Photo by Ronald Cortes/Getty Images On endurance, endings, and eventualities The man who first showed me how to shoot a basketball was born just a month after Oscar Robertson. His name was Charlie Davis, and unlike Oscar, he shot the ball completely flat footed, his body squa red to basket, pulling the ball sharply from his hip to just above his shoulder; the near-platonic ideal of an old-school set shot. There was precious little arc to the shot, and yet it seemed to bank its way into the hoop no matter the angle. Even if I had been taller, the release was so quick it would have been hard for me to block it. As I grew older and learned more about the game of basketball, it became a point of frustration. It was so obviously antiquated, and yet so hard to overcome in a simple game of horse. Charlie insisted he hadn’t played much since high school, and I believed him. The nature of his work left little room for it. Charlie was a old-fashioned in a lot of ways. A child raised in the ways of a fading frontier, by men of a west without fences and wire, he spent most of his days ranching, working, or hunting. He preferred to hunt with black powder rifles because he felt it wasn’t sporting to the animals to do otherwise, and he always seemed to have some kind of jerky in one of his pockets. On the rare occasion that he had nothing to do, he loved to watch westerns. Shane was his personal favorite. For work, he was a self-employed community journeyman. A relic of a time when small country communities fell just outside the reach of city contractors and tradesmen, it’s another role that’s beginning to fade from collective memory. At five in the morning he’d get up, handle chores around the house, and then make his way into town for breakfast and coffee with a group of other tradesmen. They would give him news of work they didn’t want, or felt was just too far to drive for, with the understanding that he’d do the same if a job seemed to be beyond his scope. Not much was, though. Though he made the bulk of his living on painting jobs, he had the skill-sets of a master carpenter, plumber, and electrician as well; laying down sidewalks, shingling roofs, and even rewiring the electrical workings of a church so old that it still had push-button light switches. Over the years as Charlie aged and the nearby cities sprawled, the jobs slowed to a trickle, until finally, as corporations diversified their way into the trades in larger municipalities, individual tradesmen began making their way out into the country to find work, and the jobs dried up. Driving through the western hills of Austin, listening to Bill Schoening call his last radio game for the San Antonio Spurs, I couldn’t help but think of Charlie. The Bill Schoening of my memory starts back in the 2002-2003 season, just a year after he started calling games. I’d come to Austin to live with my grandparents and had begun to really and truly watch the Spurs with my grandmother. But I had an ironclad 10 o-clock bedtime, so halfway through west coast games I had to pack it in and go to my room. My disappointment could not have been more apparent. I laid flat on my back in my bed imagining all the ways the game could be going. The 3rd time this happened, my grandmother met me in the hallway and handed me the Panasonic FM/AM handheld radio she used while walking in the morning. “Use your headphones, and go to bed after it’s over”, she said in tone of mock severity, her tone serious as her eyes twinkled. “It’s already set to 1200, so don’t fiddle with it, and leave it in the bathroom when you’re done.” With my headphones in, stretched out across my mattress, I entered a whole new world of basketball. I learned how to recognize where players were on the court from the urgent, southernized Yankee register of Bill Schoening’s voice, picking up terminology I had been unfamiliar with in the process. Little-by-little, things began to open up for me, as I was able to visualize sets that I’d seen the Spurs in based on their location and Bill’s description. When I saw them on the screen I’d hear his cadence in my head. It was a kind of working partnership across the distance, with Bill supplying details and my head filling in the rest of the picture. I could see Tim setting up in his office just outside the left block, David Robinson finding space at the elbows, Manu Ginobili doing that crazy thing where he sashayed from one leg to the other as he split the space between the high post and low post. I could see it all, which was a big deal because some of those west coast games came against the Lakers and Kobe and Shaq, and no one wanted to miss those. Sometimes I would just go straight to my room, not wanting to be interrupted in middle of a game. I listened to a number of playoff games that way, and even a championship. Sent to bed early for malfeasance, I watched the entirety of Game 7 against the Detroit Pistons on the 2.3 in. screen of the Casio 880 Handheld TV my grandmother had nicked from my grandfather’s garage. The