Odom and Plato

“Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.”
- David Foster Wallace, “Federer as Religious Experience”

“Greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic – in a word, moral – undertaking. Sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things, such as beauty and courage. By witnessing physical grace, the soul comes to understand and love beauty. Seeing people compete courageously and fairly helps emancipate the individual by educating his passions.”
- George Will, “Men At Work”

The play is broken.

A referee has blown a whistle just before Derrick Fisher passes the passes the ball to Lamar Odom. Odom, who having anticipated the space and time to make his move unopposed, continues anyway, and with a single motion, palms the basketball.

Palming, or holding a basketball with a single hand, fingers stretched around the curves of the ball, requires large hands and finger dexterity. If you go to your local basketball court you should see someone working on palming the ball as though it’s a half conscious attempt to copy the move that Odom is about to make. A person with smaller hands must rely on having enough finger dexterity to palm the ball although it doesn’t take much to dislodge the ball: too much motion with the hand, a defending person tapping the ball while it’s in their fingers, or even simply time as the fingers lose their grip from sweat or fatigue.

When Odom catches the ball with his left hand, his body is facing the side of the court about 6 feet from the basket. A fraction of a second after the catch, making the motion seem simultaneous with the catching and palming of the basketball, he jumps toward the basket, turning his body the 90 degrees clockwise it needs to be facing the hoop directly. This is a natural turn for him since he’s left handed just as right handed players find it easier to rotate counter clockwise while jumping. Odom not only has great leaping ability, the quickness with which he can do it makes his play like that of a smaller player. This is remarkable and even in the NBA, a rarity for any player at 6’10”.

In college, we had a player for our team named “Big Mike.” Mike was 6’10”, like Odom, and since our school played in a lower level league than larger universities, it was rare that he played against players of equal size. It was not infrequent to see Big Mike play against players who only could stretch to 6’5” – a full 5 inches shorter. Although this paper advantage could have translated to his exploitation of opponents on the court, he had a cardinal weakness. He had a terrific problem with jumping. In layup drills, where a player dribbles the basketball, unopposed, towards the hoop and “lays it up” or makes an effort to put the ball in the hoop, he would often try to dunk (throw the ball downwards through the hoop by jumping high enough that his hands were over it), barely able to stretch his hands over the empty basket. Although it was comical at the time, it’s a truism that players of that size often have a hard time with the coordination it takes to plant their feet and jump.

Dale Brown, one time LSU coach, remembering his first meeting with Shaquille O’Neal, the self described “most dominant big man to play the game,” said that O’Neal showed up to a basketball camp when he was 13 years old, at 6’9” asking how he could improve his vertical jump. His problem at the time was similar to Big Mike. Even in his senior year of high school basketball, his vertical jump was a mere 16”. Unlike Big Mike, at whom we would find ourselves laughing in puzzlement as he tried to jump the few inches it would take to dunk, he was able to overcome this in college, improving it to 42”.

Odom’s jump now has him in mid-air, facing the basketball hoop. The basketball he has palmed is stretched up, at an angle as his back arches, a windup maneuver that belies his intent: it looks like he’s going to slam dunk the basketball with as much force as he can when his body snaps forward from its arched state into the angled form players usually assume for a slam dunk from that distance. This posture of the body was seen, in almost perfect form, in the 1988 dunk contest when Dominique Wilkins threw himself a lob to himself off the backboard – so perfect, in fact, that it contributed to his defeat of Michael Jordan and the title of the NBA dunk champion.

But Odom doesn’t dunk. His body snaps forward but he brings the ball, still palmed in his left hand, around in a wide arc, above the rim, almost dropping it to fall through the net from above except that he lets it roll off his fingers, a casual flip of the ball into the hoop.

It is Plato’s theory of ideals brought to life. In the way that Plato believed that our minds conceive a perfection that is only approximated in real life with varying shades of integrity, Odom is closer to the ideal that the observer can conceive, a form that defines the imperfection of what kids do on basketball courts everywhere: palming the ball, feigning dunks, practicing layups and the “finger roll.” It’s what makes us human: to share this ideal, a thing we can name and not define like love, justice, or beauty, and yet in common grasp for it in our lives even if the world can only offer us a tainted version.

The play is broken, so the casual observer and most players are not watching. After the ball goes through the hoop and the referee waves off the basket, Odom catches the ball and after he makes a quick bounce the referee, whistle in mouth, with his hands up and out making it seem like he is answering “ten” to some fictitious question, gestures that he needs the basketball to restart play with a pass from out of bounds. In the way that we walk by fall leaves, or that we look askance a perfect flower petal in landscaping, or ignore the night sky when it’s full of stars, the players forget and finding their positions for the next play, set up to continue.