Howdy. I have to clear my brain for a couple of weeks after the long, long NBA/Olympic season, but while I’m on vacation, we’ve lined up some great Guest Tippers for you.
Our first is former NBA player and current writer/author Paul Shirley, whose wry musings on basketball and sports were chronicled in his book Can I Keep My Jersey, chronicling his three NBA stops — Atlanta, Chicago and Phoenix, from 2003 to ’05 — with stops before and after in Greece, Russia, China and Spain.
Since he finished playing in 2008, Shirley has continued to write, about everything, for many publications, including Esquire, Slate, Playboy.com and ESPN.com. He edited the collaborative writers’ website FlipCollective and now lives in Los Angeles, runs a writing workshop called Writers Blok, serves as a writing coach through PenCoach.com and is at work on his next book.
In the wake of John Wall’s assertion last week that he and Wizards’ backcourt mate Bradley Beal have a “tendency to dislike each other on the court”– an assertion that Beal basically confirmed — I asked Paul to write about his experiencesplaying with teammates that you can’t stand. Here are his thoughts.
Enjoy.
— D.A.
***
When we were kids, my mother would take my brothers and me to the Topeka Public Library to escape the sticky Kansas summers, turning us loose in the stacked mazes so we could be transported out of our small-town reality and so she could get a brief respite from the five-alarm fire that is the rearing of three small boys.
I went through different phases of reading as I grew up. First, it was the quirky illustrated books of Bill Peet. Then, the Hardy Boys, Frank and Joe. And eventually, around the time I was leaving grade school, the biography section.
I started with biographies of just about anyone, but my tastes quickly honed in on a group of people I fully intended to join one day: professional baseball players. At first, it was the obvious ones — Lou Gehrig and Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio. Then, when I ran out of Yankees and Red Sox, the more obscure players crossed my bedstand — Stan Musial and Harmon Killebrew and the Dean Brothers, Dizzy and Daffy. I even found out that Walter Johnson, who had the second-most wins of any major league pitcher, was a Kansan, just like me.
What I most loved about those biographies was the camaraderie they promised. Their subjects played games together, of course, but they also traveled together, went to dinners together, and chased girls together. (I was only 11 so I didn’t quite know why they wanted to participate in this last one, but the way they described it made it sound tolerable.)
I assumed that when I made it as a major-leaguer, I would have a similar experience.
I was wrong about that, but not for the reason most people would be wrong about that. See, I did make it to the “majors.” I just did it in a different sport. After a few growth spurts and a catastrophic run-in with a curve ball that didn’t bend away from my face like I thought it would, I turned my attention to basketball. I played in college, at Iowa State. And then I made it to the pros, eventually playing for seventeen teams in nine years, including short stops in the NBA with the Atlanta Hawks, Chicago Bulls and Phoenix Suns.
What I learned, when I got to the NBA, was that my dreams of fraternity were naïve ones. I sat in locker rooms where players barely spoke to one another. I endured team plane rides where one guy stared daggers at the next because of a contract dispute.
Consequently, I barely batted an eye at the recent “revelation” that Bradley Beal and John Wall don’t much like one another.
Of course they don’t like each other, I thought. That’s just the way it is.
The question is: should it be?
***
In addition to my short stints in the NBA, I also got to play a bunch of basketball in Europe — for one team in Greece, one team in Russia and three teams in Spain. Playing in Europe had its drawbacks, like that the team in Greece still owes me $52,000. But when I wasn’t lamenting losses of small fortunes, I was getting an invaluable education. I learned, for example, that most Europeans value different things than most Americans — things like family, community, and really long dinners that might not end before midnight.
These values were reflected in the way European teams played basketball. There were fewer “stars” in Europe. Some people put this down to contract structure; usually, players’ contracts are within shouting distance of one another. But I would argue that it’s the other way around. The contracts are built this way because of the culture, which values interpersonal relationships far more than we do.
I think we would do well to pay attention to this culture, and not just because a culture that values interpersonal relationships is probably one that is more likely to encourage tolerance and kindness.
We’d be better at basketball, too.
***
When you think about it, it is fundamentally absurd that tiny European countries can compete with the United States in international basketball. Yet it happens, year after year. In this summer’s Olympic preliminary round, the men’s basketball team from the U.S. (population 322 million) beat the team from Serbia (population 7 million, similar to that of Washington state) by three points.
And we invented the game, host its best league and produce its best players.
But we also traffic proudly in individualism, in the worship of self-sufficiency and in the stubborn belief that the world is (or should be) a meritocracy. Those attitudes seep into our sports, by way of our discussions of which player is “elite,” by way of our celebration of max contracts over max effort, and even by way of the manner we use when talk about the games those players play: never the Washington Wizards against the New York Knicks; always John Wall and the Washington Wizards against Carmelo Anthony and the New York Knicks.
It’s no wonder Bradley Beal and John Wall don’t like each other. It’s no wonder I encountered zero NBA locker rooms where the players wanted to see each other after the games. It’s no wonder those biographies I read as a child would have to be fiction if they were written now.
We’ve made it this way. By emphasizing The Individual, we’ve bred Resentment, turning our sports heroes against one another. And that’s not likely to change until we send them a different set of messages — that other people matter, that other voices are important, and that winning is a lot more fun when you do it together.
