THE schoolyard, as every child knows, is a Darwinian jungle. Before the age of 10, we know who runs faster, who’s stronger and tougher, who can throw, catch, hit or kick a ball, jump rope and ice skate, and who is a hopeless klutz. By high school, you either qualify as a jock or not. Thereafter it’s one of the lesser categories of social destiny, like geek or slut.

Considering that athletic prowess — or the lack of it — can brand us for life as indelibly as any religious, racial or sexual marker, it’s surprising that more artists in the 80′s and 90′s didn’t see sports as a vehicle to explore their preoccupations with group identity, adolescent fantasy, the society of the spectacle, the performing self and the politics of the body.

The artists who have grasped this potential — from Matthew Barney and Tracey Moffat to Eric Fischl and Paul Pfeiffer — don’t yet make up a coherent or surging movement. Photographers are more likely than others to explore these themes; witness Collier Schorr’s current show of young wrestlers at the 303 Gallery in Chelsea, Brian Finke’s recent book on high school cheerleaders and football players, and Catherine Opie’s portraits of surfers in the forthcoming Whitney Biennial. But enough work in all media has been made around these ideas that the invention of a new curatorial category called jock art may soon be necessary.

In particular, the ”otherness” of athletes, a group with its own dress and behavior codes, has interested numerous artists in recent years. Surfers have received much of this attention, resulting in the 2002 exhibition ”Surf Culture: The Art History of Surfing” at the Laguna Beach Art Museum in California. Ms. Opie’s portraits of these longtime California outsiders ride this wave. So do Mark Wyse’s surfers sitting dreamily on their boards in the middle of the ocean, which were shown at Wallspace in Chelsea last year.

Ms. Moffat has trained her camera on the swimsuit set in her native Australia and made both photographs and videos about the camaraderie of their lives at the beach. But her most compelling series on a jock theme remains ”Fourth,” images of female athletes at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games who had just lost out on the top three places in their event. Exhibited in 2001 at the Paul Morris Gallery in Chelsea, they are altered photographs, leeched of color and printed on canvas.

Like Ms. Schorr, whose high school wresters grapple with one another innocent of any homoerotic message in their actions, Ms. Moffat focuses on displays of physical affection between people of the same sex. Such body language is public conduct entirely acceptable within the code of sports, even on television, but still often suspect outside that arena. In Ms. Moffat’s touching images of women who have trained for years and won nothing for their efforts, personal defeat and generosity of spirit seem to go hand in hand.

If athletes have traditionally been seen as fitting subjects for any sort of visual representation, it has been by illustrators and photojournalists. But contests of brawn and nerve never lost their taint as blood-soaked distractions for the hoi polloi. So to celebrate this heritage, even when it derives from the Greek Olympics more than the Roman coliseum, was a risky endeavor for 20th-century aspirants to ”high art.”

The emergence in the 60′s and 70′s of video and performance moved the human figure squarely back into the center of artistic practice after decades of absence from avant-garde concerns. Body building was elevated by some into an art in itself and received tributes from Robert Mapplethorpe in his photographs of the sinewy Lisa Lyons, and from the Whitney Museum, which in 1976 mounted the show ”Articulate Muscle.” This exhibition, featuring photographs, films and a live performance by the man who 27 years later would become the governor of California, effectively announced — as did other shows of the time — that the old ”high” and ”low” art hierarchy had collapsed.

Any number of works of the period openly celebrated the physicality of making art, including Richard Serra’s classic ”Splashing,” a 1968 performance piece in which he threw molten lead into a wall corner to make a cast sculpture. But Gary Hill’s video installation ”Crux” deserves pride of place in any jock art show. In this brilliant work, developed between 1983 and 1987 and seen here most recently in his 1995 retrospective at the Guggenheim in SoHo, he strapped five tiny cameras to his head, wrists and ankles and scaled the face of a cliff.

LURCHING images of his movements were projected on five monitors arrayed like a crucifix on the wall while the sounds of his exertion — grunting and panting — were broadcast through five speakers. A cerebral study of the body disembodied, fragmented into discontinuous electronic parts within a sculptural framework, ”Crux” is also a sensual experience, a demonstration of strength and proof that athletes — like Mr. Hill, a former surfer and rock climber — don’t have to be dumb.

