Basketball can save the world

Can basketball really save the world? David Hollander, professor of Sport Business at New York University is so convinced that after organizing a course on the subject he wrote a book that is now also arriving in Italy. “How basketball can save the world. Thirteen guiding principles to reimagine what is possible”. There are more than three hundred pages trying to explain to us how thanks to basketball and what this sport teaches us we could all be better off. It’s not necessary to feel like the author who says: “With the ball in my hands, I’m like Arthur extracting Excalibur from the stone. I am transformed. I am another person, in another place. And in that space, the basketball space, life is something more, and I’m better.” The thought from which the book starts is easy to understand: “Basketball is very different from other sports. Its playing space, 28 meters by 15, is far smaller than that of a soccer or football field, which can be four times as long. Basketball players, like people in general in the world, have to move in a shared space. To do this, they have to look closely at each other and be able to understand each other. With no gear, basically in their underpants and tank tops, they are exposed to each other – partner to partner, player to opponent, athlete to spectator – unfiltered and up close. And in basketball, all athletes do everything. No one is forbidden to enter a certain area of ​​the fieldor do more or less than anyone else. There are some non-negotiable principles of basketball which make it different from other sports: the small spacethe requirement that you cannot simply run the ball past or over someone, you have to pass to advance the ball…everyone can do everything, the idea of ​​positionlessness that no other sport has…”. Basketball teaches teamwork, playing as a team, forces you to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and act like them. But it is also something else. Broadens horizons, teaches to work with people and to accept different origins and cultures: “He has transmitted – writes Hollander – and continues to transmit an effective and influential contribution in the most important social debates on racism, accessibility, gender, immigration, culture and the market. No other recreational activity sells more shoes, stimulates more social media and ignites more interest in young people.

The game thrives practically everywhere, on every continent”. There would also be football, to be honest, even there as Arrigo Sacchi has been teaching us for years, the difference is made by the score, the organization, the collaboration between departments, but in football the center forward will never be a goalkeeper. in basketball we have seen point guards also play as centers and make the difference as a certain Magic Johnson taught us. “In basketball, collaboration is not the means to an end, but both the means and the end”, the author theorizes, calling Phil Jackson, man with 11 NBA rings, player, coach and above all guru, to support his thesis: good teams become great teams when their members trust each other enough to subordinate the I to the we. This also applied to Michael Jordan. There would have been no six NBA titles if he hadn’t learned to collaborate with Scottie Pippen ”. In the NBA there have been iconic players like Bill Russell who when asked how to stop this or that giant, always replied: “I couldn’t stop it. My team does.” Collaboration is the first principle. A principle from which everything else starts. After all, this book too considering that at the end it has 51 (yes exactly fifty-one) pages of bibliography where books, articles, speeches are cited that have served to develop the concept from which it all started, namely that basketball can save the world .

So you find out that a Mojave poet like Natalie Diaz wrote that “the basketball was never just a basketball: it was always a full moon in this awful darkness… the court is the only place we will never go hungry: that net is the void we can fill everything the day”. The level goes up. So much so that at some point you meet between the Kevin Durant pages who told the New York Times Magazine: “The whole world seems brighter to me. That’s why I know there has to be something. It’s not just a game. Because I’ve seen my whole world change. Not necessarily for success or money, it’s just that I see people in another way. God has stretched out his hand over every field, everywhere. It’s amazing. I’m moved, because I tell myself, man, I didn’t know that the game could make me think such deep things, give me such deep emotions”. On the other hand, Pope Francis has also intervened on basketball who is not just a big fan of San Lorenzo. Meeting the Italian federation a few years ago he said: “Yours is a sport that lifts you to the sky because, as a famous former player said, it’s a sport that looks up to the basket, and therefore it is a real challenge for all those who are used to living with their eyes always turned to the ground”. The book is a series of steps from basketball to the world and vice versa. It’s as if basketball could pack assists in economics, politics, art. In every basketball behavior Hollander reads a life lesson. His is more than a love of basketball. There’s a bit of madness in his work, but also a lot, a lot of passion. There is true adoration of him even if on the field, he says, he distinguished himself only for the record of technical fouls that he got whistled.