Schrebnick would not renew when the Warriors moved to San Francisco. He had held two seats since the 1980s which were two rows (and an aisle) behind the team bench – and the recently added, even more prestige-conferring “Hollywood” seats beside the players – and one row (and the same aisle) behind the assistant coaches, trainers and press. When the Warriors were bad and his seats comparatively cheap, he’d comp friends, including Goshkin. But once the Warriors became good – no, great – the seats became so expensive, $750 each ($1500, by the way, for the “Hollywood”s) that Schrebnick sold half his games, as well as some seats for games he kept. For the play-offs, when the seats brought a premium, he sold almost all. But for this final season, he invited friends again, a generous – no two ways about it – act.
“They sent me a 30-page contract,” Schrebnick said, while maneuvering his Lexus through freeway traffic, “$75,000 down, refunded in 30 years – I’m 105, you’ll notice – no interest, no preferred parking.” He hit his horn for a lane-changing SUV. “And they guarantee only ‘comparable’ seats, which means they can give mine to their kiss-ass buddies.”
“Robbery,” Goshkin said, his mind elsewhere but wishing to be supportive.
“Plus, $1200 apiece. That’s promised for three years, okay – but not the playoffs. Them, they can charge an arm for, whatever, a leg. Where’s the loyalty?”
“Yeah.”
“The gratitude?”
“Fucking, yeah.”
“The building of community?”
“You want a dynasty, I guess it costs you.”
It was his first night away from Estelle since his M.I., but it had seemed a last-time-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
xxx
Goshkin and Schrebnick had met in the Oakland Bar Association basketball league in the late ‘70s. Schrebnick was transitioning from tenants’ rights law to flipping foreclosed houses. He had a rabbinical beard and a knitted rainbow skull cap which seemed just as permanently attached to his head. His 15-footer was deadly, and his cross-over ferocious. Basketball was his passion, his creed and -ism. He seemed as enveloped by it as a squid its ink. He played; he coached; he watched, college and pro, live and recorded; he read histories and bios; and he voiced opinions, rich in wit, intelligence and vitriol, then in letters-to-the-ed, now in chat rooms and on message boards, then in bars, now at memorial services. Goshkin had heard him, when challenged, rattle off the starting five for the Globetrotters in 1955.
“Tatum, Haynes, Robinson, Farquahr, and Lymon.”
“How’d you know that?” Goshkin said when they were alone.
“I made it up. Who’s going to doubt me?”
Goshkin’s Jones was more modest. He was from Philadelphia, where rabid fandom spiked the water like fluoride. He still had scars from wounds inflicted by the Boston Celtics and could name selected Big Five units from 1958 through ‘67. But once he split for the Bay Area, his attentiveness had frayed, his grasp had weakened, like the Achilles tendon whose disintegration eliminated his moves across hardwood and black top. He had litigated cases designed for a social impact that never arrived, before joining Hastings to teach torts. He had tenure, a regular salary, and health care, which proved invaluable when the near “widow maker” threw him into a two-day coma and early retirement and left him and Estelle still holding hands each time a character they cared about entered a hospital in a drama on PBS.
“They expected half the season ticket holders to cancel,” Schrebnick said. They had cleared two security checks to reach the Members Only bistro. His host’s pre-tip-off sandwich dripped pastrami. Goshkin had gone for a less artery-challenging chicken platter. “Not a third did.”
“You can’t afford them,” Goshkin needled, “maybe you shouldn’t have them.”
“Fuck you,” Schrebnick said.
He checked his watch. By halftime, he and Estelle would have been apart for a longer period than at any time since his coma. “Like, people can’t afford to live in Berkeley should move to St. Louis. Lots of nice neighborhoods in St. Louis. I’d like a beach house on Kaui, but here I am.”
“In your three-bedrooms in the hills.”
Goshkin shrugged.
“Good liberal like you wouldn’t deny people the right to clean water, health care…”
Goshkin looked for an out. “No.” He enjoyed the kidding. It beat the alternative.
“I feel the same about the Dubs. A basic of life.”[1]
Once seated, Goshkin was fascinated. The play-by-play announcer exchanged banter as he passed before them. The color man posed for selfies. Goshkin presumed all those in his vicinity was a celebrity or millionaire; and they, he assumed, presumed he was. Everyone exchanged open-to-networking smiles. The ushers were deferential – but firm. Rules governing who might walk where were politely but rigidly enforced. Restraining grips were applied to even the most expensively dressed.
“They’re coliseum employees,” Schrebnik said. “But the Warriors sent them to Disneyland for training. That’s the gold standard.”