”A lot of video in the 70′s, by Vito Acconci especially, was about the body’s vulnerability,” said Chrissie Iles, curator of film and video at the Whitney. ”But sculpture at the time was always a guy thing. Men welded. Men had muscles.” Mr. Hill’s work, along with that of Mr. Barney, she said, ”introduces the idea that the body is both material and immaterial.’

Indeed, no artist has more imaginatively probed and stretched what might be called a jock aesthetic than Mr. Barney. His startling 1991 debut at Regan Projects in Los Angeles and the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York made numerous explicit and cryptic references to organized sports. A weight-lifting bench made of frozen petroleum jelly, a video of himself dressed only in a jock strap and hanging from the ceiling of the gallery, and wrestling mats throughout the rooms imparted to these art spaces the creepy atmosphere of a gymnasium for mutants. (As a Yale art student in the late 80′s, he staged many of his performances in the school’s athletic facilities)

Mr. Barney’s blown-up photographs of Jim Otto, the former Oakland Raiders center who wore 00 on his jersey and was voted into the Hall of Fame for his iron-man endurance (he played in more than 220 games) also adorned the gallery walls. As a high school football player growing up in northern California, Mr. Barney idolized Mr. Otto and has used a fictionalized version of him as an archetype of masochistic toughness in the ”Cremaster” film cycle, which played last year at the Guggenheim Museum.

The unacknowledged or suppressed sexuality of men’s sports are recurring themes in Mr. Barney’s work. He is not shy about exploring the homoerotic echoes of professional football, which, if mentioned on a Super Bowl broadcast, would inspire a louder furor than Janet Jackson’s breast. Mr. Otto played a position that required another man, the quarterback, to put his hands between Mr. Otto’s legs on every offensive play. The 00 on his front and back represent in Mr. Barney’s mind the twin orifices of mouth and anus, a polymorphously perverse association that links Mr. Otto to dozens of other creatures in the ”Cremaster” mythology. What artist or filmmaker except Mr. Barney has ever credited N.F.L. highlight reels as a major influence?

Paul Pfeiffer’s videos of professional athletes take a cynical view of the sport’s arena. In ”Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon),” completed in 1999 and one of the standouts of the 2000 Whitney Biennial, Mr. Pfeiffer isolated a few seconds of the basketball forward Larry Johnson, a former New York Knick, as he was exulting on the court. Edited in rapid forward and backward motion, and projected on a tiny digital screen, the star athlete appears shrunken, trapped by the technology — in this case, television, whence the clip originated — that packages him for the public.

At the same time, Mr. Pfeiffer has manipulated these images, turning a celebratory yell into spasms of rage or pain and contorting a black man’s face and body so that he resembles a frightening beast: King Kong.

Along with the hot-button issue of sports and race, and the ambiguous relationship between players and spectators, Mr. Pfeiffer has addressed the genetic freakishness increasingly required of those who strive to excel at the highest levels in football or basketball.

For his macabre still-life ”Memento Mori” from 1998, he arranged 30 real and synthetic flies in a specimen box and pasted paper cutout heads of the 1997-98 Most Valuable Players from each of the 30 N.B.A. teams on their bodies. It’s like a Joseph Cornell box executed by a teenage David Cronenberg. But with young players growing bigger and faster every year, and with so much money to be won instantly when a prodigy from a poor family turns pro, the temptation to create model athletes — to breed them like fruit flies for special traits — no longer seems like science fiction.

If the metaphors of physical transformation in Mr. Barney’s work about sports are ultimately organic, self-fulfilling and benign, they have a sinister tinge in Mr. Pfeiffer’s. For him the ownership of the performing body by corporations and the choreographed flights of the ubiquitous pitchman Michael Jordan (”his reach defines the meaning of community in the television age,” Mr. Pfeiffer has written) recalls the sterility of ”Brave New World.”

IT’S not hard to imagine a jock art exhibition that would begin with the baseball players and rowers of Thomas Eakins, the club fighters of George Bellows, and the hunters and fishermen of Winslow Homer and conclude with work by many of these less traditional artists. Within the documentary photography tradition, Lee Friedlander’s 1998 series on the astonishing track star Jackie Joyner-Kersee concentrates on her rubbery, almost liquid physique, while Brian Finke’s smart and sometimes hilarious book ”2-4-6-8: American Cheerleaders and Football Players” offers a privileged tour inside the often closed society of high school sports.

