I made one slight change in the reading schedule for Cultures of Basketball. Last semester students read the sections from
about the Celtics' dynasty and Bill Russell on the same day. This semester, I had them read about the Celtics' dynasty for Tuesday and then had them read the section on Bill Russell ("Pride of the Celtics: Bill Russell and the Price of Winning) together with the section on Wilt Chamberlain ("The Nuclear Option: Wilt Chamberlain, the Man Who Went Too Far") for Thursday.
I think both arrangements make good sense, but they make different kinds of sense. Last semester’s schedule recognized that Russ and the Celtics, while not identical to one another, were inseparable. It also set Wilt apart, alone, which in a sense is appropriate to the way he presented and the way he is treated in the book.
This semester’s arrangement treated the Celtics as a team phenomenon and kept the focus on Red Auerbach. Meanwhile, it emphasized the relationship and rivalry between Russ and Wilt.
Because it is almost impossible to find any substantial story of either man that doesn’t include reference to the other and to the way in which they – depending on the sophistication of the source material – either really were or were perceived to be polar opposites of one another, the arrangement I chose also provided a valuable opportunity to think with students about binary thinking – its inevitability, its value, its limitations, and alternatives to it.
Educational philosopher and innovator Kieran Egan, writes in
The Educated Mind of the role of
binary thinking in the child development and so in early childhood education,
“the educational point is not to teach binary concepts, nor to teach that the
world is structured in binary terms, but always to lead toward mediation,
elaboration, and conscious recognition of the initial structuring
concepts.” (Egan, by the way, is a truly
valuable thinker on matters of pedagogy, psychological development, and
culture. Check out his group’s website for more information. I've written on him elsewhere.)
The fact that I’m teaching college students doesn’t render
Egan’s point any less vital. Even if
binary thinking is an especially striking feature of early childhood, it is
also an inevitable consequence of using language and very obviously not a feature
of our thinking that simply vanishes as we grow older. What can happen is that binary thinking can
come to operate in a different cognitive environment. We acquire other cognitive tools that allow
us to engage the world (and the other tools – such as binary thinking – that we
use to grasp it) in different, more subtle and nuanced ways.
Sometimes, I find, students can best identify, deconstruct,
and reflect on the purpose of dichotomous thinking when they first produce it
themselves. In other words, if I first
walk them through the construction of binary oppositions they seem to get a
more concrete sense of such oppositions as constructed as well as a better feel
for the emotional and intellectual purposes such oppositions might serve.
The students certainly cooperated, readily serving up the
standards set of oppositional terms in response to my asking them two different
questions after showing them extended video clips focusing on each player: 1)
How would you describe Bill Russell? 2) How would you describe Wilt
Chamberlain? In FreeDarko’s Undisputed Guide Bethlehem Shoals described the
Russell/Wilt binaries as “staples of NBA discourse” and helpfully enumerates
them. I’ll present them here as a table,
much as I did on the chalkboard in class, along with one more pair –
catalyst/finisher – that one student came up with.
|
Bill Russell
|
Wilt Chamberlain
|
|
Positive
|
Negative
|
|
Team
|
Individual
|
|
Unselfish
|
Selfish
|
|
Defense
|
Offense
|
|
Effort
|
Natural talent
|
|
Devotion to the game
|
Wavering interest
|
|
Results
|
Stats
|
|
Winner
|
Loser
|
|
Catalyst
|
Finisher
|
Once we had these two neat columns, we could begin to work
on blurring the vertical line that separate Wilt and Russ and all the terms we
had listed beneath their names. The
table, as a visual means of organizing information, is obviously useful and
obviously limited, just like the binary thinking that informs it. Showing this visually on the chalkboard
allows us to begin change that thinking, initially by just making changes to
the visual representation: for example, erase the vertical line. From there, we might do other things draw
lines between terms to represent different kinds of connection, redistribute
the whole array of terms and the two men’s names differently on the space of
the chalkboard, or use circles and blocks to create different (possibly overlapping)
groups of terms. Whatever the actual
physical operation, the idea is 1) to connect binary thinking to the creation
of a two column table; 2) to change the visual representation; 3) to make the connection between the changed
visual representation and the kind of critical thought it expresses (including
its complication or the original binary structure).
In all this, we were certainly aided by the treatment the
two men receive in Shoals texts, which take an appropriate critical distance
from the dichotomies and in fact side-step them neatly by looking at each
player with an alternative set of lenses.
But, for readers to whose minds that binary schema still tenaciously
clings, Shoals ends the Wilt section with the moving words that Bill Russell spoke
at Chamberlain’s funeral: “Today, I am
unspeakably injured.”
Those words started the process of scrambling our neat
table. So did hearing Russell in one of the video clips speaking of just how
much winning someone who is losing game 7 of a finals series has already
done. The list of the
NBA’s
all time leaders in win shares per 48 minutes (1.Jordan, 2.David Robinson,
3.Wilt Chamberlain . . . 24. Bill Russell) also helped. Observing first hand Russell’s ball handling
and scoring abilities confused things further.
