There is something about the spirit of our time that fuels seemingly constant discussions around the title “The Greatest of All Time” (aka The G.O.A.T.). Who started it, and why do we love this debate so?

One answer takes us back to the boxing and wrestling rings of the mid-20th century.

Muhammad Ali famously declared, “I am the greatest. I said that even before I knew I was.” But he was not the first to make this proclamation. Gorgeous George, the flamboyant 1940s and ’50s professional wrestler, commanded a king’s ransom from fans who came to see him lose.

Gorgeous George advised Ali, “A lot of people will pay to see someone shut your mouth. So, keep on bragging, keep on sassing and always be outrageous.”

After Ali upset Sonny Liston for the Heavyweight Championship in 1964, the boast became his de facto trademark. Over two decades, fans paid to cheer on Ali in title fight after title fight—even as Joe Frazier, Kenny Norton, and George Foreman exacted their pound of flesh—and whether he won or lost, well or badly, the moniker of “The Greatest” somehow stuck, even to this day.

Today, “The Greatest” has become “G.O.A.T.” Rapper LL Cool J coined the acronym in its eponymous 2000 album, which debuted at the top of the U.S. Billboard 200.

Ever since, the crown of all-time greatness has been the topic of the zeitgeist—particularly among elite athletes comparing themselves (always favorably) with those who came before.

Today, amidst a growing crowd of G.O.A.T.s of one kind or another, flaunting Olympic gold medals, Super Bowl championships, and golf tour green jackets, LeBron James most emphatically claims the crown—even wearing one occasionally (his nickname has been King James for 20 years now). Despite protests from Michael Jordan and fans, LeBron might very well be the NBA’s greatest of all time, with a host of metrics to back up the claim. And LeBron himself has said, on multiple occasions, that he believes he is the best athlete to have played the game. But does a self-coronation make it so? Uneasy lies the head that not only wears the crown but feels the need to remind us all.

And yet, it always has been thus. In Homer’s Iliad, Achilles was the G.O.A.T.—not simply for his prowess on the battlefield, but for selling an image of himself as unbeatable. In the 10th year of the Trojan War, Achilles publicly tested the G.O.A.T. appellation. He sat out the fight in a combination fit of pique and lesson to his fellow Greeks, as if to say, “Just try winning this thing without me.” They couldn’t, and he obtained living legend status when they paid him public obeisance in return for killing Hector and winning the war.

But the gods were not amused, and the telltale Achilles’ heel may have been more than the tendon at the ankle where the god Apollo struck him with an arrow. Achilles’ death was comeuppance for his self-conscious moodiness and blowhard self-love.

As Gorgeous George knew only too well, G.O.A.T.s are often not fan favorites. There is a special schadenfreude for those who fly too near the sun. The concept of hubris—the deadly cocktail of overconfidence and arrogance—finds its way into tragedies, then and now.

Hippolytus, in the famous play by Euripides, is an elite athlete, renowned not only for his hunting prowess but his extreme physical beauty. Not surprisingly, he is also a bit infamous for being a prig, self-righteous and aloof. Cultishly, he aligns himself with the virgin huntress goddess Artemis, placing him at odds with Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation. Using his smug superiority against him, she causes a series of events leading to his ignominious death, literally crushing his beautiful body under the wheels of his own chariot.

I thought a lot about that Euripides play while watching the late Kobe Bryant during the mid-2000s—the hard years that followed his first three world championships with the Lakers, and included massive off-court problems, most notably a sexual assault case.

Fans, journalists, and more than a few peers seemed to be wishing him the worst, celebrating him slipping on the banana peel of hubris and being crushed under the wheel of his own design.

Yet Kobe found a way back to all-time greatness—not just on the basketball court, where his play never faltered, but in family life, public esteem, and even in Hollywood, winning an Oscar for Best Animated Short in 2018. How did he do it?

By humbling himself, privately and publicly—with his wife, who stayed married to him, and with his acceptance of vitriol from the press and fans alike. The marriage held, and eventually the championships returned to Los Angeles, highlighted by the Lakers beating their hated rivals the Boston Celtics.

The losses along the way humanized Kobe and made his triumphs less godlike and more human. Indeed, this is something we look for in heroes, and G.O.A.T.s—the ability to turn difficulty, even tragedy, into learning and progress. We see it in Simone Biles’ 2020 Olympic Games struggles, or in Serena Williams’ late-career struggles with injuries and returns to form, or the mental health challenges of Naomi Osaka or Michael Phelps.

Why? Because we want to see ourselves in them, since we and the G.O.A.T.s are all—presumably—human. I’d like to believe that each of us has at least one moment’s greatness, an instant of superhuman strength, unexpected courage, grit, or determination, matched only by the luck of that once-in-a-lifetime set of space/time circumstances falling into place in a precise moment of Zen.

When LeBron and Tom Brady declare themselves the greatest of all time, they separate themselves not only from Michael Jordan or Joe Montana but from us. There should be a separation, of course. They are great in their chosen fields in ways that we can only dream about. But they are living and breathing and losing alongside us, their fellow humans, even as they argue the case for their all-time winning immortality.

When I hear G.O.A.T. talk, I’m reminded of Greek mythology, yes, but also of Peter Pan. By refusing to admit loss, you never really grow up. Time never passes. You are the greatest now, and forever.

But the world doesn’t really work like that.

Greatness is momentary, even for the G.O.A.T.s of the world. And the fact that greatness is momentary is precisely why it should be appreciated in all its forms.

Rather than crowns or self-proclamations and the cults that they engender, perhaps another all-time great human, the children’s TV host Fred Rogers, provides the truest metric of greatness for us all: “Being the best loser takes talent, just as being the best winner does.”

If there is a postscript, it’s that the gods of sport are fickle, to say the least. Being a self-proclaimed G.O.A.T. did not spare LeBron’s Lakers from being swept this postseason by the Denver Nuggets (who in Nikola Jokić have their own G.O.A.T. candidate). Failure and loss are part of living a human life, and despite the huckstering and hyperbole, G.O.A.T.s are human.

Watching LeBron’s postgame press conference after the Lakers defeat, what he said revealed less than the gestural power of his immense human frame over the course of the Q&A: at first combative and clipped, then gradually relaxing his shoulders as he reminisced about his team and family, even finding a way to smile. Hopefully G.O.A.T.s-to-be in all sports will take notice: This was greatness on display.

The post Why We Love the Great G.O.A.T. Debate appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I’d moved to Portugal after securing some remote freelance work. My plan was to add a language to my lopsided resume—I already spoke Spanish passingly and knew that the modest difference between the two would enable me to achieve a baseline of fluency in a matter of months, rather than years—but there were also sentimental reasons for the move: except for my mother, all my matrilineal relatives live in Portugal. I wanted the chance to better understand my family, who, for most of my childhood, had existed as faceless names on the other end of pricey international calls, and to better understand where I came from.

Portugal is also a favorable country for those looking to immigrate: between its aging population, a small existing foreign-born population (just over 5 percent of the country’s 10 million residents, compared to 15 percent of neighboring Spain, and 12 percent of France), and a brain drain, authorities know that the country needs young foreigners serious about establishing roots, and has accordingly lax immigration policies. Just the “promise of a work contract” is enough to secure residency. What I didn’t know was how the connection between those policies and my love for basketball would come to define my life in Lisbon.

The best court, I’d been told, was located at the top of a 10 square-kilometer nature reserve called the Parque Florestal de Monsanto, just outside the city center. The bus ride from my apartment took the better part of an hour, and the hike up to the court added another 20 minutes. The view was beautiful, overlooking Lisbon’s famous 25 de Abril Bridge, but the height meant constant wind, which made for a uniquely poor basketball experience. The empty court, the long trip, and the suboptimal conditions confirmed what I already knew: Portugal isn’t big on basketball. I resigned myself to the idea that the sport wouldn’t be part of my life here.

Then I took a shortcut that changed everything. Running late to meet up with some friends at a reggaeton bar in Bairro Alto, I decided not to risk waiting for the metro and began to cut haphazardly across the residential labyrinth situated between the blue and green metro lines. As I made my way through the Campo dos Mártires da Pátria park, I noticed a few young men playing basketball.

The Campo dos Mártires da Pátria park itself is not especially remarkable: there’s a duck pond for young parents to bring their children, a small gazebo to buy coffee. It’s a speck of green in a city known neither for its shade nor its verdure. But its basketball court—a vibrant, multicolored mosaic of geometric shapes and patterns—is a work of art. I couldn’t resist. Despite being dressed in chino pants and a short-sleeve button-up (in preparation for a night of drinks and dancing), they welcomed me in to play. By the time the game was over, the Campo already felt like my second home. This wasn’t only because the Campo was clearly the court for basketball in Lisbon, but also because most of the players it attracted were, like me, foreigners.