The 20-something generation of men who spent their youth on sports-video games, whose sales have outstripped Hollywood videos, will no doubt soon be making art works — if they aren’t already — about them. (The Whitney Biennial will feature a video game by the Velvet Strike Team in which the player shoots peace signs instead of bullets.) If more artists have not embraced athletic themes, that may be because so many of them in their youth felt oppressed by this socially dominant culture. Professional sports teams compete with — and pretty reliably beat out — art museums for public dollars and glory. In prestige and income top athletes, not top artists, rank with corporation presidents, Wall Street arbitragers, movie and music stars.

But one of the virtues of art since the 60′s is that anything can be material for a work. If nothing else, the opportunity for revenge against these jocks and professional athletes and their looming shadows would seem too inviting to ignore.

Richard B. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

From The New York Times

A well-written, critical post about the film

Short Cuts
Paul Myerscough

The average maximum temperature in Madrid in mid to late April is 18°C. It would have been somewhat cooler than that in the Bernabéu Stadium, at 9 p.m. on 23 April 2005, when Zinédine Zidane walked onto the pitch with Real Madrid to face Villarreal, even under the floodlights and swathed in the body-heat of 72,485 restless spectators. But by the time Darius Khondji’s high-definition cameras find him, four minutes into Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film Zidane: A 21st-Century Portrait, ‘Zizou’ is already sweating. Every few seconds, he blows the droplets away from his mouth; they collect and drip from his earlobes and his chin. There is no impression of effort – there is never any impression of effort – but Zidane’s adrenaline is up, his concentration complete. Even standing still, he is working hard.

The film is 90 minutes long, a real-time record of a single football match made with 17 cameras placed at different vantage points in the Bernabéu, all of them trained exclusively on Zidane. We see the kick-off on a television monitor; but the film camera immediately draws nearer to pick out Zidane, who blurs and dissolves as the frame narrows still further; his gait and monk-pattern baldness are easy to recognise even as he fragments into countless green, red and blue pixels. The point is made: the galáctico, like any modern celebrity, is available to us only through his mediation, and the more pervasive his image, the more frustratedly we recognise that he remains finally opaque, unreachable. The film begins and ends with a neat ideogram, a superimposition of the letters of Zidane’s name: the effect of his total presence is to obscure him completely.

This may be the idea the film starts out with; it is not what makes it compelling. Watching Zidane at work in this way is an extraordinary experience. He is in possession of the ball for only a tiny fraction of the game, a total of perhaps two minutes or less. Much of what he does in those two minutes is exhilarating. In one moment, he leaps and curves his body in the air to catch a long, high ball at his midriff, killing its speed so that it drops to the turf at his feet; in another, he feints to cross the ball with his left foot and in the same motion releases it in the opposite direction with his right; again and again, he carries the ball at speed into the heart of Villarreal’s defence, guarding and propelling it with delicate touches as the defenders back-pedal before him. These sudden bursts of movement – in which Zidane, however frantic the activity around him, retains an absolute poise – are the only moments when the action of the game coincides with what we see. Between times, we watch him as he stalks the field, tracking the ball and waiting.

This kind of thing has been attempted before. In 1970, Hellmuth Costard filmed George Best playing for Manchester United against Coventry City. Costard was forced to shoot Best with fewer cameras and from a greater distance, so that he most often appears full-length and as part of the game going on around him. The resulting film, Fussball wie noch nie (‘Football Like Never Before’), is very different from Zidane partly because of these aesthetic choices and technological constraints, but also because of the differences between the two subjects. Best was as exuberant on the pitch as he was off it; his gifts were extravagant, and he liked to show them off. His charismatic style, and his fallibility as a player were continuous with his media persona, so that we both recognise him and imagine we get to know him better by watching Costard’s film.

This is not the experience of watching Zidane. His cropped hair, his leanness, give an impression of asceticism. His features are still, his eyes shadowed under heavy brows. There are flickers of consternation, of irritation, of concern, impatience and contempt; he smiles only once, sharing a joke with Roberto Carlos. But for the most part he is impassive. Even after his finest moment, in the 70th minute of the game, when he glides through the Villarreal defence, spins on his right foot and loops a perfect cross with his left for Ronaldo to score at the far post, his expression barely changes. It has always been the convention in Hollywood cinematography that the close-up guarantees intimacy with its subject; in this, it shares with one important tradition of portraiture the notion that the image should express interiority. In Zidane, the relentless scrutiny of his face yields little in the way of an inner self, still less anything that would help us to account for his sublime skill. We feel for him, but do not identify with him; he is alone, lonely even, and distant, other.

