Spring 2022. I am in the Fed Ex Forum, a gigantic temple to sports that closely resembles a bloated and beached UFO from the 1970’s. I’ve been in here numerous times but mostly as the vaunted professorial representative for the University of Memphis graduation, swathed in cap, gown, and academic hood proclaiming my status in the learned hierarchy. We step ponderously in procession across what is the basketball court, with gravitas and dignity. Today I am festooned with a ball cap, I have a long pony-tail pulled through the hat’s opening and an over-priced graphic tee shirt, all screaming “The old dame is a rabid Grizzly basketball fan and she doesn’t care what you think”. Surprisingly, I don’t. Which surprises me more than anyone.
It is hot today in Memphis- temperature and energy-wise. The downtown is teeming with cars searching spots and people searching food. Our downtown is pretty small and contained by the mighty, albeit coy, Mississippi River. Passing through Memphis the river is languid and unnoticed. The city has mostly snubbed her- first by the white flight that left downtown shuttered and spurned and now by the monied few that have grabbed and gated all scenic waterfront property to display their chaise lounges and barbecues. A few blocks away, Beale Street is an artery of indulgence and it borders the Forum. It was packed today- hordes pacing its storied streets without thought to its gritty, creative history. What they know is they can carry drinks and get subsumed by music broadcasting onto the street as they await the sacred jump ball and that’s enough. The music is live- the musicians aged and part of Memphis legacy. They play the blues like the sound is drawn from the sacred ground beneath them. Today, few are really listening. Today a tribe is meeting up and recognizing each other in their team merch. Today Memphis, our fractured, race-haunted, poverty-ridden city is meeting itself as comrades and coalescing to send mojo and chants to a group of young men who are particularly good at getting a ball in a basket.
My son and I get here early knowing the downtown capacity may not measure up to the torrent of autos, energy and desire about to flood it. We are one of the first in. He goes to the team store in search of cool stuff. I, health food aficionado, decide to search out ice cream. I score a large plastic cup bloated with a faux ice cream product called soft serve swirl. It could feed three. I lap up every crystal. I’m swept up in this fury of the ridiculous and the only thing to do is ride the current with glee. A former self whispers, “Really? Tens of thousands of us have spent beaucoup bucks on seats and swag and hours debating line ups on the Grizz Nation Facebook thread. We have abandoned all semblance of intellectual sophistication as we fill the forum and join voices hollering “refs you suck!”. Rome is our predecessor”.
With lots of time before the game begins, I sit on a short wall in the lobby shoveling my ice cream product into my mouth. For all its girth and substance, it has little flavor. It’s flavorless cold. A forum product, not unlike the shoe leather hamburgers or bottom-less stale popcorn, whose satisfaction is the promise of quenching, not the actual experience of culinary anything. As I sit, eat, and give up caring about taste I have this blasphemous thought that this thing I am pretending to enjoy spoonful by spoonful is a metaphor for the sports fervor that’s bitten me. Both are big, loud, expensive, lures of human desire. They are both the craving and the slaking. The food product has no nutrition and the game no lasting value. Their power is that they turn on a spigot of emotion, trigger a roiling of human experience. And it’s staged in an arena where we all rise and fall and gasp as one and our human composite of ten thousand yearning hearts convinces us we are alive.
I watch people stream through the turnstiles. Everyone is excited. Babies have jerseys on, small kids hop rather than walk. The DJ plays Memphis rap with a driving beat and strong propulsive voices and lyrics too fast to understand. The dancers are Jookin’- a dance that grew up in the streets nearby. It is a hip hop form with body isolation and rhythmic dynamics but the footwork is unique and extraordinary- the dancers move on the side edge or tip of the sneaker. The dancers appear to float across the linoleum. Like ballet dancers, they defy gravity. The white flight folks who rarely come this deep into the city are here now and in the tribe, too. And they have the tribe merch on and the same fervent hope for what will happen in the next few hours. I sit on the wall and my heart breaks. Thousands of us have walked into this building filled and united by hope. Hope, belief. The air is pulsing with it. What a precious emotion to let ourselves have. It fills up our hearts. It makes us abnormally nice to each other. There are smiles, laughter- even patience with an old man blocking the hallway. We are good people right now, people we wish to be and to be with. But our big and bursting hope-filled hearts are fragile. We all know this. We have each been whiplashed before when hope shattered. But we were more alone then with our lost love or job or scary diagnosis. But here our hope is multiplied and we are buoyed and enlivened to let our hearts grow to bursting in an arena with, as we say in Memphis, errrbody.
I am a tent-revival level convert to this absurdity. If this were a cult, I’d need to be de-programmed. Family, friends, even casual acquaintances worry that pandemic life altered my aging brain. I never had any intention of becoming what I now am. I loudly held sports in derision bordering on contempt. Sports were toxic masculinity, covert training for warfare, pointless, banal, grossly overpaid competitions. Sports reinforced aggression and othering and celebrated a deception that life is about winning. Fans were beer-guzzling Neanderthals farting in their Barcaloungers. Growing up, my two older brothers were star athletes and I a cheerleader in a short skirt called thunder thighs by some boys. The roar of athletic prominence was deafening and my furtive attempts at poetry found no audience. In the 1960’s, girls’ sports were what girls did who didn’t make cheerleading or have boyfriends. I tried basketball once and only remember fingernails coming at my face. I didn’t last. Where brilliant dance companies are barely afloat, a 21-year-old player earns nine million a year. My disgust was righteously fueled.
