![]() I am certain I learned to respect the game from Black guys, and part of that code had to do with respecting each other even as we talked trash. ![]() White guys cried and moaned about being fouled, and trash talking often teetered in the edge of starting a fight. If you fouled guys and let it slide, you caught extra hell so there was a not-so-subtle message to do the right thing. Unlike white guys, as well, Black guys called their own fouls when they committed them. But we usually smiled, we often slapped hands or shook hands to compliment good play, and I really never expected anyone to come to blows. The mostly Black-guy pick-up games were intense with a great deal of mouthing. I was more mouth than ass, and I really never monitored when the other guy didn’t understand the moral code I had acquired. I could have, and should have, gotten my ass beat, by the way. Notably, these moments were always about my antagonistic interactions with other white guys. One of my white friends used to say to me often, “Paul, you’re going to get your ass beat,” referring to my trash talk. ![]() Looking back on these experiences, especially in the context of the reductive and racist debates raging over Reese/ Clark and including references to Bird, I am now vividly aware of the moral codes I was taught through the Black culture elements of basketball. Again, pick-up gains were overwhelmingly with Black guys and a couple of my closest white friends who, like me, were very Black-guy-adjacent in their basketball and personal lives. One year that stands out to me is playing intramural basketball in my first couple years of college when I was playing pick-up basketball nearly daily with members of the college team and local elite high school players. So I had to play hard, and I used one skill I trusted-running my mouth. On the basketball court, I had a great to deal to make up for since I was often the weakest pure player on the court. I learned from Carlin and Pryor that being smart and gifted knew no race, but I also learned that individual power and autonomy was grounded in my mind and my verbal abilities. Carlin and Pryor taught me the power of language while also disrupting much of my redneck upbringing that was often narrow-minded and bigoted. On the court and off, I was known for my gifted use of profanity.Ĭoncurrent with my basketball life, I listened for hours to George Carlin and Richard Pryor comedy albums. In fact, on a 13-person roster as a sophomore, I was the only white guy on the team.īut probably the most important part of my basketball life, and ultimately my life in general, was playing pick-up basketball almost exclusively with Black guys throughout high school and into college (where I also played intramural basketball).ĭespite my limited skills as a basketball player, I was pretty athletic, I knew how to play ball well, I was a physical player, and I talked trash. ![]() That basketball life included being a rabid fan of Pete Maravich and Bird, and since I was a scrawny white redneck from a working class family, there were many aspects of race and social class entrenched in my basketball life.ĭespite my compulsive practicing-much of that focusing on dunking and spinning a basketball on my finger-I was mostly a bench warmer on school teams I was routinely humiliated by my teammates who were overwhelmingly Black. My basketball life was grounded in the 1970s and 1980s when I played a great deal of basketball-on school and rec teams throughout junior and high school as well as almost daily pick-up games in the late 70s and early 80s-and was an avid college and NBA fan. I was right, and the discussions around Bird, a legendary trash talker, echoes the same racial tension that responses to Reese and Clark are exposing. When I checked Twitter and noticed Larry Bird trending, I immediately assumed that it was connected to the Angel Reese/ Caitlin Clark debate surrounding trash talk.
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