Rhetoric and Poetry

A topic I've been thinking about for a few years now is the different nature of football and basketball, and how best to describe the two sports to newcomers. I've always found that a good analogy is the best five-second answer to any question. As much as the rules of a game might interest me, most people's eyes start to glaze over three seconds into a dissertation on "ineligible receiver down field" or when it's legal to hand check someone (although everyone loves "illegal touching" and "acts unnatural to the game"). So, in striving to find the best analogy for explaining football and basketball to a novice I've settled (for the moment) on the following: football is rhetoric, basketball is poetry.

In football each game is comprised of strictly delineated instances of confrontation between the two teams - the plays. Each play has a set start and end, there is preparation before each play, and in each play both teams have a clearly defined set of actions that they intend to engage in. Furthermore, the preparation that goes into each game is intense and rigorous. You have to study your opponent, learn his proclivities and the best counters to those tendencies. Just as in a debate you should know what your opponent is going to say before he says it, so too in football should you know what your opponent is going to do before the ball is even snapped. This clearly defined structure, to me, makes football a little simpler (if not necessarily easier - and there's a distinction that's worth it's own post) to explain to a new comer. It is possible to chart out many of the basic formations, describe each individual players role, and show a few sample plays all on the back of a piece of scratch paper. The fact that a guard is (almost) always going to block, a quarterback going to throw, a running back going to run and a receiver going to catch makes it easy to understand the surface level of what's going on at any given moment.

Additionally, the stoppages between each play gives the teacher an opportunity to describe what just happened. With the miracle of DVRs you can rewind (if your pupil is really that interested) and break down each play immediately after it happens. This iterative process lends itself to explanation. It shouldn't take too long for the seemingly random movements of players to fall into recognizable patterns (a run play looks different from a pass play), and so a new comer can quickly get a sense of familiarity.

Thus, football and rhetoric. Two media with clearly defined rules of engagement and strict structures that lend themselves to rational explanation.

Basketball is a more free-form style of expression, hence poetry. Whereas football proceeds from A to B to C in a (generally) linear sense, a basketball game can seemingly move from A to D, back to B and then on to E with little discernible pause. Yes, most of the time a point guard dribbles the ball up the court, and the center is almost always the tallest guy (sorry ladies - women's sports is another dissertation post) on the court, there are many cases where that's just not the case. Unfortunately for the sake of explanation, there are situations where a team will have 2 "centers" or 4 guards all on the court at the same time.

Also, instead of the highly structured, 700 page long football play books, basketball "plays" are much more ephemeral. Sure, there's the "Princeton Offense", the "Triangle Offense", the "high screen", but like the Pirate Code, these are more like guidelines than real laws. There's nothing remotely as structured as football's "X-Right, 21-Blast, Z-Seam, Shimmy on 3". I can explain that a sonnet has 14 lines with a strict rhyming structure, but that doesn't come close to encompassing the meaning and the beauty that Shakespeare can get out of that structure. So too can I explain that a back-door play involves dribbling at a teammates defender, forcing him to commit and turn his head and then passing to your teammate running to the rim behind him, that explanation doesn't do justice to the artistry of the real thing.

Further complicating it is that fact that there are very few natural stoppages in play in basketball. Whereas you get as much as 45 seconds to explain each football play after it happens, there is a maximum of 5 seconds between each play in basketball, and often (and in my opinion at the best of times) each play will flow seamlessly into the next.

All this being said, I don't want to make it sound like one is better than the other. Both rhetoric and poetry have important places in our lives; they just touch different parts of us.

In a great rhetorical argument both sides come prepared, passionately believe in their points and are willing to listen to their opposition, and adjust their argument as the discussion progresses. Each side comes out knowing more about their point, and the mind is enhanced because of it. A good football game is the same. Both sides come in prepared with a game plan. Each play is a test of that plan against the oppositions and the best combination of plan (idea) and execution (language employed) wins the day.

Great poetry is more challenging to define. Sure it has it's central theme, but the deviations from that theme can be the most touching parts of the entire experience. It has a structure, but the expressions allowed within that structure can be almost limitless, and when they surprise us is when they are the most moving. I can know that a game comes down to whether you can force my best player into a contested 22 foot shot, but when Michael Jordan, with 41.9 seconds left on the clock, Bulls down by 3 in game 6 of the '98 finals can will his team to victory... well, I still get goose bumps.

Beating the point long after everyone has stopped reading this, I think that's why I tend to like football on a more consistent basis. An average debate is still going to have decent points, and as long as the topic is interesting it's (almost) always worth hearing people's opinions. On the other hand, bad poetry is just bad. Fortunately (or un- depending on how pessimistic you are), my formative years in basketball were spent watching Michael Jordan, the greatest player of all time. It's the poetic equivalent of skipping limericks and moving straight into epic verse, or moving straight from teeny pop music to Bach and Beethoven. There are some luminaries at the moment, Kobe, LeBron, D-Wade, CP3 can all touch upon transcendence, but having watched someone live in the light, the shadows on the cave wall can be tough to see.

To sum up, football touches the mind and so I can more easily explain it. Basketball touches the soul and so must be experienced to be understood.