Let Us Now Praise Giant Men | The Bottom of Rodman’s Secrets
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Let Us Now Praise Giant Men is a basketball column by Liam Baranauskas. This edition is about the NBA restart and walkout, Jamal Murray, ecstatic experience in Shakespeare, and Dennis Rodman as GOAT.
One of my favorite out-there basketball theories is that Dennis Rodman, by virtue of being the all-time best third-best-player-on-his-team by such a wide margin, is actually the best player of all time—i.e. if you had a fictional team on which you replaced prime Michael Jordan with prime LeBron, Bird, Magic, etc., you wouldn’t see a huge drop-off, but Rodman’s esoteric skill set (defense, rebounding, falling on the floor, boxing out, setting screens, throwing no-look, behind-the-back passes while diving into the stands) isn’t even approached by Bosh, Robert Parish, Worthy, or any other third banana you can think of. By developing a preternatural capacity for the undervalued or difficult-to-quantify, Rodman transcended basketball’s arithmetic. His contributions were ultimately reflected on the scoreboard, but he played as if within a separate game in which each possession—or each moment within each possession—was a hermetic unit, unrelated to what came before or after.
The episode of The Last Dance (the documentary about Jordan’s final season with the Chicago Bulls that first aired in April) that focuses on Rodman plays up his cultural transgressiveness, which, at least as far as I remember, didn’t really seem all that transgressive at the time. It can probably be read differently through a backwards-looking lens of race and class, but in the mid-to-late 1990s, Marilyn Manson was the soundtrack of suburban cul-de-sacs, and colored hair, wraparound sunglasses, piercings, and counterintuitively heteronormative gender-bending were practically an alternajock’s starter pack. And in The Last Dance’s present-day interviews, Rodman reads as a parody of this parody—an aging, pierced Trumpster in a promotional hat. If Woodstock ’99 were a person who had learned nothing in the past two decades, it would probably resemble Dennis Rodman.
Two seemingly opposed sides of Rodman are on view here: one who cared so deeply about basketball that he found a new way to play it, and one in a crushed-velvet topcoat and eyeliner, performing oh-well-whatever-never-mind apathy. It’s tempting to separate the two, but I believe each enabled the other. His off-court affectations (especially contrasted with Jordan’s apolitical, kid-friendly persona) show him striving, however clumsily, to define himself outside of painted lines and ticking clocks. The same need to push at boundaries was evident when Rodman was on the court, but there, where the lines and clocks were inescapable, he tunneled inside the game and found a microcosmos in its seams. You can hear it when he talks about rebounding, describing how the spin of various players’ shots affected the caroms when they missed, telling of order in a chaotic, hidden world that only he saw.
Professional basketball restarts in July, and it is deeply weird. Players are quarantined in a “bubble” at the Wide World of Sports complex at Walt Disney World in Orlando, where games take place in gyms empty except for the players, referees, and team personnel. You can “cheer” by touching a button on the NBA’s app, which affects the volume of the crowd noise on the broadcast. Images of fans watching the games at home are superimposed onto a green screen at the arena; since the size of the avatar is dependent on how close the fan is sitting to their device, their sizes are wildly variable—it’s as if half the audience ate the cake that read “Eat Me,” half drank the glass labeled “Drink Me.” Sometimes, if the camera switches to a long shot, the screen blinks into a flashing Jumbotron-style graphic as if there were real fans in the arena to respond to it, erasing the virtual ones. I’m not sure who the exhortation is for. Not me—there’s no button on the app for chanting “De-fense!”
As the restart approached, a few players began to raise concerns that returning to play would distract from the ongoing protests incited by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Eventually, granted certain concessions, the players agreed to continue the season. Statements were made to the effect that they could best use their platforms if they were playing games while they advocated for change.
But the league’s concessions are (predictably yet still unfortunately) folded into the sanitized corporate bonhomie of the presentation of the games themselves. “Black Lives Matter” is painted on the court, but it’s alongside logos for energy companies and carmakers. Players choose from a selection of league-approved slogans to replace the nameplates on the backs of their jerseys; these range from the germane—“Say Her Name,” “How Many More”—to the anodyne or distracting—“Peace,” “Education Reform.”
