Fifteenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

Pickup basketball is inherently ecotopian, a prefigurative enactment of more sensible ways of relating to each other. Pickup is a cultural practice of surrender into a larger interdependence, breaking from the capitalist status quo of ownership, alienation, and disenchantment. I present the ecological merit of pickup using methods drawn from history and anthropology, synthesizing the development of basketball and my own experiences with it into an assemblage of stories. Contrary to organized basketball, “in pickup ball there is no performance other than the daily practice. It is not preparation for a future high-stakes performance, it is the living game itself” (Mc Laughlin 3). It sets aside the illusion of scarcity that capitalism insists is the natural state of things by supplying simplicity, satisfying “our longing for immediacy of experience, in which we use all that we have and see how it works” (Cooper 62). Gay characterizes the accessibility of pickup as an “elsewhere […] whose logics […] refuse ownership and the owners, refuse settling and the settler” (160). At the same time, pickup also reveals our critical interdependence. “Basketball players need each other to have fun”, and self constitute norms around queuing for games accordingly; “ultimately the desired good is not […] the moves of the game, but the interplay between people that makes the game fun” (Jimmerson 370). Perhaps it is in prefigurative experiences like pickup where we, sharing space with those beyond the environmentalist choir, might pick up our shattered ecology and make it whole once more.