At this point, given how obviously inadequate the binary
schema is for actually understanding the two individuals as players or human
beings, the question arises of why we reproduce it and cling to it and what, if
anything, it is good for? A basketball game results in an outcome in
which one team scores more points than another.
According to the rules of the game the team that scores more points is
the winner. The rules don’t tell us what
to call the team that has scored fewer points.
But everything in athletic culture tells us to call them the losers. And so it can seem natural, certainly
understandable and legitimate, to view a basketball contest through the lens of
winning and losing.
It’s a bit harder to understand how winner and loser become
tags for individual players in a team sport, how individual players get
assigned those tags exclusively on the basis of the number of championship
teams of which the individual was a part.
And from there much harder to understand how a series of subjective,
all-or-nothing moral judgments (such as of an individual’s selfishness or
unselfishness) get adduced after the fact as though they were before-the-fact
causes of the winner-ness or loser-ness of the individual.
I want the students in my class to scrutinize that kind of
thinking, not only to understand basketball history in a more nuanced and
complete fashion, and not only to become better thinkers, but also because the
kind of thinking that reduces the complexity of Russ and Wilt to a two-column
table of mutually exclusive, dichotomous traits can also contribute to similar
reductions with respect to human beings and their interrelationships in other
spheres (e.g. “with us” vs. “with the terrorists”, “good” vs. “evil”, “gay” vs.
“straight,” “man” vs. “woman,” “native” vs. “foreign,” “black” vs. “white.”).
Binary structuring helps us get an initial grasp on a
complex situation: e.g. Q. “What happened in the game last night?" A. “The Celtics won (or the Lakers lost)”. That’s a good start and it’s easy to imagine
the conversation continuing in a way that complicates that initial binary
rendering of the complexity of the game.
By the end of such a conversation, the fact of who won or who lost may
not even be the most important fact. For
some, the most interesting part of
sports and its discourse is not who won or lost, but everything else (which may
include how someone won or lost).
But in the case of Russell and Chamberlain, we see a
discourse that not only remains arrested in the initial binary assessment, but
actually further retrenches itself in such assessment by adding a further
series of binary terms to the initial set as if they were causally related. E.g. Q: “What happened in the game last
night?” A: “The Celtics won because Russ
was unselfish, team oriented, defensive minded, absolutely devoted to winning,
and a tirelessly hard worker (or The Lakers lost because Wilt was selfish,
individually oriented, offensive minded, didn’t care about winning, and was
lazy.)”
To understand why this thinking might be so tenacious we
need to recognize that sports serves a vicarious function for many fans and
commentators. Sport may be the cultural
site in which any number of range of
feelings too uncomfortable to acknowledge frankly can run free and be aired,
authorized by the martial drama of the athletic contest to run rampant over our
rational cognitive faculties.
Thus, as Shoals explains, deep and powerful anxieties about
annihilation raised by the invention and utilization of nuclear weapons might
be channeled into (among other things) fears of Wilt Chamberlain annihilating
the game of basketball.
Metaphor, after
all, doesn’t only serve useful cognitive functions in a learning
environment. It also allows us to treat
an excellent basketball player as though he were a nuclear weapon. Indeed, metaphor is at work when we speak of
a basketball game as a battle, doubly so when we speak of it as a moral battle
between good and evil.
In the case of Russell and Chamberlain, the binary discourse
that made Russell the incarnation of good and Chamberlain of evil was doing
some racial heavy lifting. It
allowed white fans – anxious in an era of rising agitation
for civil rights among African-Americans – to sublimate guilt and fear through
a fantasy of an epic contest between the bad black man and the good negro in
which the latter emerges victorious.
The black man in that fantasy is desire incarnate and uncontrolled,
veering wildly toward violence and destruction.
Russ, the schema could say, had harnessed his individual
desire in the interests of the team (and to the degree that he could not – as
say in his political activism – he would not be accepted). Wilt, the schema could say, refused to do so. Indeed, aggressively asserted his
individuality and appetite. But, Wilt
lost and Bill won and in that way the final outcome of a sporting event is made
to do the work of a final quod erat demonstratum
in an illogical argument set within a hysterical hateful fantasy fueled by fear
and guilt and abetted by willful ignorance.
There’s much to be lamented in this, much that is tragic in
fact for our society. In class, mostly,
we focused on how frustrating it must have been for both Russell and
Chamberlain to find themselves continually cast into confining roles they’d
never consented to play, forced time and again to check the full range – good and
bad and indifferent – of their humanity at the door all because they were both
large African-American men, both played basketball, both played center, both
were superb players, and played against
each other a whole lot. Oh, and Russell’s
teams won more championships.
Whatever hold we legitimately gain on the complexity of
their situation by seeing them through the dichotomous lens I cannot see it as
worth the limiting damage that we thereby do to them, and to ourselves, our
powers of thought, and our humanity.
