The Poetics of Mashburn

The mid-twentieth century French philosopher Gaston Bachelard is a favorite of my father’s. I recall vividly books by or on Bachelard strewn about our split-level ranch for a few of the mid-80s years Dad was index-finger-only typing out his dissertation on our silver Texas Instruments machine — the result a big, fat, impenetrable (to me, at least) treatise on the Frenchman’s philosophy and its relationship to higher education.

While the content of the Bachelard books — hell, even the descriptions on the outside covers — was lost on me (due to a typical American kid’s short attention span and/or disinterest in phenomenology at the age of 14), I was always picking them up and looking them over. As objects, they were of special, unknowable importance to my father — the things that occupied so much of his non-fatherly time back then. Even back then, one stood out to me even for the simple beauty of its title: The Poetics of Space.

The Poetics of Space is a philosophical rumination on architecture and the creation, manipulation and use of individual space. It’s one of those philosophy books only truly dedicated students get through, full of phrases that you have to read about 10 times before they make any sense, and often even that may not suffice. Take for example, Chapter 1 (which is about as far as I ever got back then): “Through dreams, the various dwelling places in our lives co-penetrate and retain the treasures of former days.” I mean, I could get it but I didn’t really get it.

Years later I finally had occasion to actually read Bachelard’s 1958 work as part of research for a paper I sought to write. It was hard slogging for me — I am by nature a dreamer, but was never much of a philosophizer — but I muscled through. Thinking back now, no small part of it was that kind of soft competition with/reflection on one’s father that smart, ambitious sons of smart, ambitious fathers experience at a certain age. For me, it was also about being the son of an academic, a career choice I had the ambition but, it turned out, not the stomach for. Accordingly, the content of my paper was fine, maybe even interesting in parts, but predictably I couldn’t get my heart into it and never really adequately finished it, so it never went anywhere. Let the Generation X jokes ensue …

But if I was not philosophically inclined, I had connected with a central premise of the book and of Bachelard’s vision: that we are prone to focusing on superficial “images” we take of things and that it is those images that keep us from a deeper understanding of the persons, places or things themselves. Trapped and limited by these images, it is only through working past or around them that we can better know the objects of our examination. And in order to do this, we must stop contemplating them with a purpose — with a false objectivity — in mind and instead allow ourselves to be engulfed by what Bachelard terms reverie — a sort of daydream state in which we let our mind wander the contours of our subject, allowing our minds to wander with only a loose focus on the object as a guide. It’s something we all do, something the most daydreamy of us do to distraction pretty much all the time. But it’s also deceptively simple.

Being a dreamy type anyway, I fell in love with this idea. Lounging just beyond the fuzzy edges in order to better know is as beautiful as it is natural to me. Bachelard set out to explain reverie by consideration of the four basic elements, beginning with fire.

Me? I’m no philosopher. No, I’ll go with multi-dimensional small forwards. And one, in particular.

Largely forgotten to all but Kentucky basketball fans, onetime Wildcats forward Jamal Mashburn was in his heyday a transcendent and revolutionary player. He was also my first real basketball crush. Mashburn was the player who took Kentucky a giant leap forward in credibility as the first elite national recruit to buy into Rick Pitino’s sales pitch when the beleaguered program was laboring under massive sanctions. As such, the slightly doughy forward from the Bronx was anointed as the program savior.

Like most 18-year old kids, Mashburn was still undisciplined and raw. But he was also really, really good. Like, eventual national Player of the Year good. He proved to be uncommonly strong, mobile, hardworking and humble. He was, in short, a joy to watch grow under Pitino’s tutelage.

It was not so long ago that the idea of a basketball player over 6-foot-5 who was not only capable of but encouraged to shoot and actually make deep jump shots was a novelty. For most of basketball history, you were either an inside player or you were an outside player, and no coach in his right mind wanted his few coordinated big men drifting out to the perimeter or handling the ball in the open floor. There were exceptions to this rule. And the list reads like a who’s who of basketball royalty: Oscar Robertson, Larry Bird, Bernard King.

