Fast Break to Line Break: Poets on the Art of Basketball

Basketball and the Immigrant Faith

53 Basketball and the Immigrant Faith PATRICK ROSAL In 1986, when our bodies could do such things, four of us would contort into a Pontiac Fiero, a matchbox two-seater loaned to us by one of the gambling regulars. Our parents could play mah-jongg all night, the plastic tiles like the feet of a small flock of birds clacking on a roof. While our folks rotated seats at seven different tables in a three-day, all-day, all-night marathon of five- and twenty-dollar games (cursing each other and themselves in at least three languages), we’d head out, more often than not, to play basketball in the middle of the night. Me and Jojo, the shorter pair of our quartet, had to straddle the gearshift together. Phil and Junji, a couple of six-footers, would pivot their shoulders a little toward the windows to make room for the full car ride. We could make the courts in under a half hour. We were headed to The Ledge, a basketball court on campus at Rutgers that hung over Route 18 and peeked over the muddy Raritan River. Like no other courts in the area, there were lights there meant just for security, not Patrick Rosal 54 for all-night games. The chain-link gates were sometimes locked, so one of us had to climb the twelve-foot fence and drop himself onto the other side, then let the rest of us in. In midwinter, we packed a couple shovels in the trunk to clear the slush. There were always slippery patches, small puddles of icy water, but we got it clean enough to run two-on-two. I wasn’t a particularly athletic kid to begin with, but my parents lobbied the principal to have me enter the first grade a year early, a kind of wish for precociousness that I never fully realized. I was smaller, slower, and more awkward than most of the kids throughout grade school. My parents came from a culture where one’s physical work, farming and husbandry, kept one fit. In short, they were not athletes either. My dad claimed to have played basketball as a young man, so I was excited when one summer day he brought my older brother and me to the county college to shoot some hoops. Having been shamed during gym by my lack of athleticism, this was my chance to maybe learn something from my dad. His thing was books, shelves and shelves of them. He had several advanced degrees in the humanities as well as a late-night local radio show for a short stint. I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, when my dad, pushing fifty at the time, turned out to be a bigger version of my clumsy self with a basketball. Air balls and bricks lofted into the air, the trajectory of his shot launched from down between his bent knees. I remember feeling betrayed, resentful even, that my dad, who swore he knew the game, had no clue. It was partially that indignation that drove me to learn the standards of the game. It was the feeling that a father—my father—had an obligation to teach me how to be among men. My friends were patient enough to let me run with them to learn some skills, but more than skills, I caught the fever, a chronic condition that heats you in the chest whenever you hear the round spank of a ball against the pavement. I was hooked. Truth is, for me, there was almost nothing fun about basketball. Though I was eager for a run any time, anywhere, I was always the most serious dude on the court. I played hard. I ran hard, jumped, dribbled, and shot bricks hard. Of course, I fouled hard too, which meant I got fouled hard in return—big old hacks, body checks, elbows and bridges. In short, I didn’t Basketball and the Immigrant Faith 55 give a fuck. And if a play came to blows, well that was just another part of the game. I was both reckless and sincere, each pickup game one more battle. That is to say, I knew intuitively that basketball meant something beyond itself. America’s magnificence, more than mythically, resides in its abundance of utterly average people, and my parents, immigrants from the Philippines, wanted me to be American and therefore, I...