Everyone had a story about how they’d ended up in Portugal. Agnelo, the de facto administrator of the Campo, was a thirty-something Angolan who’d come to Lisbon as a teenager. I thought at one point that he worked in construction because one of the other players kept calling him “o pedreiro mais famoso de Lisboa”—the most famous bricklayer in Lisbon—but I later realized that this was a literal translation of an English-language insult for someone who can’t make a shot: “Brick!” Agnelo could dish out the trash talk just as well as he received it, but it was his peacekeeping that I remember most. Even from the other side of the park, you could hear his pleas to get the game going again: “Play, man! Let’s just play!”

Over sweaty post-game beers, I talked literature with Amsfgoro, a Cabo Verdean man who’d come to Lisbon for a master’s degree and then decided to stay. We bonded over a shared love for the quiet, muted intensity of South African author J.M. Coetzee’s prose, and Amsfgoro introduced me to the work of José Eduardo Agualusa, the first Portuguese-language author I felt comfortable reading in the original. Yuri, who’d come from Cabo Verde on a student visa, gave me invaluable advice for navigating the perils of Portuguese immigration bureaucracy and taught me that I was not the only one feeling quagmired. I had been told to extend my tourist visa for an additional three months while I waited for my citizenship application to process, for instance, but the wait time for such an appointment was almost as long as the length of my original tourist visa: 88 days. It turned out that countless basketball friends had found themselves in this semilegal purgatory: technically legal in Portugal, but worried or unable to leave for fear of negative visa repercussions. Knowing that I wasn’t the only one gave me some solace.

It should come as no surprise that the Campo was also the site of my biggest Portuguese breakthroughs. As we were packing up one summer evening, I got to talking with João, a Brazilian exchange student studying engineering. After I stumbled over the Portuguese word for it—enghenharia—he started laughing. “Oh shit, you aren’t Portuguese! I always figured you were from here.”

Some of João’s mix-up surely had to do with the kind of Portuguese required for pick-up basketball. It’s easy to disguise an insufficiently nasally diphthong or an overzealous shhhh sound at the end of a word when the only phrases one really needs are jeers like Lança! Vamo jogar, então? and Tás a brincar comigo ou que? But his accidental vote of confidence made me feel like I’d achieved what I’d set out to do. Though my preference for rougher, more physical play and my tendency to “travel” (according to European rules, at least) might still quickly give me away as being from the United States, my speech now revealed that my connection to Portugal was more complicated.

Several years later, after I’d returned home to California comfortably fluent in Portuguese, I made the trip back to Lisbon. When I arrived, I found many of my non-basketball friends had moved on—Europeans to their home country, Portuguese to the sleepy coastlines of Setúbal or rainy Porto, digital nomads to chase Germany’s elusive freelancer visa or try to get in early on Estonia’s burgeoning startup scene. But when I showed up to the Campo on a random Wednesday evening, I was greeted by the same familiar faces, now with a few extra gray hairs, and more knee sleeves to keep temperamental ACLs warm. There were new faces, too, but returning a few days later, I could already understand who preferred to roll to the basket and who stayed behind the three-point line.

The beauty of the Campo is this continuity: turnover happens, but the community endures. It’s a wonderful feeling, knowing that you can return to a place and, if you’re willing to wait until next game, there’ll be a spot for you. In some way, this describes my relationship to my family in Portugal, too. Even as younger relatives graduate from high school and older ones retire, and as those pricey international calls have been replaced by WhatsApp, someone familiar will always be on the other end of the line. A shared language means the relationship will endure.

As Portugal continues to shift and evolve—post-dictatorship, post-recession—one thing feels certain to me: the Campo’s stability and its open-doors policy. As the group’s Facebook page reminds players: “Convidamos TODA A GENTE a APARECER,” EVERYONE is invited to SHOW UP.

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Today, nearly 75 years later, this unassuming tableau—which would have been a new, even puzzling image for readers at the time—resonates like a thunderous slam-dunk.

To understand the significance of this long-forgotten image, it’s important to recall that after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president of the United States in the early 1930s, he used a small wheelchair to get around his office and home. But the leader of the free world, who had contracted polio as a young man, took great pains to conceal the fact that he couldn’t walk unaided. He refused to be photographed or filmed while in a wheelchair so as to “quiet the feelings of revulsion, pity, and embarrassment that his body provoked in others,” as his biographer James Tobin wrote in The Man He Became: How FDR Defied Polio to Win the Presidency.

FDR’s stance echoed the tenor of the times. People with disabilities were stigmatized and usually kept hidden from view. Many American cities passed so-called “ugly laws,” including Chicago, which banned people who were “diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object.” (This shameful law was not repealed until 1974.)

People with severe spinal-cord injuries, known as paraplegics, were rarely seen in public. Paralyzed veterans who fought in World War I could expect to live for approximately 18 months after their injury. But World War II proved to be a game-changer in preserving the lives of paraplegics. Medics deployed new-fangled sulfa drugs on battlefield wounds, and surgeons expeditiously treated the injured servicemen. Military aircraft transported them back to U.S. hospitals much faster than ocean liners had, and the advent of penicillin effectively staunched infections.

Bob Rynearson (standing, referee) and pioneering wheelchair basketball players practice inside the gymnasium at Birmingham Hospital in Van Nuys, California, circa 1946. Courtesy of the Rynearson family.

An estimated 2,500 paralyzed veterans returned home from the Pacific and European theaters. Doctors believed that, despite frequent aftercare complications, these veterans would probably experience a lengthy lifespan, perhaps even approaching their non-disabled counterparts.

That was the positive news. The downside was, they were re-entering a barrier-plagued society that was unprepared for them. There were no handicap parking spaces or curb cutouts at street corners; ramps leading to the entrances of public buildings were unheard of.

Unanswerable questions buzzed in their brains. Would they ever be able to walk unaided again? What employer would want to hire them? And, was it physically possible to have sex and father children?

To aid their rehabilitation, the Veterans Administration opened separate paraplegia wards in hospitals around the country, so that the paraplegics could recover a sense of equilibrium, physically and mentally. But even as these veterans pursued higher education, job training, and physical rehab, a key element was missing.

Many of these young men had grown up playing sports, whether for their school teams or in the service. They missed the special camaraderie of competition, not to mention the strenuous workout. VA staff, most of whom were non-disabled, wondered how they could create enjoyable and meaningful recreation options for wheelchair users.

The wheelchairs themselves were part of the problem. To that point in time, “wheelchair design” was an oxymoron. Wheelchairs were wooden behemoths that weighed over 100 pounds and resembled La-Z-Boys on wheels; they were bulky sitting chairs for permanent immobility. The most common catchphrases used to describe paraplegics emphasized their apparent helplessness: they were said to be “confined to a wheelchair” or “wheelchair bound.”

Just before the war, an engineer named Herbert Everest, who had been paralyzed in a mining accident, brought wheelchairs out of the dark ages. He teamed with co-designer Harry Jennings, inside the latter’s garage in Santa Monica, to fashion a lightweight, foldable wheelchair made of chromium-plated steel tubing. They shifted the two large wheels to the rear so that users could easily and comfortably propel the chair, and they placed two small casters in the front to provide stability and pivoting capability. A backing and seat crafted from synthetic leather allowed the 24-inch-wide chairs to be folded like an accordion to a width of 10 inches. Each chair weighed about 50 pounds.

Their invention changed lives immediately. With some practice, paralyzed vets could wheel their E&Js from the hospital ward to their cars, open the doors, hoist themselves into the front seats, fold up their chairs and stash them behind the seat, and drive off using adaptive, hand-controlled equipment. They now had mobility—and the ability to look for work, live independently outside the hospital, and as it turned out, play competitive sports.

In early 1946, at the Birmingham VA hospital in Van Nuys, California, assistant athletic director Bob Rynearson noticed how the paralyzed veterans liked to roll their chairs onto the gym floor and take turns awkwardly lofting a leather basketball toward the net. What most resonated with Rynearson were the gleeful, totally unselfconscious expressions on the men’s faces as they traded good-natured jibes and hoots.

A thought struck Rynearson: why not use basketball, that most indigenous of American sports, to help the veterans with their rehabilitation?

At first blush, wheelchairs and basketball seemed a particularly odd combination. Height is important in hoops, and no one seated in a wheelchair can boast about that. Basketball also demands constant motion—running, dribbling, rebounding, passing—and it was difficult to imagine how paraplegics could simultaneously control the trajectories of their chairs, avoid collisions with nine other players, and maintain their balance. Oh, and somehow muscle the ball up to the rim and score, too.

But Rynearson noticed that the smooth, flat surface of the basketball court was far superior for rolling wheels than grassy fields, and that the court was large enough to accommodate 10 athletes. Basketball can also be played year-round, and the upper-body contortions required for passing, rebounding, and shooting the ball produce a sweat-filled workout in the chest, arms, neck, shoulder, and core muscles, precisely those areas of the body that paraplegics most need to strengthen.

Rynearson configured a set of 10 rules that closely mimicked two-legged basketball. His most perceptive insight was that the wheelchair, which he called the “means of ambulation,” should be considered the natural and integral extension of the player’s body. Incidental contact between opponents’ chairs was tolerated, but deliberately ramming an opponent’s chair resulted in a personal foul. The veterans themselves persuaded him not to lower the rims from their standard height and not to shorten the distance from the free-throw line.

