort of way, eg. airballs, ugly turnovers, defensive blunders, etc. Make more than one of these and you may not see the ball again for the night. For me, runs like this aren’t the most intimidating to step into, but, as someone who overthinks the stakes of paid recreational activities, they may be the hardest to adjust to.

As the teams formed and the games began, it was clear it would be a competitive night. On my first move to the basket I was blocked enthusiastically from behind, on the next I had it poked away while crossing over. I wouldn’t be handling the ball or shooting as much as I normally do.

This is how it always used to be, seven or eight years ago, when I first started playing with grown ass men, by which I mean experienced pickup basketball players. As someone who’d never played competitively, it was the only way to make myself valuable on the court.

Pass. Defend. Rebound. Hustle.

I’ve always been something of a hustle guy. A glue guy. A try-hard, as the zoomers might put it. The origins of this are murky. Mostly it’s just how I’m wired. But I can say pretty comfortably that part of my hustle-first approach to sports as a kid, and even as a younger adult, was based on belief in the principle that giving 100% is the most important ingredient for success—that hustle had a predictable end point.

But through a series of large and small disappointments from the age of 14 onward, which are surely no worse than those of any human being, I no longer believe this. What can I say? I’m not a kid anymore.

Back to the night game—guys are yelling. Every game is close. Mistakes are loud and consequential. Of course, I’m not the only one making them, which shouldn’t matter but does. I’m settling in but still not contributing as meaningfully as I know I can. We lose a game and have to sit.

These days, I don’t wear the hustle guy label as a badge of honor in the way I used to—at least not all the time. Part of the reason I’ve worked on my game so much is because I wanted to experience a wider swath of the basketball spectrum—not just the thankless little sliver reserved for average, high-effort players.

It looked exceedingly fun to make a turnaround fadeaway jumper off the glass, and I wanted to know what that felt like. I wanted to improve my game beyond hustle-pass-rebound-defend. I wanted to “mature” in basketball, as one of those hooper influencers would put it.

Despite maturing in ways I’ve already mentioned in this letter, the thing about playing pickup basketball as a grownass man with other grownass men is that it reveals, maybe better than it does anything else, that we are still kids.

On the bench after the loss, I had a moment where I disassociated for a second and heard the squeaking of shoes and watched the flailing of limbs with a kind of sweaty non-attachment, and suddenly it occurred to me how goofy and amazing it is to just get together with a group of near-strangers and play.

High on the wall above the court, colorful flags display the names of the creative children who attend the school: Landon, Sadie, Jackson, Jax. On the court, guys shout each other’s names: Matt! Mike! John; Joe.

I know this isn’t an original thought in the slightest. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to carry a sense of whimsical playfulness into reality, or into a game that feels intimidatingly intense. As I sat there on the bench taking it in, I wondered what I could do to keep that feeling for the rest of the night.

The irony is that if you try to actualize this idea while you’re actually playing, you undermine the feeling you’re seeking.

You want to feel the way you did as a kid, when nothing mattered besides the game—for time to stop moving. And when you focus completely on the game itself, it works. Time stops; whimsy returns.

But when you think about wanting to be a kid, you step outside of the game and outside of yourself. Out of the moment. Then you’re just trying to play like a kid, which is almost worse than playing like an over-serious adult, because by overcorrecting you may actually become more sloppy and careless and bad. What you need to do—and by you, I of course mean me—is be the kid.

For me, being the kid means hustling. Cutting to the basket. Boxing out hard and diving for loose balls. Because that’s who I was as a kid: a scrappy little grunt.

This particular set of games called for me to be that version of myself. It called for me to be the player, the kid, who hustled and rebounded and played defense because he believed it was the only way to make a difference.

Tonight, it did. I can’t remember how many points I scored because the night turned into a blur of intense effort after that. It was around 14. I know I picked off a pass under the hoop and took it coast to coast at a dead sprint and had to take two plays off after to catch my breath. I know I ended up on the floor twice, streaks of sweat in the spots where my body slid, and that every point I scored came from within three feet of the hoop. All layups off cuts, fast breaks, and putbacks.

