Today over at The Los Angeles Review of Books Poetic/Olympics we're talking about Basketball. Scott Cunningham and Stephen Burt break it down in fine fashion and the photos will slay you as well.
On Women’s Basketball
PT. 2
Stephen Burt
The truth is I screwed up. I got my priorities wrong. I missed out the real show. I watched the wrong games. I've been able to see my favorite players—the ones I already follow closely—on Team USA, which I do support, being American; but Team USA, which I've been watching, had exactly no close games, and about five close quarters, during its four games (sixteen quarters) of pool play. The first game, against Croatia, exposed some weaknesses—not much depth in the low post, for example—but it was also a tune-up; the US spotted the Czech Republic the first ten points, and didn't play defense against China for the first six minutes, but the Americans still won both games by an almost arbitrarily large span. Diana Taurasi appears to have found her shot, Maya Moore never lost hers, Tina Charles did just fine (against slower or less polished, albeit taller, opponents) while Sylvia Fowles gave a hurt foot time to heal, and Angel McCoughtry, as is her wont, scored and scored. Team USA are, in other words, still the favorites, and while they might be severely tested on the way through the elimination rounds (which started Tuesday morning: USA vs. Canada) they could also make it look easy. (Like all great performers, they make it look easy because they work hard.)
The real drama, the big surprises, and all the close games, involved teams full of names unfamiliar to me, with two or three or no WNBA players. In Group A (the USA's group) the surprises were bad ones: Brazil, who won gold in Barcelona and have put up good fights ever since, went 0-4: something's gone badly wrong with their national player development. The Czechs, who played the US close for a half and then wilted, lost unexpectedly to China and Turkey.
But the games that would have been fun for me to watch have come, by and large, in Group B, and I missed all but one. The Australians are, on paper, almost as good as expected, with multiple low-post options, including big, young Liz Cambage, who last week became the first woman to dunk in the Olympics; and the Canadians, who were supposed to feel lucky just to show up, have made it to the elimination round. I did watch Canada vs. Australia on Sunday, and the Opals (the Aussie women's team) ruled the first quarter: then they lost focus, baffled by the Canadians' superior coordination and apparently equal foot speed. A lead that was, early on, 22-7 shrank to just three points late in the match; given five more minutes of play, the Canadians would have won Especially fun to watch, against the Opals, was versatile guard Courtney Pilypaitis, recently a standout for the University of Vermont—she can shoot threes, and distribute, and turn on a dime. There's also Shanna Thorburn, who's tall for a guard, wields a weirdly flat long-distance shot, can see the floor well, and played briefly for my Minnesota Lynx. Thorburn's last NCAA game was the sort of so-close, so-close performance that no one deserves to go out on; she missed a free throw, made a free throw, and sent her team to an overtime loss, when a win would have put them in the 2005 Final Four.
That was the one truly close game I did get to see. The French went 4-0, beating the Aussies (a surprise) but needing overtime to beat the British (another surprise), in games I did not see; instead, I got bored watching France steamroll the Russians-- the final score, 65-54, reflects a lot of garbage time. I should have been watching Celine Dumerc, and Edwige Lawson-Wade (another WNBA veteran) all along. And now, with elimination rounds starting Tuesday (I am writing on Monday night), I’ll have at most three more games, DVR permitting, in which I can watch that national team. The last of those three, if all seeds hold, will be the gold medal game, against the United States. Though nothing is certain, and injuries can screw up anyone, Team USA at the moment just looks like the best-- too deep, the bench too good, the possible substitutions too complex, for the French or the Opals (as I saw them) to keep up a lead beyond the halftime break.
What does any of this second-guessing, any of these close matches, or these predictions, have to do with poetry, or with any other art form that's not about direct competition? Just this: what I’ve missed by not watching the non-US teams in the prelims looks a bit like what you miss if you read only the established poets, or only the so-called canon, or only the supposed best. The way to enjoy a sport, or an art form, or anything really, has to involve evaluation, which means comparison, which means competition, but that doesn’t mean that you just ought to find the one best. Make that your sole goal, and you will miss the pleasure of other competitions, other moves and other matchups, elegant moves and unique accomplishments that show up only on the right day, in the right light. If you like seventeenth-century forms and concerns, don't stop with Donne, or with John Milton: who's Richard Corbett? Who's Richard Lovelace, and why are his most famous poems ("Stone walls do not a prison make") so unlike his best poems (say, "The Snail")? If you like Frank O'Hara—and who doesn't like Frank O'Hara, these days?— which among his dozens of sometime imitators also speaks to you?