But those are guys who come along once a generation. Mashburn wasn’t necessarily legendary in that way. Instead, what was important about Mashburn is that he was in many ways just another really good player, but one whose skills were a rare hybrid of post play and perimeter touch. And in Pitino, Mashburn had a perfect coach for his game.

For the most part, the late ’80s and early ’90s were still the days of the old guard of coaches. Ever in pursuit of that career-capping season, those coaching legends were loathe to alter an approach that had brought them to the pinnacles of their profession. And as rules began to change, these coaches — guys like Bob Knight, Gene Keady and Denny Crum — begrudgingly adapted to the changes brought by a shorter shot clock and the new three-point line.

Given this climate, it’s easy to forget now just what an innovator Pitino was back then. His wasn’t a gimmick system like the run-and-gun Loyola Marymount style espoused by Paul Westhead, nor was it rigid in its execution. When Pitino had shorter, less athletic players, he understandably chucked it up from deep. Once he was able to recruit the kind of athletes that would come to define the program — Mashburn, Antoine Walker, Walter McCarty, Rod Rhodes — his schemes adapted, too. Sure, there were still lots of three-pointers, but they were more liberally mixed in with set plays and a more viable interior presence. And there was, of course, that ever-present defensive pressure.

But if Pitino was great for the versatile New York forward, that defensive pressure and its resultant offense made Mashburn perfect for the Pitino system, too. At 6’8” (6’10” with his early-90s fade), “The Monster Mash” was big enough to rebound and bang inside, but versatile enough and a good enough passer to run the break from the middle of the court if needed, a must in Pitino’s trapping press. The value of a player who can catch and score on the block and bury shots from behind the arc is hard to overstate — even harder for a system that by design needs to have rotating parts all across the floor.

Mashburn, and players like him, was at the forefront of a change in the culture of the college game. On the way down were grind-it-out half-court offensive schemes. In were flexible offenses that could fast break and get easy buckets off their defense and whose players could nearly all run and shoot. The 1980s was a big man’s era — Ewing, Sampson, Olajuwon, Ellison. In part because of the three-point line, the 90s saw the emergence of the mobile big man, the inside-outside combo forward and the elite shooting guard. To wit, from 1990–2000, the NCAA champion’s leading scorer was a center only one time, in 1993 when Eric Montross and UNC beat Michigan.

But as Bachelard posited, relying only on the image keeps us from truly knowing what we observe. Thus, descriptions of a player’s importance or viability don’t really capture any of the poetry of watching him play basketball. The grace and fluidity that Jamal Mashburn exhibited on the court was a sort of ballet — spin after spin in the post, a wicked crossover with no wasted moves, a hitch-less over-the-head shooting motion off the dribble or the catch. With a defender on his hip, Mashburn would spin one way, then reverse on his pivot foot the other way and head-fake before ducking under the rising defender or effortlessly shooting with his off-hand. And he could do the same maneuver in the other direction.

When he caught the ball as the trailer on the break, as he often did in Pitino’s press, Mashburn would cross-over his defender — usually a power forward unaccustomed to playing 25 feet out — enter the paint area and loft a running teardrop one-hander, all in one motion. Or, without hesitation, he would plant his right foot an inch or so behind the three-point line and step into a jump shot that was pure nearly 40% of the time.

Not possessing of truly outstanding leaping ability or a particularly long wingspan, Mashburn made the most of what he did have: uncommon agility, a boxer’s natural footwork and timing, quick hands and no fear.

Never was this package more fully displayed than in the Sweet 16 of the 1993 NCAA tournament against Wake Forest. Again, while most folks have understandably forgotten his performance, if they ever even saw it, no Kentucky fan over a certain age ever will. It is rare to get to witness a truly gifted basketball player playing his very best on a big stage. And Mashburn’s first-half performance against the Deamon Deacons and their own similarly built and skilled forward Rodney Rogers was among the greatest I have ever witnessed.

Using his whole arsenal on offense, Mashburn — with a little help from his teammates — humiliated Wake Forest, going up 20–4 and never taking the foot off the gas. Mashburn scored 23 first-half points on a perfect 5-for-5 from three-point range and never saw action in the final 10 minutes of the game. But, again, it wasn’t just the statistical evidence that made it memorable. It was more that it was as close to offensive basketball gets to art.

