Ball is life: On becoming a middle-aged basketball obsessive

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Anakana Schofield is the author of three novels.

Of all the places I imagined becoming passionate about a completely random sport, I did not conceive it could occur at the local kebab shop. Perhaps you might catch sight of women footballers drenched in the rain at the park or stumble across some late-night gathering at the ice rink or become briefly overexcited while tipsy and bowling and think: Hey, this should have been my life. Instead, on a sizable, soundless television above the counter, very tall men – surrounded by an octopus’s worth of long arms – were propelling a ball into a hoop.

Over and over – between bits of running, pivoting on one foot, twisting, dodging, darting and managing to step backward, while sending it over multiple heads – that ball arced and sunk inside the net. Mesmerized and squinting, in the queue for shawarma, I could no longer contain myself: “Look at that. They never miss. It’s incredible.” Nobody elucidated me that the reason they never missed was because I was watching something called “highlights.”

During the walk home, I mused again to myself on human progress and that it was astonishing how no one ever missed the basket. It was a miracle sport. I likely climbed the stairs and told my son this, but he was just as likely plugged in, to tune out my ramblings. Given that, in my work as a novelist, I am prone to deeming much deserving of wild excitement based on very little, I should have known I’d just had a dangerous encounter that was likely to result in a future of hours lost to mental feuding on the unfairness of sporting outcomes, contemplating injuries to men I’d never met, and even higher cholesterol from ingesting copious amounts of chips.

My only recollection of playing basketball was two classes where we learned how to dribble a ball so that it grazed the palm of your hand (note: This does not feature in the Steph Curry Masterclass, so perhaps I made it up) and one step, two step, up for a layup, which in my case, even to this day, never goes anywhere near the hoop. British girls at that time played netball, an outdoor sport where you aren’t permitted to bounce the ball (only pass it), there are designated shooters, and the net is on a pole with no backboard. I played the position of Wing Attack, which didn’t require any shooting, just running about like a hyperglycemic whippet to deliver the ball down the court to Goal Attack and Goal Shooter.

In my physical-education classes, ridiculously, the girls chose the teams, and they only chose girls first who smoked and wore lots of hairspray or blue eyeliner. This was an early life lesson about the complete lack of meritocracy among teenage girls. I remember only ever being a reserve once for an away match, which, to this day, I am still seething about, since I believed I was an excellent Wing Attack. My middle-aged venture into the world of NBA basketball has been a form of revenge for that ungracious and deeply flawed act of netball team omission.

I visited the kebab shop many more times than is healthy for one’s lifespan. I don’t know why, but basketball was always on, and I appeared to be the only person ever watching it. I visited so frequently that one of the workers seemed to think I was crushing on him and would run back to the kitchen every time I showed up. He’s gotten over this misconception, since now I have my own TV and my kebab consumption has fallen 80 per cent.

Back then, though, I had no TV, and I didn’t know how to watch the sport other than at the kebab shop. It never occurred to me to go to a sports bar. But it did dawn on me that I needed to find a team. I didn’t know any teams except the Lakers, and since I don’t like their violent purple outfit and they already had too many supporters, that was out. On Twitter, I surveyed who was the worst team in the league at that time and was informed it was the Cleveland Cavaliers, who had recently lost their star player to those same Lakers.

I now had a team, but I still didn’t have a TV, meaning I could only watch games that had already been played afterward, on YouTube. I also didn’t understand the scoring: If the score said 117, I thought it meant a ball had to be put in the hoop 117 times over. I had no one to explain the sport, but I was happy watching and misunderstanding. A rational person would simply research what they found interesting, but this is rarely how I gather my information. Information gathers me rather like a leak going backward.

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In Halifax for a week as writer-in-residence at Saint Mary’s University, I confessed to my host and fellow scribe Alexander MacLeod that I had recently discovered basketball. Together we watched a Raptors game – I hadn’t known there was an NBA team in Canada – and I would shout out what was happening from the living room to his kitchen, where he was cooking dinner for his family, and he would translate what it meant. A man wearing red is running up and now he’s running back and now he has his hands in the air became “defence.” He narrated me through who was who, but most significantly, he told me the life stories behind the players that season. Since all these stories were from the Raptors and I didn’t know anyone in Cleveland, I switched my allegiance to Toronto.