Above all else, Rynearson made sure that the experience was gratifying for the veterans. “It was just fun getting out there to play basketball,” recalled Birmingham patient Ed Santillanes, who was injured near the Rhine River with the 65th Infantry Division when the jeep he was driving on patrol hit a roadside mine. “The hardest thing was trying to dribble while you’re in a wheelchair. You didn’t just put the ball in your lap and take off like a bat out of hell.”

On November 25, 1946, Rynearson arranged for the paralyzed veterans to play their first game. Their opponent? A squad of able-bodied doctors from the hospital who used wheelchairs for the occasion. The veterans took advantage of their hard-won experience with their E&Js to easily defeat the doctors, 16-6.

“Call it the most unusual basketball game ever played—or the first time in the United States that paraplegics have entered competitive sports in wheelchairs—or simply say it was an action-packed, fast-moving and exciting contest,” the facility’s in-house newsletter breathlessly reported. Coverage of the new sport elsewhere followed. The stories, though typically upbeat and encouraging, oftentimes brimmed with ignorance and condescension, with headlines like “Legless Five Wins Game” and “Crippled Vets Love Sports.”

Nevertheless, like a well-orchestrated fast break, wheelchair basketball quickly spread to paraplegia wards around the country.

In early 1948, Rynearson’s Birmingham squad combined sports highlights and advocacy for disability rights in one epic road trip. They scheduled a slate of wheelchair basketball games in eight cities and, before thousands of disbelieving spectators in some of the nation’s largest sports arenas, faced off against other paralyzed veterans as well as able-bodied teams in borrowed wheelchairs.

When they played the McGuire VA hospital team in Richmond, Virginia, they detoured to Washington, D.C., and rolled their E&Js through the marbled hallways of the Capitol. Their goal: to lobby Congress for legislation that would enable paralyzed veterans to purchase wheelchair-accessible homes, equipped with widened doorways, ramps instead of stairs, and bathrooms and fixtures to accommodate their disability. (President Harry Truman signed Public Law 702 on June 19, 1948.)

Their message to anyone who would listen was consistent and succinct. They wanted no sympathy or special treatment. They simply wanted the opportunity to take their place in society. “With continued evidence of what a disabled man can accomplish, not only will many be given renewed hope and confidence, but the public, business and industry will be made to realize that the disabled—with a little help and understanding—can be useful, valuable and self-sustaining citizens,” said Fred Smead, an early leader of the nonprofit advocacy group Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA).

On March 10, 1948, days after the Birmingham team concluded their barnstorming trip, paralyzed veterans from Cushing and Halloran VA hospitals (in Massachusetts and Staten Island, respectively) wheeled their E&Js onto the court of Madison Square Garden.

Hyped by nightlife columnist (and soon-to-be TV personality) Ed Sullivan, some 15,561 spectators watched as the players warmed up.

The wary crowd was alarmed at first as the veterans wheeled up and down the court and, occasionally, fell from their chairs after mid-court collisions. But their unease quickly turned to relief and then amazement as the men hoisted themselves back into their chairs and returned to the fray with a mighty yell. The fans cheered on both teams, but were thrilled to see the local lads from Halloran cruise to an entertaining 20-11 victory over Cushing.

The game’s leading scorer was Jack Gerhardt with eight points. A paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division, Gerhardt was wounded in France in 1944. He rehabbed at Halloran hospital and soon established himself as one of the nation’s top wheelchair basketball players. “He can go like hell in that chair,” said one of Gerhardt’s teammates.

A few days after the game at Madison Square Garden, Gerhardt appeared on the cover of Newsweek. Striking an athletic pose in his polished, state-of-the-art E&J chair, he also subtly boosted the fortunes of his compatriots; the three letters emblazoned on his navy-and-white singlet stand for the nonprofit advocacy group Paralyzed Veterans of America (PVA).

The cover image, far from being innocuous, told the story of a group of men who took a second chance at life and upended the stereotype of disabled people as weak and powerless.

Later that year, the National Wheelchair Basketball Association was formed, complete with an annual tournament, and the pool of players soon expanded to include post-polios and amputees (and, later, women and youth with disabilities). Also in 1948, in England, Dr. Ludwig Guttmann unveiled the first edition of the event that would become the Paralympics.

These paralyzed World War II veterans did not just help reduce the stigma of disability; they were among the first people to be applauded for their condition, the first to be considered as something other than freaks or damaged goods. If paraplegics could play basketball—basketball!—they could, if given the tools and the opportunity, do anything and everything non-disabled veterans could do: drive a car, hold down a job, buy a home, get married, and raise children.

By firing the opening salvo in what has become a protracted fight for disability rights for U.S. citizens, the paralyzed veterans championed the principles that continue to resonate today within the disability community: accessibility, inclusion, acceptance, and respect.

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It’s 1986, and I’m 11 years old, living on the north side of Long Beach. My TV has two dials and two telescoping antennas. I randomly turn on Channel 9, where a Los Angeles Lakers game is playing (back when games could be seen for free). I watch as Magic comes down on a fast break in Inglewood, looks straight southeast at me in Long Beach, and then throws a no-look pass to James Worthy streaking down the right side of the court for a swooping dunk.

A few plays later, Magic—somehow both the tallest player on the court and the best dribbler—rebounds the ball, and in three dribbles, covers the entire court. When he is cut off on his drive, he disappears, spinning full speed the other way in a balletic pirouette and laying the ball up in a swish as soft as a fireman handing a baby off to her mom.

Immediately, I said to myself: I want to do that.

I had no business falling in love with basketball the way I did. My family of five were refugees from Vietnam. We didn’t do after-school activities, summer camps, or organized sports. My brother was a visual artist. My sister played piano and was a good student. No one played sports. Heck, no one even watched sports. But after witnessing Magic orchestrate that ’86 Lakers fast break like a symphony of bodies, I meekly asked my dad for a hoop in our driveway.

I was shocked when he agreed. But of course, he did it in the most Vietnamese of ways. He built the court himself, buying a rim, attaching it to a backboard of scrap wood that he had cut himself, and mounting it to our garage with two Frankenstein-like steel bolts. Little did I know that that orange ring and cheap backboard would develop a 34-year-and-counting relationship with the game.

I’m not sure there’s a more meritocratic place in the world than a basketball court. As a person of color in America, you are judged every day. There’s a long list of places you will discover you are not welcome. But on the court, at least in good games with knowledgeable players, you earn your place. As a 5’7” Vietnamese American in a game of giants, I learned this in spades: If you can play, you can play.

Amidst the squeak of rubber sneakers and the chatter of trash talk, basketball is actually a silent language. A small ripple of your fingers says “I’m open” without announcing it to the world. A subtle head nod signals a stealthy cut to the basket. A thumb point and a smirk mean “This guy (or girl) can’t guard me.” Off the court, I associate the game most with the sound of life-affirming laughter. Have there ever been more fun and shenanigans than on the long bus ride home after a far-off tournament? I mean, who knew you could grow lifelong friendships by insulting people’s mothers?

I didn’t need youth park leagues, YMCA games, or travel ball to learn how to play. I had older cousins, and they taught me the game. They played with great skill and the even greater ferocity of fatherless Vietnamese boys whose dads had died during war. They took me to play pickup games against older players from the get-go. My first “coaches” were the grown-ass men whom I competed against.

Beginning in high school, I had quality coaches, all Black men, who not only taught me the skills and strategy of the game but also—because I was often the only Asian kid in the gym—the confidence and moxie needed to be on the court.

You would think that playing in the basketball hotbed of Southern California—and at two high school programs (Long Beach Jordan and Long Beach Poly) that featured dozens of future college and professional basketball players—I found my greatest competition in organized high school or travel ball games. While those games featured talent and skill, the most intense games I’ve played in my life were actually pickup games. Having played all over the world, including at famous spots like Venice Beach, UCLA Men’s Gym, and MacArthur Park in Oakland, I’ve found pickup games all have the same thing in common: No one wants to lose. The reward for winning is not a trophy, it’s that you get to keep playing. There’s no better feeling than leaving a court after holding it all night and having guys beg you to stay so they can keep trying to beat you. (Winning a few games, scoring on a local, and getting a dap afterward at the most well-known outdoor court in the world, Rucker Park in Harlem, is a close second, though.)

I live in Torrance now, where I’ve coached a number of my two sons’ basketball teams. It’s endearing to see preschoolers try and dribble a ball that seems half their size. I also love hearing “Hi, Coach” from former players in the neighborhood, and I’ve saved every card thanking me for teaching the game with joy and positivity. (I promised myself I would never yell as a youth coach and I’ve kept that promise: One, it’s not a good look. Two, it doesn’t work.)

Author Ky-Phong Tran (top row, right) gives back to the game by coaching the next generation of basketball players (including his son) on the FOR Razors based in Torrance, California. Courtesy of the author.

