"I'd rather go 0 for 30 than 0 for 9. Because you go 0 for 9 that means you stopped shooting. That means you lost confidence." - Dion Waiters
“My advice to you is this. Do not attempt to stand alone. The most fatal thing a man can do is try to stand alone.” - Doc Copeland, The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
It’s been a tough month for the Alberta Park Rim Riot.1 There’s really no way to cut it, losing by 40 in any sport gets to me. It cut deeper when the 5’6” guy with a George Constanza bald spot stole the ball right as I passed halfcourt and took it in for a layup. Then, nobody came back to catch the inbounds pass so I shouted for someone to turn around, only for it to get immediately stolen for another layup. Deep breath.
“It’s good exercise still”
I remembered the first time Mikal, the league commissioner, texted me this mantra after our first season when we finished 2-6. A year passed since then, and I had gotten used to winning most games. Yes, we lost sometimes but never by 20, 30, or 40! Now things aren’t seeming right. Half the time the ball bounces around the rim and out, the other half I’m hitting the side of the backboard. The clock hit zero on the game and the team sat in far too serious silence, taking off our shoes. Time to take it all in. Being 28 and playing basketball at the Beaverton Hoop, probably most known in the Portland area for being a Middle School night-club on Friday nights for local tweens. My friend Ben asked where we're going for a drink after the game, but I was in the midst of a melodramatic thought spiral; it feels like we play together every week but we somehow are getting worse. But someone answered him on behalf of the rest of the team, “We’ll see you next week.”
Last year I got stung by a wasp putting on my shirt and I was immediately transported back to sitting on the little league bench when I had last gotten stung. Now some might say, it’s Adults-Playing-Sports,2 the stakes couldn’t be lower. And this is simply untrue. I could not compete at all. And while I’m old enough to not let a loss linger and make me cry a day later like when I was a kid, for a moment it still stings the same.
After one of our recent losses my friend Corbin asked everyone what their favorite novels were.3 I just finished re-reading Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (1940), and while it is a masterpiece of American literature, I also definitely picked the thing I read most recently.
The crux of it follows the lives of four people in a medium sized industrial town in the American South: a conservative widower and owner of the local café, a young girl starting high school with a love of music, an alcoholic communist carnie, a Black doctor. These four characters are connected by their alienation from the town around them, and the relationships they independently form with the deaf-mute Singer. For all of these oft-misunderstood characters Singer is the only one that truly knows them, as they mostly project their opinions and biases onto a man that rarely answers back.
Simply put, the book has everything. A coming of age story, queer romance, intergenerational family dynamics, boredom of a job, documenting the rise of fascism in Europe and comparing it to the White Supremacy in the United States, disability justice, prisoners struggles, class struggle, segregation in movement organizing, I could go on. Amidst it all is the debilitating loneliness of pushing for social upheaval. There’s no revolution, no mass strike,4 really just talk of doing something—if only things were different. McCullers sits with moments of inaction—righteous failures or never starts because witnessing the grandeur of an opponent as powerful and pervasive as White Supremacy and Capitalism is too scary.
This is seen through Doc Copeland and Jake. Both are Marxist revolutionaries, both read the books, both have a burning need to be abstractly “correct” over agreeable, both have a short temper and limited patience with people who don’t understand their ideology, and both are sort of condescending blowhards.5 Copeland has spent years struggling to organize the Black community in town and grown pessimistic. Instead of trying to talk in the language of the people he sees as revolutionary subjects he shows some contempt for both, White workers, who hold most of the factory jobs taking short sighted material benefits that White Supremacy offers in lieu of true liberation,6 and Black workers, particularly his children, who he sees in a survival mindset that is fearful and unwilling to champion a fight that might put them at more risk.
Jake is an alcoholic former evangelical who “saw the light” of a materialist analyst and is frustrated by his deeply held belief that if only the workers saw the truth, the ugly truth of capitalist exploitation they would understand and rise up to overthrow the oppressors. A vulgar, reductive way to put it is he is a class reductionist, Jake and Copeland don’t interact much but when they do, they talk past each other. When Copeland pushes Jake on the particularities of Black exploitation, he opts to give a SparkNotes version of How Much a Coat Costs by Karl Marx.
Jake and Doc Copeland’s meeting comes after Jake hears the horror story of Copeland’s son Willy who was tortured by prison guards resulting in both of Willy’s feet being amputated. Copeland had gone down to the courthouse to try and file a complaint, but was instead beaten by a cop. Copeland’s family quickly concluded he’d gone crazy, asking him why he’d try going to the White man's court instead of waiting and praying? Jake, however, marches in with a plan. Parade Willy around town in a wheelchair to visually demonstrate the violence of capitalism. The townspeople, now armed with knowledge, will have no option but to stand up and fight back. Copeland thinks this idea is stupid. The town is too backwards to care and too small a scale to matter. They need to march a thousand Black people to Washington, DC demanding justice. Jake thinks this idea is more crazy. The police in the south won’t allow such a march and once you get to DC what happens next when the politicians don’t care? They argue into the morning until they are hurling racialized insults at each other. But through it Copeland offers a bridge for them.
‘You will recall that my only advice to you was: Do not attempt to stand alone.’
