The only thing that stays constant on my weekly calendar is the Sunday night basketball game. We play in rented gyms in Washington, DC, usually at high schools, because we’re all saving our cartilage and the local middle schools don’t have much cushioning under the hardwood. The game has been going for over 20 years, but it wasn’t always on Sunday nights, and none of the original players are around anymore. As players get injured or move away, they’re replaced like planks on Theseus’ ship. The continuity of the game is important. The game must continue, but not because someone is trying to get somewhere. None of our regulars have ambitions of climbing into the higher echelons of organized basketball. At least I hope so. That’s part of the magic of the game. The spirited competitive energy that the game evokes has no higher purpose. It’s entirely internal to the game. There’s this quality to childhood play.
In 2015, Nick Rogers, now a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh, conducted an ethnography of pickup basketball games. Like an anthropologist heading into the bush to live with tribe members, Rogers became one of the game’s regulars. During breaks, he took hastily written notes on his iPhone. (If you can do that, great work.) Rogers wanted to understand the contradictions of pickup basketball. Its culture is aggressively masculine. Its players tend to be diverse in age, race, and class. They push each other elbow-to-elbow, clashing with full force. They’re loud. And yet fights are relatively rare. Rogers thinks this carefully calibrated intensity is made possible by a special set of norms. These aren’t carved in stone like the Ten Commandments, but the players he interviewed on the sidelines all used them fluently, even revered them, Rogers told me. These unspoken rules keep the game from devolving into violence. A small group of complete strangers who have little in common other than basketball can experience a flow state, a brief but intense moment of collective transcendence.
Ethnographers like him have infiltrated almost every corner of the sports world: locker rooms, team buses, even vendor booths at baseball card shows. One spent months diving into the cold Pacific Ocean off the coast of California in the early morning to study how surfers take turns playing. Pickup basketball has drawn particular attention from sociologists because it is a highly social game. To play it well, five people (a group the size of a rock band, a hunting party, or a nuclear family) must move together in a way that allows them to improvise in real time. Though everyone is a stranger, the ball passes between them as if controlled by a single mind. I’ve played these games on and off for most of my adult life, but I never really thought much about what they represent or how we play together. One aspect of the paradox of pickup basketball is that it is invisible to the players.
Sociologist Jason Jimerson first conducted participant observation studies of pickup basketball in the 1990s. He was inspired by two writers who traveled across the United States in search of the country’s best games. As a master’s student at the University of Virginia, Jimerson played weekly at a gym near the campus. He later published a paper on how players can maximize their time on the court and the quality of their play. As a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, he returned to the subject for his doctoral dissertation. He began attending lunchtime games at the YMCA in Waukegan, just outside the city.
“Basketball started at the Y,” Jimerson told me. The Y was right next to the courthouse. Judges and probation officers would sometimes play with people fresh out of prison. Between games, Jimerson dictated notes into a tape recorder. He even filmed some of the play. He wanted to compare different basketball cultures. He started playing in Cabrini Green, a Chicago housing project that has since been demolished. He felt a little racist when Jimerson’s coworkers told him they were worried about his safety, but he was still cautious. To ingratiate himself with his fellow players, he bought two expensive leather basketballs and brought them to games. “I knew there was a reason you were letting us study,” one of them told him.
Jimerson defines sociology in poetic and straightforward terms. He calls it “the science of people doing things together.” He studied pickup basketball because it’s so hard for groups of people to do things together, even when they’re so different from each other. It helps if good feelings are communicated between them often. Rodgers was interested in how players create this atmosphere of camaraderie. He’d read Jimerson’s work and was a prepared observer. He noticed that teammates maintained a strong norm of mutual encouragement even when one wasn’t very good, or even particularly good. “When someone missed a shot, instead of saying, ‘Loser, don’t shoot anymore,’ they’d say, ‘Keep shooting, shooter,'” Rodgers told me. Even players who dribbled endlessly or attempted low-percentage fadeaway three-pointers were treated kindly. Some players casually rolled their eyes to other teammates or on the sidelines to convey their displeasure. But they wouldn’t confront those players directly.