For two years, my oldest son has played on a year-round team I coach in a historically Japanese, and now predominantly Asian American, league. I was hesitant to make such a big commitment at first, but the allure of coaching the same players year after year convinced me to sign on. There are ten third-grade boys on the FOR Razors, some skilled enough to make three-pointers and perform crossover dribbles, and some who struggle with layups and catching the ball. Coaching the games is enjoyable but the true thrill I get from it is seeing them improve and develop at their own rate. A game where all the boys score at least one basket is my favorite.

The team, once a group of strangers, has become a community. When we unite our ten families for holidays, birthdays, and big NBA games, we number at least 41 people. As a Vietnamese American who was estranged from most of his family back in Vietnam, the parties give me a sense of all those epic family gatherings I missed out on due to war and history.

Now in the midst of a global pandemic and recession, our leagues, games, and tournaments have all been suspended. We tried Zoom practices, but they left me feeling empty. A few weeks ago, we started running together to boost fitness and camaraderie. Lately, we’ve begun socially distant shooting competitions.

In Los Angeles County, basketball has been effectively shut down since March. Gyms are shuttered and the rims have been taken down at the parks. But I’m fortunate to have a driveway hoop. It is an expensive splurge with a huge glass backboard and breakaway rim that I imagine my father would have both admired and disapproved of.

In addition to missing the game and my team, I’m also struggling with the everyday challenges we all are currently facing. I’m stressed to the joints worrying about my wife who used to work from home in a quiet and orderly house. I’m worried about my two sons’ virtual schooling and their social isolation. I wake up in the middle of the night grinding my teeth, thinking of the challenge of teaching my own high school English students from afar.

When it all gets too overwhelming, I go to the driveway and shoot the rock. Of course, I am biased, but shooting a basketball could be the most perfect of human movements. When you do it correctly, the ground and your body and the ball and the rim and the ground again, become an arc, a splice of the most perfect shape in nature, the circle. When the ball swishes through, you are a rainbow, your pot of gold the satisfaction that your actions have met your ambitions.

Go try it. Find the rim with your eyes. Square your shoulders. Raise both arms up as if in prayer. Let the energy build from your toes and flow through your body. Release the ball from your fingertips like a wish onto the world. And remember: Shooting a basketball is a promise to yourself, and to do it right, you have to follow through.

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The servicemen who took to the hardwood that night were as extraordinarily ordinary as any group of veterans. They could have been the “mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys” from Ernie Pyle’s Pulitzer Prize–winning columns, or “Willie and Joe” from Bill Mauldin’s Pulitzer Prize–winning cartoons. They were your brother, your neighbor, your best friend from high school.

Except, they were different. The home team consisted of paralyzed veterans from Halloran hospital on Staten Island. The visitors were paralyzed veterans from Cushing hospital in Framingham, Massachusetts. All of the players rolled onto the court in shiny wheelchairs.

Behind the sharp-shooting wizardry of Jack Gerhardt, a wiry paratrooper who was wounded at Normandy, Halloran took a 12-9 edge at halftime before cruising to a 20-11 victory. But the final score didn’t seem to matter much to the boisterous crowd; they cheered both teams with equal fervor because they knew they were watching something special.

To that point in time, wheelchair sports did not exist. The Paralympics had not yet been invented. These veterans were sports trailblazers.

They were medical miracles as well.

Before World War II, paraplegia was considered to be a virtual death sentence. The life expectancy of soldiers who suffered traumatic spinal-cord injuries during World War I was estimated at 18 months. Most died from sepsis or infection. The “dead-enders” and “no-hopers” who survived were shunted off to institutions or hidden from view by their families. They were stigmatized for their disability and considered unlikely prospects for employment or marriage: How could they start or support a family, the logic went, when they couldn’t control their own bladders?

This stigma extended all the way to the office of the president of the United States. Franklin D. Roosevelt used a wheelchair after he was stricken with polio in the early 1920s. He did not hide his affliction after he was first elected president in 1932, but he rarely appeared in public in a wheelchair and took extreme measures to avoid being photographed that way.

World War II would prove to be a game-changer for the public’s perception of paraplegia. The war unleashed, along with new weapons, innovative medical practices, and drugs that saved soldiers’ lives. The discovery of penicillin in 1928, and the ability to produce large quantities of the “wonder drug” in the early 1940s, dramatically reduced fatal infections, especially among those with spinal cord injuries. So did the use of sulfa powder and tablets. The collection and distribution of plasma allowed for life-saving blood transfusions, while advances in anesthesia enabled surgeons to save lives on the operating table. Field hospitals and portable surgical units situated close to the battlefield enabled doctors to treat the wounded expeditiously.

Thanks to faster evacuation and transportation methods, including transport planes and hospital ships, injured service-members could return home sooner and in better health.
Once stateside, an estimated 2,500 U.S. paralyzed veterans regained their health and equilibrium in one of the seven newly opened spinal-cord injury centers within the Veterans Administration hospital system.

Ernest Bors in California and Howard Rusk in New York were among the doctors who helped popularize treatments in which paralyzed veterans used recreation to repair their damaged bodies and to adjust to their “new normal” condition. Veterans and their doctors experimented with several sports, including seated volleyball and wheelchair baseball, but none caught on until a physical education instructor at Birmingham VA hospital in Van Nuys, California, created a new sport: wheelchair basketball.

That P.E. teacher, Bob Rynearson, was a coach’s son who grew up playing sports in the San Fernando Valley. At the Birmingham VA, he noticed that the paralyzed veterans liked to play a crude form of pickup basketball after the non-disabled players abandoned the court. He began organizing practices for the wheelchair crew and then wrote the first set of rules for the sport.

Rynearson’s goal was twofold: maintaining the speed of the game without jeopardizing the players’ safety. Players were allowed two pushes on their wheels while in possession of the ball, after which they were required to pass, dribble, or shoot. Incidental contact between wheelchairs was allowed, although ramming into an opponent on purpose resulted in a personal foul.

While watching the men wheel up and down the court and jockey for position, Rynearson arrived at his most perceptive insight: that the wheelchair should be considered an extension of the athlete’s body. In this he was aided by the new-fangled wheelchair models being produced in Southern California, which the rising aviation industry had turned into an engineering capital.

Wheelchair “technology” had long been mired in Civil War-era design. Old-school chairs were all-wooden, rigid-frame models that were essentially pieces of bulky furniture, with all of the maneuverability of an aircraft carrier. That changed in the late 1930s, when engineers Herbert Everest and Harry Jennings started to fashion something more maneuverable.

Everest, an engineer who broke his back in a mining accident, had become discouraged with the cumbersome models, and proposed creating a device that would become the first truly modern wheelchair. Everest & Jennings’ easy-to-propel, transportable wheelchairs were made of lightweight steel aircraft tubing and weighed around 45 pounds. They were designed for the paraplegics’ comfort and ease-of-use. And, as it turned out, the E&J chairs worked well for basketball action.

The Flying Wheels lobby for disability rights during their cross-country barnstorming tour in 1948. Courtesy of the Bob Rynearson family.

At about the same time the games were getting underway in California, paralyzed veterans rehabbing at Cushing VA hospital in Framingham, Massachusetts, started to play their own version of the sport inside the hospital’s gymnasium. Soon, wheelchair basketball squads with names like the Rolling Devils, the Flying Wheels, and the Gizz Kids were barnstorming the nation and filling arenas with cheering fans. They routinely trounced non-disabled professional and college teams who borrowed wheelchairs for the occasion, including the New York Knicks, the Boston Celtics, and the Harlem Globetrotters.

For a short while, they became media darlings. A photo of Halloran star Jack Gerhardt, sitting in his wheelchair while holding a basketball, was featured on the cover of Newsweek. Seemingly every publication covered their exploits, from Women’s Home Companion to Popular Mechanics to the Daily Worker. Hollywood came calling to make a feature film about them, The Men, which marked the Hollywood debut of Marlon Brando.

America’s wounded warriors-turned-playmakers were joined by their British counterparts at Stoke Mandeville Hospital outside London. There, the vets started with archery and then netball (a cousin of basketball that is played without a backboard and with a lowered rim). The brainchild of these games was Dr. Ludwig Guttmann, a German-born Jewish neurologist who fled the Nazis for England just before the war. There, Guttmann took charge of the spinal-cord injury ward at Stoke Mandeville and, like Bors and Rusk, incorporated recreation into the veterans’ rehabilitation regimen.

Guttmann launched the Stoke Mandeville Games and was not modest about his goals: he wanted to turn the event into “the disabled men and women’s equivalent of the Olympic Games.” His ambition came to fruition in Rome in 1960, when he orchestrated what is today considered to be the first official Paralympic Games. Their birth inspired countless other previously unimaginable events and activities for people with disabilities.

The pioneering wheelchair athletes didn’t just revolutionize the possibility of sport, but their public presence also helped reduce the stigma of disability outside the gymnasium. If people with paraplegia could play an exciting and exacting brand of basketball—basketball!—they couldn’t possibly be considered “wheelchair-bound” or “confined to a wheelchair.” Given the chance, they were obviously capable of doing everything non-disabled veterans could do.