headphone jack on it didn’t work, so I listened to Schoening instead, something I’d carry through the rest of my adult life whenever the television commentary irked me. Now, the radio reception crackled as it had all those years ago, as I ascended and descended the hills on the drive to see my grandmother, reminding me that I was listening to a medium on the decline. There was a subtle but uncharacteristic shakiness in Bill’s voice as the adrenaline of his finals calls caused him to mistakenly refer to the game in evening (rather than daytime) terms on multiple occasions. He found his rhythm quickly though, unlike the Spurs, who the Raptors were soundly stomping. Minutes into the second quarter I finally pulled into the parking lot of the skilled nursing center. In the frigid early morning hours of February 20th, my grandmother walked out to pick up the morning paper and suffered a stroke. Unlike Gregg Popovich, she laid there for over half an hour in sub-30-degree weather before a neighbor found her. All things considered; her recovery has been going better than expected. She hadn’t lost the power of speech and was walking again with assistance. For her, there was really one point of major vexation: she couldn’t get Spurs games in her room. So, there I was, setting up the TV in the dining room for the last game of the season. We walked down the hallway together, and into a pair of comfortable chairs. She looked up at the score for the first time and let out an involuntary minor swear. “I don’t know why”, she said, by way of apology, “but it just really bothers me when they lose the last game of the season.” “Well, it’s not over yet”, I replied, trying to sound positive. I wanted to see a win for her perhaps more than even she did. We spent the rest of the quarter and the half talking about the Spurs. We talked about Gregg Popovich’s recovery, and Victor Wembanyama’ s blood clots, and joked that she was so locked into the team that even her heath was mirroring theirs. They’d always been there for her, the Spurs. From the moment they’d made their way to Central Texas, she’d followed them. Through the untimely loss of her oldest son, the Alzheimer’s of her mother, the tragic passing of her husband – there had always been a constant in the Silver and Black. To be sure, she had faith in a greater power than sports, but it could sometimes be easier to see progress with the Spurs. Through ebb and flow she’d watched them, from Iceman, to Admiral, to Duncan, to Wemby. Always they won through hard work, and team play, and unselfishness, an idealized distraction from the world at large. “They’ll do it again”, she said with certainty. “You watch.” So, I did, and suddenly the tide began to turn. After giving up seventy-four points to the Raptors in the first half, the Spurs were playing swarming defense and scoring at will inside and outside. Recognizing their roster advantage over the shorthanded Raptors, the Spurs were driving relentlessly at the hoop, forcing fouls at every opportunity. With each bucket my grandmother’s face lit up, gleeful exclamations turning back the years. Her husband used to ask me what it was that so attached people to the spectating of sports. Her enthusiasm genuinely confounded him, and I never felt like I had a good response for the inquiry. Something about it is elemental, and hard to express. But now, at the end of an era, I felt like I had answer: that it is, at its core, about the sharing of experience, of memory, more than anything else. The old guard is shuffling out. Bill Land, Bill Schoening, Gregg Popovich, my grandmother. The finality of the end is arriving, ten years in delay, dawning on us in retrospect because that’s the way that we process it. The Big Three are long retired. David Robinson will soon be sixty-years old. Age is giving way to youth, and I’m not sure that I like it. I can remember my grandparents trying to explain to me the appeal of the radio drama. Born into the Great Depression, the television was yet to come for them – the radio reigned supreme. We listened to Prairie Home Companion together, and I finally grasped the meaning, but not in the way they did, because meaning is dependent on memory, and there were memories that meant things to them that were never mine. I expect I’ll one day find myself explaining the appeal of basketball on the radio to a grandchild in the same manner. Bill Schoening’s end as radio announcer isn’t the end of basketball on the radio. It just feels that way, because for the first time I can see the end. Someone young will take his place and I’ll inevitably grumble about it. But the time is closer than we think, and that’s always unnerving. Fewer and fewer people will use the radio as the landscape continues to shrink. The games will become even more accessible, GPS navigation will replace drive-time traffic, and news has already made it’s way to our phones. FM DJs will give way to playlists, and eventually we’ll all find ourselves telling our progeny about the hits we