I remember the exact moment when I first realized that basketball was no longer the simple game I had played as a kid.
It was February of 1968.
We had just been annihilated by Princeton, then one of the country’s top college teams. The five-hour bus ride back to Providence seemed as bleak as nuclear winter. While the bus crept along through the dreary New Jersey meadows, I leaned against a window, feigning sleep. All around me in the darkened bus were teammates slumped in their seats. The air smelled like failure. If we had had any illusions about ourselves as a team, this drubbing had shattered them.
As it had shattered any illusions I had about myself as an athlete. The game had been a defining moment, the night I first came face-to-face with my athletic mortality, the painful realization that I wasn’t as good as I wanted to be and never would be.
What was I going to do with this realization?
I didn’t have a clue.
For I had been brought up to believe in the most American of convictions: that if you worked hard enough, desired something enough, sacrificed enough, your dreams could come true. I had grown up surrounded by inspirational clichés and simplistic slogans that began seducing me at an early age. These slogans were deeply embedded in the culture, forever hanging from locker room walls, essentially unquestioned, unchallenged.
So I sat by the window, running the past through my mind as if it were some newsreel, my despair increasing with each passing mile. Eventually, as if I had crossed some emotional fault line, the despair turned to disgust.
Basketball had always been more than just a game to me. It had been a way of life. It had determined who my friends were, where I went to school, what I studied once I got there. For nearly a decade there hadn’t been a day when I didn’t think about it. Without it, I certainly wouldn’t have been at Brown. Without it, my life undoubtedly would have been very different. Now I suddenly wondered what it had all been for.
I had arrived at Brown with no confidence in myself as a student, and for four years, I had consistently taken the easiest courses I could find. Now I was a college senior, two courses short of graduating with my class that spring, without any idea of what I wanted to do in the future. It was 1968, three-quarters of the way through one of the most turbulent decades in American history, when it often seemed as if the country was undergoing a national nervous breakdown. It also was a time of dizzying social change, of the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the rise of the counterculture. Cultural tremors were shaking our society, growing into shock waves that would change it forever. Here it was—going on all around me—and I knew too little about it.
Why?
Why didn’t I know anything about politics or theater? About history, literature, or art? Why, in the past decade, had I only read a handful of books outside of school, when I had been a voracious reader as a kid? Why was my life so one-dimensional? Why was my life both defined and shaped by a childhood obsession with a game? My life was a mélange of empty gyms and taped ankles, pregame pep talks, echoes of muted cheers. My life revolved around whether my jump shot went in or not.
Was there life after basketball?
At twenty-two, on a cold night in the winter of 1968, sitting on that bus and watching the future unfold ahead of me, headlights illuminating patches of the darkened highway, I wasn’t sure.
Twelve years later, I often found myself on the third floor of the Rockefeller Library at Brown, always in a small carrel by a window that overlooked downtown Providence. I was trying to eke out a living as a freelance writer at the time, which—in the real world—was a euphemism for being unemployed.
After returning from six months of active duty in the army, I had taught high school English for three years. I had quit the teaching job to write a novel about a teacher with nothing to say, in front of a class that didn’t want to hear anything anyway. But now that novel was in some drawer somewhere, right along with the rejection slips. My new project was a memoir about my basketball journey, which would eventually become the book Glory Days. It would begin with that night on the bus coming home from Princeton.
Every morning I would sit in the library, wallowing in the irony of it. Could you make up the fact that I was now spending more time in the library than I ever did in my time as a Brown student?
Did I wish I could go back and do my college years over, get up every morning with my notebooks and my sharpened pencils, then come back and study deep into the night, like a scene from some sepia-toned movie?
No doubt.
I was haunted by sketchy memories like this one: I was in a study group for a course I was taking—it was either “The Philosophy of Literature” or “The Literature of Philosophy,” but to this day I’m not sure which, because I rarely went. I was a senior at the time, and there was a peace rally on the green every Wednesday; my student deferment was about to run out, and everything was as up in the air as a long jump shot. So there I was, at a study session one night, trying to play catch-up before the next exam.
I had listened to all the talk, trying to absorb it, until one guy said, “I guess that does it. It should be no sweat.”
“Wait,” I said, flipping through my notebook. “There’s one more. It’s in my notes. Yeah, here it is. Doctor Zay-goon.”
“It’s right here,” I said. “Doctor Zay-goon. Or something like that.”
More silence.
“You don’t mean Darkness at Noon, do you?” another kid asked.
Oh.
But I’ve come to realize that Brown taught me things I didn’t know I was learning. At the most obvious level, it put me around highly intelligent, motivated people, and they did what good teammates always do: they pushed me up, opened up my world in ways that would once have been unimaginable. Could any college student ask for more, regardless of his grade point average?
Brown also taught me a certain confidence that I’d never had before. Never again would I be intimidated around academic people, never again would I be impressed with pretensions. That, in many ways, was Brown’s gift to me.
It was not an insignificant one.
* * *
After I’d freelanced at the Providence Journal for seven years, they finally offered me a job as a reporter. At the time, I didn’t want to write about sports. It was the early eighties; I had evolved and was ready to accept the possibility that there was life after basketball. I was covering town council meetings that would make my eyes glaze over. Then one day a sportswriting job opened up at the paper.
“Why would anyone give up being a reporter to be a sportswriter?” asked the top editor.
“Because the worst game in the world is better than the best town council meeting that ever was,” I said.
The editor shook his head in disgust and walked away.
That was thirty years go.
But even though I’ve been writing professionally for over thirty years now, and have written twelve books, I still consider myself a basketball player first and a writer second. Having played basketball at the level I played at is still the thing I take the most pride in. Shooting a basketball is still the thing I did the best.
But it’s never changed.
And there are still days when I find myself in some pickup basketball game somewhere, when reality gets distorted and I am still young and strong, off in my own world, oblivious to everything else around me. And on those rare occasions, which come like gifts from some benevolent god, the only thing I care about is my jump shot.