It can be frustrating to be demoted to the role of hustle guy in advanced age. I know my bag is deep enough for a bigger role. Banking a fadeaway does in fact feel amazing. But there is a freedom that comes with doing the simplest and most familiar thing, the thing I did before I knew how to do anything else.

After the run, I talk about Chicago with two guys also from there—cold weather; basketball; tavern style pizza.

Nobody acknowledges it, but we all know what we’re actually talking about. We’re just talking about childhood.

GG.

Thursday, March 5. 6 a.m.

Nothing important to report today other than that I didn’t get in a fight or slip into a rhapsodic fugue state on the sidelines.

8 points

1/4 from deep

2/4 Wins

0 fights or fugue states

Gg.

-Paul

Tuesday, February 24th. 6 a.m.

I’ve wondered if believing you have a nemesis is a sign of mental illness. To have one in the first place, you need a personality that is confrontational, if not fully adversarial. Then again, a person who goes around picking fights with people, or provoking people into picking fights with him, probably has so many foes that he doesn’t give any individual one of them enough respect to count them as a nemesis.

On the other hand, someone who’s inclined to confrontation but doesn’t seek it out, who dwells on small conflicts for far too long after they happen, who practices comebacks in the shower, is more likely to deem someone their personal nemesis. I’m one of those people.

I have a basketball nemesis.

His name is Ken*. I mentioned in a recent letter that I was relieved one morning when Ken wasn’t there. The first thing I do when I arrive for each game at 5:40 is scan the gym for him. For the last three or so years, he’s been there a little over half the time. This morning, we walked into the gym at the same time. We did not exchange a nod.

Ken is not an obviously aggressive or physically intimidating person. Guys like this usually aren’t. What he is, though, is tough. Intense. And pretty small—an inch or two shorter than me. I’ve heard, though never confirmed, that Ken is some sort of crime scene investigator or lawyer for the local PD. Or something like that. With the swagger to match. Even before seeing him play, it’s easy to tell that he runs the show. Or he believes he does, which is almost the same thing. Because the person who fully believes they are in charge is the one in charge—at least in pickup basketball.

Without recounting every dustup we’ve ever had, I’ll just say that Ken and I have had a contentious relationship since the first day I started playing in this particular morning run. I hesitate to call it a relationship, because I don’t think Ken thinks of me until we’re arguing or playing against each other. I try not to think of him much either.

Ken is an excellent player. A lefty. A point guard, a shooter, and a lock down defender. An asshole, sometimes. Though highly efficient, his game is not especially graceful or creative.

Which doesn’t matter—this isn’t art school. (Please message me personally if you have experience playing pickup basketball at art school. I’d love to hear your story.)

This pickup run sets up teams by matching up with the person who is roughly your size and skill level. Mostly by virtue of our size, Ken and I almost always end up on opposite teams, guarding each other. But skill-wise, I have to admit he’s a much better player than me.

The rivalry, one-sided though it may be, has grown over time. In my time playing basketball, I’ve had more arguments with Ken than any single person—probably more than all of the arguments put together. Usually they’re over calls. At some point, Ken got it in his head that I call a soft foul. So, every time I call one, he loudly registers his disgust. Even when he’s not involved in the play.

Needless to say, this is annoying, even aggravating. Accepting that he gets under my skin, though, has been the most important aspect of leveling the disparity between us. Another regular once told me after an intense day between Ken and myself that I play better against him. I’m not sure if this is true, and it hasn’t always been the case, but the truth is that I absolutely play harder against him, and that he has made me a stronger player over time.

Part of having a nemesis, I think, is pushing each other forward. I’m not sure if I push Ken in any way other than making it harder for him to score than usual. For the most part, that’s been enough.

