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10-26-2007, 06:10 PM
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October 28, 2007
Not to Get Too Mystical About It
By CHIP BROWN
Steve Nash sat down on a playground bench in Washington Market park, like all the other tired Manhattan fathers.
It was a summer evening, late in August, and somewhere in the scrum of kids roiling under the monkey bars was one of his 3-year-old twin girls, Lola, and her nanny. A rubber ball came bounding by with a pre-K hotshot in hot pursuit. He seemed like the sort of kid who in a few years would be shooting baskets behind a school, pretending he was Steve Nash. Nash from the corner!
Nash driving the lane! Nash in the media room talking to a reporter!
At the sight of the kid, the wariness melted out of Nash’s blue eyes. It was easy to imagine the N.B.A. star himself at that age, before he had his paper route, before the local newspaper clips began to trickle in, and the trophies, and the fans, and the Sports Illustrated covers, and the instructional DVDs, and the $11-million-a-year contract and now the 11 seasons as a pro in which he has enjoyed every success but a championship, his one remaining goal as a professional athlete. The hint of sweetness that crossed his stoic face said he knew how joyful and profound the rapport of a boy and a ball could be. Nearly all the canonical stories of Nash’s ascent to the pantheon of N.B.A. point guards feature some kind of ball, whether it is the round mound of wadded-up tape he and his younger brother Martin used to play hall-hockey with, or the basketball he took out to shoot on Christmas Eve in the rain at the junior-high-school court behind his parents’ house in Victoria, British Columbia, or the tennis ball he once dribbled around Santa Clara University on his way to class, or the soccer ball he once kept aloft for 600 consecutive kicks until he collapsed. A ball had been the talisman of what he called “my dream.”
Then again, maybe what the ball-crazed kid provoked had as much to do with the fact that Nash often found himself in the position of pretending to be Steve Nash, too: “Steve Nash” the brand pushing the ball up court on the Wheaties box or hawking watches and sneakers and bottles of Clearly Canadian water; “Steve Nash” the white, non-dunking, four-time all-star whose back-to-back Most Valuable Player Awards won him the unwanted role of minority-race champion in a predominantly black league; “Steve Nash” the self-effacing Canadian long shot whose life story had been puréed into an edifying fable about Chasing Your Dreams and Working Hard and Always Giving Back, and in some parts of his home country had been polished to such a saintly sheen that people called him Can-Je, short for “Canadian Jesus.” Nash himself sometimes seemed flustered by this double team of person and persona, struggling to reconcile his sardonic sense of humor and lethal competitive instincts with the humanitarian concerns that obliged him to ladle out all kinds of canned corn at charity events and celebrity appearances. What can you say without playing yourself false, or leaving your body completely, when zoo officials who have paid you the compliment of naming a 12-pound female Bengal tiger cub in your honor put the razor-clawed kitty-cat in your arms and stick a microphone in your face? (Shrewdly, Nash channeled Tiger Woods (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/tiger_woods/index.html?inline=nyt-per): “It’s pretty special.”) Or for that matter, what about the play-killing questions routinely lobbed by sportswriters after the game?
“It’s always the same three questions,” Nash said. “ ‘What do you think about the game tonight?’ ‘How do you feel about the game tomorrow night?’ ‘What do you think you’ll have to do differently next time?’ I started off trying to answer honestly, and then I tried being ironic, but that didn’t really work either. . . . ”
In the park, a stranger approached, hand extended.
“Steve Nash!” the man said.
“Hey, man,” Nash said, shaking his hand after a quick assessment.
“I love your game.”
“Thanks.”
Nash’s game had been on the shelf for three months, since the Phoenix Suns (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/phoenixsuns/index.html?inline=nyt-org) were muscled out of the second round of the Western Conference playoffs by the San Antonio Spurs (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/sanantoniospurs/index.html?inline=nyt-org), who went on to win the N.B.A. championship against the overmatched Cleveland Cavaliers (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/clevelandcavaliers/index.html?inline=nyt-org). It was a bitter end for the Suns’ championship hopes, and for Nash especially. A Game 1 collision with Spurs guard Tony Parker had split his nose so badly that Nash had to leave the court at a crucial moment in the fourth quarter. It took six stitches to close the bloody gash. In Game 4 the Spurs forward Robert Horry forechecked him into the scorer’s table, and the ensuing melee cost the Suns their big men when Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw were suspended one game each for leaving the bench. Losing the series 4-2 was a defeat that would “forever haunt us,” Nash said at the time. In the months since, he’d consoled himself with the distractions of New York, the adopted off-season city where he has spent the last three summers with his wife, Alejandra, and their twins, Lola and Bella.
