Sports Saturday
I suspect that I am not the only fan disappointed by the way that the NBA basketball playoffs have shaken out. Defense is suffocating offense and teams that are noteworthy for their fluid style of play have either been eliminated or are about to be (the Knicks). The victims include the Golden State Warriors and the Oklahoma City Thunder, who were felled by untimely injuries. The Grizzlies and the Pacers, meanwhile, are playing ugly basketball, and the Spurs seem to have decided that they must follow suit if they want to win.
The only team that excites me at the moment is the Miami Heat. Watching Lebron James is like watching Michael Jordan in the olden days: one never knows when he is going to uncork an astounding play. I was fervently hoping to see him matched up against Kevin Durant in a replay of last year’s championship series, but we will have to wait until next year for the possibility of that happening.
In the meantime, we have only our memories to fall back on. Which is what this B. H. Fairchild poem is about:
Old Men Playing Basketball
By B. H. Fairchild
The heavy bodies lunge, the broken language
of fake and drive, glamorous jump shot
slowed to a stutter. Their gestures, in love
again with the pure geometry of curves,
rise toward the ball, falter, and fall away.
On the boards their hands and fingertips
tremble in tense little prayers of reach
and balance. Then, the grind of bone
and socket, the caught breath, the sigh,
the grunt of the body laboring to give
birth to itself. In their toiling and grand
sweeps, I wonder, do they still make love
to their wives, kissing the undersides
of their wrists, dancing the old soft-shoe
of desire? And on the long walk home
from the VFW, do they still sing
to the drunken moon? Stands full, clock
moving, the one in army fatigues
and houseshoes says to himself, pick and roll,
and the phrase sounds musical as ever,
radio crooning songs of love after the game,
the girl leaning back in the Chevy’s front seat
as her raven hair flames in the shuddering
light of the outdoor movie, and now he drives,
gliding toward the net. A glass wand
of autumn light breaks over the backboard.
Boys rise up in old men, wings begin to sprout
at their backs. The ball turns in the darkening air.
From The Art of the Lathe (Alice James Books, 1998)