Gordon’s film wouldn’t have been given a cinema release – his work is normally shown in galleries – if it hadn’t been for the way Zidane ended the last game of his career in July. Captaining France in the final of the World Cup, he was sent off for violent conduct: in what must immediately have become one of the most widely seen sporting images of all time, he drives his head – forcefully and, it must be said, with considerable grace – into Marco Materazzi’s chest. He was, he claimed later, responding to the Italian defender’s ‘very hard words’ about his mother and his sister. In the final moments of Zidane – it is stoppage time at the end of the game, and Real have all but won, having come back from a goal down to lead 2-1 – a mêlée begins off-screen. Zidane, who is thirty yards away at the time, suddenly breaks from the frame. Another camera, further away, finds him again as he jogs, then sprints towards the arguing players. He catches one of them with a glancing blow, and is protectively wrestled away by David Beckham. He stands alone again, as he has for much of the film, but awkward now and a little wretched. The referee dismisses him, and the film ends as he leaves the field, shrugging off the attentions of his team-mates.

More than anything, in this moment, it feels as though we should have been able to see the explosion coming, that having watched him so closely for so long, the signs should have been there. They weren’t, of course. Watching Zidane at work is different from interpreting an actor’s simulations in a Hollywood movie, different from examining a painter’s attempt to express his subject’s essence. Searching his face for 90 minutes brings us no closer to understanding his actions at the end of this game, just as no account of his interaction with Materazzi can account for his final self-immolation. If that’s what it was. Unlike any other player on the pitch that night in July, Zidane was the only one with nothing left to prove. He had won everything there was to win, every trophy, every personal honour, many of them several times over; and eight years earlier, he had scored two goals in France’s 3-0 World Cup Final victory over Brazil. How do you end a career like this? In this year’s final, Zidane missed his chance at the perfect climax – a winning goal in extra time to regain the cup for France – when Buffon, the Italian goalkeeper, tipped his powerful header over the bar. He was sent off minutes later. You couldn’t explain why by reading Materazzi’s lips, or by watching Zidane, or by studying the biography of this son of Algerian immigrants, the story of his rise from the poor northern suburbs of Marseille to become the greatest footballer in the world. There are, though, more economical forms of explanation, sometimes from unexpected sources. At a party the day after the game, a friend of mine overheard a psychoanalyst, asked why she thought he’d done it, reply: ‘You know, I think he’d just had enough.’

From The LRB

The Art Critics write Sports

Check out the results

The Goal Standard 
by Michael Kimmelman

Not long ago, Nike, having repeatedly failed to crack the rebellious skateboard market, had its ad agency hire a bunch of Ph.D. students in anthropology to produce ethnographic studies of skateboarders’ tastes. Eventually this led the company to hire the graffiti artist Futura, who designed a limited edition of the Dunk basketball sneaker that Nike made in the 1980s. The sneaker was sold through skateboard stores, and sneakerheads snapped it up. Like art museums, sports companies have found that the best way to tap into the coveted youth market is to bring outsider artists in.

America has become like a giant playing field. We dress in neoprene and Lycra, tattoo our bodies in ways that mimic the logos on athletes’ uniforms, and collect sneakers as if they’re Ryan McGinley photographs. They’re sometimes worth nearly as much.

We consume reality shows rooted in the old Roman gladiatorial games, and our political leaders hawk war to us on television the way Vince Lombardi psyched up hisGreen Bay Packers, saying that winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing (except, as true athletes know, for losing).

Meanwhile, late modernism’s cult of the gym-toned body has elevated narcissism to the level of religion, extreme sports being our equivalent of what flagellants did in the Middle Ages. Skiers schussing down Everest or climbers clawing up K2 seek what Kant called “the terrifying sublime” by filtering natural beauty through death-defying stunts. When a society like ours, inured to traditional forms of beauty, comes to equate shock with awe, the true sublime gives way to its glitzier simulacra. Which is pretty much what the photographer Andreas Gursky provided us not long ago when he shot a soccer match in Amsterdam from an improbable eagle’s-eye perch above the stadium. The glamour of his panoramic picture is derived from the prowess in accomplishing it.