“The years to come are not going to be wasted in self-pity or vain regrets,” the New York Times editorialized in 1948, after another early wheelchair basketball contest. “They are going to be participants.”

They proved to be more than “participants.” In 1946, as they were rehabbing in the VA hospitals, they banded together to form the Paralyzed Veterans of America organization. The PVA was an early and vocal leader in the protracted fight for human rights for those with disabilities. Its members raised money for scientists to research paraplegia; lobbied Congress for legislation that addressed accessibility, employment, housing, and transportation; advocated for the principles of independence and self-determination; and refused to be treated as objects of pity.

In demonstrating that ability matters more than disability, these veterans fired the first shots in what would become the protracted fight for disability rights in this country.

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I’d spent the previous year working on a book about the Sixers that focused on Hinkie and his polarizing team-building strategy, which involved assembling a losing squad in the short term to get big wins in the future. Hinkie’s data-driven devotion to tanking had given Philadelphia a shot at greatness, and raised all sorts of interesting questions about team building in professional sports.

But the strategy—known as “the Process”—had taken a toll on the team, including Hinkie himself. We’d spoken a couple times on the phone, but we’d never met. He had declined, on multiple occasions, to be interviewed for my book. “I don’t have any interest or willingness to quote-unquote shape a legacy,” he told me in an early phone call.

Hinkie was hired by the Sixers in May 2013. He was just 36 years old and, unlike the majority of his peers, his on-court career had ended after high school. But he had an MBA from Stanford, and experience in management and private equity. He thought and spoke like a finance guy, so it wasn’t a coincidence that the private equity billionaires who had purchased the Sixers in 2011 took a liking to him. He represented a fresh hope.

The Sixers had once been home to NBA greats like Wilt Chamberlain, Julius “Dr. J” Erving, Charles Barkley and Allen Iverson. But the franchise had spent much of the decade before Hinkie’s arrival trapped in NBA purgatory. They were not good enough to compete for a championship but not bad enough to scoop up the high draft picks which the league, in an effort to promote parity, hands to its worst performing teams. The Sixers were mired in mediocrity on the court, and it was hurting their bottom line. They ranked in the league’s bottom-third of attendance in 2009, 2010, and 2011, despite playing in the country’s fifth-largest metro area.

Hinkie saw a way out: He’d build a team to lose. He wasn’t the first to employ such a strategy, but, as one NBA general manager told me, “he went further than anyone else.” To Hinkie, the math was simple. He knew that five teams had combined to win 20 of the previous 23 NBA titles, and that these teams had monopolized the titles because they each had multiple stars on their rosters—Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen of the Chicago Bulls, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal of the Lakers, Dwyane Wade and LeBron James of the Miami Heat. He also knew that, typically, star players spent the majority of their careers playing for the teams that had originally drafted them and that these types of players were typically selected early in the draft.

If the best chance to win a championship was by acquiring a superstar, and if the best chance to acquire a superstar was by landing a high draft pick, then, Hinkie’s thinking went, the Sixers’ best chance at succeeding would involve acquiring as many high draft picks as possible. Since the worst teams get the highest drafts, Hinkie believed it would pay to be bad for multiple years.

Few leaders in the history of sports have ever so willingly and aggressively sacrificed the present in order to chase a better future. Less than two months into the job Hinkie traded his team’s best player, All-Star point guard Jrue Holiday, for a pair of draft picks. A year later, Hinkie dealt Michael Carter-Williams, the reigning Rookie of the Year, for yet another future pick. He also used the Sixers’ two first round picks on a pair of players who wouldn’t suit up for two more seasons: a University of Kansas center named Joel Embiid, who had recently suffered a fractured foot; and a Croatian forward named Dario Saric, whose deal with a Turkish team would keep him overseas for at least two more seasons.

Hinkie didn’t stop there. Veterans were shipped out. Salary cap space was left unused, infuriating the players’ union. Hinkie never instructed his coaches to lose games; given the roster he handed them, he hardly needed to. Two years into Hinkie’s tenure, the Sixers had amassed a war chest of draft picks unlike anything the league had ever seen.

But this zero-sum, McKinsey-like approach blinded Hinkie to the subtler aspects of the job. The Process triggered all sorts of anger, from all sorts of parties. Some fans viewed Hinkie as a scam artist running a dirty game of three-card monte, a man in violation of professional sports’ Golden Rule: You play to win the game. NBA commissioner Adam Silver was furious that one of the league’s 30 teams was so willing to damage the NBA brand. Sixers business executives and opposing owners were irked about being forced to sell a subpar product to fans.

“It’s not complicated,” Milwaukee Bucks co-owner Marc Lasry told me. “No one likes coming to see a horrible team.”

Hinkie’s biggest misstep, though, might have been writing off the complexities of his players. He left the vital work of relationship-building and player development to others. He rarely attended team practices, believing it was important to build a wall between himself and the coaching staff since they had conflicting priorities (Hinkie didn’t want to win games, and the coaches did). A culture of accountability was never created. Embiid, whose 13-year-old brother was tragically killed during his rookie year, would blow off rehab sessions and ignore medical advice. Another young draft pick, Nerlens Noel, who had grown up in an environment surrounded by adults trying to leverage his talents into their own rewards, would often show up late for practices and team flights.

Then there was Jahlil Okafor, a player out of Duke University who Hinkie selected for the Sixers using the third pick in the 2015 draft. Okafor was a prized prospect. He was massive—nearly 6-foot-11 and about 275 pounds—with huge hands, deft feet, a soft touch, and a full arsenal of post moves. But he had internal demons that he’d yet to confront.

One day, when he was 9 years old, Okafor was sitting in his living room watching BET when his mother started coughing. Okafor laughed. He thought she was joking. She gasped for air. Okafor laughed again. His mother kept wheezing, each breath more labored and painful than the one before. Finally, Okafor realized something was wrong, but his call to 911 was too late. One of his mother’s lungs had collapsed, and she died in the hospital that night.

Okafor was crushed. “Even now,” he would tell a reporter while in high school, “I still have to think, ‘What if I could have known right off the bat that she wasn’t playing? She would still be here.’” But it wasn’t until he entered the NBA that his emotions manifested themselves in dangerous ways. During his rookie year, he began frequenting bars. One night a stranger in a parked car pulled a gun on him; another evening, someone filmed Okafor stumbling around streets, cursing out onlookers. TMZ aired the footage the next day.

The story embarrassed the league and served as the final straw for Sixers ownership, who soon brought in Jerry Colangelo, a longtime basketball executive, to work above Hinkie and right the ship. The Sixers offered Hinkie the opportunity to stay on as an executive. He declined—and then surprised his bosses by submitting an elaborate 13-page resignation letter, with subsections paying homage to famous investors like Charlie Munger that cemented his reputation as both an eccentric and an ideologue. “What Sam did, the principles he showed, the loyalty to those principles, it takes a really special person,” one of his friends from within the NBA once told me.

And yet, despite the missteps, the Process basically worked. The Sixers, now nearly seven years since Hinkie’s hiring, find themselves near the top of the NBA. All those losses and high draft picks netted two young superstars, the aforementioned Embiid and Ben Simmons, and the team has become a playoff mainstay. This season, before the COVID-19 NBA shutdown, the Sixers led the league in attendance. Forbes recently valued the franchise at $2 billion, about four times its purchase price in 2011.

To many, Hinkie’s unwavering pursuit of efficiency is something worthy of both praise and emulation, the kind of thing that gets held up in classrooms and boardrooms as an ideal. These days, Hinkie spends his time in Silicon Valley, teaching at Stanford and raising millions of dollars for his venture capital firm.

But there’s one more lesson to take from the Process, one that Hinkie’s acolytes often miss.

Hunting and exploiting market inefficiencies may be sound business, no matter what field, and especially in a cutthroat multi-billion-dollar world like the NBA. And the Sixers, thanks to Hinkie’s work, are no doubt positioned better than they were before.

But when you stop looking at things in black and white—asking simplistically, Are we better than we were before?—and instead consider the full-color range of reactions the approach triggered, the truth that Hinkie’s calculations all missed reveals itself: People aren’t widgets. They’re complicated and irrational and emotional. They have egos. They have pasts. They’re unpredictable. They can surprise. They can disappoint. Not only is treating them like assets amoral; it’s also bad business.

That Hinkie inherited a middling team and turned it into a contender will always be part of his legacy. So will the fact that his mishandling of people led to his tenure, and the Process, being cut short.

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The hoops seen outside most homes and gathering places on western reservations speak to basketball’s cultural significance for Native peoples. For them, the sport is more than a pastime. It has become a modern expression of indigenous identity and pride, and a glue that bonds families and tribes more tightly together.

