Let Us Now Praise Giant Men | Ben Simmons’s Infinite Free Throws
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Let Us Now Praise Giant Men is a basketball column by Liam Baranauskas. This edition is about a finger roll, a dunk, and foul shots.
I used to play in a semiregular pickup game with a few friends in Mississippi. Some of us were decent players—Mario could shoot and had a nasty, Rondo-esque ball fake that released you into the air behind him like a child’s lost balloon; John had the quick-twitch speed of an actual athlete—but for the most part, these were casual, beer-gutted runs among MFA students and musicians and dudes who worked at the record label. If the weather was nice, we played at the middle school, where a bad pass on the shady side of the court dropped the ball into a gully’s tick-infested weeds. If it wasn’t, we played indoors at John’s father’s church, behind Pitner’s Office Supply and next to the car wash, on a court with spongy backboards and low joists that swatted high-arcing jump shots.
Pickup games are inherently disposable, but there’s one play at the church I remember. Not the whole thing, just from the moment I took one dribble along the baseline and jumped. In my 30s, jumping was the one basketball skill I’d retained. Most of the stickiness had left my hands by then, I’m not tall and was never very quick, and my shot always came and went, but somehow I could still get up. In my peripheral vision, I saw John—faster, taller, and not that it matters, better looking than me—leap from the opposite side of the lane to block my shot. I had the ball in my right hand.
What happened next was that time slowed down. Everything moved with the gooey motion of a dream.
I knew I couldn’t lay the ball up with my right hand because John would have stuffed it against that dead backboard. So I switched hands in midair, swinging the ball under his arm, and took the contact with my shoulder. Most of my body (and more importantly, the ball) was at this point beneath the rim. I was still in the air, rising slow and easy as if surfacing from underwater. I leaned back and flipped the ball with my left hand over John’s right, over the front of the rim, and softly through the net. To anyone watching, it was probably nothing spectacular—a move about at the level of a decent high-school player—but I’m talking about what it felt like, not the move itself. I can still see it all. I can still feel it.
Perceiving time slowing down is a notorious effect of near-death experiences—car crashes or almost-drownings, usually. There’s a Radiolab episode where a neuroscientist claims that the phenomenon isn’t about perception in the moment, but that the brain, in crisis, immediately dumps loads of detailed information into its long-term memory. The slowdown supposedly occurs later, as you look back. But like a lot of scientific explanations that run counter to anecdotal experience, this doesn’t totally wash; it doesn’t explain how you can actually react to these slowed moments more quickly, since to do so you have to be processing them faster in the moment. The Radiolab neuroscientist doesn’t acknowledge the discordance between his explanation and the story he tells of a motorcycle accident victim composing a song in his head to the rhythm of his helmet bouncing off the asphalt.
When I was a kid, I imagined that when you died, time decelerated continuously but never stopped, each split second splitting again and taking twice as long as the one before to complete. You got closer and closer to the light without ever, ever reaching it. That was how you found eternity, in an infinitely small slice of time that kept growing smaller.
I don’t remember if I talked a little shit on the way back down the court but probably not. We were in church. John broke me down off the dribble and took me to the rack on the next possession.
The clock in basketball, as played on any level formal enough to have one, is elastic. In the NBA, quarters last twelve minutes, but the game clock bears no resemblance to one you’d hang on your wall. It stops for time-outs, fouls, replay reviews, the ball going out of bounds. It stops, with no acknowledgement of irony from anyone involved, for delay-of-game penalties. There are scheduled commercial breaks. There’s also a shot clock that runs by different rules from the game clock’s, so a point guard will sometimes “walk the dog” after the opposing team makes a basket, letting the inbounds pass roll in front of him without touching it, running down the game clock while retaining the shot clock’s full twenty-four seconds. Confusingly, the rules change in the last two minutes of each half and the game clock runs even more slowly. The final seconds of a close game often take a half hour of real time to complete.
But there’s another hidden chronology in every game: the passage of time on the court as it’s perceived by the players themselves. Neurological experiments (unacknowledged by the loser from Radiolab) have validated the idea that physically reacting to an overflow of information helps the brain process that information faster. Other studies claim that entering “flow states” may help truly exceptional athletes control their own perception of time. Could the postgame interview cliché “The game slowed down for me” bear some truth, indicating that the best-performing player in any game is the one who subjugates the game’s time to their own?
Last week I got my son in bed in time to watch the second half of the Atlanta-Philadelphia game. It was game five of a tied playoff series. The 76ers, one of the best teams in the NBA this year and heavily favored, had led for most of the game, and by the time I began watching, were in front by around twenty points. Intellectually, I know that actively rooting for a sports team is embarrassing and regressive lizard-brained territoriality, but at the same time I am an unreformable 76ers fan, and every splashed Seth Curry three-pointer or vicious Joel Embiid block gave me a jolt of dumb pleasure.