For contemporary artists, and for fashion designers, too, sports have become a metaphorical gold mine. As a meditation on disenfranchisement and loss, the Australian artist Tracey Moffat shot a memorable series of pictures at the 2000 Olympics of fourth-place Olympians, the ones who just missed getting a medal. Collier Schorr photographed high school wrestlers as a measure of masculine identity and a window onto teenage subcultures. Wrestling is brutal and also touching, Schorr said, so she suspected that “a lot of people see their own struggles as teenagers in the pictures.”

Art has always trafficked in sporting symbols, of course, beginning with the art of the ancient Assyrians, who carved hunting scenes into stone as emblems of their imperial ferocity. A long history of art in China and India includes countless scenes of Mughal emperors hunting animals like antelopes and tigers. In Western art, the virgin huntress Diana, when spied in the nude by Actaeon, turned him into a stag, after which his own hounds devoured him. (No wonder Freud loved ancient myths.) In Titian’s hands, Diana, protectress of pubescent girls, became a sporty archer in tie-up sandals and bracelets, hair gathered in a loose bun, a silky tunic gaping to reveal one breast, shooting an arrow at her hunky voyeur, who has newly furry ears and a shiny nose, dogs nipping at his crotch.

The connection between art and sport has depended on a mutual infatuation with physical perfection, which translates easily into sex and power. In Leni Riefenstahl’s orgiastic paean to Hitler’s 1936 Olympics, the camera ogles naked, beaming, German swimmers giving each other rubdowns in the sauna, then leaping off the high board, doing pirouettes and swan dives (it’s raining men!), more and more of them presented in erotically slow motion from above, below and underwater, plunging into the pool, then leaping back out of it, in and out. (Riefenstahl included backward shots to heighten the cinematography’s kinetic abstraction.) It’s so seductive that you might almost overlook the inconvenience of the fact that these beautiful people were Nazi ideals, as Dolce & Gabbana perhaps unconsciously did in last year’s bizarre replay of Riefenstahl’s Aryan men, dressing the models in tank tops and shorts.

But then, art has never necessarily been moral, which is why Riefenstahl’s boss, one of the most aesthetic of tyrants, negotiated to buy from Italy the most famous work of sporting art in Western history, the divine Discobolus by Myron — a sculpture of a discus thrower, arm raised, knees flexed, torso bursting with muscles, the epitome of grace and anticipatory release, and the culmination of all that sexy Greek art about athletes. “Noble simplicity and quiet grandeur,” as the historian Winckelmann put it. For Hitler, this meant Teutonic, and it became Riefenstahl’s model.

Notwithstanding her Nazi links, she established the visual template for later artists. You might even say that much of the performance movement of the late 1960s and ’70s defined itself in relation to her. When a skinny Bruce Nauman in a white T-shirt filmed himself falling backward into the corner of a room, then pushing himself upright, then falling back again, he was echoing, consciously or otherwise, Riefenstahl’s use of repeated movements, her disorienting camera angles with their resulting abstraction. Her heroics became his version of a Beckett play, sport as nihilism, and in the process, Nauman established a whole new image of athletic cool.

Leap forward to Jeff Koons’s 1980s basketball (the Julius Erving model) immaculately suspended in a tank of water, like Dr. J himself hanging in midair before a dunk. It served as an affectless sign of capitalist excess, with a nod to Minimalist form. Gary Simmons then paid Koons homage by arranging pairs of gold-painted sneakers as if in a police lineup, using sports to riff on crime and race. After which David Hammons, the bricolagist, fashioned a crude backboard out of a window frame fringed by ruffles of rubber tire, turning Koons’s device into a symbol of broken ghetto dreams.

But no artist has absorbed sports more thoroughly into his work than Matthew Barney, the former J. Crew model and high school quarterback turned cryptic filmmaker and self-mythologist, whose looks come straight out of Riefenstahl. Barney’s work, building on Nauman’s and on other ’70s video and performance artists’, is partly about acting as a kind of model, a symbol (he talks about letting the body be “a tool”) in scenarios that entail athletic feats — climbing an elevator shaft, leaping off a 40-foot pier or off a bridge with a bungee cord, straining at the end of a tether and trying to make marks with a piece of chalk on paper affixed to a wall. Call it extreme sports art.

Barney is operating at the limits of coherence and endurance — both his limits and ours. He likes the analogy of muscle being built up through exercises that break down tissue. Art, like sports, requires effort, risk and resistance. In a sense, he’s asking his audience to take a leap, too. It’s the perfect sports metaphor.

