Skyhooks and Singularity

On family, Kansas Basketball, and the Existence of Everything

All these things happened…

My father’s father, from whom I take my middle name, was an ARMY company clerk during the years immediately following the Korean War. He was there in 1957, during the first years of my father’s life (already in Georgia for basic training when my father was born, the family drove south to introduce him to his son before he was shipped overseas). While there, he subsisted on letters from my grandmother, an occasional picture, and the radio, with which he could occasionally get a good signal for a Kansas basketball game.

The day before the 1957 NCAA Championship, he was able to locate an American GI who served as the company’s unofficial bookie, with whom he placed a bet. You see, Kansas was playing North Carolina in the National Championship, and my grandfather was certain Kansas was going to win. We had Wilt Chamberlain, the most dominant basketball player of his generation, a God-among-men, who utilized an impossible-to-defend skyhook to score at will. Unfortunately, head coach Frank McGuire and North Carolina employed a devious scheme. North Carolina played four corners, rotating the ball around the perimeter, extending their offensive possessions long past any amount of time that would be allowed in the shot clock era (among the many rule changes specifically implemented to impede Wilt’s dominance, Kansas fans often contend that a shot clock would have allowed us to notch at least a couple more Championship banners). Wilt was swarmed by defenders throughout, and North Carolina famously prevailed in a triple overtime victory.

My grandfather never got over this.

Decades later, anytime this game was mentioned, he was sure to remind his grandchildren, “I had money on that game!” He’d slam his hand on his armchair and curse under his breath about missed free throws. Despite all the success of Kansas basketball he witnessed through the years, he carried the pain and despair of that loss until the day he died. So too, apparently, did Wilt. He played one more season with the Jayhawks, and left Lawrence under a cloud of shame, not to return to Allen Fieldhouse for another 40 years. He maintained, until the end of his life, that the 1957 Championship game was the most painful loss of an otherwise illustrious career.

There’s a prevailing cosmological theory known as the Initial Singularity, which states that, before the Big Bang, all matter and energy of the Universe were together in a single point of spacetime. Everything that has ever existed, or ever will exist, was together in this moment before history. You were there. Everyone you’ve ever known, or known of, was right there, in that place. Every emotion, every fear, every bliss, every thread of consciousness, all of it existed together.

What is the implication of this?

The Universe will continue to expand. In billions of years, our own Sun will engulf the Earth, and all these things that happened will fade into spacetime, nary a blip on the cosmological radar. The future state of human life and consciousness remain to be seen, but the reality of this moment remains: We exist in a special instant of spacetime in which we have evolved to have consciousness. We understand that we exist, and we understand our own existence well enough to ponder it — how it started, how it will end, and everything in between. We are, in effect, pieces from that Initial Singularity that evolved to a place to look back on it and ask questions.

We are pieces of the Universe trying to understand itself.

All these things happened…

I am not old enough to have memories of the 1988 NCAA Championship, but I am told that my father — by this time a grown man, with a family, living in a home he and my mother purchased with their own money — this man fell to the floor and cried tears of unbridled joy. He sat right there in the living room in Merriam, Kansas and cried, thanking God for making Danny Manning. Somewhere, in the background, Bob Davis’s radio call echoed out of cars and restaurants — “The dream is real! The dream is real!”

As a child, I maintained a genuine belief that I would play basketball at the University of Kansas. I was so beholden to this notion that I imagined my driveway on 55th street in Turner to be James Naismith Court. I would toss the ball off the brick side of the garage, pretending as though Jacque Vaughn himself had just fed me an assist as I cut to the hoop. Another grandfather, my mother’s father, oversaw the project of burying the base of the basketball goal in a concrete slab (we joked that, in the event of a tornado, one would only need to hang on to the goal for safety). Our neighbor, Lloyd Peck, a devoted KU fan himself, heightened the realism by painting a full regulation key and free throw line over the concrete. I’m not sure he even asked my parents’ permission to do this. One day, I came home from school to find that he had purchased and strung a crimson and blue net from the goal. The guys from school would come to play, and we had our own little Allen Fieldhouse right there in KCK.

I never got over this.

This past school year, I coached basketball for the first time — 7th grade boys at Summit Trail Middle School in Olathe, Kansas. For the most part, I followed the playbook of the 8th grade coach, but every once in a while I threw in my own scheme; in particular, during certain inbound scenarios. There was one we called “Jayhawk.” Starting under the opponent’s basket, the inbounder would throw a high-arching entry pass to a tall center, while a guard or small forward would cut out beyond the arc, before immediately cutting back to the basket. The inbounder would step out and screen for the cutter, hopefully, leaving him wide open under the basket for a layup. Self ran this inbound routinely for Perry Ellis. We did it successfully exactly one time, prompting a burst of excitement from our bench, and a triumphant fist pump from myself. I don’t even remember if we won the game.

Before each game, I’d take the team back to the locker room, we’d go over a few more details of the game plan, then we’d head back out to the court. The student section would cheer as they took the floor, while I trailed behind. I deserved no ovation, but usually a few students would cheer me on as well, and it was always right then, in that moment, I’d perform a short pregame ritual: Walking to my spot on the bench, I would clasp my hands together in a fist, open my fingers, and blow warm air into my palms. It seems the same thing that told me Jacque Vaughn was really passing me the ball, the same thing that brought us together at the beginning of time, that same thing also told me that I was Bill Self.

There was much talk through the college basketball postseason of this tournament run being “for” something. Players frequently cited the 2020 squad as a motivation for their efforts. That team was in the unfortunate position of being #1 in both the Associated Press and Coaches Poll when the world stopped for the COVID-19 pandemic. Viral video after the game showed Bill Self symbolically gift his National Champions hat to that team’s leading scorer, Devon Dotson. “This should be yours,” he told him, before bringing him in for a hug.

