Насан туршдаа сагсан бөмбөг тоглохын утга учир нь зөвхөн хөдөлгөөн төдийгүй нийгмийн харилцаа болон сэтгэл зүйн эрүүл мэндэд эерэг нөлөө үзүүлдэг байна.
Өдгөө 81 настай Ричи Звейгенхафт 51 жилийн турш долоо хоног бүр сагсан бөмбөгийн тоглолт зохион байгуулж иржээ. Тэрээр 1970-аад оноос хойш Калифорнийн их сургуульд докторын оюутан байхдаа эхлүүлсэн энэхүү уламжлалаа Гилфорд коллежид үргэлжлүүлж, өдгөө түүнийг “өвгөчүүлийн тоглолт” хэмээн нэрлэх болсон байна. Тоглолтын гол зарчим нь нөхөрлөлийг нэгдүгээрт, өрсөлдөөнийг хоёрдугаарт тавих явдал юм.
Социологич Жейсон Жимерсоны судалгаагаар сагсан бөмбөгийн талбай нь зөвхөн биеийн тамирын орчин бус, хүмүүсийг нэгтгэж, стресс тайлах, бүтээлч байдлыг нэмэгдүүлэх “гуравдагч орон зай” болдог аж. Тоглолтын үеэр тоглогчид багийн ажиллагаа болон дамжуулалт дээр төвлөрч, “flow” буюу бүрэн уусалтын төлөвт ордог нь сэтгэл зүйн хувьд асар их ач тустай юм. Энэ нь амьдралын жижиг ялалтуудыг мэдэрч, өөрийн хязгаарыг танин мэдэхэд тусалдаг байна.
Звейгенхафтын хувьд сагсан бөмбөг нь амьдралын хором бүрийг үнэ цэнтэй болгох шалтгаан болдог. Хэдийгээр нас ахихын хэрээр бие махбодын чадамж буурч, гэмтэл бэртэл гарах эрсдэлтэй ч сагсан бөмбөгийн талбайд гарах нь түүнд өнөөдөр амьдарч байгаагаа мэдрэх, амьдралаас таашаал авах хамгийн том боломжийг олгодог ажээ.
Дэлгэрэнгүй эх сурвалжийг харах
Эх сурвалжийг нээх ↓
This story is part of Peak, The Athletic’s desk covering the mental side of sports. Sign up for Peak’s newsletter here.
Richie Zweigenhaft plays pickup basketball once a week, and when people ask him to describe his game, he usually lands on three names: Muggsy Bogues, John Stockton and Dave Twardzik.
Zweigenhaft stands 5 feet 4 inches tall, so he found inspiration in Bogues, the shortest player in NBA history. He also loves to share the ball, which explains his admiration for Stockton, the NBA’s all-time assists leader. His appreciation for Twardzik, a tough and cerebral floor general for the Portland Trail Blazers in the 1970s, is a deeper cut. But there’s a good explanation for this.
Zweigenhaft is 81.
He started playing regular basketball in the early 1970s, when he was a doctoral student at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Then he basically never stopped. For the last 51 years, he has organized a weekly pickup game at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., where he’s professor emeritus in the psychology department.
The Guilford game is likely one of the longest continuous pickup runs in America. It has survived nine presidents. The players are mostly in their 60s and 70s. A few years ago, as the players slowed down and the pace deadened, the game became halfcourt, and Zweigenhaft came up with a new league name: “Geezer ball.”
“Every time I have a birthday now, I think, Jesus Christ, I’m so fortunate to still be playing,” Zweigenhaft told me. “There’s no telling how much time I have left.”
I reached out to Zweigenhaft in the hopes that he could help me with an emerging life crisis. Earlier this year, I was playing in a pickup game when my man caught the ball and drove hard toward the lane, which caused me to slide quickly to my right and stop abruptly.
The awkward plant caused the ligaments in my right knee to stretch to an undesirable degree, which limited my ability to walk or run for weeks. The experience was jarring.
My 40th birthday was just a couple months away, and for the first time, I realized: I could not play forever.
I once tried to explain to a friend why my pickup game at 9:30 p.m. on Monday nights could be the most joyous 90 minutes of the week. It was a source of creativity and improv, a high-intensity workout that supplied endorphins and soothed anxiety, a collective state of flow in which we all existed fully and purposely in the moment.
It seemed to offer modern life’s most precious commodity: the ability to quiet my mind and just be. A pickup basketball game was a direct portal to momentary enlightenment.
“It has a therapeutic quality in that respect,” Zweigenhaft agreed.
That’s why I reached out to Zweigenhaft. After 50 years, I figured he would have some wisdom about this thing we shared.
Our conversation revealed a lesson in happiness built on a half-century of trips to the gym, a guide to the good life based on back-door cuts, help defense and the perfect extra pass.
When you are 81 years old, there are certain things you cannot do on a basketball court. Here is one: Zweigenhaft cannot shoot a pull-up jump shot.
He used to be able to stop on a dime and unleash a feathery jumper. But as the years piled up, his muscles stopped cooperating. He could shoot, or he could drive, but he could not do them simultaneously.
Other than that, the Guilford game is surprisingly lively. It’s still twice a week. The average age is around 64. The players have stopped counting hip and knee replacements, and over the years, the run has lost participants to injury, retirement and, on occasion, death.
Yet, just a few weeks ago, Zweigenhaft was on the floor inside Ragan-Brown Fieldhouse, matched up with a smallish guard who played fierce defense, crashed the boards and generally played with the aggression of Jose Alvarado of the New York Knicks. Which, of course, made sense.
“He is 40 years younger (than me),” Zweigenhaft said.