Until today. Today, I got a taste of the other side, beating Ken in both of the two games we played against him—and both on game-winners from yours truly. And oh how sweet the sound of Ken cussing under his breath as he walked his ass off the court.

With almost 20 people in the gym, his team had to wait not one but two games before getting back on the court. When we met them again, Ken was looking to win. Instead of playing conservatively on offense like I normally do when he guards me, I took every open shot and lane I could find.

And they were falling. Falling like stars on a summer night. Like fresh snow into a bucket. Like goose shit onto Ken’s head.

I’m boasting. And exaggerating. It wasn’t really that many shots–three 3’s and a couple long 2’s, over two games. But coming off a shooting slump for the last couple weeks, they felt good. Along with holding him to a bucket or two, the plus/minus between us leaned heavily in my favor.

I doubt Ken will lose any sleep over the game-winners I splashed on his head this morning. Neither will I. I’ll be too busy dreaming about them.

GG and sweet dreams.

-Paul

Everyone is a lawyer

Monday, March 2nd. 6 a.m.

Maybe writing about how I sank a game-winner over my rival last week was bad karma, because it came back around to me again in the form of an argument as intense as any I’ve had in probably a year. And yes, you guessed it. It was with Ken.

Here’s what happened.

My teammate went to the rim. Ken and another player contested the shot. Shot goes up, doesn’t fall, and sometime in the time between when he went up the first time, secured his own rebound, and put it back in to score from a foot away, Ken called a foul. My guy—the offensive player—didn’t call a foul, and said so.

Ken says: doesn’t matter. I called the foul. Meaning, because I said I fouled you on the first shot, the bucket doesn’t count.

I’ll also point out it was a big point, after several 50/50 calls that Ken forced through in his team’s favor by way of his authoritarian fist over the game, and over the guys who’ve played with him for many years and know it’s not worth it to argue with him.

Every pickup game is built on one foundational rule: call your own fouls. As in, when you are fouled by someone else. Some runs also follow an additional, secondary rule: try to admit your fouls when you commit them. Honor system—you get it. This morning run claims this rule.

But this secondary rule can be abused. It’s premised on the idea that you can’t admit/call your own foul if the offensive player doesn’t agree. This one was such a fast play that to stop it in the middle without consent from both players is breaking the spirit of the rule. If the secondary rule takes precedence over the foundational “call your own fouls” rule, then you can tap someone on the shoulder on a fast break, say you fouled them, and stop the play.

So, Ken yells “That’s not how we play here.”

I say, “Do you play pickup anywhere but here?”

Because that doesn’t fly anywhere else. It doesn’t fly in that same gym on the weekends. What Ken is saying is that the people who play in that run consistently have an unwritten code that everyone must follow. A code of which he is the judge.

We’re jawing back and forth. I’m triggered, I’ll admit.

“We heard you,” Ken snaps. “Now shut up.”

Well excuuUuuse me.

Could I have let the call go? Sure, and I probably should have. But I think when people cave too easily to a person like Ken, especially in a group setting, it’s in part because they don’t want to catch the heat from him. Maybe they don’t enjoy being told to shut up at six in the morning. Which—understandable. But I also think that some guys—especially in the friendlier runs—don’t push back because they don’t want to come off as difficult or unlikeable themselves.

Ken is comfortable being unlikeable—which is part of why he gets to wear the role of judge. I don’t want to be the judge of anything. But also I don’t want guys like Ken to get the role by steamrolling everyone else.

That was during our final game. Up to that point, all of them had been close. We’d split 2/2. Tied at game point, I’m guarding Ken. I get screened on the left. Too slowly, I switch onto the other guy. He shoots over me, I contest. It falls.

Ken shouts: yippee, oh boy, woohoo!

Daps are begrudgingly exchanged. On the bench, I tell Ken, “When we’re arguing about a call, don’t tell me to shut up.”

He mutters a half-apology. But as he grabs his bag and walks out he says, “You know that’s not how we play here.”

gg.

