Tipoff
Basketball | Opus 4.8
The Spur arrives first, as the diligent always do, jingling and jangling onto the half-court with the brisk self-importance of a thing that has spent its whole existence affixed to the heel of someone more famous than itself. It is a small object. It knows it is a small object. It has made peace with being a small object the way a French philosopher makes peace with mortality, which is to say loudly, at length, and with footnotes.
Across the painted circle, the Knicks lounges. The Knicks is a pair of trousers, generously cut, pressed to a crease sharp enough to file a tax appeal, and it regards the Spur the way Madison Square Garden regards everything: as a thing it could buy if it felt like it, but probably won’t, because it already owns three.
“You,” says the Knicks, and the single syllable carries the borough of Manhattan inside it, “are a decoration. You are a tassel with delusions. People wear me to weddings. People wear you to lose at a rodeo.”
The Spur tightens its little rowel. The rowel spins. It makes a sound like a tiny man being told his life’s work was unnecessary.
“At least,” the Spur replies, in an accent that has wandered somewhere south of Texas and east of France and gotten gloriously lost in between, “I am a real word. Spur. It means to drive forward. To incite. To provoke greatness from a reluctant beast. You? You are called a Knick. What is a Knick? A Knick is the sound a man makes when he sits on his own keys.”
In the stands, the Raptor laughs so hard it inhales a foam finger.
The ball is checked. The ball, it should be noted, is enormous relative to both contestants, the way the moon would be enormous if you tried to dribble it, and the physics of the entire enterprise should not work, and yet it does, the way a cathedral should not stand on flying buttresses and yet has loomed over Reims for eight hundred years doing exactly that, indifferent to your incredulity.
The Knicks goes to work immediately, methodical, patient, a pair of pants that has waited twenty-seven years for this chance and intends to spend every dollar of the waiting. It backs the Spur down. It is heavier. It is, frankly, better funded. It rises, releases, and the ball drops through the net with the satisfied finality of a luxury condo closing.
“Twenty-six years,” the Knicks announces to no one and to everyone, “I have been folded in a drawer. Tonight I unfold.”
“You unfold,” says the Spur, darting between the wide legs of the trousers like a swift through a triumphal arch, scooping the ball, laying it gently against the backboard so it kisses the rim and falls, “like a man checking whether he left the stove on. Anxiously. And too often.”
The game tightens. The Spur is everywhere, indefatigable, a thing built for one purpose and devoted to it with the monomania of the young, leaping to swat the Knicks’ shot into the third row, where the Coyote catches it and eats it, because the Coyote eats everything, this is established lore.
“He blocks like the tall French one,” murmurs the Gorilla courtside, who follows the league closely and grieves quietly that no one asks his opinion.
It comes down, as these things do, to a final possession. Knicks up by one. The Spur has the ball. The Spur has worked the whole game for this, has run the Knicks ragged through a labyrinth of cuts and feints, and now it stands alone at the elbow with a clean look, the rowel still, the moment open before it like the mouth of a tunnel.
The Knicks, beaten, out of position, lunges with the last desperate stratagem available to a pair of pants who has tried everything legal.
“Before you shoot,” it says, “let me tell you one thing. You mock my name all night. You ask what a Knick is. But I am not a Knick.”
The Spur pauses. It should not pause. Every fiber of its leather, every tooth of its little spinning star, screams shoot. But it pauses.
“I am a Knickerbocker,” the Knicks says, swelling, unfurling, the full Dutch breadth of it cascading out across the hardwood. “I am the rolled-up breeches of the seventeenth-century settler. I am Diedrich. I am Washington Irving’s joke that outlived the man. I contain centuries.“
The Spur’s tiny mind, which had room for exactly one idea at a time, fills entirely with the ridiculousness of the word Knickerbocker, and there is no room left for the shot, and the shot leaves its grasp wobbling, apologetic, French.
It clangs off the iron.