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Bibliotech: The Warriors and Thomas Pynchon
Spotlight Series posted 2/20/2008 from ballhype.com
Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 2: Bibilotech, a series of essays about books. In this edition, Ty Keenan (FanHouse, FreeDarko) discusses his thesis on Gravity's Rainbow and the concurrent Warriors playoff run. Enjoy.
From the beginning of last April to the middle of May, my life was occupied by little more than two activities: following the Warriors’ playoff run and writing my thesis on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow. On a purely emotional level, both events were of supreme importance. The Warriors’ late-season push and upset of the Mavs in many ways validated a near-lifetime of disappointment and self-delusions on the level of convincing myself that Mookie Blaylock could be the leader of a playoff team. At the same time, my thesis on Pynchon represented the culmination of years of reading books above my grade level and subsequently talking and writing about them like I knew what I was talking about – the only difference being, of course, that this time I actually approached the subject with some degree of authority.
These two events were obviously important to me for different reasons, but it was the act of engaging with them at the same time that made that span of a few weeks to one of the best experiences of my life. (It was also one of the most antisocial, but that’s a story for another time.) Yet while the Warriors and Gravity’s Rainbow are not immediately comparable, there are connections between them. Both the team and the novel flout convention, establishing new forms of basketball philosophy and storytelling, respectively, that do not conform to our standard expectations of what works in those different arenas. Throughout those few weeks, the novel informed my experience of the games (and vice-versa), showing me that basketball and literature do not exist in their own secluded spheres of influence and discussion. Sports were no longer just a pleasant diversion; they now spoke to disciplines ranging from philosophy to politics.
For the uninitiated, Gravity’s Rainbow is an incredibly long (my copy is 760 pages with very small type), extremely difficult novel set during the end of World War II in Europe. There are innumerable plotlines and characters, but, to give you some extent of the overall craziness, the main plot involves Tyrone Slothrop, an American GI whose sexual conquests match up with V-2 rocket blast sites in London. This connection sets off a massive quest through Western Europe for information about Slothrop’s past, although the novel ends without anything being clarified. Every clue is essentially one more red herring, although readers usually finish the novel with the sense that things would have eventually come together if Pynchon had just kept going. Instead, he didn’t, and Slothrop drops out of the narrative entirely with about 100 pages to go. Despite these frustrations, Gravity’s Rainbow is widely regarded as one of the best novels of the last 50 years, if not ever, and it’s difficult to end the novel thinking that the entire enterprise has been a waste of time. As such, my thesis looked at the different ways in which Pynchon compels the reader to keep searching for answers when none are given. I argued that the novel promotes a method of reading – and, by extension, experiencing the world – that shifts focus from results and towards the journey. Or, to put it another way, things that do not immediately conform to established systems become viable.
The Warriors’ run has been talked about at length, and I hope the connections between it and Gravity’s Rainbow are starting to become clearer. Even if you think that Mavs series was an aberration, there’s no denying that, for anyone but Dallas fans, those games represented a moment at which the possibilities of the sport began to expand. Here was a team built around the idea that each player’s talents should define his role and the greater system, a concept that seemed at odds with the common perceptions of What Works in the Playoffs. The most ecstatic of us declared it a revolution and, while it isn’t yet clear if the upheaval will have lasting effects, the idea was extremely potent and exciting at the time. (I wasn’t blogging last spring, but, if I had been, my posts would have looked like that one – just with less lyricism and more explanation points.)
The Warriors were putting my grand claims about Gravity’s Rainbow’s relevance into practice. Sports and books, my two lifelong hobbies, were speaking to each other in a way they hadn’t since I read the entire Matt Christopher oeuvre – it is most certainly an oeuvre – in first grade. Basketball fandom wasn’t just confined to games and websites – it was about deeper ideas that we usually only get to talk about in ivory towers. Yet basketball didn’t occupy the low end of the intellectual relationship – it taught me just as much about the theoretical importance of my academic work. This subject needn’t be confined to the masturbatory intellectualism usually associated with pretentious English majors. It had relevance beyond the confines of campus, and I would be stupid if I decided that this thesis was merely an opportunity for me to impress my professors.
All this talk might sound hyperbolic, and it at least partially is. It is probably just a coincidence that I turned in my thesis on the same day that the Warriors were knocked out of the playoffs by the Jazz, and I would be wrong to think that these two events are perfect fits for one another. After all, Gravity’s Rainbow is not going to be a part of the Warriors Book Club any time soon. But, if this novel has taught me anything, it’s that connections such as the one between it and the Warriors are not illegitimate simply because they’re coincidental. Whatever connection I saw between them expanded my appreciation of both and eventually turned those few weeks into something much more than 75 pages of analysis and a second-round playoff exit.
In recent weeks, John Krolik and Jay Busbee have written in this space about the ways in which importance of sports to the inner city and rural Texas, respectively. These books (and their pieces) have detailed the primacy of sports in these areas extremely well, but I think we do sports a disservice – and let me make it clear that I don’t think John, Jay, Frey, or Bissinger do this – if we assume that sports is only relevant to our greater society when it defines the fortunes of particular people. We can read aspects of psychology, politics, and American culture into the smallest moments in sports. This process doesn’t have to involve borderline-pretentious exercises such as my thesis, either – in a way, it’s the basis for every post with a title like “What if NBA Players Were Household Kitchen Appliances.”
But expanding our analysis of sports isn’t just a way of connecting aspects of our lives to each other. I’ve occasionally heard my fellow grad students decry sports as inconsequential. This, frankly, is a bunch of crap, but the fact that this view remains prevalent means that we cannot assume that it shouldn’t be corrected just because sports are more popular than books. Assuming we want to be taken seriously as analysts, connecting sports to other parts of life is, to put it bluntly, something that can keep us from descending into escapism and intellectual irrelevance.
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