Moreover: people divide the arts—none more so than poetry—up into opposing teams: language poets, post-language poets, formalists, regionalists, neo-surrealists, neo-Objectivists, precisionists, the Gurlesque. (I've supported a couple of teams myself.) Sometimes it's useful to think about teams, schools, opponents, given how many artists define themselves against their immediate precursors; but it's never a good idea to watch just your own team. If you're attracted largely to the traditions of Williams and Oppen, to plainness and precision, what if you tried to read the neo-Baroque (e.g. Angie Estes)? If you're interested in the Gurlesque, are there neo-confessionals you might dig? If you're American, what about reading Canadians (Mary Dalton, for example), or South Asians? Why are so many classes, anthologies, notions of modern poetry, organized in effect around one national team? Look around; look for the unfamiliar, the minor, the work that might reveal itself only in certain contexts, against certain challenges; vary your viewing, and don't just watch your own side; see the others too.
****
A Dreamy Team Photo Interlude (curated by P. Scott Cunningham)
The Dreamy Team: U.S.A. Basketball in 2012
by P. Scott Cunningham
“It'd be a tough one, but I think we'd pull it out."
-Kobe Bryant, on the 1992 U.S. Men’s Basketball Team versus the 2012 U.S. Men’s Basketball Team
The debate is still going on, spurred on by Kobe’s quote above and more recent comments by LeBron James, as to who would win a game between 1992’s Dream Team (the quote-unquote greatest basketball team ever assembled) and this year’s U.S.A. squad. I won’t rehash it. If such competitive abstractions interest you, a Google search will provide you with hours of reading.
Poetry is antithetical to rankings, and I think basketball should be too. Was Jordan better than Dr. J? is as boring a question as whether Bishop was better than Stevens. In both cases, the artists in question are inextricably related and much more interesting when we get past simple binaries that exclude questions of aesthetic similarities and differences.
Still, with all apologies to Patrick Ewing’s flattop, the Dream Team was a prosaic bunch: all scowls and frowns and old rivalries, a veritable telenovela of who-did-what-to-whom, with Michael Jordan starring as the jealous viejo who thinks everyone is after his estate. (Which they were.) If Chekhov had been their coach, he would have started every practice by placing a revolver at center court.
2012’s “Dreamy Team” is having much more fun. I imagine USA Basketball’s lodgings in the Olympic Village as some sort of Hogwartsian castle, with passwords and secret tunnels and skull-size doorknobs. Kobe’s room is still probably all Barcelona chairs and glass coffee tables, but otherwise, a rope swing hangs from every ceiling. 87% of the surface area of the floor is hot tub.
Here’s why I love this team:
James Harden’s Beard
If Harden were a poet, he’d be Walt Whitman. He doesn’t look at all like an NBA shootin guard. He looks like a Portland, Oregon bartender who listens to God Speed You Black Emperor and makes knock-off Danish furniture in his garage. But once on the court, everything about the way Harden moves is like a line from “Song of Myself”: a clear idea flying through contorted syntax. Was Whitman also left-handed? Players who shoot left-handed are inherently more beautiful, but Harden takes it to a new level. His three-point stroke is effortless; the way he finishes a lefty layup is like whipped cream coming out of the can. He’s not one of these players who will retire early on a high note. Harden will be 40+ and still at work in the Association, pads on everything, socks fraying, salt-n-pepper hair, spitting blank verse in his press conferences, reading Tasso on the bench.
Russell Westbrook’s Glassless Glasses
The Heat defeated the Thunder in the NBA Finals this year, but there was another battle going on behind the stands that not enough people acknowledged: Dwyane Wade’s press conference outfits versus Russell Westbrook’s. Like Hansel vs Zoolander, Westbrook is the upstart; Wade the reigning champion. Wade owns more pairs of socks than some small countries, and I think he can be safely credited with turning David Stern’s draconian fashion laws into one of the best things about the NBA. Every game it seems is now a contest to get photographed by The Sartorialist, and Westbrook is quickly establishing himself as Wade’s usurper. He made the black-frame-eyeglasses-that-don’t-actually-have-glass-in-them the must-have item in the 2011-12 season. Then, in a bold attempt to one-up Westbrook, Wade came out during the Playoffs in custom-made “Dwayne Wayne” flip-up shades, a reference which Westbrook, 23, might not have even gotten. Wade’s look is all, “Hey I’m only teaching in Rome for a semester and then my sabbatical’s over and it’s back to running accounts at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce,” while Westbrook’s look says, “I used to be in a little band called Vampire Weekend so why can’t I bring my skateboard into the All-England Club?” It’s safe to say if Wade hadn’t been injured this summer, Team USA would’ve needed an extra plane for the luggage.