The game changed soon after I began watching. Lou Williams, probably the NBA’s most loveable dirtbag since J.R. Smith retired (when Williams was caught breaking the league’s pandemic restrictions to go to a strip club, he claimed he was just picking up some chicken wings), went on a hot streak, and Trae Young, the Hawks’ annoying, precocious star, began hitting long three-pointers. Someone banked in a desperation three at the end of the shot clock. On the other end, the Sixers’ offense stagnated into a morass of ugly shots and sloppy passing. They resembled untalented amateurs stumbling through a pickup game. The Hawks, collectively, had begun playing a faster game than the 76ers’. They were moving to different clocks.
I dropped my novel in progress into the fire last month (I have a folder on my computer called “the fire” where I put unpublishable work). I started writing it in Mississippi seven years ago. Seven years is obviously an eternity to put into a project that ultimately comes to nothing, but it seems like a vulgar postmortem to my dead book to simply mourn lost time. I don’t want to lose the joy I felt in the process of its creation, and I want to feel humbled by its failure. I hope this will help me start something new.
So I think about the two drafts I finished and the six incomplete ones. The themes that seemed prescient when I started the book that are now banal and obvious. I think about the characters’ hazy futures snapping into focus as I got them down on paper, and about the lost rhythm of the language that—occasionally, miraculously—flew so effortlessly from my fingertips that it seemed like another, more talented writer had control of them. I think of the good days when I would float from my chair and save the document one last time, irrationally sure of my book’s brilliance, and of the last many, many months, shuffling commas and lifting blocks of highlighted text to different pages before desultorily moving them back again.
At what point did the book spin away from me? If writing were broadcast like a spectator sport (granted, the most boring spectator sport in the world, possibly excepting golf) with a chyron depicting hours at keyboard, word count, clever turns of phrase per page, pathos score, and time spent daydreaming of the lies I’d tell about what’s on my nightstand for the New York Times “By The Book” feature, would there have been a moment where a viewer watching me would have muttered into their beer, “There it goes, he’s got no chance.” Would it have been obvious a long time ago?
But that’s not quite right either. Writing isn’t a zero-sum game with winners and losers, and even if it were, that wouldn’t be what’s good about it. Basketball is a zero-sum game with winners and losers, but the best parts are those strange moments when the quantitative borders around the sport—scores, clocks, gravity—break down. Shammgodding a defender onto skates before you lay the ball in is objectively better than hitting an open jumper, even though they’re both worth two points. The process and result are linked, but one isn’t dependent on the other. In former NBA star Gilbert Arenas’s long-defunct blog, he once claimed that a friend who dunked for the first time in his life during a pickup game was so overcome that he died. Arenas, giving no indication that he’s taking the piss, portrayed this moment not as tragedy but with envy.
If my childhood theory about the moment of death is correct, this makes perfect sense. Arenas’s friend would always be basking in the joy of having just dunked for the first time.
When you’re rooting for a team that’s losing a big lead, the score becomes yet another type of clock. A made shot for the good guys changes the relative scale—it means one more exchange of possessions, around thirty to forty seconds—giving the opponents, in effect, less time to come back. In game five, we (for I am now a member of the 76ers; as time turns fluid for the two sides playing against each other, rationality goes out the window) need one basket, one stop, to ensure we’re still in front when the last shot goes up and the clock runs out.
The Hawks get a stream of layups and dunks against leaden Sixers defensive rotations. The Hawks begin to foul Ben Simmons, the Sixers’ star who’s preternaturally good at every facet of basketball except actually shooting the ball into the basket, on purpose. The game clock stops for foul shots. The time, practically speaking, does not exist. Simmons will end the postseason with the lowest playoff free-throw percentage in NBA history; he will claim that his struggles are “all mental,” but that isn’t what it looks like on TV. A Ben Simmons free throw looks like the physical manifestation of a spiritual crisis. You can almost see him trying to break down the motion, limb by limb, muscle by muscle. In the non-time of a trip to the free throw line, his shots take forever and yet their future exists before their present: he’s missed each one before it leaves his hand. I never replicated the moment when I once slowed down time on the basketball court, but I know it didn’t work like that, from desperation and palpable fear of failure.
https://youtu.be/MIWbhl0fZQY
Despite the irrationality of identifying with a bunch of twenty-five-year-old millionaires because their jerseys say the name of the city I grew up in, my guts drop to my shins as the Sixers’ lead disappears. The vicarious sensation I feel is more acute, somehow, than when I decided that the novel I’d poured so much into would never see the light of day. That was a feeling of failure communing with its own acceptance, present even in my euphoric moments, a looming shadow cast and yet cast off by every word I put on the page. Watching the Sixers blow game five is witnessing condensed failure approaching head-on, too fast and too slow simultaneously. The Hawks are knifing through the water of the game clock while the Sixers drown in it. I’m watching the Sixers gasp for air.
By the time the Sixers finally hit another shot, right before the game clock goes to zero, Atlanta has a five-point lead, rendering it irrelevant.
Philadelphia wins the next game in the series, but this is clearly staving off the inevitable. When Atlanta wins game seven, the Sixers go home. They’re sidelined until their reincarnation next year, when all the clocks will reset and win-loss records will return to zero. They’ll undoubtedly have different players but the same city on their jersey.
I’ve started research for another novel. This one, this time, is going to work. I can see it like it’s already happened.
Liam Baranauskas is a writer from Philadelphia. He was working on a novel.
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