First, There Was Ken Mink And Now There's Stanley Fish! Who's Next? Larry Bird?

Larry Bird is a household name in hoops. For those mystified by the reference to Ken Mink, use the search tool in the upper left corner of the page. As for Stanley Fish, don't bet the farm on his tout for March Madness '09. Dr. Fish, when he wasn't hustling games at a Durham playground, was the chair of the Duke University Department of English. However, his suggestion that the Blue Spawn of Satan will take it all in 2009 is ludicrous. Any sane person knows that the Louisville Cardinals are going to win the national champeenship this year. You could look it up. If this is (fair & balanced) nonsense, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
Think Again: My Life on the Court
By Stanley Fish

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I have been playing basketball since I was seven years old. That’s more than 60 years, and as March Madness moves into full swing, I find myself thinking about the game and my addiction to it.

It isn’t skill. I can do two things — shoot from the outside and run. (I don’t get tired.) I dribble as little as possible. I drive to the basket once a decade; I’ve blocked two shots in my entire life, and if white men can’t jump, this white Jewish man really can’t jump. Maybe twice a year my shot is on and I feel I can’t miss. On days like that I think that I’ve finally arrived and can’t wait for the next game. But when game day rolls around again and I get out on the court, I find that I have regressed to my usual level, which is several degrees south of mediocre.

In all these years I have had two triumphs. Once when I was playing on the beach-side courts in Laguna Beach, every shot went in. The other players, black and Latino, started to yell, “Larry Bird, Larry Bird.” I knew it was a joke, but I savored the moment anyway.

Another time, when I was living in Baltimore, I hired a tall young man to remove the leaves from my lawn. When I came back a couple of hours later I found the leaves merely rearranged. I complained and refused to pay. We got into a shouting match, and then I asked, “Do you play basketball?”

“Yes,” he answered, and I said, “There’s a gym up the street; let’s play for it. You win, I pay you; you don’t, I don’t.” He replied, “Are you crazy old man?” (At the time I was in my mid-forties; I hate to imagine what he’d say today.)

We trekked to the gym and I beat him three times by big scores. In the first game he didn’t guard me because he didn’t believe I could do anything, and I hit one long shot after another. In the second game he guarded me too closely, and I went around him. In the third game he didn’t know what to do, and it was all over. The whole thing took less than half an hour, which was good because in another 20 minutes he would have figured out that I had only two moves and that both of them could easily be neutralized by someone taller, stronger and more athletic, all of which he was.

And then there are the thousand other times when I walked off the court either feeling happy not to have embarrassed myself (although I hadn’t done much) or trying to come to terms with the fact that I had indeed embarrassed myself. Whichever it was, I always knew that I would be back.

Why? Why continue to do something I wasn’t any good at nine times out of ten? Well for one thing basketball players are by and large generous. (There are exceptions.) If you’re not very skilled, if you’re old and slow, they will make a place for you in the game. In his recent book Give and Go: Basketball as a Cultural Practice, Thomas McLaughlin speaks of the ethical practices that emerge in the course of a game even though no rules have imposed them: “Every time one of the players in our game says to a weak player as he is taking an open shot that he will likely miss ‘Good shot,’ he is weaving the ethical fabric of the game.”

I have often been the beneficiary of that ethical fabric, even when those weaving me into it are perfect strangers. For one of the great things about being a basketball player (or pretending to be one) is that no court is closed to you which is why I always have a basketball in the trunk of my car. You can just show up wherever there is a hoop and a game and you will be included. (This holds also in foreign countries where there may be a language barrier, but never a basketball barrier.)

At Live Oak Park in Berkeley I played with college standouts and with American Basketball Association all-star Lavern Tart. On a famous court in the West Village I played on a team that won every game. It was glorious even though I never touched the ball. In a strict sense I didn’t belong on those courts, but pick-up basketball doesn’t enforce any strict sense and is willing to relax the demands of competition and winning for the sake of extending its pleasures to those whose skills are minimal.

What are those pleasures? They are not, I think, pleasures that point outward to some external good. Rather they are the pleasures of performing (however badly) within the strict parameters of a practice whose goals and rewards are entirely internal. Hans Gumbrecht, in his book In Praise of Athletic Beauty, links sports to Kant’s account of the beautiful as the experience of “pure disinterested satisfaction.” It is a satisfaction, Gumbrecht explains, that “has no goal in everyday life” (like virtue, it is its own reward), and he quotes with admiration Olympic swimmer Pablo Morales’s description of the pleasure he feels in competition as “that special feeling of getting lost in focused intensity.”

The marvel is that focused intensity can be achieved even in the act of failure, even by someone who knows what to do but most of the time can’t quite do it. And it is for that intensity — not its object or its goal — that one plays, for in those moments of surrender to the game all one’s troubles, all one’s strivings, all one’s petty irritations fall away. And if, occasionally, you actually do set the hard pick or deliver the perfect pass or make the improbable shot, well, that’s just icing on the cake.

And by the way, my money is on Duke to take it all. A pick from the heart. ♥

[Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, and Duke University. He is the author of 10 books. His new book on higher education, Save the World On Your Own Time, has just been published. Fish did his undergraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania and earned his Ph.D. from Yale University.]

Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

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