From The New York Times

THE HERESY OF ZONE DEFENSE

by Dave Hickey
It’s in the third quarter. The fifth game of the 1980 NBA Finals. Lakers versus Seventy-Sixers. Maurice Cheeks is bringing the ball up the court for the Sixers. He snaps the rock off to Julius Erving, and Julius is driving to the basket from the right side of the lane against Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Julius takes the ball in one hand and elevates, leaves the floor. Kareem goes up to block his path, arms above his head. Julius ducks, passes under Kareem’s outside arm and the nunder the backboard. He looks like he’s flying out of bounds. But no! Somehow, Erving turns his body in the air, reaches back under the backboard from behind; and lays the ball up into the basket from the left side!

When Erving makes this shot, I rise into the air and hang there for an instant, held a loftby sympathetic magic. When I return to earth, everybody in the room is screaming, “I gotta seethe replay!” They replay it. And there it is again. Jesus, what an amazing play! Just the celestial athleticism of it is stunning, but the tenacity and purposefulness of it, the fluid stream of instantaneous micro-decisions that go into Erving’s completing it… Well, it just breaks you heart. It’s everything you want to do by way of finishing under pressure, beyond the point of no return, faced with adversity, and I am still amazed when I think of it.
In retrospect, however, I am less intrigued by the play itself than by the joy attendant upon Erving’s making it, because it was well nigh universal. Everyone who cares about basketball knows this play, has seen it replayed a thousand times, and marveled at it. Everyone who writes about basketball has written about it. At the time, the crowd went completely berserk. Even Kareem, after the game, remarked that he would pay to see Doctor J make that play against someone else. Kareem’s remark clouds the issue, however, because the play was as much his as it was Erving’s, since it was Kareem’s perfect defense that made Erving’s instantaneous, pluperfect response to it both necessary and possible—thus the joy, because everyone behaved perfectly,eloquently, with mutual respect, and something magic happened—thus the joy, at the triumph of civil society in an act that was clearly the product of talent and will accommodating itself toli berating rules.
Consider this for a moment: Julius Erving’s play was at once new and fair! The rules,made by people who couldn’t begin to imagine Erving’s play, made it possible. If this doesn’t intrigue you, it certainly intrigues me, because, to be blunt, I have always had a problem with “the rules,” as much now as when I was younger. Thanks to an unruled and unruly childhood,however, I have never doubted the necessity of having them, even though they all go bad, and despite the fact that I have never been able to internalize them. To this day, I never stop at a stop sign without mentally patting myself on the back for my act of good citizenship, but I do stop(usually) because the alternative to living with rules—as I discovered when I finally learned some—is just hell. It is a life of perpetual terror, self-conscious wariness, and self-deluding ferocity, which is not just barbarity, but the condition of not knowing that you are a barbarian.
And this is never to know the lightness of joy—or even the possibility of it—because such joys as are attendant upon Julius Erving’s play require civilizing rules that attenuate violence and defer death. They require rules that translate the pain of violent conflict into the pleasures of disputation—into the excitements of politics, the delights of rhetorical art, and competitive sport.Moreover, the maintenance of such joys requires that we recognize, as Thomas Jefferson did, thatthe liberating rule that civilized us yesterday will, almost inevitably, seek to govern us tomorrow,by suppressing both the pleasure and the disputation. In so doing, it becomes a form of violence itself.
An instance: I can remember being buoyed up, as a youth, by reading about Jackson Pollock in a magazine and seeing photographs of him painting. I was heartened by the stupid little rule through which Pollock civilized his violence. It’s okay to drip paint, Jackson said. The magazine seemed to acquiesce: Yeah, Jackson’s right, it seemed to say, grudgingly, Dripping
paint is now within the rules. Discovering this, I was a little bit more free than I was before, and I know that it was a “boy thing,” about privileging prowess at the edge of control and having the confidence to let things go all strange—and I know, as well, that, in my adolescent Weltanschauung, the fact that Jackson Pollock dripped paint somehow justified my not clearing the debris from the floor of my room (which usually, presciently, resembled a Rauschenberg combine). Even so, I had a right to be shocked a few years later when I enrolled in a university and discovered that Pollock’s joyous permission had been translated into a prohibitive,institutional edict: It’s bad not to drip! the art coaches said. It means you got no soul! Yikes!
