Field report

Er, basketball’s played on a court

By Tanya Whiton

SLOPPY: they may not know a finger roll from a turn-around jump-shot, but they sure can drink.

“How about those Patriots?” my favorite bartender asked me recently.

“Who?” I replied.

My friend Heidi and I sat perched at the bar, discussing our upcoming assignment. We were supposed to attend the first annual Maine Basketball Report All Star Showcase, a three-day extravaganza put together by rabid high school b-ball fan, Tom Nolette. We’d done a couple of pieces on boxing and grappling, and our editor thought we ought to branch out, cover some team sports. Well, that’s when things went awry. Because I hate team sports. And I particularly hate basketball.

Heidi and I began our accidental career as a sports writing/action photography duo about a year ago, on a road trip that took us through Buffalo, Cleveland, and Cincinnati en route to Louisville and New Orleans. Always hopeful that our travel experience might somehow mirror a movie, we went to Buffalo in search of Vincent Gallo. He was nowhere to be found. But the deranged sports fans he captured so well in Buffalo 66 were.

Next stop, Cleveland. We were mystified, pulling into town after a long day of driving, by throngs of people who poured down the sidewalks, blocked cross streets, and disregarded traffic signals. A bright, bright light glowed in the distance. Many of the ill-mannered pedestrians were wearing jackets with a Native American logo on them. It wasn’t until we’d parked and gotten ourselves a beer in the Redfish bar across from Jacob’s Field that we sorted it out. “The Indians were playing,” an incredulous local told us. “Baseball.”

By Cincinnati, we’d started to catch on. The people here in the cold, post-industrial cities of the north, they like sports. Driving over the bridge that separates Cincinnati into two halves, we could see TWO stadiums, the newest glowing in the afternoon sun like a giant copper spaceship.

We began to refer to our trip as “the stadium tour” in postcards home. Little did we guess that our journey foretold a strange detour in our respective professions. I couldn’t tell a Bengal from a Brown or an Indian from a Red. I’d always felt that the most depressing acronym in current use was ESPN. Sports, for me, have always been associated with humiliation, frustration, and boredom.

But then I discovered cardio-kickboxing. Whupping my own ass in the mirror at the YMCA to the tune of “Pump up the Jam,” I began to be interested in the more pugilistic sporting forms. Heidi and I started going to Friday night fights at the Portland Boxing Club. We got an assignment. We recognized in ourselves a bloodlust that had previously gone unnoticed. She practically balanced her camera on the edge of the ring. Bare knuckles was next — hungover as hell, we drove three hours to Springfield, Massachusetts to see a bunch of guys in underwear try to snap each other’s tibias. I’d never imagined myself as a sports correspondent. She’d never imagined herself as a sports photographer.

Before I go any further with the story of our unlikely career, though, let me give you some background on our athletic achievements in the field of basketball. Heidi (the pro) played basketball in seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. She recalls “hating it, wondering why the hell I did it,” and describes herself as “awkward and clumsy.”

“I had no sense of team,” she says, “and I panicked when I got the ball.” As for myself, my two most noted accomplishments in Phys Ed hoops were: 1. When I made a basket for the opposing team and, not realizing my error, turned to make the “champ” sign. 2. When I shot a basket and was so astonished that it went through that I stood beneath the board and the ball hit me in the face.

And as if that humiliation weren’t enough, when I got to high school, since I couldn’t PLAY anything, I ended up being a cheerleader. For basketball. Dazed and unhappy on the sidelines in a polyester mini-skirt and orangey-brown pantyhose, I recited things like: “Incite a RIOT, lose CONTROL, a revolution’s on its way, Tigers, TAKE THAT GOAL!”

So you can understand why, when Heidi and I walked into the gym at Brunswick High School this past Sunday, to the sounds of sneakers screeching on hardwood floors, half-hearted fans yelping and the dreadful thump of a dribbling ball, we decided we ought to go get a beer and think about our assignment a little bit more. Discuss the angles, as it were.

Several pints later, we had determined that indeed, we still hated basketball. What could be worse than a sport in which you struggle endlessly to get something, only to have somebody try and take it away from you? And what’s more, if you hit them for it, they get to make a free shot! And what about that unflattering overhead light? The stressful sound of the buzzer? The coaches hollering from the bench?

When we returned for the championship game, we saw the erstwhile Tom Nolette hunkered over a table, making calls into a microphone. A few dispirited parents shouted things like “Way to work, Taylor,” and “Oh Ralph, honey, nice try.” Heidi snapped some pictures, I took some notes, but we’d already decided that we should stick to our area of expertise:

Back at the bar, on close-captioned TV, a Budweiser commercial had played during half time for Sunday afternoon football. The point of the commercial seemed to be that drinking beer was the noblest sport, the way to celebrate the lesser sports. We asked the bartender to take our picture. We interviewed our teammates who sat on stools around us, and with the encouragement of our new coach, made it through one last round.

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@prexar.com.