There was no doubt that Mashburn would go pro following his junior campaign. There was nothing left for him to prove at Kentucky, and Pitino was ready to fill his shoes with a number of elite prospects. That’s what coaches like Pitino do. Mashburn had all the skills he would need for the NBA already. He was among the new breed of multi-position players the NBA coveted. He was drafted fourth overall in 1993 , behind Chris Webber, the freakish Shawn Bradley and Anfernee Hardaway. Webber and Hardaway were also rare combinations of size and agility, and both would prove it in successful pro careers.

In part because of guys like Jamal Mashburn, today we take for granted that 6’8” players can and should hit threes. Those that cannot, those whose throwback interior skills makes them in-the-paint players, are often dubbed “tweeners” — as in between positions — and they mostly grade out as good college players who lack the athletic ability or size to make the jump to the professional ranks.

But even ardent college hoops enthusiasts too easily get suckered into grading out players’ abilities based on their future pro potential or physical attributes. There is a temptation to fall into the trap of seeing the college game as something of a minor league for the NBA, and its players in a constant audition. This does a disservice to the players and, more importantly, to the college game overall. Because what makes the college version of the game most intriguing is precisely its fuzzy edges, its imperfections, its beautiful flaws. In NCAA basketball, “tweeners” can be more valuable than a better future prospect, and at this level, it’s routine for guys who are too short, too fat, too slow, too whatever to dominate a better athletic specimen on both ends of the floor.

We do, like Bachelard intoned, get caught up on our perceptions, on our images, of what a player is or is not instead of reveling in the simple pursuit of just watching and appreciating him, not judging or grading at all. But it’s not easy to do. Especially if you watch a lot of teams and a lot of players. You naturally begin to pick and choose and compare. Styles invariably contrast.

For me — and I wager for most folks who view college basketball through its own prism and not simply as a subdivision of professional basketball — it’s important to stop grading and just watch, just enjoy, just let the game happen. We don’t do it enough. If you make the effort to let go, to fall into reverie while you watch, you’ll see how a guy like Gary McGhee at Pittsburgh, or Demetri McCamey of Illinois or Levoy Allen at Temple gets it done despite supposedly lacking the “it.” Stop listening to talking heads tell you a player’s value and start letting that value, that basketball gift, overcome you.

For me, there was one player whose style, abilities and bearing were such that falling into reverie was easy. Sure, in this case it was the best player for my favorite team. Maybe for you, it’s the same.

Or maybe instead it’s some gritty walk-on, or an undersized fifth-year senior or a gangly freshman who was lightly recruited or a coaching style or none of these. Whatever the story, next time you watch try and let the poetics of basketball help you better understand what you are seeing rather than letting what you already know define the game. It’s a beautiful, if unfamiliar, dream.

THREE TO WATCH THIS WEEK:

Syracuse at Pittsburgh: While the Big East may be annoyingly omnipresent, thanks in part to too many teams and too many East Coast media types, this one should be a doozy. It might not be gorgeous basketball, but it will definitely be intense. Monday at 7:30 pm, ESPN.

Mississippi State at Georgia: Mississippi State has been a train wreck all season long, with enigmatic big man Renardo Sidney and starting point guard Dee Bost missing long stretches of time and looking spotty once back. Finally whole, the Bulldogs (in maroon) can still be the class of the SEC West (which isn’t saying much). Whether MSU is good enough to still make a run at the NCAA tournament may well depend on its ability to win games against better-regarded Eastern Division teams like Georgia, whose best three players are good enough to keep the Bulldogs (in red) on the cusp of the top 25 the rest of the season. Saturday at 4 pm, ESPN Full Court/ESPN3.com.

Indiana State at Wichita State: Actually locating this one on your TV might be tough, but if you can find it, you’ll get to see two of the Missouri Valley Conference leaders go at it. Both squads are cut from the same cloth — heavy on upperclassmen and well-balanced on offense. This one might not decide the league yet, but it’s mid-major, Midwest hoops at its late-January best. Saturday at 8:05, Satellite TV (Kansas 22).

Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.