In the last town in which I lived, I stumbled into a thrice-weekly game of noon basketball, populated by a hodgepodge of college students, faculty members, and townies who would descend on the college gym during their lunch breaks. Such a mixture meant that players’ ages ranged from eighteen to sixty. Rather than adopt the usual pickup method and try to blend ages, though, our game instead opted for a strict young versus old divide.
You might think that such a division would lead to lopsided results, with the younger players running the old folks out of the gym. But seasoned players of pickup basketball will know better: there’s a curious magic, even a Bismarckian special providence, in the “old man” method. As much as basketball rewards feats of stunning physical prowess, it also makes space for delay, trickery, and a working of the angles, features readily exploited by the wily senex on the court.
The current consensus best basketball player in the world, Nikola Jokić, plays like a suburban dad from Davenport. Not that he’s not athletic—he’s nearly seven feet tall, and his doughy appearance, like a slightly underbaked gibanica, belies a surprising stamina and toughness—but his dominance relies not on soaring through the air, or on beating opponents to the basket with his quickness, but on his preternatural ability to process the game.
His touch allows him to hit “driveway” shots with frequency—those one-footed launched prayers that dads so often hit over the outstretched hands of their frustrated sons. But his primary weapon is his brain. Several times a game, he will find a teammate with a pass so ridiculous, so unexpected, that it takes your breath away, because he’s clearly thought five steps ahead of everyone else on the court. It’s not uncommon for him to catch the ball and pass it again all in one motion. This ability to read and react, to understand the geometry of the court at all times, is the apotheosis of dad ball.
Jokić has singular processing ability, of course; pickup dads like me can recognize and admire, but never achieve, his greatness. Other facets of old man basketball filter down pretty well from the professional level to the blacktop, however. Take Chris Paul, consummate old man baller, who played like a fifty-year-old even when he entered the league.
Like Jokić, Paul manipulates the game at a high level, but he also has a skill more easily imitated by casual players: he’s irritating as heck. He gets under other players’ skin, from his pesky, physical defense (there’s nothing young pickup players hate more than guys who actually play defense) to his constant chirping at opponents and referees. Plenty of players complain to referees, of course, but Paul actually gets results, thanks to his pedantry with regard to the N.B.A. rulebook: he once got an opposing player called for a technical foul for having his shirt untucked.
Though norms vary from court to court, most pickup games run on a laissez-faire foul philosophy: offensive players determine whether they’ve been fouled, but the code dictates that you refrain from calling out the defense unless you’re close to bleeding. Secondary concerns like traveling and double-dribbling fall by the wayside—except if you’re playing with a cranky older player, who’s liable to watch eagle-eyed for any slip-ups as you handle the ball. I once played with a fifty-year-old who delighted in watching young guys blow by him to the rim, only to waive the layup off, pointing fervently to the place where they had taken an extra step.
Conversely, the sly veteran won’t hesitate to push at the edges of legality when defending, pulling shirts and slapping backs to gain that smallest of edges against younger bodies who might otherwise leave him in the dust. No self-respecting young man will call such ticky-tacky fouls, so the old artificer remains free to press his advantage: rim protection by a thousand paper cuts.
I have yet to find a geriatric game in my new environs, so these days I play almost exclusively against college students. They treat me with unfailing kindness, calling me “sir” and complimenting my hustle and defense, even though I must seem as old to them as Tennyson’s Ulysses. Still I press on, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will: to school some whippersnappers in the labyrinthine arts of old man ball.
This essay appeared in the Assumption 2024 issue of The Lamp.
