Ball As Life
Not much, watching the game, drinkin' a Bud, changing my life
It’s time for the NBA playoffs! If you missed the tip, well, we’re still in the first round, so there’s not much to catch up on. Injuries and cheap shots have ruled the first weeks of action; Giannis Antentokuompo and Kawhi Leonard, two former NBA Finals MVPs, are nursing injuries, and players across the postseason have gotten in trouble for either stomping on their opponents (Draymond Green) or hitting them in the, ahem, groin region (Joel Embiid, Dillon Brooks, James Harden, honestly the list just gets longer every day.) If you can move past all that, some really excellent basketball is being played; the Heat barely made the playoffs and just dispatched the top seeded Bucks, LeBron James is still doing peak LeBron things twenty years into his career against the Grizzlies, and the Knicks – the Knicks! – are energizing New York to dangerous levels. The best first round series, in my book at least, has pitted the defending champion Golden State Warriors against the upstart Sacramento Kings, a team that hadn’t made the playoffs for seventeen straight seasons before this one. Each game has featured long stretches high-octane offense, indifferent or nonexistent defense, and, for lack of a better phrase, some real high-quality shotmaking. Also, the Kings turn on a gigantic beam of light on top of their stadium every time they win a home game; for pure theatre, it’s tough to beat that.
The Warriors were the predominant team of the late 2010s, making the NBA Finals five years in a row and winning three of them between 2015 and 2019. Even more than success on the court, they fundamentally changed the way basketball was played, with Steph Curry’s success from deep three point range turning the game into what it is now – efficiency ball, all threes and shots at the rim, with an emphasis on space and movement. After 2019, injuries and roster attrition led them into the NBA doldrums, but they finally got healthy last year and made a somewhat surprising championship run after a couple years in repose. It was one of those rare times when (most) people were happy to see a perennial winner back on top; they’d taken their lumps. There was a sense last year that it might be the Warriors’ last shot at a title; having won it once more, they gained an extra life, and here they are again fighting for one last ride, until the next last ride, until all their stars retire.
So what’s that got to do with anything? Like all sports, not much, but it’s something to talk about. Basketball in particular has carved out a niche among literary types; I’ve written before about the highly baroque vein of ‘basketblogging’ that flourished in the early aughts, and I can’t think of a pro sport with more bookish devotees. The game is fluid and beautiful enough to inspire hosannas, and, more than any other sport, its drama is exaggeratedly human. To put it simply, larger than life people are playing on a very small (proportionally) court, and there are high definition cameras everywhere to catch every grin and grimace. Unlike other sports, where the athletes are buried beneath para-military equipment, basketball players are just out there, making it easy to latch onto their assorted personalities and quirks. Add in the offseason contract drama and various off-court beefs between guys who have been in the same sphere for almost their entire developmental life, and you have all the ingredients to form fierce parasocial attachments among fans.
One such fan with a particularly fierce attachment is Shane Anderson, a poet and translator obsessed with the Warriors, so much so that he decided to shape his life around their “four core values” – joy, mindfulness, compassion and competition. One of the results of this endeavor is 2021’s After the Oracle, Or: How the Golden State Warriors’ Four Core Values Can Change Your Life Life They Changed Mine, Anderson’s quote-unquote self help book and / or ‘lyric essay’ on the Warriors, basketball, and how those two things might help one live.
Suspicious of self help books? Hey, same here, and so is Anderson, who presents most of them as “stupid” and a “very neoliberal undertaking” before crossing over those concerns, leaving them in the dust, and deciding to write one anyway. “None of this would be linear or definite after the first rational acquisition but it would slowly become all encompassing … By conjuring up countless other voices and engaging with my surroundings as much as possible, following the Warriors’s values would also mean going beyond the self of the neoliberal self-improvement … What you have in your hands is a document of my attempt to change my life.”
Anderson begins the book as many self-help books do, at rock bottom; he’s divorced and living alone in Berlin, drinking too much and watching the exile’s late night pirate feed of American sports and trying not to wake the neighbors. After that late night, the next day is an all day binge that eventually leads to a breakdown and a suicide attempt; after that, the chance discovery of a Rilke poem – we should say that Rilke poem, given how much the words “change your life” have come up – orients him towards finding a less destructive way of living, one that neatly ties in with the Warriors becoming one of the best basketball teams of all time.
