Phthursday Musings: Pistol Pete Ponderings

In recent months, Phthursday Musings has tended to be written in a flurry on Thursday evenings. It hasn’t always been this way! Sometimes a post would actually start to take form on Monday and would slowly be cobbled together over the course of the week.

This week’s installment begins while I sit in a facility recently renamed the Nikola Tesla Cultural Sport Centar. This is a gym, in a standalone building, on the overall footprint of the property which used to be St. Hugh Catholic Church, but which was acquired several months ago by the parish of St. Nikola Serbian Orthodox Church. I find things like this to be fascinating, because the idea that a large century old church could turn into a different church is so contrary to the idea of “a church” in my mind.

A certain goofy child is on the gym floor, going through goalie training exercises. He decided a couple of years ago that the thing he most likes in all of organized sports is being a soccer goalkeeper. We do not really know how this came to be. There might be an element of not having to run run run run run run run the whole game, but I don’t think that’s it. I think it has something to do with wanting to see the whole field in front of him. But I don’t know that.

A few weeks ago when he started this Wednesday night goalie study, this building did not have its electric new name. It also did not have the impressive vinyl posters on the wall spotlighting the most very famous of Serbian athletes. You can predict who a couple of these jokers are. But I was surprised to see this guy:

Pete Maravich was before my time, but somehow I still knew about the legend growing up. Among other things, Pistol Pete was - and as of this writing still is - the all-time leading scorer in college basketball history. And he did it before the three-point line existed.

I have to put the “as of this writing still is” because in another week or two, he’ll be overtaken as “the all-time leading scorer in college basketball history”.

This was the shot by which Caitlin Clark broke the official record for most points by a woman in NCAA history:

She’s the biggest thing going right now. I looked into getting tickets for when Iowa played at Northwestern a few weeks ago, and the cheapest tickets available were $170!

Among the book I’ve finished in the last couple months was Hoop Muses: An Insider's Guide to Pop Culture, and the (Women's) Game. It’s a fascinating way of constructing the history of women’s basketball. Trailblazers from across the decades were woven into a narrative that felt a lot like narratives I’m much more familiar with.

One of the clever tricks in the book is to frame a time decades into the future as the book’s “present”, such that current stars in today’s WNBA are treated as legends of the past. Instead of a framing like “oh hey A’ja Wilson is pretty good”, the framing is more, “Do you know about A’ja Wilson? She is a damn legend!”

On the one hand, reading this book, and living in the midst of the final few games of arguably the biggest-to-date athlete in this sport, really makes me want to watch more women’s basketball. On the other hand… I haven’t been watching any basketball at all the last two months! I’ve watched maybe four or five basketball games total this year, and it’s not because I haven’t been home and able to watch at night.

It’s strange: I’ve been reading more about sports than I’ve been watching.

But what I really want to do is go watch in person. Finally this past weekend me and the goofball kid went to a game, and it was awesome, and yet it was a cult sport that isn’t even important enough for ESPN to include the league on its app!

For the second year in a row, we went to a Milwaukee Wave match. (I wrote about it last year.) The Wave play in a league called MASL - Major Arena Soccer League - and this team has somehow been around for 40 years, across multiple leagues. It’s a lot of fun and it feels like the perfect thing to be a cult follower of.

After that and after some other things I’ve read recently, including a lot of baseball books, I ver ver much feel motivated to get out there this year and take in a lot of different games in a lot of different places. Going to a new place, feeling a new rhythm, and seeing excellent athletes perform at a high level: this will never grow old to me. Would I consider organized sports to be the most important thing in the world? No, but, I don’t consider music to be the most important thing in the world either, and yet I can’t imagine living in a world without music. Sports aren’t for everyone, but at its core, sport is about performance, and therefore it just isn’t that far off from seeing a band to me. And I absolutely do think performance is central to the human experience. We’re not all going to be drawn to the same things, and that’s part of what makes the human experience cool too.

When I was 10, what would have been the equivalent of walking into a gym and seeing a gigantic vinyl poster of Pete Maravich - someone whose legend dated to a time before my own parents were born?

The closest thing I can come up with is being in 7th grade (so 12 instead of 10) and being on the basketball team and having a drill called Mikans. This is an incredibly simple drill: in 30 seconds, make as many layups as you possibly can. It’s named after George Mikan, the first ever basketball mega superstar, who played at DePaul from 1942-46 and then starred for the Lakers when they were still appropriately geographically named.

How on earth, with so much information available today to slice through, would my kid ever be expected to understand who George Mikan or Pete Maravich were?

It’s a question I think about sometimes. What can a kid reasonably be expected to know? The way the world produces terrabytes of information per millisecond today, how is he supposed to have a meaningful frame of reference for the ‘27 Yankees, even if he has “learned” about them? What on earth would allow me to explain Count Basie to him? He’s never heard of Rocky and Bullwinkle!

And my thinking is: this is all OK.

And meanwhile: I find myself continuing to read about baseball games that happened around the time I first learned to walk. I read 20 pages just last night about the one-game playoff in 1978 between the Yankees and Red Sox!

So while I don’t need my kid to know all of the ridiculous crap I know, I do need him to know his own ridiculous crap, and I need to get him out there to witness whatever performances there are to be witnessed, and let him come to his own zany conclusions, and maybe one day he’ll be in a gym with his kid and there’ll be a vinyl poster of Caitlin Clark on the wall and it will all trigger a latter day stream of conscious weirdness in a world that, even if it often feels like the odds are against it, I stubbornly believe will be just a little bit better off than the one we inhabit right now.