Word travels among writers when you become a fan of a sport. Basketball is a favourable sport for writers, maybe because the agony can mirror our own process, and writers were very encouraging about my new interest. Soon I had a cohort of mainly hoops bros and one gal with whom I could discuss the games (or matches, as I call them). I invented nicknames for the players. Norm Powell was “Pits” because his shirt always covered his armpits. Marc Gasol was “Ham” because he was giant and made me think of those big ham hocks in the windows of Spain’s butchers. Fred VanVleet was “the Imam” because he had a good beard and always played well on Sundays, which I associate with faith. Kawhi Leonard was simply “Lady Macbeth,” because he was very composed and out for a silent, unstated revenge at the rim.

I would text back and forth with Alex and my other hoops friends during games. Someone might let you know what the score was or what was happening if you were indisposed and couldn’t catch the game, and you would do likewise for them. It was important to text each other “TURN IT ON” if the game was going well. If we were losing very badly, someone would text “I’m out.” This was important: being able to assert your emotions as a statement or an assessment in the form of an entrance or an exit. I rarely exited because it felt disloyal. If the players couldn’t exit, why should I? Occasionally, someone might text to say they were on their holidays in Japan, and one would be reminded that sensible people do have a life outside of following a sports team.

I was no longer a sensible person, but I was enjoying being worked up about something, other than not having written enough of the novel I was usually struggling with or the weather, which was previously my closely studied concern. (I was no longer texting people weather warnings in their region as frequently.) It was like religion. I grew up in the Catholic Church, so I was adaptable to this structure. It shaped the week. I didn’t care about winning. I was blissfully free and unencumbered by outcome. Instead, I was fixated on the formation of lines in the sport: the way a ball could be passed up the court and then suddenly be stolen and stampeded away down the other end. Somehow it began to remind me of prose and specifically the iambic pentameter. I would even try to calculate the rhythm of the ball movement in this vein, which, in hindsight, was unhinged. The dribbling and passing reflected the composition and beat of sentences. I began to think more and more about narrative as I watched. This might explain why I had very little concern over what happened on the scoreboard.

I appreciated that the players weren’t slobbering over each other if they scored a bucket. In hockey after one goal the team would pile on top of each other like plates cascading off the draining board into a sink to celebrate. In soccer, players ran out toward the crowd with their arms aloft like they’d just saved Pompeii, before, again, the pile-on occurred. Basketball had no time for such self-aggrandizing and congratulating because the other team would have already scored down on the other end. You could learn how to move on in life watching the moment when a player realizes that ball is going in and that acceptance shocks the body onto the next.

A magnificent aspect of the sport is how in a matter of seconds the outcome can be reversed. Ecstasy can nest in such proximity to agony. A minute in basketball feels like six months if it ends up going against your team, or a blessed holy relief if your team is plucked out of the chilly sea by a buzzer-beater.

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This was a very good year for our team. The Raptors made the playoffs with the second-best record in the league. I didn’t know what a playoff was.

My novel Bina had just been released, and my book tour took me to Toronto for Game 2 of the NBA finals against the Golden State Warriors. I had arranged to meet some basketball friends in a bar to watch the game. I hadn’t seen anything quite like this madness. My ears hurt and my feet hurt, so I took off my shoes and then worried about all these drunk basketball fans accidentally stamping on my feet.

I don’t think winning the chip made nearly as much impression on me as it should have until I saw how many people lined the Toronto streets. I hadn’t seen anything like this since the Pope’s visit to Ireland in 1979. I had no context for how unlikely it was for any team to win.

Related: The grandson of James Naismith on the Raptors championship and basketball coming home to Canada

I attended my first basketball game that October, when I was back in Toronto for a literary festival. I scored a great seat for the Raptors versus the Pistons sitting near Detroit’s bench. Beyond the obvious joy of seeing giraffe-sized players up close, I liked how carefully I could concentrate on the patterns and lines. I didn’t like the shouting and hip-wiggling and T-shirt throwing by the team dancers, who were relentless and blocked my view. I also didn’t like the man behind me chirping out his redundant coaching advice to Kyle Lowry because Kyle Lowry couldn’t hear it, only I could – and even this neophyte knew it was rubbish.

It was an enthralling experience, except it was all terribly fast and sometimes I couldn’t really tell what had happened. I couldn’t even text my gang of hoops bandits for explanation. It felt debauched. I left with, and still have, a lot of unanswered questions.