To keep the game from falling apart, players also need to cooperate with their opponents, especially when there is no neutral referee. The difficulty of this task depends on the number of players waiting on the sidelines, Jimerson told me. If there are only a few, most players can play again immediately, win or lose. As a result, the competitive spirit is reduced. The quality of the game is lower, but there are not as many collisions. The more players waiting, the higher the stakes are, because a loss could mean sitting out two games. When the stakes are too high, “people start to really foul,” Jimerson said.
It is in competition that the larger social order is most at risk. Conflicts can start when players disagree about the score, or if someone has traveled or gone out of bounds, but most occur when they argue about fouls. In pickup basketball, each player must announce when they have been hit, shoved, or otherwise inappropriately contacted. Like any responsible sociologist, Jimerson hesitates to make universal statements, but he told me that nearly all pickup basketball players have a norm not to call “tick-tock” fouls that are too minor to actually affect the shot. The whole purpose of pickup basketball, he said, is to keep the game moving. (Group flow states are a central interest of Jimerson, and he has also conducted ethnographic studies of musicians who play in improvisational jam sessions.) This is why no one shoots free throws in pickup: it would interrupt the game. But then again, neither do protracted arguments. In the games I play on Sunday nights, there is a clear norm that if a player claims he has been fouled, players on the opposing team will respect that decision even if they don’t agree.
In pickup basketball, such norms are the norm, but any player will tell you they are sometimes violated. Gonzaga University sociologist Michael DeLand told me he observed protracted altercations while playing in a long-running pickup game in Santa Monica. He picked the game because it was more intimate than the world-famous games played on the coast at Venice Beach. He wanted to get to know the players. “Orthodox Jewish guys were playing with businessmen, bartenders, bouncers, rappers, actors,” DeLand told me. They arrived on foot, by bike, by bus, by car. Some became friends. DeLand noticed that when players got into protracted altercations on the court, a civil legal process was played out. People appealed to precedents and presented evidence. People who were watching the next game served as jurors, but their verdicts were not always conclusive. Sometimes, DeLand told me, players would say on the black asphalt, “Fuck you, you have no right to say that.”
Mr. Rogers also studied arguments in gyms at the public schools where he played, and he found that there was a ceiling on the intensity of verbal disagreements: Players were hesitant to use the homophobic and misogynistic slang common in online soccer games, for example. call of dutyBecause arguments drag on and violence is more likely to occur. Even at their angriest, players Several According to Rodgers, the players signaled that they didn’t take the arguments too seriously. They were nose-to-nose, yelling at each other, but they would smile faintly or show in other ways that they didn’t want the altercation to escalate. Often, when the players reached an impasse, someone would take a shot to settle it. Rodgers stressed that this was “more than just a semi-random way of settling an argument.” The players seemed to have a mystical belief that the basketball gods controlled the outcome of the shots, expressed in a saying familiar to nearly every pickup basketball player: “The ball doesn’t lie.”
Jimerson told me that he thinks of basketball as a “third place” outside of home and work. In the third place, the usual social hierarchy is suppressed. People feel comfortable being themselves in front of strangers and interacting with others. That’s why playing a good game regularly is beautiful and fleeting. I’ve been fortunate to have played one (or more) basketball games almost my entire adult life, and I intend to keep it that way for as long as I can. I know a few guys who play into their 60s. I wasn’t surprised to learn that Jimerson was one of them. His later years on the court were his best years, he said. “Older players understand the game differently,” he told me. They know how to use backcuts and pass. They’re less likely to get into fights. They keep the game moving. The luckiest ones will stay healthy enough to play pickup games with their adult children.
Injuries give players a taste of the dreaded but inevitable retirement. For the past few months, a friend I play with in another sport has been recovering from a torn calf muscle. Doctors have kept him off the court. He described the experience to me as a disturbance to his soul. Basketball is not only exercise for him, it’s a place of human connection. He gives his all to the game and knows others will too. “I love watching grown men limp and give their all to win,” he told me. On his days off, he sends numerous thank you messages to our WhatsApp group. He’s grateful for the many blessings basketball has given him and the micro-communities it has created. He talks about how much he cares about basketball. Last week, he sent me another message, an announcement. He described it as something he had to do a long time ago. He’s been cleared to start stretching. He said he’ll be back on the court by early July. It’ll be nice to see him.