Publicly, the NBA’s restart was first hailed as a success, mostly because basketball players do amazing things. If Damian Lillard can manifest the ball into the basket apparently using only his mind, it doesn’t matter if it looks like a video game. The important part is that you believe it’s really happening.
I still can’t shake the feeling that the entire presentation is using sports to help systematize an isolating technological dystopia as an inevitable future that’ll just take some getting used to.
I still watch. I don’t really understand quantum mechanics, but the only thing that makes Luka Dončić’s passing seem possible is if the ball is matter and light simultaneously.
One of the few books I get through in quarantine is Ron Rosenbaum’s The Shakespeare Wars. The book is about the ongoing conflicts among literary scholars who try to shape how Shakespeare is read and performed, but it’s also about ecstatic experience, and whether it’s possible to represent it or replicate it. Rosenbaum claims to have experienced ecstasy (in the original meaning of the term: the sense of standing outside oneself, essentially an out-of-body experience) in his early twenties at a Royal Shakespeare Company production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
One of the ways he believes Shakespeare attempts to convey an ecstatic experience is through (avert your ears, MFA faculty) ambiguity. And one of the theories Rosenbaum outlines on how Shakespeare achieves this ambiguity is, oddly enough, through spelling. Some scholars, Rosenbaum writes, believe that the most fulfilling way to read Shakespeare is from the earliest known editions with spelling unchanged (“unanchored” is the word Rosenbaum uses), no matter how nonstandard or confusing. For example, in the unanchored 1608 Quarto text of Richard II, the line “I, no; no I, for I must nothing be” tethers reading the words on the page to a projected experience of hearing them. The spelling most modern editions use, “Ay, no; no ay, for I must nothing be”—from the 1623 Folio version of the play—does not. With unanchored spelling, the homonyms bubble to the surface; the line is a simple lament, yes, but the character can also be read as meditating on the “I,” the first person, while the jarring syntax opens the possibility of an oblique reference to his “eye,” his own perception.
Rosenbaum (somewhat ecstatically) suggests that this creates a mysterious “special dimension” within the texts that might blur borders between page and stage, between performance and fact. The language turns limitless, transposing “the narrow confines of the Globe Theatre into the spherical expansiveness of the globe, in the sense of the entire human cosmos.”
Sometimes, at the Wide World of Sports Complex, an errant camera angle shows the fourth wall of the arena, revealing it to be nothing but a darkened fourth wall, adding a sense that this is a stage. This has the opposite effect from Rosenbaum’s “special dimension.” Yes, yes, of course, it says. How can a basketball court be anything but full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?
In late August, the Milwaukee Bucks (including Sterling Brown, himself a victim of police brutality) refuse to leave their locker room for a playoff game, citing a lack of legislative action in the wake of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The five other teams scheduled to play that night follow the Bucks’ lead in refusing to play. WNBA players (who have consistently risked their own more financially tenuous statuses for public political statements, recently wearing shirts imploring voters to oust Kelly Loeffler, a conservative Georgia senator and the owner of the league’s Atlanta Dream, from office) immediately cancel their games that night, and a ripple of player withdrawals in professional baseball, football, and tennis follows.
This is referred to as a walkout, a boycott, a strike, and a wildcat strike, but none of those terms are strictly accurate. In their business, professional athletes are both the labor and the product, performers and performance. The aesthetic trappings of TV sports—uniforms and logos, the musty jock jams played at game stoppages, slow-motion replays, and generated narratives meant to add context and a dramatic arc to a given game—are a stage, necessary for the show to go on but unable to confine what it expresses.
Back in March, within two weeks of the NBA’s original shutdown following Rudy Gobert’s positive Covid test, Trump was calling for sports to return, complete with live audiences, as a mark of a return to normalcy. So by shutting the league down again, not for quantifiable reasons but simply to say “enough,” the players connect the BLM protests to the pandemic in a public, visceral way. They realize that their “platform” alone (mediated through the trappings of their stage, surrounded by and projected through a maze of disorienting screens upon screens) has not effected change. Maybe the only way they can expand beyond the confines around them is to leave the stage, to cease being basketball players.