‘I get it,’ Jake said.
‘But once you enter this it must be all. First and foremost. You must give of your whole self without stint, without hope of personal return, without rest or hope of rest.’
‘For the rights of the Negro in the south.’
‘In the South and here in this very county. And it must be either all or nothing. Either yes or no.’ (260)
In the moment, Jake declines out of principle. That is, needing to be “right” and “win” the argument. But shortly after Jake is alone again and getting depressed at the state of things, seeing more and more violence beating down working people. Before deciding to leave town he seeks Copeland out again. Only Copeland, enfeebled from the beating, sickness, depression, and being failed by White potential comrades again, is sent to live his final years in a family farmhouse upstate. Both are left with a painful loss, and the spiritual paralysis of resounding to not do anything. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, or whatever. But there is a slight consolation,7 Jake was moved by Copeland, and even leaving town, he hasn't given up.
He remembered what the Negro, Copeland, had said to him, ‘Do not attempt to stand alone.’ There were times when that was the best. Copeland was crazy. He was a fanatic, so that it was maddening to try to reason with him. Still the terrible anger that they had felt that night had been hard to understand. Copeland knew. And those who knew were like a handful of naked soldiers before an armed battalion. And what had they done? They had turned to quarrel with each other. Copeland was crazy—yes—he was crazy. But on some points they might be able to work together after all. If they didn’t talk too much. (292)
When trying to change the world, you’re going to lose more often than win. In this struggle we face, does that mean we resign ourselves to inaction—a world of our control, where we can endlessly argue or vent or interpret the world around us—or is the point really to change it? Taking a first step towards a new world requires action. It involves trusting that there are people around you who know. And those people who know, you’re going to need them, and you’re going to need to keep picking something to do and continuing to do it.
Obviously adult rec league basketball is not Organizing. It’s not revolutionary. It doesn’t have the stakes of fighting for racial solidarity in the Deep South. It really doesn’t have any meaning after the game ends, aside from the chance to be on the portlandbasketball.com power rankings, and to get a pixelated photo in the league newsletter and Instagram.8 But I find ways to assign meaning in what I do. When playing sports part of the fun is in making up some backstory. One of Michael Jordan famous lies was telling reporters lifelong role player LaBradford Smith9 sarcastically told him “Nice game Mike” after Smith dropped a career high 37 on him. Years later Jordan admitted it was simply motivation for himself to come back and score 47 on Smith.
Even the greatest ever to play the game found ways to make himself an underdog trying to come back from certain defeat. For me it’s far easier indulging such fantasies. I remember when the 6’10'' guy slammed his tenth dunk of the game in my face a few weeks ago. There was a rumor floating around about him too. The ref told us this guy once had a 10-day contract with the San Antonio Spurs.
On Monday the Rim Riot were back at Columbia Christian School vs. the Russian team Cincinnati Zoo. They're tough and have beaten us in five or six close fights, but we managed to win one recently. This time we were making a late game comeback. I caught an outlet pass from Stefan in transition and stood wide open on the perimeter. I had missed two threes and a layup already, but there would be no hesitation. I put it up. It felt true. No need to bother looking. But I looked anyway. A silent swish, barely even touched the net. Then a minute later I glanced at the scoreboard and we’re down 10 again.
Those melodramatic thoughts could sneak back in. I wondered if this hurt more than when I lost my union election, got divorced, found out my friend had passed suddenly without warning, and so on. But then I saw my friend Ben pack a Zyn, mention how last night he re-watched Killa Season by Cam’ron and “pounded some Coors Banquets.” And I knew this was obviously not true. Everything was pretty alright, could be much worse. We sat on the bench of the Christian School gym. Kyler, the best player on our team and the most dogged competitor spoke up, “Hey, this was an improvement. We missed some we usually make, and I thought our defense looked better even when we’re missing a big guy this week.”
This time we went out for drinks after. There was some talk of strategy. Do we switch to man defense sooner? Overload the opponents 2-3 zone? Try out Stefan’s favorite 1-3-1 zone defense? My friends knew.
Even in those moments when I was feeling much lower, where the stakes weren’t on the level of a manufactured argument to simulate real conflict and turmoil, I couldn’t say I was truly going at it alone. I knew at least somebody else who knew, who stood naked with me, but we didn’t quarrel. Instead, we’re ready to stand there again. It’s good exercise still, and, hey, maybe I’ll remember to go to my next union meeting too.
My adult Rec League team through PortlandBasketball.com
Follow Corbin A Smith on Instagram for his wonderful photos and coinage of this title.
Corbin’s was Anna Karenina (1878), which he corrected and said, The Iliad (IDK BC). But I don’t think that counts as a novel and also it’s annoying.
Jake arrives in town and asks about the last strike at the mill to some mill workers, only to realize he’s talking to someone that moved to the town to scab on that strike.
We all have met (and most likely been at one point) this kind of socialist.
Stop reading this and go read the essay “Black Worker / White Worker” (1972) which I feel ultimately voices the perspective Copeland comes from only in a different time, place, and context of the 1970s steel industry in Indiana.
Certainly played for dark comedy.
If Mike remembers to post it and update it.
A great Hoop Grids player for all the sickos out there.