heard on the radio, and the stations we listened to. I visited Charlie Davis several times after he too suffered a stroke that ended his working life. The last time that I saw him, he was watching Shane again. For the first time the ending hit me like a thunderclap. I finally understood what it meant to him, a man who’d been raised by men who remembered cattle trails and who’d herded livestock on long drives to the railheads that would ship them all east. I’d always assumed he’d felt like Shane, a symbol of a fading American West. Instead, I realized, he felt like the boy chasing after him. Watching my grandmother watch the Spurs pull out a 4th quarter win, I felt the same way. For the first time I’m acutely aware that the end is near, and I know now why I will continue to watch the Spurs. Win or lose I know that on some level I will keep watching over the years for the play that reminds me of the player, that reminds me of the person, that reminds me of the moment. The lonely bank-shot that takes me back to watching Tim Duncan close out the Nets with a quadruple-double while I’m curled up on the couch next to my grandmother. The euro-step that takes me back to the moment that she furtively handed me a mini-television with warm-yet-silencing look, so that I wouldn’t miss out in sharing the moment with her. The inbound play that reminds me of the one in Austin from March of last year, and the moment we both wordless recognized that it would be her last in-person game, and the deeply personal exchange that came with it. “Thank you, for always watching sports with me.” “It’s been one of the great pleasures of my life.” It was the end the fourth now, and I could tell she was tiring, but I also knew there was no chance she’d leave that chair until the game was over. She was asking questions now, something she never did, having always trusted her 70+ years of watching basketball. What that Keldon again? Did that Toronto fellow foul him? Whose ball is it? Right around the two-minute mark Stephon Castle burst through Toronto’s defense and dropped a floating 11-footer into the bucket while drawing a foul to give the Spurs the breathing room they wouldn’t relinquish. Unassisted, my Grandmother stood up. It took us both by surprise. As she eased herself back down into her chair, she looked over at me, eyes aglow. “He’s really getting better, isn’t he?” “Yeah”, I replied, my heart contorting like a balloon animal in the hands of an inexperienced party clown, “he’s definitely getting better.” Takeaways As big a deal as it has been having Chris Paul on the team, I’d be willing to argue that Harrison Barnes has been just as important an veteran influence on this team. Certainly, he’s been worth every penny of his contract despite being unceremoniously offloaded by Kings organization that just cannot get out of their own way. It’s not just Barnes played all 82 games this season, but the degree of effort, and fire, and unselfishness he’s brought with him to every single contest. He’s been my favorite non-Wemby Spur this season, and I’d love to see PATFO extend him. He everything you want in a role-player, and his effort appears to be contagious. As nice as it’s been having an actual veteran center in Bismack Biyombo, I sincerely hope the Spurs use this off-season to shore up their big man rotation. Even when Wemby was healthy, the lack of a rim-defending backup caused the defense to absolutely crater and undermine any offensive gains made by the first unit. Personally, I’d love to see them address this in the draft with the Atlanta pick, as there are a number of promising options projected for the latter part of the 1st round. My pick would be Rasheer Fleming out of St. Joseph’s, who profiles as a versatile menace capable of playing both the 4 and the 5, and has shown some promise shooting from outside. As happy as I was to see Branham and Wesley play solidly over the last couple of games, I just don’t know that they’ve done enough not to be usurped by another young guard if PATFO opt for one in the draft. However, the probable exit of Paul, and the lack of other guards in the 2nd unit may end up seeing them get some run in the last year other contracts. I still don’t see either of the being able to break into the rotation, but I’m rooting for them to prove me wrong. At some point you have wonder who San Antonio brass values more, Keldon Johnson, or Devin Vassell. Vassell has an overflow of shooting skill, but lacks situational versatility, requiring a lot of shots to get in rhythm, and doesn’t appear to set the tone in the same way that Johnson does. Keldon, in spite of shooting and defensive flaws, brings a real burst of energy regardless of his role and was huge part of the comeback in this one, refusing to back down for any reason. At some point, the Spurs are probably going to have to ship one or the other out in a trade, and I’m curious to see what they value more. Playing You Out – The Theme Song of the Evening: Time Stand Still by Rush ...read more read less