My questions aren’t the typical ones. I want to know about the injuries, and the person who must do all the team’s laundry. How are those arm and leg bandages supplied? Do they arrive on a long roll or individually wrapped? How much does it hurt when you go flying onto that hardwood? How do you summon the strength to play when you do not feel like playing or you have a sore tummy or you eat something that doesn’t agree with you and what if you need the toilet while you are playing? And what about the balls? Are they brand new out of the box for each game, or are they used again and again?

Since then, I’ve been to a half-dozen more games. One time I flew from Vancouver to watch the Indiana Pacers and a fire broke out and we all had to evacuate and we only saw 1½ quarters and had to watch the rest in the pub down the road and I caught COVID despite being mostly masked. Also, somehow, I’ve never been to a game where they lost, which is nothing short of a miracle given how many games we have lost in recent seasons. Mostly I go alone because I need to concentrate. I don’t agree with the terrible food and lack of a drinking fountain in the stadium and the level of waste, and the salivating capitalism, but that’s probably the remit of billionaire owners. Our ticket prices seem so high compared with the United States, likely because we have high demand and only one team. Soon though, Toronto will have a WNBA team, and, considering how good that league’s final games were last week, I will have to switch or share my allegiance.

During the first summer of the pandemic, I went to the local park twice a day to shoot hoops on the rather dodgy-looking net there. I often saw youngsters or teenagers, sometimes a dad and a child, but I never saw another solo middle-aged woman.

I was very terrible because I only knew netball, but it didn’t matter. I developed a lovely rhythm firing the ball and scampering to nab it once it bounced wildly off the rim or abseiled about two miles wide of the intended target. I tried to get dates on Tinder who would come and shoot hoops with me at the park, but the only time I succeeded, the fella was even worse than me. Another such attempt led to an unfortunate misunderstanding, where the man in question didn’t realize I was quite serious and thought shooting hoops was a euphemism for I’m still not sure what.

If you embrace a sport, there’s a language that comes with it. It’s been years trying to understand exactly what a “pick and roll” means, but many of the other terms have been wholly absorbed. I enjoy that the language is rooted in movement and can be percussive and even funny, with double entendre such as penetration in the paint.

One of the things about engaging in any sport is that it provides an instant shared community (perhaps like being a dog owner). For the past five years, basketball to me has become a parable of possibility: where elation and disappointment combine to create a quagmire of moments, misery and marvels. It is immersion. It is terrible, delightful and surprising all in the same minute. For me, it’s a unique form of gathering. It’s also very satisfying because it’s far from something I imagined I’d ever be this captivated by. In daily life, I need narratives with unexpected outcomes, where predications are upset, and someone or something surprises me. Basketball satisfies this. Mostly in life, we experience our disappointments privately, so it’s liberating to collectively invest or outsource emotion to activities or spectacles beyond our individual selves, whatever the result. The sight of a player, battered and limping with nothing in the tank, somehow finding a drop of something – this is why it’s worth it. And in my own way, in my own little life, for the people I care about, maybe I can sometimes be this person, too.

My concerns also include the players who have brought me such joy. I don’t like to imagine them sad or upset. Last month a thunderstorm broke out briefly on X when Karl-Anthony Towns was traded from the Minnesota Timberwolves to the New York Knicks. For my part, I kept remembering that Karl-Anthony Towns’s mother died during the pandemic, and so I worried about how he’d take being uprooted from the only team he’d ever known. I always relate to the sport as a mother because most of the players were old enough to be my sons.

My actual son, now 24, has no interest in the sport. He’s an NFL fan. A battle is brewing for the TV on the Sundays when the Raptors have a game.

“Was it embarrassing to see your middle-aged mother become a basketball obsessive?” I asked him recently. “No,” he said, “it wasn’t embarrassing, but I would have appreciated a bit more support when I got into football.” And when pressed on exactly the type of support he felt was lacking, he told me: “Maybe support isn’t the right word – I was just looking for less abject hostility.”

I am trying to be more supportive of his newfound passion, but I find myself yelling at the TV whenever he’s watching a game. In any case, this week the new basketball season began, and along with how the Raptors will fare, the battle of who gets the couch for their sport on Sundays remains unknown. There will be chips.