The players apparently legitimately consider refusing to finish the season, but in the end, just two nights of games are rescheduled. The most concrete result is that arenas in NBA cities will open as polling places in the November elections; other concessions (per the press release, establishment of a “social justice coalition”; use of league advertising to increase “civil engagement and access to voting”) still seem unlikely to make much of a difference. Now, occasionally the screen will split and a promo appears that I know is hyping a racially or socially progressive cause, but it’s cut like a spot for the conference semifinals and it’s hard not to focus on, like, P. J. Tucker shooting a free throw or something on the other side of the screen.
Rosenbaum outlines a theory on the origin of Bottom’s name, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He describes how Bottom’s line “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen” can be read as a comic inversion of a line from First Corinthians: “The eye hath not seen, and the ear hath not heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” Rosenbaum interprets the passage in Corinthians as an attempt to describe the indescribable, the “experience of ecstatic communion with the divine.”
In the version of Bishop’s Bible commonly used when Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the next line is “For the spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God.”
But in the 1557 Geneva Bible, likelier to have been the translation Shakespeare grew up with (he was born in 1564; the Bishop’s Bible wasn’t published until 1568), “the deep things of God” is translated as “the bottom of God’s secrets.”
The bottom of God’s secrets!
If God’s secrets have a bottom, that means His impossible, unquantifiable things—from grief to ecstasy and all between—have a shape, a direction, borders. But to find their limits, to expand them, to risk transgressing them, to get to that bottom, maybe that’s the reason those borders are there in the first place?
I rewound one of The Last Dance’s slow-motion replays of Rodman getting a rebound over and over. He jumps and tips the ball around bigger and stronger players countless times, exploding upwards with what looks to me like pain and joy simultaneously on each leap. His effort takes him halfway across the court, before, eventually and inevitably, he secures the ball. The documentary doesn’t show what happens next, whether the Bulls scored or not, because that’s more or less irrelevant to the version of basketball Rodman is playing, which is something deeper, stranger, alien yet more human.
I catch the last quarter of a Nuggets–Jazz playoff game late on a Sunday night, three days after the league’s second restart. I luck into one of those rare, astonishing stretches where two players, Denver’s Jamal Murray and Utah’s Donovan Mitchell, are going basket for basket on every possession, neither seeming to miss. It’s not graceful, team-oriented basketball but something cruder. Everyone knows who’s taking each shot for either team and it doesn’t matter. You can tell each time either player shoots, no matter how contorted his body angle or the irrational distance from the basket, that it’s going in. The score provides context to the game but doesn’t seem to matter much anymore. Watching feels like being teleported into Murray’s and Mitchell’s childhood fantasies. Even through the screen, it’s hard not to get a vicarious glimmer of what must feel like an ecstatic experience to both players.
Denver wins, and Murray, who goes for fifty points, is the postgame interview. He begins to answer the interviewer’s first question, then breaks down, clearly trying not to cry. He says nothing for a long time that feels longer on television. Finally he says, “These shoes give me life,” pointing to the portraits of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd on his sneakers. He repeats it before adding, “They help me find strength.”
Transcribing the words on the page does not capture them. Watching, I feel the vibration of poetry, the kind that lies beyond the words’ meaning. Somehow, the whole of the interview’s performance approaches an emotional transfer of what it must feel like to come back into your body, into an unjust world that hates that body when it’s not on the basketball court you’ve just transcended, and yet to have a microphone in your face, to still be on stage, to still have to perform. Beyond his language, something (maybe Murray’s empathy? Is it that simple?) redirects that expectation of performance, and expands it outward, dares us to feel what he’s feeling, which seems now to be the opposite of an ecstatic experience.
I don’t know if this moment might possibly have any quantifiable, measurable impact on anything, that it would amount to even a grain of sand on the new shore of a better world. But I know that’s not the point, either, any more than the point of praying is to be answered.
Liam Baranauskas is a writer from Philadelphia. He is currently working on a novel.
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