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The most amazing part of the game is its longevity, and Zweigenhaft credits a slogan he borrowed from the Chinese during the Cold War: “Friendship First, Competition Second.”
“We didn’t have many lawyers,” Zweigenhaft said. “That’s another reason the game lasted so long.”
It began in 1975, when Zweigenhaft was a fresh-faced faculty member researching the American power elite. At first, it was just a classic noontime pickup run, the players gathering inside an old-school gym nicknamed the Crackerbox, which looked like something out of “Hoosiers” and featured the kind of soft rims that every player loves.
By the mid-1980s, the run was in a new facility and featured three full-court games, three times per week.
In a way, it was a thriving community experiment that academics call a third place, a social space separate from home or work. It was a culture unto itself, complete with its own rules, norms and language.
In fact, it was exactly the kind of culture that interested a sociologist in Chicago.
Members of the Guilford game used to play in a gym nicknamed the Crackerbox. (Courtesy of Craig Chappelow)
In the early 1990s, Jason Jimerson was a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Chicago who had spent the previous decade playing pickup basketball on college campuses.
Inspired by his personal experiences and a book about basketball culture, Jimerson set out to begin the first qualitative academic research on pickup hoops, examining games in suburban Chicago and West Lafayette, Ind.
There is a reason sociologists have spent decades studying pickup basketball. The sport is naturally physical, aggressive and competitive. The stakes are clear: The winner usually gets to stay on the court and play again. Yet, the activity is orderly, efficient and overwhelmingly positive, the players almost solely concerned with the collective whole.
“What makes a good party is not just that you have fun but that other people have fun as well,” said Jimerson, now a sociology professor at Franklin College.
The weekly game I play in New York fits the description: it has existed in some form for more than two decades and years before I started playing. The roster is in constant churn, though the bloated email list exists as an unofficial archive of former players. (When an old commissioner retired last year, one former player replied to the thread that he had not played in five years and had no plans to return. But he still wanted the emails.)
Like most games, we divide the teams evenly, hoping to be as competitive as possible. We call our own fouls with (relatively) little conflict. There is an almost performative focus on process over results. When a player finds themself open and misses a shot, you will hear a chorus of teammates, ready to uplift them.
Good look.
Keep shooting.
“One of the things that’s really interesting about human beings is how we can work together as a group to help individuals stand out,” Jimerson said. “That’s transcendent.”
A musician with an interest in jazz, Jimerson came to realize there was an almost meditative quality to a pickup basketball game. In the early 1970s, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discovered the “flow” idea, which described a particular state of heightened consciousness in which people were so immersed in an activity that they lost all semblance of the self.
What made pickup basketball unique was not just that it was an effective tool for entering a flow state. It was that, like jazz, it was an activity in which people could experience a state of collective flow, which has been found to enhance creativity and create stronger social bonds.
“What makes a game really fun is when you play against people who make you play better,” Jimerson said. “That’s collective efficacy. That’s when collective flow occurs.”
After talking with Jimerson, I thought about a Monday night pickup game from last summer, when I had extended an invite to James Edwards, who covers the New York Knicks for The Athletic. Despite working at the same company for years, James and I had never met. But within minutes, I picked out an aesthetic quality in his style of play, obvious to anyone who has spent a lifetime playing basketball. James had an old-school game — fluid pace, a crafty handle, great court vision.
Moments later, when James subtly looked off a pass and hit a cutter for a layup, I didn’t have to say anything.
I felt like I’d known him for years.
Zweigenhaft didn’t set out to play basketball until he was 81. When he hit 70, he had no illusions he would be playing at 80.
“I said, ‘Uh-oh, you’re 70,” Zweigenhaft said. “You used to be 60.”
He kept seeing friends who had to give up the game. They missed the exercise, the physicality and the source of creative expression. But more than anything, Zweigenhaft could see they missed “that whole social experience.”
Not long after talking to Zweigenhaft, I found myself playing in a pickup game on a Sunday morning in Lower Manhattan. One of my teammates was a guy named Jack Appleby, a 38-year-old former small-college basketball player who was once one of the best seventh-grade basketball players in the country. (Then he stopped growing.)
When he reconnected with the sport in adulthood, he realized how much he needed the teamwork and cognitive stimulation he found on the basketball court.
“I get to use my brain to problem solve live on a basketball court, which I really love,” Appelby told me. “And I get tiny, defined victories for myself.”
A few years ago, on a lark, he launched an Instagram page with a simple gimmick: “How to Hoop Forever.” He had considered the so-called male loneliness epidemic — the rising rates of isolation and the dwindling social engagement from younger generations. He started offering advice to people he met in New York City: Have you thought about pickup basketball?
On the day I met Appleby, his back was hurting severely. After a game, he sprawled on the floor to stretch, which was a good reminder of our basketball mortality. It may not be possible to hoop forever, but there is a reason why people like Zweigenhaft cannot stop.
The game fosters social connection and individual artistry. It helps us understand our own limitations.
“It helps me appreciate the life I’m living,” Zweigenhaft said.
He lives by a simple rule, one shared by the musician Warren Zevon as he died of cancer in the early 2000s.
“You put more value on every minute,” Zevon said. “You’re reminded to enjoy every sandwich.”
Zweigenhaft had just played basketball that day. One of the other guys in the Guilford game had spent the day in the hospital.
“So as I went to play,” he said, “I was thinking about him being in the hospital, and I was thinking: Enjoy every sandwich. If you don’t play well today, don’t give yourself a hard time.”
The joy is in the attempt, in the ability to go out and play. So Zweigenhaft is going to keep playing until he cannot anymore.
