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    Open Looks: My Life in Basketball
    Open Looks: My Life in Basketball
    Open Looks: My Life in Basketball
    Ebook129 pages1 hour

    Open Looks: My Life in Basketball

    By John Saker

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    About this ebook

    In this candid and beautifully written memoir, New Zealand Tall Black John Saker tells of his lifetime love affair with basketball, how it changed his life, and the head-spinning moments when the sport became the talk of the nation. From his early teens, when shooting hoops was a way of dealing with family tragedy, through to his scholarship to an American university, career in France as New Zealand’s first professional player, and selection to the New Zealand Tall Blacks, Saker canvasses both highs and lows of a sport where players such as New Zealand’s Steven Adams today command multimillion dollar salaries.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAwa Press
    Release dateJul 1, 2015
    ISBN9781927249192
    Open Looks: My Life in Basketball

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      Book preview

      Open Looks - John Saker

      Ball

      Shooting in the dusk, Montana. Mark Blaszkiewicz

      Introduction

      Several years ago I played my last game of organised five-on-five basketball. I was part of a team of middle-aged men whose different lives aligned every Tuesday night through this shared pleasure. Our opposition was always younger—much younger—but seldom smarter. It was their legs vs our heads. We would gift them 20 or so points a game because a lot of the time we wouldn’t, or couldn’t, run back on defence. We had to make up for this handicap with a half-court offence based around sharp passing (and, I have to admit, often a height advantage), along with a defence where the tactical foul was raised to an art form. We could make it work, but only for a while. Although we’d once been champions of the B Grade, the law of diminishing returns that applies to all declining jocks saw us gradually slide down the league table as our ages moved in the opposite direction.

      By that last game, the pleasure factor was also waning—for me anyway. An old ankle injury made running painful. Worse, I’d joined that subspecies of player I’d always detested: grumpy old pricks who once had a game and can’t let go. Bearing witness to your wilting skills on a weekly basis is to be reminded that death has you in its sights, and what could be more grumpiness-inducing? To co-exist amicably with the game as a mature exponent I saw I had to recast my relationship with it—I had to stop caring, basically. I could never quite manage to do that.

      In my younger years, if I’d gone without playing basketball for a matter of days I’d start feeling bereft. Today, I’m happy enough in my role as passive observer.

      The hold it has on me now may be gentler, but my admiration for it still runs deep. From the moment basketball arrived in my life there seemed no end to its generosity. For one, it was so permissive. Every player was allowed to do things, to be inventive. Although it was played in a more confined space than most other games, there was no other in which I felt as free as I did playing basketball. To be effective in exercising that freedom meant practice, lots of it, and that was no imposition. You ran to basketball practices, they were so much fun. This was mostly because there was a competitive element to almost every drill (unlike rugby practice, where a half-hour was usually spent going 15 on none—pure tedium). When there wasn’t competition, there were other compensations, viz. the pacifying symmetry of the five-man weave.

      Something I never expected at the start was the playful imagination that drove the basketball lexicon. Given my fondness for words, this was a bonus. Metaphor bursts from the game like fruit from a tree. Different shots come clothed in wonderful descriptors—teardrop, dagger, alley-oop, skyhook—as does the sound of them hitting their mark— swish, string music, harmony of the hemp. Even shots that never look like going in are given their due—airball, brick—along with the geography and features of the playing area—elbow, arc, lane, window, cup.

      Poetry would also gush from commentators: it’s off the boards and through the cords; he tickles the twine for two; and my own favourite from Cato Butler (who figures on page 115), the leather sphere drops through the iron orbit.

      Then there is gym rat—the name for a person so hopelessly infected by the game that he or she hangs out in gyms for hours on end, practising on their own, playing with a passing parade of shorter stay devotees, as permanent a presence as the lines on the floor. Gym rats soak up the game’s smells and sounds, listen intently as others pass on its stories, and shoot the ball—they’re always ready to do that. A gym rat thinks nothing of putting up a couple of hundred js a day, maybe topped off with 50 free throws.

      My own gym rat years ended when I was 22 and signed a professional contract. The wholesome bond a gym rat has with the game gets rudely roughed up when money enters the picture. Whenever a young sporting pro tells the world about the joy of getting paid for doing what he or she loves, I’m dubious. For me, the transition was not wholly joyous: the start of something I’d wanted was tempered by the passing of a sweetness I never thought I’d lose.

      The stories that make up this book were written over the last couple of decades, at different times when the opportunity arose or I felt compelled to write about basketball. Many have America as their backdrop, although I spent only two years playing there.

      One memory from those times was entering my college coach’s office for the first time. Behind his desk were rows and rows of books, all written by other coaches. Invited to explore further, I found a reservoir of ideas and philosophies on every aspect of the game. Plays for every possible situation, how a practice should be structured, drills and defences, fast break styles, zone offence principles, the importance of the reverse pivot… the game was dismantled to reveal parts I never knew it had.

      These books were emblematic of two things. The first was the givingness of America’s basketball culture. If you knew something, you shared it. You spread your knowledge and your enthusiasm: the game deserved no less. My standing in that office, a Kiwi on a scholarship, was a facet of this open-handedness.

      The second was basketball’s power to generate published words. There are so many basketball books in America, penned not only by coaches but also by writer writers. Non-fiction works about the game by the likes of David Halberstam, Rick Telander and John McPhee have become classics, while novelists like John Updike have woven it into their fiction.

      Writing about basketball as a part of life, rather than simply chronicling results and careers, is not commonplace outside America. That’s partly because writing and sport generally have a less inhibited relationship in the US than they do almost everywhere else. And also because the game’s presence as a cultural totem around the world is only about a generation old. My parents never had an opportunity to play or watch basketball. For them it was as exclusively American as Mount Rushmore. That changed as I grew up. Basketball’s global diaspora gained in strength and attitude during the 1960s. The seriousness with which the game was being taken in some countries had no more powerful a symbol than the shock loss by the US to the USSR in the 1972 Olympic gold medal game.

      Other countries have now got game but the basketball muse is taking longer to take hold. This book, I hope, helps redress that imbalance.

      Unleashing a hook shot, 1986. Photographer unknown

      Tracing the Arc

      In my mid teens I discovered something I thought very beautiful. Like a lot of beautiful things in my country, it wasn’t out there on show, soaking up rays of national delight. It was tucked away in a shadowy corner, hidden beneath a rough crust, like a paua shell’s rainbow lining. Getting to it required inside knowledge, or else a lucky stumble.

      It was a perfectly executed, sweeping, right-handed hook shot. Inside the corrugated-iron boatshed that passed for a basketball stadium in Wellington for about half a century, I sat becalmed with pleasure as I watched a man roll across the key and, with a willow-branch sweep of his raised arm, catapult the ball towards the hoop. The orange sphere traced a gentle arc before snapping the white net.

      God knows what his name was, and I mean that—God probably does know. The guy played for one of those teams of American Christian troubadors who came through in the 1960s and early ’70s, whipping the pants off local teams but—unusually for a visiting sports team—never the local women.

      They called themselves Venture for Victory and they were America as approved by the State Department: big-jawed, wide-eyed boys with hair cut short at a time when most young men had severed all ties with hairdressers. They had names such as Randy Pfund and Buddy Gregg. All were white but for one, an exhibit of sorts, an original Chester Williams. We all knew even then, 40-something years ago, that black

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