“I’ve had a great summer,” he was saying now as he stretched out on the bench. He was wearing cargo shorts, a gray T-shirt and laceless black Converse sneakers. “I watched Tiger Woods and Roger Federer (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/roger_federer/index.html?inline=nyt-per). I went to movies and restaurants. I had great conversations.”
He stayed in shape mainly by working out with a trainer and playing soccer at Pier 40 off the Hudson River with a team sponsored by Phebe’s Tavern & Grill in the East Village. When he took up basketball in the eighth grade it was for “social reasons,” a means of hanging out with his friends. Being able to use his hands felt almost like cheating, because the sport he loved best was soccer. “ ‘Goal’ was my first word,” he told me, a vintage Nash brand detail found in nearly every profile of him. Nash’s English father, John, played soccer professionally in South Africa, where Nash was born; his Welsh mother, Jean, had various careers as an airline ticket agent, secretary and special-education teacher. Sickened by apartheid, they emigrated to Canada when Steve was one, eventually settling in Victoria.
“We had one little TV you had to turn on with tweezers, and even on Christmas Day we would watch the N.B.A.,” recalled Joann Nash, who was born after Steve and Martin. “When I was eight, I could recite the audio commentary on the Michael Jordan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/michael_jordan/index.html?inline=nyt-per) highlight video. It was burned into my mind.” Joann, who recently married Manny Malhotra, a center for the Columbus Blue Jackets (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/hockey/nationalhockeyleague/columbusbluejackets/index.html?inline=nyt-org) of the National Hockey League, had been captain of the University of Victoria soccer team. Martin still earns his living as a midfielder for the Vancouver Whitecaps, a first-division team in the United Soccer League. In the family, the source of the kids’ competitive fervor is not ascribed to their pro-athlete dad but to Mom, who can be counted on to dig deep for victory whether the game is tennis, Pictionary or simply beating other shoppers to the only open checkout lane at the grocery store.
“Steve makes a mockery of Pictionary,” Joann said with a forlorn note in her voice. “He won’t take it seriously.”
Nash’s soul-salving summer had already included a trip to Thailand, and some time back home in July, where he opened a sports club and hosted a charity basketball game in Vancouver. He had spent three days in New Jersey tutoring college and high-school point guards at a camp organized by Nike. He also produced a video for Nike, with a crew shooting him as he legged around Manhattan on his skateboard. He sat for an interview with Charlie Rose (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/charlie_rose/index.html?inline=nyt-per), confiding in his self-deprecating way that there were other N.B.A. point guards who “are more talented than me physically. . . . I say to myself, ‘How do I have the same job as this guy?’ ”
At 33, Nash has defied the actuarial trends of point-guard mortality. He has gotten steadily better with age and insists he is now not just smarter but quicker than when the Phoenix Suns, amid a crescendo of boos, made him the 15th pick in the first round of the 1996 N.B.A. draft. The statistical evidence bears him out. Last season Nash put up his finest numbers, better than some of those he posted in his two M.V.P. years. He may not have the obvious physical gifts of some point guards, explosiveness or vertical leap, but his repertoire of inventive shots and ballhandling skills, his break-neck transitions and barn-swallow zigzagging through the tall timber of big men in the paint bespeaks exceptional body control. “His core strength is off the charts,” the Phoenix Suns’ coach, Mike D’Antoni, told me. “Steve’s balance is so good he can stand on an exercise ball.”
I’d been struck by Nash’s poise, the mental counterpart of his physical balance. Talking to Charlie Rose, the word Nash had picked to describe his ideal state of mind on court was “unflappable.” Had he always been able to cast a cool eye at pressure?