-Paul

*Footnote: I change the names of all the people in this newsletter. If you think you recognize yourself, please take your inclusion as a sign of respect. It means you or your game made a strong enough impression for me to want to write about it. If I say something critical—which I reserve the right to do; this isn’t church league—just do what all the great hoopers claim to do and use it as fuel for our next encounter on the hardwood. Take it as respect. And take it personally. Lord knows I do.

Today was not my finest, nor my worst day of basketball. A couple weeks ago, however, there was a game that I may have considered the worst I’ve ever played in my own Modern Era.

This is the era after I crossed the threshold from a medium liability player to a pretty good player. In that era, I’ve largely overcome the catastrophic performances that once descended on me roughly every fourth time I played. It was the recurrence of these days that pushed me to play more frequently, not less, and to actually, intentionally practice on my own to improve my game. There was a dilemma I couldn’t deny: either I had to get significantly better or I had to quit playing basketball altogether.

Somehow, through training at the small rec center in my neighborhood two to three days a week for about five months, I improved at nearly every aspect of the game. The biggest improvements were in my finishing at close range and my jump shot. The rest came from actually playing—those are the intangibles, and you can’t get better without improving your IQ and feel for the game. And confidence, which is the most important thing, comes through both playing and training.

Like I said, I had one of those catastrophic, pre-Modern Era days a couple weeks ago. I blame the food poisoning that hadn’t quite settled on me yet by morning. Until that day, I thought I’d put games like these behind me once and for all. Not just because I’ve gotten better, but because I’ve built up my ability to not be debilitatingly flustered by them when they start to happen.

Catastrophic games happen when you start panicking because you’re not playing well. You miss your first five shots and think there’s something suddenly, irrevocably wrong with you. It’s around this moment when people start to notice that you’re not playing well either—or so you think. And this is where the spiral starts.

So, I started off today by missing my first five or six shots. My excuse is that I got to the gym four minutes before the game started, so I didn’t get a warm-up in. When that happens, the chances of missing the first handful of shots, especially if they’re jumpers or mid-range—anything that doesn’t involve the backboard—are high. So it shouldn’t be all that surprising when it happens. And yet it never feels good, especially when it’s hurting your team.

We lost that game and had to sit. I kept moving to stay warm and to breathe through whatever was starting to flare up. Deep breathing is, from what I can tell, the only way to stop my brain from completely running amok. I’m still just getting the hang of it.

When we came back on, we had a bit more of a flow. I found my way to an open space in the lane, and our point guard found me for a behind the back bounce pass. I snagged it and, with some nerves still tensing up my arms, laid it in. I almost smoked it though–that’s what happens when your nerves take over. Everything goes tight, and the easiest shots become the hardest to make.

But I made it, which broke the tension. It doesn’t fix it, but it does enough to put things in perspective and settle me down. So, after that, the day proceeded more or less the same as it often does, with a few more missed layups than I care to admit. A couple bunnies. My shot from deep also felt wonky, but I can usually blame that on age-related factors, e.g. stiffness, soreness, and baldness.

Just kidding about the last one. By virtue of resembling it, being bald actually strengthens your connection to the ball.

Over the years, I’ve noticed that I tend to start games stiffer than many other guys. Natural hoopers are naturally loose and don’t seem to take as much time to find their rhythm—they just have it. There’s a slinky, easy quality about the way they move and handle the ball. Some of this is a learned skill masquerading as natural talent, but usually it’s a little of both.

Whatever silkiness there is to my game is learned. I was a runner in college and a football player before that, which doesn’t explain anything other than that I’m not a natural basketball player. Nor am I a gifted athlete. I’m a sporty guy—no more, no less.

But it is my quest to become a hooper. And a hooper plays with ease and finesse.

On a day like this, ease can only come through letting go of the idea that you are going to have a great day. You also can let go of the idea that there will be consequences to having a bad day–which is somehow more difficult to do. When things start to slip, some part of you is actually craving a confrontation over your poor play—as if someone is going to yell in your face to snap out of it. But like in life, those moments rarely come. Catharthis, whether positive or negative, is usually not external.