It might seem peculiar that a sport invented by Dr. James Naismith, a white man, has become so dear to Native people, especially since their ancestors first encountered it during hard times, in hard places. Native youths began learning basketball just prior to the turn of the 20th century while confined to government and missionary-operated boarding schools—or “Indian schools” as they were known. These institutions aimed to erase Native identities, and left many youths traumatized. Yet from these schools sprung a renewed athletic zeal that helped invigorate Native communities in times of struggle. The story of how this occurred speaks to both Native resiliency and the redemptive power of this sport.

Basketball’s association with the boarding schools’ assimilationist mission was more than incidental. In accordance with federal Indian policy, non-Natives in charge of these places used basketball, and other mainstream sports like football and baseball, as tools to mold Native boys and girls into model pupils, and model Americans. The idea was that playing exhilarating, well-ordered sports against white opponents would boost student morale, instill discipline, and improve race relations.

Native athletes largely rejected this agenda. They instead claimed possession of the sport to serve their own purposes. Ever-determined and adaptable, young Natives perceived structural parallels between basketball and their ancestral sports, and so played this new game to connect to the old ways and score victories amidst the injustices of the white man’s world. At the same time, the sport also allowed for escape. For youngsters who had been wrested from their homes and confined within institutional walls, basketball became a mental and physical refuge, allowing them to temporarily leave behind daily drudgeries, relieve stress, and bond with teammates.

Students could relate positively to basketball, despite its institutional attachments, because they exercised a surprising degree of control over their experiences with it during the early 1900s. Although authoritarian environments in most respects, the boarding schools were uncharacteristically lax in supervising athletics, due to understaffing. Outside of structured physical education classes, Native athletes self-managed most of their interactions with basketball. They formed and coached their own intramural squads, organized pickup games, and practiced shooting during precious moments of free time. Even in varsity contexts, Native captains directed on-court play, often under the supervision of Native coaches who were themselves graduates of these schools.

Students tasted similar freedoms playing other Indian school sports, but in fewer numbers. Compared to all-male football, which was the schools’ leading spectator sport, basketball’s availability to girls, as well as boys of small stature, made it a more democratic game. Its playability in tight spaces, minimal equipment demands, and easily learned rules further boosted its appeal, making it the most widely played Indian school sport by the 1920s, at both the intramural and varsity levels.

Basketball’s rise to popularity in the Indian schools was an underdog success story. Most administrators regarded the game as a minor diversion—especially compared to football, baseball, and track—when it debuted at their institutions. The supervising U.S. Indian Office only loosely promoted the sport, and local superintendents only occasionally introduced it. More often, lower-level employees and contract staff, many of whom had learned basketball through the YMCA (the sport’s parent organization), brought the sport to Native kids.

Despite humble beginnings, basketball caught on like wildfire amongst students within weeks after its introduction to various Indian schools during the mid-1890s and early 1900s. One hoops hot spot was Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, the second-largest Indian school after Carlisle, in Pennsylvania. By 1900, even before the school had purchased its first basketballs, students were shooting old footballs and clumped balls of rags at makeshift hoops all over campus.

We know this from their enthusiastic letters to relatives back home. “Basket ball is all we know now,” reported one female student. “In the girl’s building we play in the halls sometimes, with a bucket for a goal.” There was “not much to think about in what extra time we have except basket ball,” wrote one of the boys. In his letter, he included a written rundown of the rules so his parents could try it themselves.

Gymnasiums at Haskell and other Indian schools soon filled with boys and girls trying out for prized positions on newly organized varsity teams. Those talented enough to make these squads earned the pleasure of escaping campus for days or weeks at a time to compete on the road and see the country. The most athletically talented boys relied on basketball to stay out during lulls between football and baseball seasons, while it was the sole sport affording girls such opportunities.

Hawk Street in Starr School, Montana, on the Blackfeet Indian Reservation. Courtesy of Tony Webster/flickr.

Indian school athletes so embraced basketball, and intensively played it, that they developed their own stylistic approach by the early 1900s. In contrast to the plodding, controlled game many non-Natives employed, Indian school teams typically played an agile, fast-paced, high endurance, and long-shooting version that dazzled spectators and flummoxed opponents. As culturally diverse as these students were, most were from tribal communities that had long emphasized distance running as a life necessity—and as a spiritual bridge to immortal creators who had run their own races before the dawn of time. Prior to entering the schools, many tribal athletes had also played indigenous field sports like lacrosse that privileged agility, toughness, and speed.

While confined together, these youths developed an uncanny synergy that allowed them to channel these shared traditions into a new format. They did the same with football to a degree, as exemplified by Carlisle’s famously quick and nimble gridiron teams of the era, but basketball’s freer flowing design made it particularly conducive to stylistic innovation. It afforded the interpretive space they required to fully express the old ways through the new.

Indian school teams refined this swift, free-wheeling style so effectively that even the sport’s inventor took note. During James Naismith’s years coaching at the University of Kansas between 1898 and 1907, he frequently observed male players in action at neighboring Haskell Institute. “I made it a point to see several games at Haskell,” he later wrote, “because I delight in the agility of the Indian boys.” He was struck by how fast and effortlessly these athletes moved their bodies and the ball about the court, a style that matched his idealized vision of the game. Naismith did not comment on girls’ teams at the Indian schools, but sports reporters noted that they too were fleet of foot. Among them was a team of Yuchi girls in Oklahoma that outpaced its opponents while playing in moccasins. They were the only Indian school team in the country to opt for this footwear, no doubt because it increased their speed advantage over opponents who, in that era, commonly played in heeled leather shoes.

This high energy play made champions of some early Indian school teams. Haskell’s young men triumphed first, in 1902, when they snatched a national amateur title away from a team representing a fraternal order in Independence, Missouri. Soon thereafter, some Indian school girls’ teams captured state championships against high school and college opponents. Albuquerque Indian School took New Mexico’s territorial crown in 1902. The next year, Chemawa won in Oregon, and Fort Shaw triumphed in Montana. In 1904, Fort Shaw’s team earned even greater distinction while playing match games at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Led by sharp-shooting center Nettie Werth and forward Emma Sansaver, who was said to dodge “here and there with the rapidity of a streak of lightning,” they beat all comers and were dubbed world champions by some reporters.

News of what these teams accomplished instilled pride in tribal communities, thus spreading basketball’s appeal beyond the Indian schools. But regardless of whether they returned home as champions, thousands of former Indian schoolers all did their parts to disseminate the sport. By the 1910s and 1920s, hundreds were returning to the reservations each year committed to stay in the game and teach it to their tribespeople. They were soon joined by former schoolmates who had kept playing basketball in other formats prior to returning home. A handful beat long odds to play college ball, while hundreds more played in Army training camps during World War I, again relying on basketball to nourish their spirits during difficult times.

Dozens more made a go as professional barnstormers, capitalizing on the hoops skills they developed in the Indian schools to tour the country and earn a modest living. Notable among them was the world’s greatest athlete, Jim Thorpe. Although best known for his achievements in football, baseball, and track, he had also played basketball in the boarding schools. He returned to the game late in his professional sports career by captaining the so-named World Famous Indians from 1926 to 1928. Like other Native barnstormers, Thorpe and his teammates stayed true to the Indian school playing style, employing a fast “driving attack” that wore their opponents ragged, and drew enthusiastic crowds throughout the Midwest.

Sadly, public memories faded over time of what the Indian school teams and alumni had done to inspire tribal communities, and to inject added life into the sport of basketball. By the late 20th century, the Indian boarding schools had largely been supplanted by public high schools as the focal points for hoops ins Native communities. Only a handful of people remembered how the Native athletes at places like Haskell and Fort Shaw had claimed this sport for their people. But the legacy of those Indian school players nevertheless lived on—in the joys basketball kept bringing new generations of lightning-quick Native hoopsters and their adoring fans.

The post How Native Americans Made Basketball Their Own appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

These once-ubiquitous, one-size-fits-all socks are a product of Americans’ simultaneous love of sports, technological innovation, and nostalgic fashion statements.

The tube sock’s trajectory is knitted into the growth of organized sports in America, particularly basketball and soccer, both of which were popularized around the turn of the century. Basketball was a new and uniquely American diversion, played in YMCAs and school gymnasiums, while soccer was a centuries-old tradition imported by European immigrants. They had a crucial commonality, however: unlike baseball and football, they both required players to wear shorts.

With so many bare, hairy legs suddenly on display, knee-high socks—called “high-risers”—became essential accessories. As Esquire put in in 1955, shorts “look like the devil unless you wear high-rise socks with them. High-risers are usually eighteen inches, but the rule to follow is, get them up to your kneecaps. You can turn over a cuff or not—it doesn’t matter so long as they don’t end halfway down your calf.”

Photos of early basketball stars—like Chuck Taylor, who lent his name to the canvas Converse All Star high-top—show them in knee-high stockings, often with stripes placed midway (or all the way) down the leg. The increased demand for tall socks suitable for these pastimes stretched the ingenuity of the nation’s hosiery industry.

