Basketball

Continuing with Rabbit Angstrom, we will approach his interest in sports. Combining his love for basketball with the fact that many men of his generation played amateur sports tells me that America’s love for sport and competition ran high in the post-war years. Rabbit played basketball for his rural hometown of Mt. Judge, Pennsylvania. In his description of that time, some of the gyms they played in were so small that they had backboards mounted directly to the end walls. The crowds reached to the rafters to watch Rabbit shoot and score against the opposition. In the Rabbit books, Angstrom is what every boy aspires to be and what every man wants for his son. Rabbit, to the denizens of Mt. Judge, was Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant and Magic Johnson rolled into one player. He was their superstar, the leader and the man who got the ball on every possession. Most nights he would play well and score many baskets, but win or lose Rabbit would put up multiple shots a game. It’s like the present day Los Angeles Lakers, Whether Kobe goes 20/40 shooting or 7/40 shooting, he is going to put up all 40 shots every night and his teammates can learn to deal with it. In Mt. Judge, it was Rabbit’s team.

This point was much to the chagrin of Ronnie Harrison, Rabbit’s friend from the country club and the husband of Rabbit’s illicit lover Thelma. Ronnie played basketball with Rabbit and would be considered a grinder or a role player. While Rabbit was out front, draining shots and getting the credit, Ronnie was in the post and in the paint playing tough defense and rebounding. Throughout the books these two have a long and twisted relationship, but two metaphors come to my mind here: Ronnie is Newman to Rabbit’s Seinfeld, and if Rabbit is Jordan then Ronnie is Dennis Rodman (without the hair and piercings and women’s clothing). Ronnie did not receive the spotlight on the court, but talking heads on ESPN would value his contribution to the team. Some would even go so far as to say that Rabbit could not be the player he was without a Ronnie backing him up, pulling down boards and posting up on defense. These men are a microcosm of the larger world and America at the time. In the prime of both of their lives, Rabbit is a successful Toyota dealer, member of the country club and various civic organizations and makes a very comfortable living without trying very hard. This parallels his experience in high school and on the basketball court. Ronnie is a struggling insurance salesman, has to work hard every day to pay his bills and has to live knowing that Rabbit is sleeping with his wife. These men are characters of the world around them.

America has a great sporting past, and though the largest sport today is professional football, this wasn’t always the case. Boxing and baseball dominated the sporting world well into the 1960’s, hockey was (and is) a niche product for cold latitudes and basketball was just coming onto the scene in post-war America. Baseball captured American hearts in such a way that is curious. Of the stick-and-ball sports it is the most obtuse: the defense controls the ball, there is no clock and most positions outside of catcher and middle infield do not require real athletic talent. Baseball was the pinnacle of sporting entertainment to those post war suburbanites. They lived and breathed baseball at all levels, from Little League to MLB to old-man-slow-pitch-rec-league softball. Boxing too captivated their minds and spirits. Blood sport, handed down through history from ancient Greece all the way to the biggest names like Sonny Liston, Jake LaMotta and Sugar Ray Robinson. These men climbed into the ring and beat each other senseless all for the glory and honor of the crowds. While these sports are beautiful and successful in their own right, it makes sense that Rabbit Angstrom made his bones playing a different sport than them.

Basketball is cheap; it only requires one ball and two hoops. It also doesn’t require as many men as football or baseball. Since only five are needed per side, poor schools can afford to outfit a team more readily than if they played football or baseball (which to anyone who has seen Hoosiers makes sense because Hickory doesn’t have the cash for football, let alone enough boys). And, it is played in the winter. Farmers and farming communities are at their most idle when snow is on the ground and the crops are in the silo. Plus, small towns can more easily support a basketball team and fill a small gymnasium than they could fill a football stadium. For Mt. Judge, the poor rural town in Pennsylvania, basketball is as good as sporting gets. And for the time, Rabbit is the best they have ever seen. Young boys in town want to be him, and all of the girls want a piece of him. He swaggers and struts around the town because life is easy for him. He has no further responsibility or care in the world than to put the orange ball in the hoop.

In this period, sports glory matters more to the fathers and sons because life was boring. In sports there are glimmers of action and adrenaline. Hitting a line drive, or having one hit to you, is for a few seconds, almost as intense as the combat these men saw abroad. Pride was gained and lost based on the Friday night score and how the hometown team did. And for the few years that Rabbit Angstrom rained buckets for Mt. Judge, life was not bad.