Others cited the impact of Bill Self’s father, Bill Sr., who passed away during the season. The following day, Self coached the Jayhawks to a come-from-behind win against in-state rival Kansas State; a game they were, incidentally, down by 16 points. Self spoke a mantra to his team, passed down from his father: “Don’t worry about the mules, just load the wagon.” The motto stuck, and was apparently recalled by players when they found themselves in similar circumstances during the National Championship.

Maybe it was for all those other Jayhawks who never got their shot. Paul Pierce certainly thinks so. The night before the game, The Truth himself spoke to the Jayhawks, telling them that they had an opportunity to do something he never had the opportunity to do. “You represent for guys like me that didn’t have a chance to play in this game. So when you go out there and win, I feel like I’m winning.” He wasn’t alone. Sure, there were a few in New Orleans with rings of their own — Danny Manning, Mario Chalmers, and Brandon Rush. But there were many others whose careers ended in grief — Drew Gooden, Nick Collison, Wayne Simien, and Christian Moody, to name a few. Other players who fell short of a title tweeted their excitement in the hours after the win — Frank Mason, Joel Embiid, Scot Pollard, Devonte Graham, and Perry Ellis. All of them celebrating like they had won something; like it was their victory.

My most recurrent childhood fantasy was of the Kansas Jayhawks winning the National Championship. I wanted, more than anything, for my own “the dream is real” moment. By the time it happened in 2008, I was a college student at the University of Kansas, and like many, I experienced the moment in a state of shock. My whole childhood was so rife with Kansas basketball disappointments that, when the Jayhawks found themselves down 9 with two minutes remaining, I quietly resigned myself to a fate all too familiar. The comeback, the Miracle, was all such a sudden jolt to the program, the fanbase, it felt hard to appreciate it as it was happening. I certainly did my best. Shortly after the 2008 NCAA Championship victory, I wrote this:

“As I watch the last remnants of my childhood fade away, I now realize what is important. KU basketball really has nothing to do with basketball. I’m not a college athlete. I’ll never coach a college basketball team. I’ll probably never be a college basketball commentator. I will be a husband. I will be a father. I will love my family. I learned these things in Allen Fieldhouse. I learned these things in the upper decks of Kemper Arena. I learned these things in a living room in Kansas City, KS.”

Those lessons are still pertinent, and I’m proud that I wrote it. But there’s something else I didn’t anticipate; an underlying sentiment I got wrong. I don’t even think I understood what it was until Monday night.

The day after the game, I showed my father another viral video, this one of Final Four Most Outstanding Player Ochai Agbaji embracing his mother shortly after victory. He is sobbing, his mother holding him, whispering in his ear, words that will remain between them. His father stands behind them, reassuring, “You’re a champion.” Agbaji is obviously physically larger than both his parents, but there’s a strange smallness to him in this moment. Perhaps the best player in college basketball this year, Agbaji, for only an instant, seems weak, feeble. As my father watches this, he smiles and offers one remark: “He’s just a kid.”

When the final buzzer sounded on Monday night, something happened inside me that hadn’t even occurred in 2008. Without hesitation, without even consciously being aware of it, I fell to my own living room floor, and I sobbed uncontrollably. Perhaps I convinced myself that the tears of joy were for a basketball game, but as I look back on it, only days later, I wonder if, for just a moment, my own daughter got to watch her father be ten years old again. I wonder if my mother saw the same boy from the driveway on 55th street. Many times, my parents consoled me after heartbreaking KU losses, in 1997, 1998, and again in 2003. Maybe Paul Pierce was right. Maybe this one was for all of us. Every single one of us, every Jayhawk fan all over the world, together for a moment, a point of singularity.

I am a husband. I am a father. I was right about that, though it has brought me more happiness than my 21-year-old self could have ever fathomed. What I got wrong in 2008 was that notion of the “last remnants of my childhood fading away.” And it’s not just that I now spend much of my life trying to act cool around 7th graders. It’s the idea that, somehow, I would get over this; that these dreams would fade, and I would grow not to care. The truth, that Paul Pierce understood, and my grandfather understood, is that we are all children of something, and we never get over it.

What is that something?

In 2022, I’ve lived long enough to accept that I won’t ever have the answers to these questions. But when I watch that moment between Agbaji and his mother, I cannot help but think of my wife holding our daughter on Monday night, and my sister holding her daughter, and I wonder if any of those moments are really all that different. I wonder if my own mother and father think of those tearful nights in ‘97 and ‘98. I see videos of Mario Chalmers and Paul Pierce and Drew Gooden, and dozens of former players filled with jubilation, and I think of my cousin, seated next to me the whole game, now standing, his hands on his head, overcome with joy. Neighbors cheer. Fireworks erupt. Mass Street floods again, and students storm James Naismith Court. All of it, the same joy. All of us together, in singularity.

I step out on to my front lawn, and look up at the stars, at this existence we’re all a part of, a piece of the Universe pondering itself.

The last points Kansas scored were for David McCormack. Up 1, with less than a minute to play, Bill Self ignored every season-long criticism of his big man and went back to the set he has used thousands of times. McCormack posted up, received the entry, backed his man down, and towered into the lane, off his feet, into the air up there, a beautiful, poetic skyhook. I’d seen it before. It looked like old, grainy, black and white footage of another KU center, performing the same graceful maneuver, not really all that long ago.

Somewhere in spacetime, a company clerk in Korea with a picture of his son in his pocket cracks a smile, for reasons he’ll never understand.

And all these things happened.

The dream is real.

Nate Carter is a 7th Grade English teacher, and lifelong Jayhawks fan. He graduated from the University of Kansas in 2010, and lives with his wife and daughter in Shawnee, KS.