Paper Clipper

I HAVE NEVER HAD STRONG ANKLES. At 42, I now know the significance of each cut or pivot on the hardwood, clicking up the counter on the sum total of favors I’m able to ask of my body. Still, indoor basketball grants my body mercy that asphalt does not. The hardwood seems, somehow, to have softened over time.

March is about the rock, the roundball and the old “rock house” built for it. March Madness is of extra note this year, since first-round games of the NCAA Championships (March 16 and 18) are played in Cox Arena on the campus of San Diego State University. It’s all part of why—despite the sunny days that replace the waning San Diego rainy season—our local rec centers continue to swell. Indoor courts are in session. And it’s why you see so many old guys playing in the gyms and rec leagues around San Diego. Guys so old they—we—look rather out of place running with the young guns.

The way we play doesn’t impress much, either. The compelling feature is that we are there, and we play. We are a dying breed of basketball craftsman. But there’s a reason we have to play: It’s a longstanding relationship with the game. Just the smell in the rock house takes us immediately back to our youthful b-ball days.

The musty old-school gym represents something pivotal. It earmarks an era reminiscent of Hoosiers and the way the game used to be. It’s a faded collage of sweat and dust and industrial disinfectant, embedded in countless layers of glossy, oil-based, cancer-causing paint, and it somehow includes the distant echo of a cheering crowd from the past.

Today’s game is radically changed, and the rock house has witnessed the transition.

When Bill Walton played for the San Diego Clippers in the early 1980s, he could never have been provoked into the Sports Arena bleachers in pursuit of a foul-mouthed fan—few fans as there were. It wasn’t his demeanor. Nor is it an ethic he has passed on to his ball-playing boys—Adam, Nathan, Luke and Chris. Though his pro ball years here were hardly the high point of his dual–Hall of Fame career (Bill is a member of both the NBA and Grateful Dead halls), he carried our franchise affably—on bad ankles!—for five seasons before the Clippers set sail for Los Angeles.

Oddly, the game is more marketable now that the fundamentalists have been traded out for high-priced, trash-talking “entertainers.” But this is not about talking trash. It’s not the old guy hating the young guys (and girls), or fundamentals versus flash. It’s about those peripheral details that, for me, are a priceless piece of basketball history. I’m reminded of them every time I smell that old gym smell.

Born in a small New England prep school, the pioneering peach-basket exploits of basketball inventor Dr. James Naismith were meant to be employed indoors, a wintertime recreational pursuit not requiring mittens. With today’s vast selection of brand-new facilities and great outdoor pick-up spots, it would be easy for some to forget the humble beginnings of the old rock house, host of so many significant moments in the evolution of America’s true pastime (remember: Cricket preceded baseball; rugby preceded football).

The good doctor wouldn’t recognize today’s game.

When I played junior high school ball for St. Edward’s, we didn’t have a gym. Every game was a road trip and created the excitement of new Midwestern frontiers to be conquered: the thrill of the journey to an unfamiliar town, the snarling boosters of the opposition, the new court eccentricities to navigate. We occasionally played in a high school gymnasium that boasted high ceilings, bleachers tucked to the rafters, and brilliant team-color paint schemes decorating well-lighted complexes, all designed to prepare young talent for college play. Running there felt like playing in the Final Four, a glimpse into the big time.

But the dimly lit, dusty hues of the rock house, brick or tile walls from yellowed hardwood floor halfway up to low ceiling, were signs—even then —of the game’s heritage. Like caves to an archaeologist.

Or Pac-Man to today’s videogamer.

My appreciation for the University of San Diego’s Jenny Craig Pavilion or San Diego State’s Cox Arena and other modern facilities is immense. But the old-school gym is a dinosaur, like an old Remington typewriter. I wouldn’t expect a youngster to revel in it the way I do, any more than I’d expect him (or her) to marvel away hours glued to the screen of a clunky old Magnavox playing Pong. In fact, I wouldn’t want to bang away at a Remington, myself, if I had real work to do. It’s just reminiscing, I suppose. I am old.

But as I travel around to the many fine remaining rock houses in San Diego, I am reminded how much richer my b-ball experience is because of them. My most cherished roundball memories are packed beneath the rafters of this old house. And I wonder if my young opponents realize how close they are to such a significant moment in basketball history, the passing of an era.

Or that there would be no Xbox if there hadn’t first been Pong.

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