A basketball catastrophe is exacerbated by a desire for a catharsis that never comes. The actual relief comes in accepting that no matter how badly you play, there are no actual consequences. Ironically, this is when the internal catharsis tends to come.

In the final game, after missing my first six 3’s of the day, I splashed one in the corner that extended our lead to a point where the other team couldn’t catch up. It felt good, if only because it turned it all into a wash. Nothing that happened before mattered. But the win didn’t matter much, either.

A pickup game is a story we live only once, in the moment, and then it’s gone. After that we’re just telling it.

Good game. GG.

-Paul

Thursday, February 19th. 6 a.m.

Tim, the Multi-Tool Player

All that talk of catastrophic days must have spooked me, because I had one today. Once again there were 20 guys—where in this country can you get 20 guys to do anything at the same time except drink beer?

I have been playing well around the rim. Finding seams to the lane, creating angles, and making enough space to give myself open looks. The problem is that I’m only making about half of those easy shots I’m creating for myself. Which isn’t bad, but when you factor in that I’m not making ANY jumpers at all lately, the percentage tanks. And when the percentage slips, so does my confidence.

I wish I were coming to you with better news about my play today, especially considering it was the morning before taking off on a 3-day bachelor party weekend with one of my groomsman, Mike. We’ll be living out our version of Sideways in Santa Barbara wine country. It’s called Sideways 2: Two Giamattis.

Rather than dwell on my shitty game, I’ll talk about another player. His name is Tim. When I first started playing in Denver 6 years ago, at the outdoor courts in Wash Park in 90 degree heat, mid-COVID, Tim was there balling out.

I got the impression even then that he was a presence in the scene. A very good player, a strong and natural athlete, and a nice enough dude. I’ve played with or against him at 4 or 5 different regular runs around town, and he’s always, without fail, one of the best players there. I’ve seen him dunk on people before, seen him go off for nine or ten tough buckets in a row from every level. And I’ve also seen him crash out more times than I can count on one hand. Yelling at people, walking off the court—throwing basketball tantrums.

He once directed one at me because I said the score of a game incorrectly. I fired back at him, which he didn’t appreciate. He proceeded to not speak to me, pass me the ball, or pick me up on his team for a good three months. I can’t say this for sure, but I believe I only earned back his respect by playing exceptionally well for several consecutive days in his presence.

This is one of the strands of hoop culture I don’t love—the meritocracy of respect. But I also think that in a way, guys like Tim are necessary to preserve a certain caliber to the game. You could call Tim a gatekeeper. You could also call him a true believer.

I think Tim has these blowups because he really, deeply loves basketball and is giving more of himself to it than almost anyone there. You can tell from the way he plays—he exudes a respect for the game that occasionally trumps his respect for other people.

Anyway, I hadn’t seen Tim in three or four months, not sure why. I didn’t ask. But he played like he’d never left. Knocking down turn-around middies off the glass. Getting to the rim and finishing through contact. Splashing triples. In the last game of the day, we were down 1 point at game point, after rallying back from down 6. None of which was my doing. I was playing so poorly that I had basically stopped attempting to do anything at all on offense.

I was guarding the ball at the top of the key. As I slid to the right I hit one of the hardest screens I’ve felt in recent memory. Absolutely blindsided. My head snapped and I exuded a thudding gasp like a ball being punted. There might as well have been little cartoon birds circling my head.

It was Tim. The rest of the play was a blur and they hit the shot to win it. Game.

Walking back to grab our stuff, Tim said he was sorry he had to do that to me but it was a clean screen. And I agreed completely. My teammate could have called it out and maybe I’d have heard it, but Tim just knows what he’s doing. It was a perfect screen.

It wasn’t Tim that knocked the wind out of me today. It was the game itself.

gg.

-Paul