The tube sock was invented by the Nelson Knitting Company of Rockford, Illinois, just over 50 years ago, in 1967—the same year that America’s first professional soccer leagues were established. Founded in 1880 by John Nelson, the inventor of a seamless sock knitting machine, the company widely advertised its “Celebrated Rockford Seamless Hosiery.” The tube sock, though seamed, was no less monumental a technological marvel.

A true tube sock is shaped like a tube rather than, say, a human foot—a configuration so novel that the sock took its name from it. It has no heel, and, instead of a reciprocated (reinforced) toe, the end is closed with a simple seam. Nelson Knitting developed a machine expressly for that purpose, which could do the job in five or six seconds.

Eliminating the shaped heel and toe made the manufacturing process faster—about 30 percent faster than traditional shaped socks—and easier to mechanize. In addition, the tubular shape, combined with the development of new stretch yarns, allowed the sock to be made in a single size, meaning it could be produced in larger, more economical batches. These shapeless socks could be dyed, dried, inspected, and packaged much more simply and efficiently than heeled socks, all of which was reflected in their low cost.

Unfortunately, Nelson Knitting failed to patent its revolutionary design, meaning that it was immediately knocked off. This oversight may explain the style’s omnipresence in American athletic and popular culture in the late 1960s and ‘70s. Knee-high tube socks were made famous by shorts-wearing sports heroes like Björn Borg, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Pelé, and Julius “Dr. J.” Erving. Farrah Fawcett donned tube socks to go undercover as a roller derby player in an episode of Charlie’s Angels; so did Raquel Welch in the 1972 roller derby movie Kansas City Bomber.

Leaving aside its advanced physical properties, the tube sock had (and retains) a powerful emotional pull. This most democratic of accessories shapes itself to the wearer’s foot, making it both universal and intimately personal. Though tube socks have typically been produced in a single color—usually white—the ribbed elastic bands at the tops can be woven with colored stripes, indicating personal taste or group loyalty, such as team membership. Nelson Knitting supplied tube socks to a number of professional sports teams, including the knee-high socks ringed with team colors worn by the Miami Dolphins and the Washington Redskins in the 1973 Super Bowl.

Tube socks became associated not just with American sports, but with American youth, and the country’s much-mythologized landscape of suburban lawns and urban blacktop. They were ideal for growing kids because they continued to fit as children grew. And, as Good Housekeeping magazine pointed out in 1976, “any 2-year-old can put them on without hunting for a heel.” Because there were no fixed stress points, they did not develop holes as quickly as traditional socks.

The tube sock hiked up the fortunes of the American hosiery industry. A 1984 U.S. Department of Labor report attributed strong growth in the sector over the previous two decades to “advances in technology, particularly in regard to pantyhose and tube-type socks” which “reduced unit labor requirements.”

That same year, however, a new government trade deal lifted the sock tariff, opening the market to cheap imports from Honduras, Pakistan, and China. Although sock manufacturing was largely mechanized, some steps required human workers—including the seaming of tube sock toes. Lower labor costs overseas made it impossible for American mills to compete, and several shut down. Nelson Knitting filed for bankruptcy in 1985. Fort Payne, Alabama, was once the sock-making capital of the world; today, that honor belongs to Datang, China.

The Department of Labor report defined tube socks as “hosiery for casual and athletic wear.” Even today, the Fairchild Encyclopedia of Menswear states that they “are worn for athletic activity.” But the tube sock gradually transitioned from sports equipment to fashion item. It became available in a variety of lengths and colors as it was adapted for a wider range of leisure activities.

The tube sock’s transition from sportswear to streetwear was not entirely seamless. In 1996, Vogue called the combination of black shoes and white tube socks “the unofficial male footwear of Catholic grade schools, high schools, and more senior proms than you’d care to imagine.” The tube sock was the trademark hosiery of the TV nerd Steve Urkel, and Anthony Michael Hall in any given John Hughes movie—the telltale sign of a man who was not as cool as he thought or hoped he was. It was used as a visual joke—often a dirty one—in Risky Business, That ‘70s Show, and American Pie.

Over the years, tube socks in some contexts became visual shorthand for in-your-face masculinity, often deployed ironically. In 1983, the rock band the Red Hot Chili Peppers performed a show at an L.A. strip club. For their encore, they took the stage wearing tube socks dangling from their genitals—and nothing else. Though the club’s manager was apoplectic, the “Sock Stunt” has since become one of the band’s signature concert routines—one that would be impossible, incidentally, with a shaped sock.

But sock-time does not stand still. The tube sock was not actually very comfortable to wear—the instep tended to bunch at the ankle, and the slack fit could cause blisters. Just as the humble Chuck Taylor has today been replaced by precisely engineered sneakers, tube socks have been eclipsed by similar-looking athletic socks with shaped heels. But the generic term “tube sock” continues to be used today to describe athletic socks, with or without a heel.

Modern “athletic socks” are more likely to be moisture-wicking and odor-absorbing, with graduated compression and built-in arch support. There are different socks for different sports; the idea of a runner, a shortstop, or a hiker wearing the same socks as a basketball player is anathema. Instead of one size fits all, it’s every man for himself—or every woman for herself, as most of these socks come in versions custom-designed for the female physique.

But the unassuming tube sock endures as a fashion statement for both sexes. Resurrected as street style by Harajuku girls in turn-of-the-millennium Japan, knee-high tube socks emblazoned with colorful athletic stripes turned up (in footless form) in Prada’s Fall 2004 collection. By 2016, the collision of athleisure, the “normcore” trend, and the ‘70s revival prompted Vogue to announce: “Tube Socks Are Back!”

Since then, they’ve been spotted on influencers like Rihanna, Justin Bieber, Kristen Stewart, and Tyler, the Creator; name-checked in raps by Jay-Z and Kendrick Lamar; and reinterpreted for the runway by Stella McCartney, Dries van Noten, and Valentino. It’s no stretch to imagine that the tube sock—invented, made, and worn in America—will be around for another 50 years.

The post The One-Size-Fits-All Sock That’s a Democratic Fashion Statement appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Go back home to Ohio, LeBron James.

Yes, as a fan, I’m happy to see the world’s greatest basketball player relocate to California and join my favorite team, the Los Angeles Lakers.

But as a Californian, I fear LeBron is the last thing our state needs.

His arrival is a high-profile symptom of one of our state’s big problems: California tends to favor flashy outsiders who are older, proven, and wealthy over our young, homegrown compatriots who haven’t succeeded yet.

Comparing LeBron to his young new teammate, point guard Lonzo Ball, demonstrates the problem—and shows that the stakes for the state go beyond whether the Lakers can deny the Golden State Warriors another championship.

In recent decades, California has been very good at recruiting people like LeBron, who received a $154 million, four-year contract to leave his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers and to revive a losing Lakers squad. A Stanford study shows that, despite its high taxes on the wealthy, the Golden State attracts more millionaires than it loses, since one advantage of being rich is not having to worry too much about taxes or other costs when you’re deciding where to live.

The trend holds even among those who are merely upper-middle-class. People moving to California have more education (the state has seen net gains in graduate degree holders) and income ($110,000 annually or more) than the average Californian. They need the money to afford our expensive housing.

But, at the same time, California has been struggling to develop and retain people like Lonzo Ball, a 20-year-old L.A. native who grew up in the Inland Empire community of Chino Hills. Younger Californians who were born and raised here have struggled to find their footing and have been leaving the state for cheaper places like Arizona, Nevada, and Texas. This is especially true for those who make less than $55,000 a year, don’t have college degrees (like Lonzo, who attended UCLA for just one year before joining the NBA), or want to start families.

Lonzo himself may be on his way out the door; the sports media are reporting that he could be traded in exchange for older and proven players who can help LeBron win now.

This makes sense in 2018, when LeBron is far superior to Lonzo. But in the long term, LeBron’s value to Lakers could be less than Lonzo’s. LeBron, at age 33, is old for a pro basketball star, and he is likely to be injured and in decline, perhaps ready to retire, by the time his new contract expires in 2022. In contrast, if Lonzo realizes his potential, he could help the Lakers win games into the 2030s.

At this point, I’ll leave the basketball debate to the hoops experts. But in the larger context of California’s changing demography, the Lonzos are indisputably more important to our state’s future than the LeBrons.

That’s because so many more of us are Lonzos.

This Lonzo-ization of California represents a sea change. From the Gold Rush until 2010, we were mostly a state of LeBrons—people who had migrated here from some other state or country. As a state, we were very much like the Lakers, traditionally a franchise dependent on free agents from elsewhere, like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain, and Shaquille O’Neal. There were great advantages to our free agent past; California didn’t have to develop as many of our own taxpayers by paying for their schooling and health care, because so many of our people just showed up from someplace else.

But in this decade, as immigration levels have fallen, we’ve become a state of Lonzos.

Now, more than 54 percent of Californians were born and raised here. Most of our adults are originally from someplace else. But Lonzo’s rising cohort of millennials is so homegrown—at more than 70 percent—that it will be California’s first homegrown generation.