Henceforth, it has always seemed to me that the trick of civilization lies in recognizing the moment when a rule ceases to liberate and begins to govern—and this brings us back to the glory of hoops. Because among all the arts of disputation our culture provides, basketball has been supreme in recognizing this moment of portending government and in deflecting it, by changing the rules when they threaten to make the game less beautiful and less visible, when the game stops liberating and begins to educate. And even though basketball is not a fine art—even though it is merely an armature upon which we project the image of our desire, while art purports to embody that image—the fact remains that every style change that basketball has undergone in this century has been motivated by a desire to make the game more joyful, various, and articulate,while nearly every style change in fine art has been, in some way, motivated by the opposite agenda. Thus basketball, which began this century as a pedagogical discipline, concludes it as a much beloved public spectacle, while fine art, which began this century as a much-beloved public spectacle, has ended up where basketball began—in the YMCA or its equivalent—governed rather than liberated by its rules.
***
Basketball’s fluidity and adaptability in this century has been considerably enhanced by the fact that it has no past to repudiate—by the fact that it was invented, and amazingly well-designed as a passionate, indoor game. It was less well-designed to serve its original purpose,which was to stave off a delinquency problem in Springfield, Massachusetts in the winter of1891, where the “incorrigible” working-class youth who hung out at the Y were perceived as needing some form of socially redeeming “physical expression” during those months when football and baseball were unfeasible. Ideally, this diversion would involve some intense (i.e.,exhausting) physical activity that would leave both the gymnasium and the young hoodlums physically intact.
James Naismith was enlisted in December of that year to design such a game. So he evolved some Guiding Principles. Combining the most democratic, least territorial aspects of rugby and lacrosse, he invented basketball—and succeeded well beyond his wildest dreams.Within three years, literally thousands of gymnasiums, in every corner of the nation, smelled like teen spirit. Not long thereafter, the YMCA newsletter New Era began running a series entitled “Is Basketball a Danger?” It posed the following questions: Was basketball getting too rough? Was it too exciting for America’s youth? Did it incite unruly behavior in its fans and participants? Did kids neglect their studies to “play it all the time”? And was it, therefore, losing the pedagogical aura of gentlemanly American sport and becoming professionalized? The answer to all these questions, in 1894, was Yes.
Within four years of Naismith’s inventing the game, basketball’s ground rules were in place. By 1894, the size of the court and the five-player team were normalized. The backboard was added to discourage spectators from goal tending, and the rules defining passing and dribbling were codified. And, amazingly, from that time until this, all subsequent legislative changes to the game have been made in the interest of aesthetics—to alter those rules that no longer liberate its players, that have begun to govern the game through tedium and inequity. And
all of these changes probably would have come to pass more rapidly had Naismith codified his most profound insight into the game that he invented: It does not require a coach.
Naismith thought his game would teach itself, which it does, and that the players, trying to win, would teach one another, which they do. But coaches were a part of the gentlemanly,parental tradition of American sport, so basketball got coaches whether it needed them or not. But consider the potential consequences had Naismith acted on his original intuition: Without coaches, there would be no “education.” And without education, there would be no basketball gyms at universities. And without basketball gyms, there would be no “basketball programs.”And without basketball programs—designed to exploit the unpaid labor of impoverished city kids by lying to them and corrupting their adolescence, by teasing them with the false promise of an education and the faint hope of a pro career—basketball would still be a brave and beautiful game.
The long-standing reform coalition of players, fans, and professional owners would have doubtless seen to that, since these aesthetes have never aspired to anything else. They have never wanted anything but for their team to win beautifully, to score more points, to play faster, and to equalize the opportunity of taller and shorter players—to privilege improvisation, so that gifted athletes, who must play as a team to win (because the game is so well-designed), might express their unique talents in a visible way. Opposing this coalition of ebullient fops is the patriarchal cult of college-basketball coaches and their university employers, who have always wanted to slow the game down, to govern, to achieve continuity, to ensure security and maintain stability.
These academic bureaucrats want a “winning program” and plot to win programmatically, by fitting interchangeable players into pre-assigned “positions” within the”system.” And if this entails compelling gifted athletes to guard little patches of hardwood in static zone defenses and to trot around on offense in repetitive, choreographed patterns until they and their fans slip off into narcoleptic coma, then so be it. That’s the way Coach wants it.Fortunately, almost no one else does; and thus under pressure from the professional game, college basketball today is either an enormously profitable, high-speed moral disgrace or a stolid,cerebral celebration of the coach-as-auteur—which should tell us something about the wedding of art and education.
