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The NBA is the USA
Every game is a bit of modern America, pitting individual desires against the needs of the community.
By Neal Gabler
April 27, 2008
The NBA playoffs, which began last Sunday, remind us of the suspense, the aesthetic beauty, the emotional identification, the intensity and the transcendence that sports provide for their fans. But within the play on the court there is something else, something that, whether we are fully conscious of it or not, resonates at a much deeper level than the rooting interest or the entertainment value, and that gives the playoffs significant cultural heft.
As high-blown as it may sound, the truth is that every NBA game is an object lesson in one of the great ontological dilemmas of human existence -- the delicate balance between individual and community, the tension between one's desire for acknowledgment and the urge to be part of something larger than oneself. And to the extent that this theme reverberates through modern America, where celebrity has become the gold standard of life and a sense of community has steadily diminished, this makes professional basketball a source of American drama and an explicator of an American crisis.
All sports incorporate themes, and all sports come with a distinctive ethos. Baseball, with its leisurely rhythms and its open spaces, has been called our pastoral sport, hearkening back to the days when it was played on pastures. Football, with its sense of regimentation, its specified duties and its obedience to the clock, has been called our industrial sport, recalling the old steel mills of the East and Midwest where workers, also enslaved to the time clock, performed essentially in formations along the assembly line. And basketball, with its improvisatory flow, its blacktop courts and its up-and-down speed, has been called our urban sport, Hoosiers notwithstanding, pointing to the explosive energy of the cities and to the abandon of the ghettos where it has thrived.
In expressing its origins, each sport also addresses some aspect of the human condition. Baseball, with its roots in the early 19th century, still speaks to the fears of disorder in a modernizing society. As students of the game have noted, what happens in baseball is that peace is continually disrupted by the batted ball, which triggers a kind of chaos.It is left to the defense to restore order. Football, with its roots in the industrialization of the late 19th century, speaks to the power of the mechanical in the Machine Age. What football does -- just look at its formations -- is forge a purring machine out of its human parts.
But no sport seems to capture our current preoccupations with self and society the way professional basketball -- a 20th century sport -- does. Some observers have analogized the sport to jazz. It has the same looseness as jazz, the same sinuousness, the same spontaneity. NBA players run, cut and intersect, ever riffing, and one usually emerges the way a soloist emerges in a jazz composition, only to return to the ensemble after making his basket and thus highlighting his skill.
This is one of the thrills of the NBA, but it also has been a source of criticism of the league -- too many soloists, too much egotism. There is even a designed play -- the clear-out and one-on-one -- that institutionalizes the soloist. Detractors complain that the breast-thumping after a basket, the jersey-popping, the grimacing, the preening, even the tattoos all contribute to putting the spotlight on the individual at the expense of the team. They prefer the more sedate college game with its seeming discipline and decorum.
What this view misses, however, is the real drama of professional basketball and the way it reflects modern America. NBA players, like other professional athletes today, grow up in a nimbus of adulation. Most are identified as potential stars from the time they are in middle school, and they go through high school and at least one year of college (if international players, no college) as celebrities. They are accustomed to being coddled and ogled and worshiped. By the time they arrive in the NBA, after what amounts to a fearsome vetting process, they are regarded by fans as gods, which, not incidentally, is the state to which many Americans aspire.
All this encourages players to assert themselves, and it is part of the genius of the game that it provides temptations to do so. In professional basketball, offense is the fun part, and players talk about how much they love to score. This meshes with the culture. ESPN features the slam dunks and great feats of scoring. It seldom shows a shot block or a steal. Fans know who racks up the points. Fewer know who is grabbing the rebounds, and stellar defensive players, such as Bruce Bowen or Shane Battier, receive a millionth of the attention accorded leading scorers such as Kobe Bryant and Allan Iverson. The lure, then, is to do whatever it takes to be noticed.
But there's a hitch. Despite the truism that offense begins with defense, basketball is the only game in which defense often comes at the expense of offense and vice versa. Every other sport separates offense from defense either by assigning different individuals to perform each task or by dividing the game into offensive and defensive segments. In basketball, offense and defense follow one another in rapidity, and the team that plays great defense typically has to sacrifice its offense (to wit, the San Antonio Spurs), while teams that play great offense typically sacrifice defense (to wit, the Phoenix Suns, Golden State Warriors and Denver Nuggets). Most teams can do one or the other, not both, and because it is more likely to be acknowledged and rewarded, offense is more personally satisfying.
What this means is that basketball is, once again, of a piece with the rest of American life, where the showiest get the biggest accolades and where celebrity goes to those who command it -- which is to say that self-celebration is the American way, not only the NBA way.
But the NBA throws us another curve that underscores the shortcomings of egotism: You cannot win championships -- which is, after all, the goal -- without playing as a team. Even the most skillful players will not hoist the trophy unless they know how to read the game and understand when to assert themselves and when to subordinate themselves. Basketball is just too fluid and complex for any one player to control a game. It takes a village.
Yes, this is a sport cliche we've all heard ad nauseam, but in no other sport is the cliche put to as constant a test as in professional basketball, and in no other sport is it the centerpiece of the game. Alex Rodriguez doesn't have to subordinate his hitting skills to the success of his team. Nor does quarterback Tom Brady. Their personal success is the team's success. This is not true for LeBron James or Iverson or especially, as we have seen in recent years, Bryant. In the NBA, an individual can do exceedingly well for himself -- and wind up costing his team dearly. In basketball, you must cooperate or lose.
And so professional basketball is ultimately a continuing exercise in calling forth selflessness in an environment and in a culture that does everything to discourage selflessness. That is why every NBA game is a battle not only between teams but between each individual player's inherent desire to be the primum mobile and the demands of the team not to be one. Because it isn't in one's nature to want to sacrifice one's own glory, and because the objective is to win, every NBA game hums with a kind of personal agony.
This may have been what Woody Allen, a New York Knicks fan when the Knicks weren't a laughingstock, meant when he once said that the best drama in America is at Madison Square Garden. Thanks to the NBA, the next two months of playoff action will give us yet another demonstration of that drama: the timeless struggle within the human soul. May the best team win.
Neal Gabler is the author of many books, including "Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination" and "Life: the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality."
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