The great basketball player, like the great jazz musician, anticipates what others around him or her will do. Both events — jazz and basketball — thrive on moments of spontaneity and creativity, and while jazz musicians possess the ear necessary to anticipate the notes around them, basketball players possess the eye necessary to anticipate, innovate, and create.

Night Hoops and Swoops
(Riverbank State Park, New York City)
BY Delano Greenidge-Copprue

Arthur Jafa invented a term for this phenomenon — “polyventiality,” which he has defined as “multiple tones, multiple rhythms, multiple perspectives, multiple meanings, multiplicity.”^[9] Jafa’s brings his point home very well, and his idea builds upon W.E.B. DuBois’s notion of double consciousness. Because African Americans have at times experienced exile in their native land, they share the unique perspective of being both insiders and outsiders. Jazz artists, like basketball players, aim to reconcile seemingly divergent points of view. In art, we call it “creative tension”; in sport, “antagonistic cooperation.”^[10] Any way we look at it, it all comes down to the same concept — whether trading twelves or playing hoops one-on-one, those we go up against help us hone our skills, and teach us important lessons about ourselves. And the great players inspire others.

Even poets adhering to more standard forms often find metaphors of flight in describing the nature of basketball. John Updike’s “Ex-Basketball Player” is the classic story of the high school sports star trapped in small town America, yet in moments of nostalgia, transcendence occurs:

A poem of full stops, much like the life of Flick, which has, after basketball, come to a full stop. While Updike’s poem isn’t as dynamic as Troupe’s, his plodding cadence captures the Hoosier-style basketball of the American 1940s. Even so, the simile at the close of the stanza offers a semblance of possibility — hands like “wild birds,” yet the verb, like all of the verbs, are past, and in this case, no longer active.

Magic Johnson, in the words of Quincy Troupe, creates his own space to fly through, changing the dimensions of the court through his angle of vision and his ability to elevate his game. The language here, of course, brings to mind Michael Jordan, one of the greatest poets from Brooklyn, New York, descendant of the great bard of Brooklyn, and of America, Walt Whitman, and a contemporary of Jay-Z and the late Notorious B.I.G., some of Brooklyn’s finest.

In his informative essay on Michael Jordan, American cultural critic Michael Eric Dyson^[12] has noted, “His body is still the symbolic carrier of racial and cultural desires to fly beyond limits and obstacles, a fluid metaphor of mobility and ascent to heights of excellence secured by genius and industry” (379). The ideas here of flying beyond and of mobility both capture the virtuosity we hear in supremely skilled jazz musicians, the ability to create and innovate at seemingly a moment’s notice. The paradox of improvisation, however, is that it emerges only after hours dedicated to honing one’s craft. No one is naturally born performing cross-over dribbles or stringing together “sheets of sound” on a saxophone. The naturalness of any artistic endeavor comes through those unseen moments of sacrifice, what Joyce refers to the artist refining himself out of existence. We see this when Michael Jordan becomes known as Air Jordan, or his “Airness,” where the man and the act become one, or when a Louis Armstrong becomes known for his sound, where the growl of his trumpet, and that of his voice, are aligned, and he is transformed in Satchmo.