In professional basketball, however, art wins. Every major rule change in the past sixty years has been instituted to forestall either the Administrator’s Solution (Do nothing and hold onto your advantage) or the Bureaucratic Imperative (Guard your little piece of territory like a mad rat in a hole). The “ten-second rule” that requires a team to advance the ball aggressively, and the”shot-clock rule” that requires a team to shoot the ball within twenty-four seconds of gaining possession of it, have pretty much eliminated the option of holding the ball and doing nothing with it, since, at various points in the history of the game, this simulacrum of college administration has nearly destroyed it.
The “illegal-defense rule” which banned zone defenses, however, did more than save the game. It moved professional basketball into the fluid complexity of post-industrial culture—leaving the college game with its zoned parcels of real estate behind. Since zone defenses were first forbidden in 1946, the rules against them have undergone considerable refinement, but basically they now require that every defensive player on the court defend against another player on the court, anywhere on the court, all the time.
All offensive players need not be guarded, of course, and two defensive players may double-team a single offensive player, but nobody can just defend a space. Initially, it was feared that this legislated man-to-man defense would resolve competition in terms of “natural comparative advantage” (as an economist might call it), since if each player is matched with a player on the other team, the player with the most height, bulk, speed, or quickness would seem to have a permanent advantage. But you don’t have to guard the same man all the time; you can switch, and this permission has created the beautiful “match-up game” in which both teams run patterns, picks, and switches in order to create advantageous situations for the offense or the
defense—to generate the shifting interplay of man-made comparative advantage that characterizes most post-industrial commerce. And once you learn what to watch in this game(basically, everything), it is civilized complexity incarnate—quite literally made flesh.
This is not to say that basketball is a religion. It is better than a religion. It is a gift and a pure allegory. Whatever local moralities I wish to assign to it, I may, and so may you, as you and I gaze down through the lens of hoops into the old barbarity that the game has elevated into joy.In doing so, of course, we recognize that the rules that once elevated us into joy now govern us.Still, in the complexity of the game, there is the promise of solutions as daring as Doctor J’s. And they are personal solutions, because my basketball is not your basketball, and you are not me.
Probably you are not even a freelance writer, so you can hardly be expected to understand my pleasure at finding a refined armature for the “deadline life” in a game—of finding a spectacular analog for the nonstop intensity of it, an embodiment of the breathless push of writing and thinking about everything all the time, perpetually shifting from defense to offense, from reacting to acting, with no time off—the experience of arising each morning certain that if you don’t write today, you won’t eat in eight weeks, that if you don’t get a job today, you won’t eat in sixteen weeks—and knowing, most urgently, that the shot clock is ticking down and, eventually,as the deadline approaches, you are going to have to drive the lane. You are going to have to take the ball in one hand and leave the floor, with Kareem between you and the basket—knowing,finally, that there is no hope of your making any of those zillions of fluid, instantaneous decisions that you must make in the air, if you are not borne aloft, buoyed up, as you leave the floor, by a serene, tenacious, gravity-defying confidence that, in just a few seconds, you are going to duck,twist, extend, and slam that sucker down!
James Naismith’s Guiding Principles of Basket-Ball, 1891(Glossed by the author)

1) There must be a ball; it should be large.
(This in prescient expectation of Connie Hawkins and Julius Erving, whose hands would reinvent basketball as profoundly as Jimi Hendrix’s hands reinvented rock-and-roll.)

2) There shall be no running with the ball.
(Thus mitigating the privileges of owning portable property. Extended ownership of the ball is a virtue in football. Possession of the ball in basketball is never ownership; it is always temporary and contingent upon your doing something with it.)

3) No man on either team shall be restricted from getting the ball at any time that it is in play.
(Thus eliminating the job specialization that exists in football, by whose rules only those players in “skill positions” may touch the ball. The rest just help. In basketball there are skills peculiar to each position, but everyone must run, jump, catch, shoot, pass, and defend.)

4) Both teams are to occupy the same area, yet there is to be no personal contact.
(Thus no rigorous territoriality, nor any rewards for violently invading your opponents’ territory unless you score. The model for football is the drama of adjacent nations at war. The model for basketball is the polyglot choreography of urban sidewalks.)

5) The goal shall be horizontal and elevated.
(The most Jeffersonian principle of all: Labor must be matched by aspiration. To score, you mustwork your way down court, but you must also elevate! Ad astra.)