Let Us Now Praise Giant Men | Manu and the Snake

Let Us Now Praise Giant Men is a basketball column by Liam Baranauskas. This edition is about Victor Wembanyama, Manu Ginobli, and a mischievous snake.

Attempting to describe NBA prospect Victor Wembanyama, ESPN talking head Richard Jefferson trips into metaphysics, spluttering, “He is space! He is the embodiment of human space!”

In a podium interview, Giannis Antetokounmpo distorts the temporal plane, quickening evolution’s slow march, to state, “In 2045, everyone is going to look like Victor.”

It’s easy to understand why Wembanyama, widely considered the best NBA prospect since LeBron James, inspires this kind of astrally projected hyperbole. At nineteen years old and currently playing in France, Wembanyama looks like the logical end point of the “unicorn” archetype—a big man who both protects the rim and defends in space, who bullies in the low post and knocks down threes. He’s quicker than Embiid and seemingly more defensively engaged than Towns. His shot isn’t any more consistent than Antetokounmpo’s, but it’s prettier.

But while a part of me loves hearing anyone project impossible futures onto the game, another part can’t help going, “Him?” It’s not to say that Wembanyama won’t be worth the hype, but these proclamations seem to be based less on a reimagining of possibility than on the same basic idea that some doofus at the International YMCA Training School probably had right after James Naismith nailed up his first peach basket—“Well, what if we got a really tall guy and just gave him the ball every time?”

While the beautiful clods—the Bols, Blabs, and Bobans—that have made it to the NBA based on this simple, flawed proposal originally inspired this column, what I love is those players’ consistent failure as much as their rare success. Every missed bunny and posterization contradicts the “taller=better” theory, but in being on the wrong end of these small humiliations, they show us something simultaneously more relatable and more transcendent than if the theory were true. To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, they create the freakishly proportioned, oafish cracks that let the light in.

Will Victor Wembanyama score a lot of points and block a lot of shots in the NBA? I don’t know, probably! Will his eldritch size enable him to transcend time and space, expanding the ontological potential of humanity before we shuffle off this mortal coil, as Jefferson and Antetokounmpo seem to believe? That’s a harder question to answer.

A month into my current semester teaching a university first-year writing course, I’ve caught three students using ChatGPT to write their assignments. Despite all the hand-wringing about AI-generated plagiarism on my university’s teaching listserv (and boy, do I envy you if you’ve never seen a university teaching listserv), in its current state it’s really easy to tell from writing created organically. I’ve called these students out on it but can’t really blame them. Their previous educations seem to have mostly taught writing as functional, valuing sentence-level concision and organizational clarity above all else. Current composition theory (as far as I know—I’m not a very diligent comp instructor) pushes against this a bit, trying to emphasize process and discovery, but the discipline ultimately can’t escape its roots as a hostile takeover, meant to inject quantifiable metrics into the writing classroom in order to carve out a separate space (read: tenure-track jobs and departmental funding) from English departments, with all their abstruse theories and rickety learning objectives. If you try to teach good writing as something inseparable from numerical calculation, are students doing anything wrong when they turn to calculators to produce good writing?

It’s not that AI-generated writing doesn’t have potential as a tool for both literary pedagogy and prose itself (in 2021, The Believer published a surprising and poignant piece by Vauhini Viri called “Ghosts” in which she uses an early version of ChatGPT to help her write about her sister’s death), but if you believe, as I do, that just about every technological convenience of the internet age has made the sphere it’s disrupting (restaurants! Movies! News! Interpersonal relationships!) holistically worse, you probably aren’t holding out a whole lot of hope either. I can think of a lot of reasons why convenience will eventually give us death, but the essential one is that it spurs compulsive deference to results over process. Once there’s an easy way to get what you want, why would you make things harder on yourself?

As far as literacy goes, this brings up a cultural paradox, in which we still uphold reading and what Toni Morrison calls “word-work” as necessary but don’t allow space for it. The black-diamond descent of publishing sales figures over the past thirty-odd years shows this, but I can also look at my own habits for evidence. Maybe you can too. Amid the blare of the competing, constant trumpets from every corner of the attention economy, it’s hard to carve out the time and contemplative space to actually read regularly. There’s no quantifiable benefit to doing so—despite what internet book stans insist, reading a book (especially, God forbid, a novel) isn’t going to make you smarter or more empathetic—and there are a million things on your phone right now that are going to give you an easier and probably more intense dopamine rush.

What purposeless reading is good for is making space for another’s consciousness to supersede your own. This is true even if the body that once contained that consciousness is long gone, which is amazing—with twenty-six letters and a handful of punctuation marks, Robert Walser or Sylvia Townsend Warner are in my fucking head, with all the messiness and imperfections of another person’s mind. The problem is that in an era defined by technology’s omnipresent emphasis on forward progress, there’s no value to reanimating the dead. In the Nobel Prize lecture that I force my students to read, Morrison calls word-work “the measure of our lives,” but that measurement isn’t quantifiable, so for the purpose of calculation, it doesn’t exist.

My grand conspiracy theory regarding the confluence of algorithms, AI, and corporate curation—and eventual creation—of art presumes that the end point of AI-generated words, music, and visual art is to cut media company expenses by getting you to pay for creatorless content. It starts with the Turing test, the idea that a machine successfully demonstrates human intelligence when it can fool people into believing that it’s one of them. It’s usually referenced in terms of AI technology’s advances, as if the only way for a machine to pass the test is to follow Moore’s law on a death march toward humanlike interactions.

