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Sports

A Personal Journey to the Animal Heart of Basketball, with Corbin Smith

In which our Basketball Highlights Critic turns a critical eye on his own game. In the process, he taps into a deeper and more primal vision of basketball.
Image via YouTube

The critic's life is a simple one. I raise from bed, eat breakfast, do relaxing morning calisthenics just like you do. But instead of leaving the comforts of home for the harsh world of the rat race, I go to work behind my computer console, where I watch highlights and crank out insight after profound, galaxy-shattering insight with my broken, calloused fingers. It's a living, but it's also a calling.

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As with others in my cohort, I receive little or no respect from the world at large. "Why are you writing this?" "This is too esoteric?" "Who are you to judge these athletes? I don't see YOU on the court, grinding!" Pedants on the web, looking for ways to denigrate the FREE, PREMIUM spiritual moral, and aesthetic insights I provide every week!

Of course, I don't have to be a great basketball player to be a functional basketball critic. All one needs to do that is a knowledge of a subject and a taste from the great well of pure liquid insight, located atop Mount Critor on the Critic Homeworld. But every time I confront this base attack on my work, somewhere deep inside me—somewhere past the cities and forests of reason planned and planted deep in my being—I feel a pang. A pang . . . of truth.

Read More: Kobe Bryant Majored in Drama, Not Math

I try to ward it off. I do not need to manifest basketball to understand it, I tell myself. I do not need any more insight; adding even a little bit more insight would put me at risk of experiencing full self-awareness, which the fragile human brain cannot bear. I woke and I slept. I wrote, I thought, I read. I rode a canoe to the mouth of the ocean and felt, in my deepest soul, the living freshwater give way to the wilder, undying life of the sea. And still, after all that: the pang.

And so, to the audience, I submit. I hired a professional camera crew and asked them to photograph me playing basketball. Obviously, critical morality and spirituality prevents me from a true assessment of or engagement with myself. Instead, I offer mere lunges at objectivity and mindfulness. Reader, I did my best.

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1.

The Mikan Drill, the greatest of all basketball warm-ups, is an exploration in repetition. Left, rebound, right, rebound, left, rebound, right, rebound. In the mind of the performer, a recursiveness arrives as the task becomes second nature. Left, rebound, right. The music of your body, syncing up with the drill, begins to guide you. Eventually, pure repetition sets in. You cannot miss, because the rhythm of the game is buried deep in your bones. George Mikan's spirit possesses you and guides you to the Mikan Zone that resides deep in your heart.

But, of course, order is an illusion. We are hardwired with thousands of inconsistencies and minor problems. And even if we're deep in the spiritual MZ—feeling our arms get longer and our glasses thicker, memories of a time when goaltending was not only legal but the single rational defensive tactic—our bodies will fail in thousands of little ways, leaving every layup somehow different from the last. My large, somewhat broken body—my left foot is missing some crucial ligament connections after a lifetime of high ankle sprains which, I swear, is why I look silly playing basketball—in Mikan Motion probably highlights these little ways more than most. But I can speak from experience: I was there, for however long. I was granted entry to The Spirit's temple by performing the rite of repetition.

Please, get to a rim and seek the temple yourself. You don't have to be great at basketball to find its truths, as you can see.

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2.

Aside from some moderately embarrassing shirt-raise action, my three-point shooting started off well. After making my first shot, I came to believe, for no particular reason, that I was in A Zone. I searched inside to get deeper and deeper in the zone, so I could never miss again.

I failed because I forgot the fundamental basketball ethics I was taught by my longtime coach, Rufus Dougeoulous.

Some background on my longtime coach. There was longstanding conversation in the community about whether Rufus was man or dog, or both, or something else. He himself did not know for certain, but deferred to the human side of his nature. He is private about the question, and says only that he is "satisfied" with the question of his true origins and his purpose on Earth, which is to teach basketball.

Coach Dougeoulous believes, and has believed from a very young age, in the essential spiritual and practical connections between a "pack mentality" and "basketball teamwork." The goal in both is to find victory—over an injured fawn or another basketball team, it does not matter. To do that, we have to give and receive strength from the collective.

Human beings, of course, are not naturally equipped for TRUE community. A dog's, or a wolf's, innermost nature is far more empathetic than that of the low, greedy, lecherous human. And so, my coach teaches, in order to become a great basketball player, we must leave the selfish portions of our nature behind and embrace The Way of the Dog.

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And so I called several friends, and ran a pick and roll:

3.

As you can see, since the time I wrote about and thoroughly mocked Bob Cousy's totally absurd dribbling arm raise, I have capitulated and introduced it into my game. It looks silly, but it really does help with balance if you've had a big oatmeal breakfast. If we all played the same, basketball would be long jumping.

But I worried. A straight drive to the rim? This was not a sacrifice in the proper spirit of the pack. I had done a dishonor to the Dog Gods of Basketball, to my teacher, to the spirit of the game. It wasn't all my fault, of course, as Randall also did a disservice when he didn't roll properly. (His celebration was excessive, as well.) But there's nothing I could properly do about Randall. All I could do was go deeper, and find the noble dog in myself.

4.

The dog does not dominate defenders with pure force alone. See me here, situated on the block, ready to dominate a smaller defender. In Human-Style Basketball, I would use my superior mass and skill to push the opponent deep underneath the basket, drop a spin move on him, and lay it in.

All well and good, but how efficient is it, really? I would have to exhaust myself pushing him with my butt, then I risk a traveling call on my move, and THEN, even if it all goes well, my opponent might foul and send me to the line, where I am just reality-warpingly bad at shooting free throws. There's no way to get out of this cleanly.

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But in the dog style, THE PACK ORDER is dominant. Addressing your opponent as Beta, by growling at him for his indolence in seeking to take the title of alpha away, is ALWAYS the first step. If your opponent's deepest instincts realize that nature itself has made you a threat to his happiness or achievement, he will submit to your superior will. Two points, yours for the taking, acquired with nothing but your deepest, innermost will and some surprising natural touch on a bank shot.

5.

Of course, Alpha Dominance isn't just for the post. When my opponent doesn't bite on my crosses—he is, and will forever remain, Beta, but he has impressive perimeter defense instincts—I summon a bark from the deepest part of my will, and send him to the ground, trembling in fear at his leader's purity of power. He can only watch, awed, as I glide to the rim on clouds made of candy.

6.

Dog style isn't just for the dominant player lurking inside of you. Human/Dog social structures are RIDDLED with novelty and sentimentality, and ripe for exploiting. If you're squaring up against a Human-Style opponent who doesn't understand the true social and ethical structures of basketball, you can trick them by presenting a friendly front and betraying them when the window opens, like a Shetland Sheepdog distracting its owner before breaking into the cellar to devour the expensive steaks Dad is dry aging.

7.

It is tempting, and all too easy, to fixate on the dominion of interpersonal dominance in Dog Style and totally ignored its teamwork benefits. "The Call" is one of the tradition's proudest tactics, guaranteeing victory on the pickup court no matter what kind of sticky situation.

8.

The only way to truly master Dog Style is to void your mind of human concerns and embrace the more cooperative, community-building spirit of the dog in its deepest nature. Burning sage and submitting to a fetch is a basic technique you can do in a local park. It also functions as proper athletic warm-up. Do not eat dog food for this purpose.

Now that I have fully deconstructed my game, and, by extension, rekindled the light in my soul, I will be writing about the highlights of actual NBA playoff games for the foreseeable future. Thank to Caitlin Obom, Zak Nelson, and Randall Cleveland for video assistance. You can see them perform at the_ Pocket Theater in Seattle_.