The four core values, as delineated by Warriors coach Steve Kerr in a hard-to-find video message to the team, are joy, mindfulness, compassion and competition. Anderson devotes a chapter to each, weaving in autobiography, philosophy, history, sportswriting, and posts from the Warriors reddit page throughout. Joy is characterized by Steph Curry and his “child-like silliness” and “merriment” on and off the court, which leads to a realization about how “the trophy is yours if you learn to have fun in the daily grind”; mindfulness shows us the way to “the zone” (a state of total consciousness “while being unconscious” where you’re playing the game the right way, without thought, and in rare moments you can lock into this feeling, perhaps by meditating, or by being mindful when, say, you’re dealing with an annoying person at your job) with Klay Thompson, whose otherworldly 37 point quarter in 2015 and general stoner-buddhivista personality demonstrates the benefits of said zone; compassion focuses on the Oakland Ghost Ship fire of 2016 (rave culture is a big part of this book) and the aforementioned Draymond Green’s complicated relationship with compassion (he’s a heel on the floor, but generous off of it) and the four core values in general; and competition wraps things up by positing the four core values as “entangled,” constantly feeding into one another, and ultimately concluding that playing good team basketball, in life and in a game, feels pretty good. Befitting its status as an un-self-help book, interstitial chapters are all titled “Beginning, Again”, highlighting the wending, circuitous path of self-improvement. All things must end, though, and this narrative slams right into the pandemic, where we get to hear some classic early-Covid optimism: “Perhaps things will be more subtle … perhaps we will be more mindful and compassionate of and toward one another.” Well, Shane, I’ve got some good news and some bad news: none of that happened, in fact the pendulum swung almost entirely the other way towards obvious cruelty, but the Warriors did end up winning another championship.
Anderson writes with a fan’s passion, for better or for worse. On the positive side, the descriptions of the Warriors’ intricate ball movement and teamwide actions are excellent, chock full of details that only an obsessive could clock: “The merriment of the Baby-Faced Assassin carries into the game itself when he passes the ball to Draymond Green at the top of the key, then curls around a screen at the baseline, shooting a three and galloping down the court like an overexcited foal prancing in an open field.” On the other hand, Anderson’s fandom for the Warriors leaves him with some serious blind spots. Overlooking the more unsavory elements of your favorite franchise is part and parcel for any fan, but it makes for less persuasive writing when the reader doesn’t share your affinity. So while I’m sure Warriors fans love Draymond Green, Anderson never convincingly reconciles the fact that Green regularly leads the league in technical fouls (for overly rough or unsportsmanlike conduct), has earned a reputation as a cheap shot artist (aforementioned stomping, a very famous nutshot in the NBA Finals that may have cost the Warriors another title, among others), and just this year punched his own teammate in the face at practice. OK, fine, Anderson couldn’t have known that last one, but even during the time of the writing of this book, Green was semi-publicly feuding with his teammate, Kevin Durant, essentially telling him that he would never be as loved as the original Warriors even after winning two championships with the team. All Anderson can muster in Green’s defense – and he must muster this in order to fit into the core values schema of the book – is Green’s off the court1 charity work and the fact that he stopped pursuing triple-doubles in games and focused more on team success. The simpler, unspoken explanation is that Green regularly does not live up to the “core four values,” but provides enough value otherwise that the Warriors are willing to put up with all that. In other words, he’s a shithead, but he’s our shithead, the classic guy that every fanbase hates but would secretly love to have on their team. These are the ‘cultural’ trade-offs that championship teams have to make all the time, and it would actually be a testament to the culture the Warriors have created that it could stand someone like Green,2 but instead Anderson forces him into the general wellness narrative of the book.
The other on-court move that gets curiously overlooked and written-off is the addition of Kevin Durant, one of the best pure scorers ever, to the team after the 2016 NBA Finals. The Warriors had just lost the Finals after holding a 3-1 series lead over LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers; Durant and his Oklahoma City Thunder had just lost to the Warriors after holding a 3-1 lead in the Western Conference Finals. Durant decided that if he couldn’t beat the Warriors, he’d join ‘em, and the Warriors decided that they would do anything to make sure they never lost to LeBron James again. If you were a fan of the Warriors, it must’ve felt pretty awesome; to everyone else, it kind of sucked. Instead of, ahem, competing, Durant and the Warriors created a super team, and spent the next two years anti-climactically dominating the league.3 It might have been the best basketball team ever assembled; it never felt all that fun, given how inorganically it was constructed. But fine, don’t hate the player, it was Durant’s right to go and get his; I can, however, hate the game, and note that Durant’s addition to the Warriors often bogged the team down into a decidedly unjoyful version of itself, the offense devolving from freeflowing movement and sets into sluggish isolation basketball. When you have Kevin Durant, it makes sense to just chuck him the ball and let him work; while it was brutally effective, it didn't have quite the same magic as the early days of the Warriors dynasty. All Anderson has to say about this – besides a lot of praise for Durant as a player and person, curiously eliding Durant's famous touchiness – is that "the 2018-19 team had lost touch with the core four values." Sure did! Sure seems like the Warriors carved some very large exceptions into their “core four values” to keep winning basketball games!
