Of all the indignities man must suffer (call-waiting being foremost), few can lay one as low as trash-talk on a basketball court. Well-rehearsed lines flow across the boards: “Are you blind? ‘Cause I just shot your eyes out!”
In another stunning defeat for equity feminists, males are the exclusive talkers of trash. Trash-talk is one more example of the male’s urge to conquer and, upon reaching victory’s doorstep, to make certain everyone knows he has arrived: “You couldn’t stick me with Crazy Glue!” Some trash-talk is intended to heap further shame on the vanquished: “You’re slower than you mom gettin’ out of my bed!” And some of it is the victor celebrating himself: ” Ain’t no shame in my game!” The form runs the gamut from religiosity (“Can I have a witness from the congregation to testify!”) to empowerment (“Give me the pill so I can pay my bills!”) to self-help (“Get your weight up!”).
I have some expertise in this matter because I just spent three months driving across America playing basketball–and as a genteel suburban kid, I was ill-prepared to compete in this rapacious round-ball rhetoric. My initiation was quick and ego-shattering. On a playground in Jersey City, N.J., Stacy ripped into me: “School’s in!” he cackled as he performed a thunderous dunk that bounced the ball off the asphalt and over a chain-link fence. A few minutes later Stacy soared over me and slammed the ball through the rusty rim again, but this time he hung from the basket and bellowed a ground-shaking, guttural “Ka-Kong!!” Earthbound as before, I guiltily prayed for a drive-by shooting to distract people. Right afterward, Stacy poked the ball from my grasp and sprinted down the court with it before laying it in and laughing, ” Ankles!”
“What did you just say?” I asked, as much perplexed as embarrassed.
“Ankles,” he answered matter-of-factly.
“I’m sorry, but what does that mean?”
Stacy stopped play, looked at me with a puzzled expression, and said, “It means, you know, ankles.”
“What?”
Another fellow by the name of Moose broke in: “It’s like, if he pulled your pants down, you know, and then you were standing there in your drawers while he ran off and, like, the only thing you could do was reach down to your ankles to pull your pants up. You know, so you should feel kind of stupid.”
Moose was right, of course, but I don’t know which made me feel more stupid- -being athletically humiliated or having to admit I didn’t even understand the trash being talked in my direction. But after about two months, I was starting to hold my own. In a heated contest against a team of European kids, I was on fire. The words just came to me. “I don’t hate you, I got nothing but love in my heart for you,” I vamped after one particularly pretty move. The gentleman guarding me stared quizzically.
After another basket, I pumped my fist in the air, did a little dance, and employed the presidential-candidate third-person singular: “You cannot stop him, you can only hope to contain him,” I proclaimed. Finally, and I was really feeling it by now, I dunked and barked the line made famous by Nike: ” You can’t guard me; the Secret Service couldn’t guard me!” Yet I wasn’t quite satisfied; none of my antics elicited a reaction from the other team.
Sometime later that night, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard a word of English from their mouths the entire afternoon. Alas, in trash-talking, as in much of life, a true craftsman must often be content with the pure esthetics of his work.
JONATHAN V. LAST
