Summer Creativity

I am a sports-lover. I love the thrill of a good athletic contest, whether that contest be a meaningless game of kickball for FHE, an intramural ultimate Frisbee game, a district tournament tennis match, or that all-important basement basketball game that decides the alpha male in the Wilson household. (Let it be known that I still reign on that court after two sweeping blowouts this week!). Basically, I am perfectly content anytime that I am playing any sport, no matter who is playing with me, as long as at least someone else is as serious about winning as I am. I love giving my all in any competition. Yet there is one stage that I love more than any other. Despite the fact that I first and foremost consider myself a tennis player, it is not the hard courts that I consider the best athletic arena to play on; it is the hardwood. That’s right, church basketball holds the spot closest to my heart right now.

If you’ll indulge me for a couple of moments, I would like to attempt to explain why that is. I hope you realize what a monumental task that is. Pick-up basketball is absolute chaos. No plays, no coaches, no referees, just a bunch of people flying around a gym as fast as they can. I love all of it—the energy, the sweat, the thrill of victory, the pressure of a big moment, the vengeful feeling of defeat, the high of throwing the perfect pass, the motivating low of turning the ball over, the calculating while trying to come up with a winning play, a winning strategy. All of this happens nearly simultaneously across each individual player, all the while the game flows on at a rapid pace, and thus it isn’t hard to see where the chaos of the sport comes from. All of those contributing factors play into my love for basketball, and yet there is something more than the chaos that appeals to me. As I mentioned in this article about Roger Federer, I tend to see the beauty and the artistry in sports. My premise in that post was that Federer was fun to watch and root for because his skill level allowed him to turn tennis into more of high-level art than a competition.

Comparing Churchball with tennis’ gentlemanly vibe is about the equivalent of comparing the prim and proper characters of Downton Abbey with the harsh and uneducated cast of iCarly. Churchball is pig wrestling to tennis’ equestrian shows. Yet they both do have a certain beauty to them, at least to me. The aesthetic beauty basketball loses in its rough-and-tumble play is substantial, but I feel it more than overcompensates in another important area: creativity.

You see, in some sports you only have a very limited set of actions you can perform while playing. In tennis, no matter what kind of brilliance you show, it all starts on a basic level with a ball hitting a racquet. Baseball is similar, except with bats (which make those who can appreciate the subtleties of baseball very impressive. I personally think watching it is exceptionally boring, but I can understand how baseball fans might feel the same about tennis.) Basketball is in a whole different category. Yes, the rules of dribbling and the ban on kicking the ball might lessen the amount of possible actions available on the court, but dribbling, once mastered, feels natural, and in truth basketball frees up the two most easily controlled limbs (your arms) to do pretty much whatever you can think of, only limited by the limits of your mind.

That is one of the main reasons that basketball is so fun for me. In every post-up situation, every time a ball-handler and a defender face off, every fast break run, in truth, just about anytime a defender tries to stop an offensive player, creativity goes on. To the creative player goes the victory, in most cases. Sure, things like speed, energy, strength, length, and weight definitely matter, but a smart player can overcome deficiencies in any of these areas simply by being creative.

I discovered this fact, the hidden trump card of creativity, in high school. Up until about my sophomore year, I had always played a pretty standard version of basketball, doing everything by the books, according to the fundamentals. Then I started playing my friends more and more often, and my basketball experiences with a coach present declined sharply. I think it was completely by accident one day that I discovered what was to become my bread-and-butter move. The theory behind it is simple and bases on two facts. The first, that since I am on offense and thus know where I am going, whereas the defender has to wait for my move and then counter it, I will have a split-second advantage at the start of a move. Along with this, the shorter the total duration of the move, the less time a defender has to make up for that difference. Thus I could beat a quicker player simply by virtue of being on offense, as long as my move was concise. The second fact is that a defender can only prevent me from going one way—it’s impossible for one guy to be on both my right and left sides at the same time. If they stop me from going right, the left side is open, and vice versa.

Thus, the patented Aaron Wilson “baby hook” was born. In a nutshell, it goes like this: I work my way into a post-up situation (where I am close to the basket with my back to it and the defender on my back, for the non-basketball-lingo-talking readers out there). My preferred location is as near to the middle of the court as I can get, about three or four feet away from the rim. Once I get the ball, I figure out which side my defender has chosen to prevent me from going, and I spin 180 degrees as fast as I can the other way, and take as large of a step as I can, so that I have moved laterally as much as possible. This spin is usually prefaced with a fake of some kind. While spinning, I throw out my arm as wide as it can go, completely utilizing my wingspan and the length of my legs. Then, from that position, I launch a one-handed shot at the corner of the backboard with a flick of my wrist.

It’s a fairly simple concept, but one that is hardly ever used, since the shot at the end is one of the ugliest ways to finish. Plus the baby hook somewhat difficult to master, but I spent a couple of hours working on it in my driveway, and that’s really all it took. Simply put, although it was odd, it was creative, and that creativity made it devastating. My baby hook alone propelled me from a very sub-par basketball player to being a fairly effective scorer, because no stranger that I ever played against saw it coming, or knew right off how to counter it. It was so…odd of a play that people just weren’t sure what to do. I could go against taller, more skilled players and still have a pretty good chance at getting the ball in the hoop.

Then of course, adaptation sets in. My friends in Wilsonville whom I would usually play with started to figure out the secrets to contesting the shot, and it stopped falling. At BYU, I rapidly discovered that quicker players in more crowded gyms meant that second and third defenders came too fast for my baby hook to work as an effective option, and I had to relegate it as a second or third-choice move instead of my primary weapon on offense. Yet even as one option went away, I started finding other ways to put the ball down the cylinder. The creativity cycle started all over again, as I sought to try to find ways to minimize my weaknesses and exploit my strengths.

In the chaos of basketball, ugly things like a baby hook might pass off as just being that—ugly. But when I look and see innovation on a basketball court, innovation that may appear on the surface as less than aesthetically appealing, I see beauty. Things like Stan the Man’s quick-release jumper, Ian’s deep turnaround jumper, Tallmadge’s lateral jump-shot, Dylan’s turnaround, Dillon’s floater, Allen’s backdoor cuts, and so many other countless examples show the true creative nature of basketball. It is that individualistic stamp that every player puts on the game that makes basketball so much more than the crazy stampede it can seem at times. It makes the game more alive.