The Warriors-colored glasses extend beyond the players; Joe Lacob, the owner of the Warriors, is cast as some sort of visionary businessman, armed with the idea that “success is inevitable if you work in a collaborative environment where inclusion, trust, togetherness, transparency, audacity and grit are the fundamentals.” That’s all well and good, but he’s also just a rich guy who bought a team that had previously drafted Steph Curry, moved his team out of Oakland and into the tony confines of Silicon Valley, and priced out a ton of the team’s long-suffering fans in favor of, well, herbs.4 You can love a team and not love the figure of capital that stands behind it, which makes it particularly weird to read Anderson, the strident anti-neoliberalist, practically fawn over venture capitalist Joe Lacob. Even Lacob’s comment that the team was “light-years ahead of every other team," one of the more smug pronouncements of the past decade, is brushed off as "rather brash", an instance of Lacob's confidence getting the best of him rather than a defining ethos of the Warriors: an overriding sense of superiority.
Every team that wins as much as the Warriors has the tide turn against them; as Anderson explains, “the team’s winning started to feel inevitable. The Warriors were going to the Finals. Again. And again. And again. After the fourth time, you kinda had to hate them as a casual sports fan, just like you had to hate Real Madrid, the New England Patriots, or the New York Yankees.” Those are fitting examples to pick across the sports world, but perhaps not for the reason Anderson thought: they all have the same superiority complex as the Warriors, with the Yankees and Patriots even having their own mythological “way” that explains their success.5 Anderson pins this derision against the Warriors to the idea that "sports fans indulge in a form of speculative fiction where the world as it could be is better than the one that is." Sure, there's a bit of envy baked into Warriors hatred, but the Warriors also just became annoying: ownership itself insisted that more than luck or even skill, the Warriors had figured it all out better than anyone else, just like all the other 'innovators' in Silicon Valley. It's one thing to believe something that – it's a competition, after all – but it's another entirely to hold it over everyone else. Especially when Anderson's distillation of the Warriors' organizational success comes down to Bill Simmons' vaunted "Secret" – that team chemistry and achievement is more important than individual talent and accolades. Could anyone else have thunk of that?
Self help books, like sports, require total belief: a conscious deadening of all internal opposition to simple platitudes and inane mantras. There’s no such thing as a half-assed champion, and you can’t half-ass your way to self improvement. Anderson’s book is a tongue-in-cheek self help book shackled to a form that it doesn’t believe in. All the references are erudite and the biographical scenes are affecting; there’s even a bit in the compassion section that approaches a Jon Fosse-ish empathetic revelation. But things keep having to circle back to the semi-silly core four values and enacting them in one’s life, even when Anderson recognizes their limits: “Now was the time to mention the Warriors” he writes at one point as he faces an acquaintance devolving towards the alt-right6, “[b]ut somehow I couldn’t force myself to do it. It wasn’t like I was enacting their form of mindfulness, so how dare I force it on you.”
It was surely helpful for Anderson to think through his own issues with the help of his fabulously successful favorite basketball team; the reach of that to anyone beyond Anderson is questionable, and would be just as questionable if it was about a Rilke poem and the work of Brecht changing his life. I don’t think I’d be able to convey to any of you how Alyosha Karamazov and Father Zosima in Brothers Karamazov changed my life; the schema that we grip onto in times of crisis are so extremely particular and personal that explaining them strips them of the faux-relatability that’s the key to the self help genre.7 The overwhelming feeling that After the Oracle gives is that rooting for the Warriors has been pretty great for the last decade, and that Shane Anderson concurrently pulled himself out a personal nadir. The links between those two things get less and less clear the further away you get from being Shane Anderson, or at least being a Warriors fan at a personal low. That’s the risk that anyone takes with theory-heavy autobiography – the line between brilliance and something that only makes sense to oneself is thin. So we might qualify this one as a clang off of the rim, or an audacious pass that just misses its mark, the mind meld between two players not quite there. If you want to see the good stuff, you can just tune into the games.
While we’re on off the court stuff, does Steph Curry’s opposition to public housing in his neighborhood offset his on the court joie de vivre?
Or Andrew Bogut, another player that Anderson writes glowingly about, despite him being an oncourt lug and an offcourt pizzagate guy.
Apologies to my friends who root for the Raptors, but they were on their way to a third straight championship had Durant and Thompson not been injured.
Real Madrid mostly just hoover up the best talent in the world and win that way, but they do also engage in the fantasy that they just do things differently over there.
Anderson describes this character as someone out of of Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in The Americas, but he comes back spouting conspiracies about aliens and UFOs, so that’s actually more like Bolaño’s “Enrique Martin.”
I also think sports can only do so much in a life: you can read about that here!