Parlor Trick

Basketball is vertical unless you’re Chris Paul, who is—I have to note—small. He’s six feet if he stands all the way up. Not particularly long. But set a screen for Chris Paul, and watch all five defenders tense. Getting Chris Paul into a twist with your starting center is a dance you lose every time. With all the same pace he runs straight ahead, Paul roves across the entirety of the lane waiting a full twenty seconds for the big to lunge forward. Or that’s how it feels—really he can feel the vibrations of every movement around him. To be on the floor against Chris Paul—or now his protege Devin Booker—is to feel the tensity of guarding Chris Paul one-on-one even when you’re on another man. Chris Paul is small and I am grateful because Chris Paul is my favorite parlor trick. What looks ordinary at first and then is impressive. The ordinary that becomes extraordinary is magic.

Chris Paul has been doing this parlor trick for sixteen years across five teams and all thirty NBA cities. Like every great trick, it’s not magic, really—it is practiced and it is refined. There are no secrets to what Chris Paul is doing: negotiating the invisible strings he has on all five defenders and the pulley systems rigged up to his feint and his crossover—teams have been running the pick and roll for decades. It is an old technology. If you ask NBA historians, there have been at least four permutations of entire basketball strategy in the last 50 years—whole championship playbooks solved by defenses and shredded. None of them has solved the pick and roll. What Chris Paul does is timeless. But I need to say: the one thing he doesn’t have is time itself. At that moment, Paul was in his first NBA Finals at age 36, and what I don’t understand is how he remained so patient on the floor. I couldn’t drive a car when Chris Paul started to devote his career to winning an NBA championship. Thousands of hotel room beds. Tens of thousands of reps holding himself back, waiting for the moment his screener’s feet set.

Even then, Paul waits to pin prick the balloon of a defense. Mostly, he waits until they do it themselves—tens of thousands of reps, and yet they always do. Chris Paul shredded defenders the same way after 9/11 as he does in a pickup run as he does with one finger on the trophy he’s spent two decades seeing in his dreams. No momentum carries him forward in the way it would carry me—he has the patience of a glacier. And perhaps, too, the focus of one. Chris Paul as a competitor isn’t too different from the TV show Severance—he drops his personal history the moment he steps on the floor, or if he doesn’t, its singularity has been obscured by almost two decades of repetition. Chris Paul’s worked at his grandfather’s gas station, the first black-owned gas station in North Carolina. Chris committed to Wake Forest, and the next day his grandfather died. Chris Paul goes back to North Carolina, but it’s not quite “home”—he lives outside of LA in Encino. When the curtains open and the spotlight narrows, Chris Paul turns it on. Chris Paul the basketball player carries with him what he can fit in his carry-on, and Giannis brings his family. He cannot separate the two—who he was growing up around his family and who he is as a basketball player, and his brother Thanasis is at his side on the bench every game. It is not that there is no separation between personal Giannis and the professional one, but that the professional one springs forth from his history, from his family. Chris Paul dedicates much of his life away from a basketball uniform to justice, but what’s inside the lines is born inside the lines, lives inside the lines, and will die there too. And when it does, there will be a life beyond it—something to reintroduce himself to but something to return to.  And in a life well-lived is this separation better? I worry for Giannis when basketball goes away. I worry for any cleaving that takes a blade down an undefined path.

What I think I am trying to write about here is again momentum, what carries us in the directions we go, and what boundaries we choose to respect for ourselves. Chris Paul’s belief in unions and the pursuit of whatever shade of justice he believes in will carry him long after he stops rounding his screener, but on the court of his life he can stop on a dime. Something bogs me down when I try to pivot and sprint somewhere new. Maybe the thousands of hotel rooms are really a gift—the only constant in a sixteen-year NBA career is yourself. I have just three cities in my adult life and I’m still learning how to learn to love where I am as a way of loving who I am, not who I’d like to be or who I like that I’ve already been. This is lonelier than I am comfortable with, and I am still learning—so I’ve been caught picking up my dribble again. It is time to reset again. And go.

Ben McCormick is a writer in Portland, Oregon. He is at work on an essay collection and can be reached at benmcc.writing@gmail.com