With this shift, California needs to develop and educate more of its own young people, so that they can replace the immigrant entrepreneurs who have been responsible for starting so many of our innovations and businesses. “Homegrown Californians are the anchor of our economic future,” Dowell Myers, the USC demographer who has detailed the rise of the “homegrown majority,” has said.

In other words, we desperately need our Lonzos to succeed. Too many haven’t. Some are leaving the state. And those who are staying are contributing to our highest-in-the-nation poverty rate. Education levels have stagnated among California’s young—a huge problem since today’s youth will have to be more economically productive to support our aging population.

Yes, the LeBrons of California help subsidize the Lonzos by paying taxes under our progressive system. But the LeBrons also retard the growth of the young. Arriving LeBrons help run up the price of housing—LeBron already has two homes in L.A.—making it harder for Lonzos to buy houses and start families.

The LeBrons of the world tend to be expensive—and less innovative, since younger people are responsible for most inventions. Even more important, California’s Lonzos are far more loyal to the state; they are about three times more likely to stick around California and make their lives. When LeBron tires of his new Hollywood friends Leo DiCaprio and Al Pacino, with whom he recently lunched, he can go back home to Ohio. But Lonzo’s family—including a father who may be sabotaging his career (that’s another story)—is here.

The Lonzos’ loyalty has real value to the Golden State—it will help California retain its labor force as baby boomers retire in greater numbers. Polls also show that the Lonzos are far more supportive of taxing themselves to support public investments than the LeBrons are.

In this context, the Lakers are sending precisely the wrong message to their fans, and to all Californians. So cheer for our superstar import if you’d like. But don’t forget that our future depends on Lonzo.

The post LeBron, Take Your Ball and Go Home appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Like struggling musicians or actors, basketball players needed a day job. But Taylor’s day job—selling the athletic shoes that he wore on court—became a lifelong career. Endowed with a love of the game, a showman’s flair, and just the right amount of self-aggrandizement, Taylor would become a veritable Johnny Appleseed for promoting basketball to Americans and around the world. By inventing himself, he helped invent what is now one of the most popular sports across the globe.

Many people know the name Chuck Taylor from the autograph that since 1932 has been stamped on the ankle patch of hundreds of millions of Converse All Star shoes—the classic beloved by everyone from James Dean to Kurt Cobain to Michelle Obama. Larry Bird and Julius Irving wore them on the court. They’re a celebrity staple, unisex and multigenerational, a kind of “hipster” fashion statement. Today, Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars take their place among sports Americana with Louisville Slugger baseball bats and Chicago Schwinn bicycles.

The real Chuck Taylor can sometimes seem like a fabrication, an ad-agency invention like Juan Valdez or Betty Crocker. In fact, Taylor was a standout forward at Columbus (Ind.) High School and captain of his team as a sophomore. He later played semi-pro and “industrial league” basketball in Indianapolis and Detroit. His most famous team was the Akron, Ohio-based Firestone Non-Skids. He proved to be a competent player but he was not the star he had been in high school. He made his name, instead, when in 1922 he took a full-time job selling the recently introduced All Star court shoe for the Converse Rubber Company’s Chicago regional office.

The All Star wasn’t the first shoe of its type—rubber-soled with a canvas top. The A.G. Spalding and Bros. company had previously introduced a similar shoe, and “plimsoles” and “sneakers” had long existed in England. But the Converse All Star, introduced in 1917, improved on earlier designs, particularly with its diamond pattern sole that many believed led to quicker stops and starts on a hardwood court. The trademark on that design was upheld by a court ruling as recently as 2016.

A 1960 basketball game with several pairs of Chuck Taylors on the court. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Taylor was not a good salesman at first. According to a newspaper interview given by his widow, Lucy Taylor Hennessey, in 1979 with the Lansdale (Pa.) Reporter, he was nervous the first time he approached legendary coach Knute Rockne (he of “Win one for the Gipper” fame) at the University of Notre Dame fieldhouse. Rockne allegedly saw the young Taylor pacing outside his door and called him in, and then schooled him in the power of positive thinking and good sales technique.

Taylor’s territory included selling to high schools and colleges, which typically outfitted student athletes at school expense. It wasn’t an obvious sell. Most basketball coaches were just football or baseball coaches with time on their hands in between seasons, and didn’t care much about the finer points of the new game. Taylor, who cared very much, had a brilliant idea to boost sales: Around 1925, he began organizing in-school “clinics” to demonstrate the sport. Grateful coaches appreciated his expertise and welcomed him—and ordered the Converse shoe.

Before long, the clinics became public events, often co-hosted by a local sporting goods store. Taylor would explain the rules, do trick shots, and sometimes compete one-on-five against a local team, daring younger players to block his shots or steal the ball. His most famous trick was called “the invisible pass.” Taylor would thrust the ball toward the face of his opponent, then pass it quickly when the defender instinctively blinked. It was something of a cheat, of course, yet basketball was more of a rough-and-tumble sport in its early days, with far fewer rules and whistle calls than today. And Taylor was genuinely unstoppable against youthful players when he would dribble the ball from one end of the court to the other, weaving between a whole slew of defenders. It’s said that his passes were so forceful and straight that he could pass a ball under a truck underhanded without touching either the floor or the truck’s undercarriage.

Taylor’s theatrics—with a boost from Converse’s financial sponsorship of the Kansas City-based National Association of Basketball Coaches—eventually made the Converse All Star the dominant basketball shoe in America. In time, the company would almost exclusively hire former players or coaches as salesmen, such as Grady Lewis (who was later to replace Taylor as Sales Manager), Canadian basketball player Bob Houbregs, and the important early African American player Earl Lloyd.

Why was Taylor’s autograph added to the shoe in 1932, though? After all, he was just a salesman for the company, and while he had been a pro, he did not prove to be one of the stars of the game as an adult. It was a combination of his marketing skill (those clinics), plus the fact that he’d served for a time in the late 1920s as player/coach of the well-regarded Converse All-Stars (with the hyphen), the company’s own traveling basketball team. The Converse Rubber Co. had gone through a bankruptcy in 1928, and was sold and then sold again in the early 1930s. While it’s not known whose idea it was to put Taylor’s name on the shoe, his “brand” was clearly better than that of Converse at the time.

Plus there was this little thing about the invention of “Chuck Taylor.” He was real, but he often exaggerated his earlier success as a professional, most notoriously claiming to have been a veteran of the most famous basketball team of the 1920s, the New York City-based Original Celtics. Historian Murry Nelson has written the definitive history of the Original Celtics and he found no evidence that Taylor ever played for that team.

Taylor was paid a fixed sum annually for his autograph. It’s not known how much he was paid annually (in one document dating from the early 1950s he received $15,000) but as a traveling salesman he lived on the road almost 365 days a year, staying in the finest hotels and expensing everything. He drove Chevrolets at first, then Lincolns and Cadillacs. Though he clearly was a showman, he proved his basic humanity in other ways. After his older brother, Howard, was blinded in France during World War I, Taylor supported him his entire life, even going so far as to insist in a divorce settlement that his estate must always pay Howard’s expenses off the top before any alimony payments would be made.

Taylor also served his country during World War II as coach of the best “service” team in the military at the time, the Wright Field Air-Tecs, who competed in fundraisers against the best college and pro teams of the day and usually won. He toured South America as a goodwill ambassador for the U.S. State Department in the late 1950s.

By the 1960s Taylor, and the canvas athletic shoe itself, were somewhat anachronistic. Mass marketers were replacing the locally owned sporting goods store and national advertising was overtaking the gladhand approach of men like Taylor. European manufacturers such as Adidas and Puma were introducing new leather shoes with lighter-weight soles and other high-tech materials, and in some cases were paying coaches directly to adopt their shoes. (While Converse did subsidize the National Association of Basketball Coaches for years, that money went to the organization, not to individual coaches or players. In the 1970s Converse, too, followed the herd and started paying players and coaches directly to adopt their newer shoes, but that was long after Taylor was gone from the scene.)

The real death knell of the canvas All Star in competitive sports came in 1969, when the most famous basketball coach in America, John Wooden, announced that going forward he would not outfit his players with the shoe. As he told Sports Illustrated and others, he was tired of personally trimming rough seams and loose threads inside the shoe. Converse brought Taylor out of retirement, flying him from his Florida home to meet in person with Wooden in Los Angeles, but to no avail. UCLA went to a new shoe the following year. Though Converse did eventually introduce newer, more modern footwear for competition, it was an uphill battle. Adidas, Reebok, and the upstart Nike (which now owns the Converse brand) all had taken their positions in the marketplace.

Taylor died in June 1969, shortly after he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in a stellar class that included former Boston Celtics coach Arnold “Red” Auerbach, true Original Celtics star Henry “Dutch” Dehnert, controversial University of Kentucky basketball coach Adolf Rupp, and former Oklahoma State coach Hank Iba. Taylor was inducted not as a player or coach, but as a “contributor.” His tagline at the Hall of Fame reads, “Taylor … pursued his goal of building players, coaches, and spectator interest in the game of basketball by conducting clinics and demonstrations throughout the country.”

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