Chris Paul
I was sad to see CP3 leave New Orleans, a city I love just as hopelessly as I love Chris Paul. Want to be sad with me? Watch this and try not to weep. (hyperlink: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuMPVq2YzTk)
Professor Melo-arty
The New York Knicks currently have the NBA superstar who least embodies their city’s values: Carmelo Anthony isn’t in a hurry to do anything. He’s just as content sitting on the bench as he is dropping 37 points in 14 minutes, as he did this past week in a game against Nigeria. Think about that for a second: 37 points in 14 minutes. That’s insane. Most of us would have trouble scoring that much in 14 minutes in an empty gym. Why can’t he do that all the time? Melo is a mystery wrapped in an enigma cut-n-pasted into a John Cage acrostic. He’s the place where all meaning and explanation go to eat Chik-Fil-A at a Democratic National Convention. What does a man of mystery do at night in London? Benedict Cumberbatch, watch your back.
#GotEm
If you’re on Instragram, follow @cp3 or @dwill8 or any of the other Dreamy Team members, and you’ll start to notice a game they play with one another called #gotem, which is adolescent and silly and makes me laugh every time. Basically, it involves waiting for another member of the team to fall asleep on a bus or an airplane, then dressing him up and snapping a pic with someone in the background smiling or making googly eyes. Various members have proclaimed “Game over” but it seems to be a game without an end: the best kind.
Kevin Love
Kevin Love is a good-looking man. If Ryan Gosling fell into Cary Grant’s martini and was then consumed by Gary Cooper, the man who popped out carrying Jean-Paul Belmondo’s revolver would be Kevin Love. Not only is he the face of the new-look Minnesota Timberwolves, he also comes from pop music royalty. His uncle Mike is none other than Mike Love, who co-founded the Beach Boys. Love’s point guard on the Wolves is Ricky Rubio, a young Spanish genius who may be related to the Jonas Brothers. Why does that matter? Because the late James Wright also did many fine things while in Minnesota under Spanish influence; in his case, the point guard was the great Peruvian poet César Vallejo. I fully expect Love to win multiple championships, and upon retiring, declare, “I have wasted my life,” then disappear to Paris to die in the rain.
Anthony Davis’s Unibrow
I’m not making fun of backup center Anthony Davis’s unibrow, merely celebrating what the man himself has already fully-embraced. Just before he was drafted number one overall by the New Orleans Hornets this past June, Davis trademarked the slogans, “Fear the brow” and “Raise the brow,” in reference to the uncommonly united shape of his eyebrows, paired with the uncommon athleticism he possesses for a man who stands six feet eleven. Not since Shaquille O’Neal has this much talent been paired with such a great sense of humor, but unlike Shaq, Davis is refreshingly self-deprecating and humble. As the youngest member of the Dreamy Team and the only NBA rookie, he’s probably enduring some hilarious hazing rituals during these Olympics that I would give anything to witness.
Potential Anthony Davis Hazing Pranks: A Sonnet
after Terrence Hayes
Shave the brow while he’s sleeping
Shave the brow while he’s sleeping
Shave the brow while he’s sleeping
Shave the brow while he’s sleeping
Shave the brow while he’s sleeping
Shave the brow while he’s sleeping
Shave the brow while he’s sleeping
Shave the brow while he’s sleeping
Shave the brow while he’s sleeping
Shave the brow while he’s sleeping
Shave the brow while he’s sleeping
Shave the brow while he’s sleeping
Shave the brow while he’s sleeping
Shave the brow while he’s sleeping
Will this team win gold? Probably. Spain and Russia, by my estimation, are the only two squads who have a shot to knock them off, and even then, I just don’t see it happening. But even if they fall short, I don’t care. I love this new era of the NBA.
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