But here’s the thing: the whole premise of the Turing test is like a scale, the humanity of machines on one side and the humanity of humans on the other. The fulcrum of this scale is perception. One way to balance it is to add to the machine side and persuasively simulate a soul; the other is to take away from the human side, convincing people that they don’t have souls in the first place. Which do you think is easier?

This one time when I did ayahuasca, a subtle green snake took me inside my body to show me everywhere that was cold or dying. The inside of my body was moonlit. I was going through some shit, and there was a lot inside me that was messed up, physical and otherwise, so the journey took a while. Finally, the snake took me into my scrotum, and showed me my blackened left testicle. (The next morning, sleepless, I wrote, “Uh, get that checked out, dude,” in my journal.)

The next day, I asked my shaman about the snake. “You saw the snake?” he asked. His tone was kind of suspicious, like I’d stumbled into something I shouldn’t have seen, or at least wasn’t ready to.

“Yeah,” I said. “I followed him into my body. So what’s the snake?”

I was probably hoping to have my vision validated, to be told that I’d been found worthy of seeing hidden worlds and meeting secret gods.

He took a long time to respond, then said dismissively, “The snake is the drug.”

There’s a Manu Ginobili pass from the 2013 Finals that I always think about. After a made Heat basket, Tony Parker, pressured by Norris Cole, throws it upcourt to Ginobili across the timeline and races toward the lane. In one motion, Ginobili turns and returns a bounce pass to Parker, threading the pass through Cole’s legs, despite the fact that Cole is a) turned around, b) running after Parker at full speed, and c) about twenty-five feet from Ginobili. Cole’s legs open at precisely the right time, like a miniature golf obstacle. On the broadcast, Jeff Van Gundy doesn’t seem to notice the pass, instead continuing to talk about the Heat using flare screens to free Ray Allen, as if what Ginobili just did fits so poorly into the expectations of what’s usually seen on a basketball court that it’s functionally invisible. The ball makes it to Parker in stride.

It’s easy to dismiss the pass as serendipitous. Search “Ginobili nutmeg” on YouTube and you’ll find plenty of rational examples of Ginobili practicing the nutmeg’s dark art—tossing it directly to a cutting teammate (usually Tiago Splitter) for an easy layup, where the only possible route for the pass is between the wickets of a facing-up defender. There’s one where Thaddeus Young endearingly fails to close his legs in time and ends up holding a pose like Porky Pig when he loses his shirt and discovers he’s not wearing any pants.

But the Cole nutmeg, if it is intentional, is an irrational nutmeg, different from the others in both form and function. Cole is defending Parker, not Ginobili, he’s halfway across the court, and again, he’s running at almost full speed, meaning that as Ginobili begins to throw the pass, Cole takes at least two complete steps (i.e., the window for the pass opens, closes, opens, closes, and finally opens again) before the ball passes through him. And there’s an inverted risk-reward ratio from what could be considered a good pass, or at least a smart one. After all this, Parker receives the ball around the foul line, but is moving across the court away from the basket, the pass leading him toward a well-defended lane.

The argument for intention starts with, well, Ginobili himself, the wacky next-door neighbor in the otherwise-predictable 2010s Spurs sitcom. Just as his luminous bald spot disguised his sneaky athleticism (he was a fierce dunker), his game was based on deceit—walking baseline tightropes when any other player would have stepped out of bounds, letting the ball leave his hands at surprising angles and moments. He popularized the Eurostep, in which a driving ballhandler channels a stage magician’s misdirection, disguising their momentum to sidestep a defender fooled into standing still to take a charge. Spurs coach Gregg Popovich tells a story about trying to tell an early-career Ginobili to rein it in, in which Ginobili, with Popeye-esque existentialism, responds, I am Manu. This is what I do.

You see Manu’s wildness, and its collective valuation, not just in the Cole nutmeg itself but in what happens after. It’s as if the ball retained Ginobili’s intentions and transferred them to Parker. He takes an inefficient shot, a contested fadeaway over two defenders, seemingly because the only way to reify Ginobili’s pointless generation of possibility is to quantify it. Parker shot not for analytics but for art.

It’s a brick.

Ten years after I met the snake, I was lying on a hospital bed with goo all over my balls while an ultrasound technician grimaced at a monitor. “That bad?” I said.

“You’ll have to wait for the doctor for a diagnosis. You haven’t had any pain before this?” he said.

“Just tonight,” I said.

“Huh,” he said. “Really?”

While you still see vestiges of Ginobili’s game in the NBA today—most prominently in the ubiquity of the Eurostep, most gloriously when New Orleans guard Jose Alvarado hides cartoonishly near his own bench to swipe at opposing point guards from behind after a made Pelicans shot—it’s hard to categorize Ginobili into a lineage with other players. Unlike Victor Wembanyama’s size, lateral movement, and rim protection, poking at boundaries to see where they give isn’t a quantifiable metric for a scouting report. I am Manu, this is what I do can be read as an assertion of individuality, but you can also see it as a middle finger (or whatever the Argentinian equivalent is) to replicability, to scalability. You can’t teach height, but you also can’t teach miracles.

No one will ever say, “In 2045, everyone is going to look like Manu Ginobili.” It’s less outlandish to say that in twenty years we’ll all be giants than to say that we’ll occasionally do something cool that’s also maybe a little bit unproductive.

The snake showed me my cancer ten years before I was in the hospital for it. But here’s the thing: the cancer was in my right testicle, not the left. The snake, that trickster god, was being deceitful. He is the snake, this is what he does.

Or maybe it was just a hallucination, and the cancer was a coincidence.

The snake was the drug. The snake was a miracle. There’s a rational answer, and then there’s one that opens up possibilities.

Liam Baranauskas is a writer from Philadelphia.