“Ah,” Goshkin said, “Disneyland.”
In fact, the seats did not seem that good for actually watching a game. Or maybe, Goshkin thought, decades of basketball on television had defined for him of what this experience consisted. He lacked the elevation to properly see the action at the far end. And what happened in front of them was constantly interrupted by ushers, security personnel, food and drink vendors, and members of the media walking up and down the aisle. It was like watching a reel of cut-and-spliced-together moments.
“I know a guy sits with Peter Guber on the floor,” Schrebnick said. “There you got the referees standing in your line of sight. Even an owner can’t say, ‘’Scusie, pal, you mind moving.”
There were other distortions/annoyances/unfamiliarities. An arena-shaking public address system, whose command suggested Jahweh had taken the gig, announced/exhorted/emitted exercises in pure noise with no “Mute” button to defuse it. Kleig lights swept the darkness. Though concealed by television, the national anthem still played. No player, Goshkin noted, knelt – even leaned; no spectator remained seated as in Vietnam days. One fellow ignored instructions to remove his hat, but from his appearance, that of a commodities trader, this appeared less political statement than distraction by pork belly futures. When Tower of Power “entertained,” with no camera to reverse his angle, Goshkin saw only rears. The Warrior Girls – all false smiles and bouncy hair – seemed an assault by toothpaste and shampoo ads. The arena, for player comfort (and safety) was chilly; and when “flames” along the baseline shot ceilingward for celebration or arousal, the temperature jumped a dozen degrees.
And because Schrebnick’s seats were on the perimeter, Goshkin never felt part of the crowd. Their roars and groans seemed in no way his, and their jeering of referees an exercise in childish idiocy. What did they hope to achieve? And if achieved, what would it matter? He realized he was directly visible to the TV cameras, so if a stretcher was called for a spectator, Estelle could tell if it was him.
Goshkin and Schrebnick had often debated whether basketball players were artists. “Think of ballet dancers,”Schrebnick said. “Physicality developed to perfection.”
Goshkin believed that artists sought to fulfill a personal vision, often with no end in mind beyond satisfaction in what they found when it seemed they had arrived there. “Basketball players seek to put a ball into a basket. Their goal is to win a game. Maybe if they didn’t keep score…”
Now, up close, he was overwhelmed by how special these men were. Julius Erving, he’d heard, had encouraged high school students to pursue education by emphasizing how unlikely an NBA career was. You stand in a line of a million, he would say, and must outperform everyone else. Dr. J exaggerated, but the odds were still enormous. With about 20 million teenage boys in America, and a near 30-percent of roster spots filled by the foreign-born, the chances for an American kid were, like, one in 57,000.
Goshkin had seen NBA players in gyms. While huge, they were more normally proportioned than, say, football linemen. They appeared like actual human beings, only double-size; and even this was a new phenomenon. In Erving’s day, players looked like they had never seen a weight room. But it was not just deltoid-dimension that set them apart. The speed and intensity with which they competed seemed super-heroic. A few minutes play and they were dripping.
Professional athletes, Goshkin recognized, regularly resumed work after injuries that would have permanently disabled most people. Partly, this was because the athletes’ pay – a million-two minimum in the NBA; but part was due to their strength of will. To have achieved their level of success – to have beat out their particular 57,000 – required an inner drive that few possessed. They also had an extraordinary level of brain power.
Some years before, he’d read an article questioning how we measure “intelligence,” based on how much easier it was to teach a machine to defeat a chess grandmaster than to walk upstairs. Well, he thought, what about teaching it to leap into the air, recognize that an opposition machine has leapt to block its dunk, and, while still airborne, spot a teammate free beyond the three-point line, and kick the ball out to it. And to do it in less time than he had taken to formulate his thought. The players on the floor did this – or something as amazing – routinely.
The possibilities of human achievement appeared vast.
“The biggest shock,” Goshkin said to Estelle the next morning, “was the score.” They sat at a curbside table in front of the café, he with a double espresso and she a decaf latte, on which the barrista had drawn a chocolate rose. “You know how at home my tension can rise or fall with each possession?”
“Sometimes you are bummed the next morning.”
“Or high, depending.” It was below 60, but the air was clean, the sky bright, and the sun shone. The homeless fellow from Rwanda sat, back to the front wall, pondering a brownie. The woman from Java read her Buddhist text. “But last night, in the arena, I lost track of who led whom by what margin”
She took my hand.It was lovely, with nothing – and everything – going on.
xxx
NOTE
1 I can think of five people who contributed to Schrebnick, but this line, his best, was voiced by FOTM-contributor Budd Shenkin in a similar conversation with the author.