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The South Atlantic Quarterly 103.1 (2004) 169-191



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"Man to Man":
Basketball, Movement, and the Practice of Masculinity

Thomas McLaughlin


Alonzo Mourning, the great center for the Miami Heat, was diagnosed in the summer of 2000 with a rare kidney condition that threatened to end his career. At a minimum he was advised to take a year off from the game to adjust to the needed medications. Instead, when playoff time came around in the next season, Mourning could not resist the urge to return to play, and so he speeded up his rehabilitation process and played in the last twenty or so games of the regular season, as well as the playoffs. When he was asked by a reporter why he decided to take the risk, Mourning talked the usual clich�s about his dedication to winning and to the good of the team, but he also said with great energy that he missed the physical contact in the game, what he called "the traffic." Mourning's game is very physical. He is best known as a fierce defender, patrolling the lane, contesting every opponent's shot, fighting for every rebound. He scowls in menace and roars in triumph, and his body language communicates rage and violence kept barely in check. But when he described what he missed about the game, he did not seem violent at all. He evoked an atmosphere of friendly, competitive physical contact, and he seemed to need it like an addict. [End Page 169]

Mourning's term traffic articulates one of the chief pleasures of playing basketball—forceful and complex movement in contested space. Ten players move at high speed through a limited and articulated space, all of them every moment making movement decisions that alter the others' movements, creating together an impromptu dance. Their decisions are informed by the rules and objectives of the game, so their movements are neither random nor natural. They are shaped by the culture of the game, which is itself connected to larger cultural formations. For its players and fans, basketball is an important cultural practice precisely because it operates on the body, teaching kinetic and perceptual habits specific to the game. Players learn how to negotiate a spatial field occupied by many other agents, all with their own interests and goals, and the rules of negotiation are part of the cultural payoff of the practice.

Basketball culture, like other subcultures, teaches those who practice it a complex array of lessons. The game promotes a characteristic ethical style, a way of thinking and making decisions, and a specific range of emotional responses, as well as a way of occupying and moving through space. The lessons of the game and of other everyday practices are so deep that they shape the very identities of players, perhaps even more powerfully than the grand cultural identities of race and gender and class and sexuality. Operating below the cultural/political radar, basketball creates a loose community whose members recognize each other through their subtle embodiment of the lessons of the game.

Those lessons are very much a part of my own life, my way of being in the world. I have been playing since I was a kid, and I have had the good luck of finding an ongoing local game that has allowed me to continue to play into my fifties. I would describe myself as a lifelong mediocre player, physically limited but intense. I am also an avid basketball fan. I will stop and watch any pickup game I come across, and I watch college and pro games regularly. That is to say, I write this analysis from within the culture of basketball, as a person whose identity has been shaped by the practice. My goal is to use my own experience as a player to describe and articulate the usually unspoken feel for space and movement that the game encourages.

Playing basketball has particularly been central to my experience of being a man and of being in the company of men. I have occasionally played the...

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