Made baskets
A Few Words
Renae Bottom
It was a wooden backboard with an orange hoop bolted on. We attached it to a salvaged telephone pole, tamped deep in the ground. I’m sure the rim was measured to correct height. My older brother, who grew up to be an engineer, would have seen to that, by which I assure you—engineers are born, not made.
We strung a net and spent hundreds of hours shooting hoops. We played PIG and HORSE and every other word we could spell from made baskets. I got pretty good at sinking underhanded no-look shots while facing away from the goal.
Sometimes we talked or argued about the typical things: Would Husker football be good that year? Did you really bank that last two-pointer for G in a close game of PIG? Mostly we shot and rebounded, then shot again, taking turns without speaking at all.
After my brother left home, I shot hoops alone. Sometimes, if the moon was bright enough, I’d grab the basketball, so worn the black lines were faded to pebbled orange, and shoot baskets under the stars. I wasn’t all that good at it, but it felt good. The repetitive motions, the sound of the ball hitting the backboard, the whoosh of the net, the ball bouncing off the ground where we’d worn the native grass to hard-pack. It was soothing, a time-out-of-mind way to kill half an hour, with no static from the rest of the world.
Shot, rebound, dribble, shot. Somewhere in the 1980s, I discovered that repeated string of words in a book of poems: Shot, rebound, dribble, shot.
The poem is called “Shooting Baskets at Dusk.” It was written by Michael McFee. He grew up in North Carolina. Probably doesn’t care a thing about the Huskers. And I was 15 years removed from that hoop at the farm by the time I encountered his poem. Nevertheless, his words found my memory.
Shooting baskets is “perfectly thoughtless motion,” he says, exactly the time-out-of-mind experience I recall. The boy in the poem is “absorbed in the rhythm that seems to flow from his fingertips to the winded sky … until he is just a shadow and a sound.” Exactly. How did McFee know about me shooting baskets? Was he there?
No, he wasn’t. But somehow, all the way from North Carolina, he was. And that’s part of the magic.
It happened again, years later. I was at a summer workshop for nerds, otherwise known as English teachers. The poet on hand was Roy Scheele, an accomplished professor from Doane College. He was a remarkably kind and generous guy, just as you’d imagine a mostly-from-Nebraska poet would be.
In “Nothing but Net,” he describes the general principles of the jump shot, then says: “What I like best is shooting baskets by myself.” He speaks about warming up gradually, then closes with this description of a made basket: “I can tell that it’s going in as the ball leaves my fingertips, arcing to intercept the air at the dead center of the goal—that one split second of eclipse.”
And there I am, back at the farm, shooting baskets by moonlight. How did he know? Was he there? No, but yes. And that’s why the words feel like magic.
Roy Scheele signed my copy of his chapbook containing that poem. It’s a classic, titled “Pointing Out the Sky.” I take it off the shelf and re-read selections from it now and then, and remember how lucky we are to have good poets among us, and how lucky I was to hear him speak about that, more than 20 years ago.
Engineers and poets are born, not made, I think. As poets, Michael McFee and Roy Scheele did what good poets do. They took an ordinary experience, felt the way people feel about it, then captured the essence of why, using ordinary words. That’s art. And that, I believe, is the magic.