Eighteen months later, I am ready to sit atop any victory float or learn how to back flip in honor of a basketball team. This thing that happened to me resists explanation even as I will try and parse it. I harbor a notion that logic has no role and I’ll flail around trying to making sense that is beyond my mind. I google “converts”. St. Paul converted. St. Paul loved God but didn’t think much of Jesus until he was blinded by a lightning strike and a laying on of hands was all it took to fix that. He was smitten. Where’s my smite hiding?
I know why I began attending games. It was October 2019. My son’s marriage detonated and he moved in with us for a while, devastated. My self-appointed purpose in life has been to keep my kids from suffering. I’m at my most rabid and ingenious in this. He liked sports some. Basketball has a ridiculous number of games. Voila! I will fill his time and distract him. We headed downtown. It was loud, the food crappy and other than the obvious element of getting an orange ball through an orange rim I was clueless about what went on. I watched the bodies in motion, though. I found the timing exquisite and the use of space dazzling. An upstart shortie (only 6’4”) leapt like Nureyev. Unlike Nureyev, he also twisted, ball-faked and scored. Another player entranced me. This mountain of a man with hands that dwarfed the ball calmly and consistently peeled it off the backboard and gave it back to us. He didn’t dazzle me, he comforted me. This I could watch. When our guys huddle before tip-off, they circle up and do a joy dance. In the hierarchy of NBA elitism, Memphis is low, low. Then, in 2021, we beat two powerhouses to land a play off berth. Commentators were tongue-tied. Upstart, underdog. We got proud and we stayed Memphis- half-time shows feature hip hop and Jookin’. Courtside seats are strewn with Rap artists sporting a Fort Knox worth of gold in their mouths and around their necks. The players, mostly from a childhood of training on cement courts in their neighborhoods, will not be denied. And the growing story is that they are winning in no small part because they really like each other. And now they are mine, and I gratefully share them with the rest of this restless, brewing city. This is all of our mess and magic, our crime-afflicted, music-filled real time realm on display.
I’ve about finished my ton of ice cream product which I must have made look irresistible because two separate people have made bee-lines to me needing to know where I got such a delectable item. I’m happy to tell them, even though the stuff is lousy, as I recognize the desire and I know the taste of the ice cream is not the point. There is still time before the game begins, so I sit. I conjure a tinge of my Zen consciousness. This day in this lobby life is expressing itself. I am dazzled and taken by surprise. In this place, this afternoon, there is an explosion of joy. Though what has conjured this is ludicrous- a basketball game-what has been conjured is precious and fleeting. It’s grace- life gifting us a burst of its inherent beauty whether we deserve it or not. Like suddenly discovering a hidden field of wild lavender you weren’t even looking for after trudging up a steep hillside, this is a surprising, unexpected and temporary expression of bliss which is part of being alive. The game will start, both teams will rely upon extraordinary talent and hours of sweaty hard work. They’ll run plays, apply strategy. But nothing is guaranteed or known. The ball has its own bounce mind. Human emotion will arise as maybe confidence or maybe fear. A player will miss an easy shot and be unable to shake the sense of failure he has been battling all his life. The refs will always piss someone off. A player will land hard and his all too human flesh will damage and he’ll leave play. One or the other team will win and be ecstatic until the next loss. There will always be another game, more success, failure, joy, disappointment. It will never follow the game plan because life is bigger than coaching, practicing, talent, millions of dollars, thousands of fans, good luck jerseys and pre-game genuflecting. Life is huge and spacious and generous and unbridled. It has no need for us or our machinations. It will show up as it does and though we may try to explain and wrestle it to our will, we will fail. What we can do is ride its roller coaster with upstretched arms and beating hearts.
I know why I now love basketball. It’s because I’ve seen how each game is a manifestation of life. Each moment counts and each is fresh and unique. Past and future are footnotes to its dynamic present of decision, action, outcome. The ardent goal to be a winner is ultimately unreachable; winning will always be temporary. But it is the fervent drive toward that, regardless, that showcases our poignant human experience. We’ll die-but in the face of that ultimate defeat we grab our tickets and encounter our moments as they unfold. So life is like how I see basketball. The game begins with a jump ball then runs headlong from encounter to encounter. Players bob, weave, fake, pass, shoot, rebound, crash, leap, dunk. There is hope and joy and disappointment and anger and fear. And then it ends. Play stops, we disburse. Game’s over never to be repeated. Remembered, maybe. There may be grief or perhaps jubilation. Each will pass. Then we will begin again- we’ll enter the arena anew; again full hope and again no guarantee of how things will turn out. But here we all are anyway, streaming forward, tickets in hand. No lessons are learned, no moral imparted, no solution found. The message? Just show up, ready. Next game, next life. And so on.
Holly Lau is Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of Memphis
