Hoosiers

Here's an interesting bit of unconscious racism: I much prefer the whiter, more organized, substantially less athletic and entirely unolympian version of basketball that people played before taller, musclier men with afros started dunking instead of passing the ball four times before attempting a chaste lay-up. Back when teams played as teams--and this is the only reason I liked the Utah Jazz for so many years--or is it? They did have three prominent white starters--and not as bric-a-brac groups of illiterate adventurers, basketball embodied an elusive and very Platonic, and very satisfying, aesthetic of movements. Not motion, which individuals can accomplish, but movements--those gorgeous, rarefied patterns that stun the audience with their simplicity and dizzy the ages with their inevitability. The intricate plays forced a higher level of cooperation, and that standard of interacting, and not merely coexisting, elements kept the game both in danger of imminent confusion and in promise of eternal transcendence. Until 1970, basketball was a supremely lucid game. Look at Gene Hackman's face: it does not tolerate messiness.

Now basketball is full of vanity and disorder, and I don't like it as much. And never forget that the superior athleticism of black players has raised the game's standard so much higher than Indiana farmboys can reach that we must celebrate, even as I lament, competition's fall into ugly perfectibility, one that is, rather anti-Platonically, entirely of the earth, the body, and the individual's triumph over gravity.

As for the movie, I liked it, probably because of all the white guys, unfortunately.