Nothing But Net: On Thomas Beller’s “Lost in the Game”
Thomas Beller | Lost in the Game: A Book about Basketball | Duke University Press | 2022 | 240 Pages
Last summer, while playing pickup basketball in Brooklyn, after knocking down back-to-back threes, I turned to my opponent and said, “The pandemic’s over! You’re giving me too much space!” I was just having some fun, but the guy took it personally. A territorial challenge of sorts ensued, and having lived in the neighborhood for a decade and played on these courts for years, I was obligated to accept. Things escalated quickly. The physicality of the game was taken up a notch. An open path to the basket was a trap. My glasses got knocked off. In the end we won the game, but I didn’t feel good about it, and I apologized to my humorless adversaries afterwards.
I’ve mostly given up the competitive ghost. Shooting hoops meditatively, alone, remains my preference, but in a city like New York, you’re going to get roped into pickup, even if it’s because you’re the only one with a ball. I have a method for taking the temperature of how a game might proceed. Once the standard litany of rites is spoken—first to 11 straight up, ones and twos, take back everything, etc.—I throw in a little something to lighten the mood. If there’s laughter, you might be in for a friendly game. If not, you’re probably playing for keeps.
As Thomas Beller warns in the introduction of his new book on basketball Lost in the Game, trash talk is almost a prerequisite for pickup. He describes his own experiences with playground escalations, including taking a punch to the face. Even with his son watching from the sidelines, he can't help but dish it back to a loud, dominating big man. Lost in the Game entertainingly demonstrates all the excitement, intensity, and uncertainty that comes with playing pickup. But what’s most gratifying about the book is its articulation and understanding of those ambiguous feelings one may have about over-caring about basketball later in one’s life. The time it takes to get your body right. The effort to stay on the court. The sweaty laundry.
The author of several books, including a biography of JD Salinger, and co-founder of the defunct literary journal Open City, Beller’s basketball background checks out as impressive as his literary credentials. He’s 6’5”, played college ball at Vassar, got dunked on at an NYC playground by a then-fourteen year old Joakim Noah, and shot H.O.R.S.E. with Jason Kidd. Now well into his fifties, he maintains an obsession with the game.
Lost in the Game consists of essays previously published in places like The New Yorker. There’s Beller’s personal writing about playing in high school and college, and his forays into pickup, which touch on all aspects of city life and politics. And then there’s his profiles of the NBA’s current and former stars. High-minded references dance across the page as elegantly as an expertly timed Euro step, from Beller reading a classic thousand-page history of Yugoslavia and having to coach himself to “let go of the hope that it would mention Sombor, the home and birthplace of Nikola Jokić,” to painstakingly breaking down the iconic moment when Allen Iverson crossed over Michael Jordan, which he admits feels like describing “a story from Greek mythology.” Elsewhere, Beller calls upon Raymond Carver, Jonathan Swift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Edgar Wideman, Dante Alighieri, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, and Heraclitus, among others for assists, and daydreams about writing a novel in the vein of John Cheever’s classic short story “The Swimmer”:
At some point over the summer, I started mulling over a work of fiction I would write [...] in which the protagonist would spend his life moving itinerantly from one basketball court to another. He would start in his own city, branch out to others in his state, travel the country, the world—a pickup basketball smorgasbord, a do-or-die situation each time he walked onto a new court [...] The “Swimmer” adaptation lingered in my thoughts—would I call it “The Baller”?
Two weeks before I got married, after more than a dozen years happily living basketball- and exercise-free, I joined a work rec league for reasons somewhat obscure to me. Perhaps it was wedding butterflies, or a desire to have something just for myself. But there I was at the Roberto Clemente School in Alphabet City on a Wednesday night in October practically coughing up blood on the sidelines because I was so out of shape. My wife and I didn’t make vows that autumn in Central Park—we didn’t feel we needed them—but after our honeymoon I made a few myself and much like Beller, who always wears “basketball clothes to CrossFit, as if to say, this is just a means to an end,” I joined a gym to strengthen my “core.”
I’m no longer so easily winded, nor do I stubbornly resist wearing proper high-tops. Buying that first pair of basketball shoes in years felt strange, euphoric even. I gravitated immediately toward a retro FILA shoe, thinking of the Grant Hill poster that adorned my bedroom wall. I was surprised that they still made these bulky models. The Footlocker worker was surprised that I planned on playing in them: “You can’t hoop in these! There’s no support!” Paul George’s signature line was enticing from a cost perspective, but he’d just gruesomely broken his leg at the Olympics. I had a plate and seven pins in my right ankle and superstitiously didn’t want anything more to do with injuries. I opted for the pricey Kyrie 3s instead. There was not yet talk of the earth being flat. He’d just hit the shot of shots to help bring a championship to Cleveland.
I quit basketball in high school because I had no close friends on the team and the game had changed from when I was a kid slinging a bright red personalized monogrammed “Air Urban” duffle bag over the shoulders of my Mark Price jersey. Everything had become so serious, and like Beller, I relied on what I learned on the playground: “flow, improvisation, unconsciousness [...] all the habits coaches try to erase from their players.” Now it doesn’t matter who I play with. I look forward to meeting new people through pickup, or in casual leagues, like the Word League in Greenpoint. I interact with the neighborhood and the city in ways I might not otherwise. As Beller correctly highlights, you may not know much about the people you’re playing with, but it doesn’t matter. Playground basketball’s the common denominator.
Some of the finer moments in Lost in the Game are when Beller writes about basketball during the height of the pandemic. Besides the Tom Hanks news from Down Under, it was the shutdown of the NBA on March 11, 2020, when Rudy Gobert tested positive for Covid-19 that things started to really get serious in the US. In New Orleans, his adoptive city, more than 100 rims were removed from the courts during the pandemic. That didn’t stop him from playing, not completely, as he continued to practice shooting on rimless hoops, hitting the square on the backboard over and over again. “The sound was that of a hollow gong.” In New York City, Beller reports, more than 2,000 rims were removed. I remember shooting baskets at the nearby courts on a cold and drizzling pandemic morning when a cop car slowly drove by, stopped for several minutes, then cruised off. The next day, the rims were gone.
It wasn’t until in Florida after so long indoors I got my shots up at the most beautiful outdoor courts I’ve ever played on. I understand now why writers give thanks to the courts sacred to them. Like how Beller writes reverentially about a court in Kent, Connecticut, or Lester K. Spence shouts out a Johns Hopkins gym in the acknowledgement section of Knocking the Hustle. Politics aside, I was relieved that nobody was going to remove those Floridian rims anytime soon.
Beller has doubts about the current state of playground basketball, that it’s trending towards older players and may be endangered. But I’ve played with kids so young I must excuse myself from the game and just watch. In any case, Beller’s right to point out that “video games, gentrification, and the general professionalization of youth sports,” like AAU—where if a player shows any real promise, there’s no way the kid’s playing on concrete—are to blame for the decline of pickup.
But that’s not all.
Another specter haunts the playgrounds of America: the “fastest growing sport” in the nation, according to the New York Times. Visiting family in Indiana, the birth state of many NBA legends, including the Hick from French Lick, Larry Bird, and the Supersonic high-flier Shawn Kemp, I didn’t think I’d have a problem finding a court. We drove to a nearby park and discovered a demolition crew and steamroller. After apologetically interrupting to see what was going on, it turned out they were replacing the basketball hoops with pickleball courts.