All of it a Religion
Hoops, hope, and the poetry of open doors
David Tully’s image “Landwork 15” registers in my body first. Those good chills ripple chicken skin along my arms, back of my neck, base of my skull, top of my messy-bunned head. Then what I call the Spirit Surge, a zap-jolt response to art firing in my core, radiating up and out until I’m incandescent. Then a smile. More of a smirk, really. Then the thoughts, rapid fire: now this is some public art street art graffiti art protest art business. This is a prayer. This is some sacrilege. This is divine.
Next the future-tripping: I’m carrying my old bald ball, losing my footing, making it to the top, dribbling on the asphalt base of this cross, the reverb holier than church bells. I’m trying to put up a few j’s on this iron hoop drilled into stone, I’m missing and damn, can a girl get a rebounder up here? I’m sweating and windswept, bun messier by the moment, I’m making a shot, missing another, making again, making a few. I’m sitting with my back against the graffitied base, arms on my knees, ball under them, breathing hard, looking out on the mountains, thinking about my family, thinking about pilgrimage, thinking about belief, about things that seem incongruent – about basketball and poetry and open doors and Ross Gay and Dr. J.
In 2012, Tully climbed to Bray Head, part of the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland, and drilled a basketball hoop into the standing cross. Online, I find two short wordless videos of the hoop’s chain net blowing in the breeze. When Tully pans out, we see rocks and scattered wildflowers in the foreground. The chain net reminds me of our public park court and of Christ’s crown of thorns. The rocks and flowers echo the Garden of Gethsemane, where Jesus mourned his inevitable death, and Golgotha, the place of the skull and the site of his crucifixion. I know all of these stories because I learned them at church, the place we went to with almost as much devotion as we did the basketball court.
Delight expert Ross Gay delivered the keynote session for LitFest Youngstown in 2023 on a Saturday night in the sanctuary of the local Episcopal church. It had been years since I’d entered a church, but Aimee, Nora, and I settled in a couple rows back from the lectern. My family had always been left-pew sitters. Tonight, I had unconsciously chosen the right side.
The place was packed, far more crowded than the Presbyterian churches of my youth. After his introduction, Ross thanked us for being there, and then, smiling, asked if it would be okay if he did a longer reading from his 2020 work Be Holding: A Poem. We all nodded yes as I held my underlined, dog-eared copy, memorized like scripture.
The pews creaked and cracked like old bleacher rows do. Dust motes danced in the gleam of century-old olive green pendant lights. Behind the pulpit, 6’4” Ross moved silk-like and smooth, a ball player poet, bouncing slightly at the knees, and with his good book in one hand, scooped the air with his other—his right like Dr. J’s bringing the ball low before he defies gravity, flicks the ball up and in—and while Ross’ voice bounced off the walls of the sanctuary he
has begun his extended course of study
on gravity and grace…
…Erving simply decided in the air
to knock on other doors
And I am thinking about
the simple decision
to knock on other doors
and Ross is in the zone, as we say about players having a good night, torso leaning forward, picking up the pace like you do on a fast break and you’ve got two perfectly-spaced outlets streaming in front of you, leading us like a good passer does
while a draft leaks through the lead pane of the blue and crimson stained glass to my right and I know I am holding my breath
and the Spirit Surges jab and retreat, jab and retreat because this art is the way, the truth, the life
It is finished.
For a beat, two, maybe three: uncommon quiet. Sacred silence.
And then applause. In a church!
The Presbyterians would never.
Waves of robust applause, just shy of thunderous.
Ross’ words and cadence and spirit hung in the air, dripping like a baptism.
This is the reading of Ross Gay. And all the people said “Amen.”
I’m sure there were others before him, but Ross Gay was the first literary writer I knew of to write so compellingly, so tenderly, about basketball—a sport I loved with my whole heart despite being painfully average at it. His June 2020 publication in The Sun, “The Ramshackle Garden of Affection,” a series of letters about basketball and poetry with his MFA student and friend Noah Davis, reflected the intimacy I felt with the game and the others who love it, even in my mediocrity. His September 2020 essay “Have I Even Told You About the Courts I’ve Loved: On the Tenderness and Care of a Good Pick-Up Basketball Game” was essential to my understanding that a literary writer—a poet!—and educator could write about sports and still be taken seriously as an artist and intellectual. My whole life, I had thought of sports and art as separate endeavors. I never considered what might happen if I let my passion for both rip.
As a happily single, child-free woman and educator who loves spending her time reading (idolatry of worldly ideas: of the Gospel according to Ross Gay), making art and watching basketball (idolatry of objects: of the miracles of Dr. J and his disciples), and writing personal essays (idolatry of the self: of lady navel-gazing myopia), traditional evangelicals find my very existence offensive. And this is why I might erect a David Tully-style cross with a basketball hoop attached on the front lawn of my childhood church.
Until then, here I sit on a Sunday morning at my altar, the inherited oak kitchen table of my youth, scuffed like a gym floor, thinking about acts of devotion as the pilgrimage I’ll make today. Turn to a vignette from Gay’s The Book of Delights. Get some thoughts down to meet my daily word count goals. Make time for a workout, maybe even walk down to the abandoned hoop on Antioch’s campus a few blocks over—the one just to the right of the chapel. Take my old bald ball and put up a few jumpers, a few layups, a few reverse layups if I’m really feeling myself, finish with some free throws, a distance from the hoop I can sense whether there’s a marked lane or not. Faith in how far away I am and the force I need to reach the goal.
Two dribbles, index finger on the valve, breathe, release, follow through, the ball bouncing on asphalt like the metronome of my youth, like the knocking on a door, all of it a religion.
Erin Hill is a writer and hoops enthusiast in Yellow Springs, Ohio.
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