“My first and second years in the N.B.A., I used to get really nervous in a tight game,” he said. “But now I wait for that moment when things are really close — that’s what I really love. Having the ball in my hands and the responsibility makes me feel calm and open. Not to have that, not to get to that point in a game, would feel really. . . .” He paused to find the precise word. “ . . . Really confining,” he said.
“Was there one shot or game when you first felt that way?”
“Probably it built over time — I don’t want it to sound like there’s anything too mystical about it.”
In a few days he was flying to England to visit relatives and meet with the officers of the Tottenham Hotspurs to discuss business opportunities with the soccer club. “I’d like to be an owner,” he says. “It’s something I could do for the rest of my life after my little window of popularity dies.” In September he was leading a group of N.B.A. players to China for a series of charity events.
We had been talking in the park for almost an hour now, and I was beginning to appreciate the elusive quality that the author Jack McCallum, who spent a year with the Phoenix Suns for his book “:07 Seconds or Less,” described as Nash’s “mysterious Canadian reticence.” Even though Nash is one of the more introspective and intelligent athletes in the N.B.A. — a player who got a lot of criticism for speaking out against the war in Iraq in 2003, and had the sportswriter fraternity in a dither because his winter reading list included bodice-rippers like “The Communist Manifesto” and Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” — it didn’t seem that what made him interesting was coming out in conversation. Part of the reason may have been that what made Nash exceptional was his temperamental inclination to downplay what made him exceptional. In interviews he often conveys a mix of humility and politic self-restraint.
As Nash began to fidget on the bench — maybe his back was tightening up, or he was thinking about Lola’s supper, or he was just tired of answering questions and the full-court press of chores entailed in being “Steve Nash” — I remembered something his agent, Bill Duffy, had told me: “With Steve it’s all about the flow.” Flow, of course, being shorthand for that state of mind that artists and athletes strive to enter into, and which in full flood entails an ecstatic expansion of consciousness that releases them from confines of the self and produces crowning moments of creation and performance — not to get too mystical about it. Maybe the truest picture of Nash depended on seeing him in motion, in the flow; whether he was threading a half-court bounce pass or exploiting his small window of fame to get potable water to third world villages or practicing surreptitious acts of generosity, like slipping spending money to the coaches to give to his less wealthy basketball teammates at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Enacting himself, as it were, as opposed to talking about himself.
Three-Point Land and Beyond
“Hey, rooks,” Nash shouted from the back of the bus idling in the garage of the Regent Beijing hotel. “What time does the 9:30 bus leave?”
It was a trick question, of course, but the “rooks” — D. J. Strawberry Jr. and Alando Tucker, both new members of the Phoenix Suns — froze.
“They told us to go back and get our umbrellas,” said Strawberry, a shooting guard and the son of the former New York Mets (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/baseball/majorleague/newyorkmets/index.html?inline=nyt-org) star outfielder Darryl Strawberry (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/darryl_strawberry/index.html?inline=nyt-per).
“Let’s go!” Nash hollered to no one in particular. Apparently more stragglers were still fetching umbrellas. It was nearly 10 a.m., a rainy Thursday in mid-September, though in truth you couldn’t be sure what time it was from the coal-and-car-fume miasma obscuring China’s capital.
Among the two dozen or so passengers on the bus — agents, trainers, friends, a reality-show film crew — were eight N.B.A. players: the rooks Strawberry and Tucker; the 20-year-old Detroit Pistons (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/detroitpistons/index.html?inline=nyt-org) forward Amir Johnson; Paul Davis, a 23-year-old center with the L.A. Clippers (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/losangelesclippers/index.html?inline=nyt-org); Chuck Hayes, a 24-year-old forward with the Houston Rockets (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/houstonrockets/index.html?inline=nyt-org); and the established stars like the Suns’ Leandro Barbosa (the “Brazilian Blur,” who last year won the N.B.A.’s Sixth Man Award); Carmelo Anthony (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/carmelo_anthony/index.html?inline=nyt-per), the outstanding forward for the Denver Nuggets (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/denvernuggets/index.html?inline=nyt-org) who was one of the top scorers in the league last year; and Baron Davis, the street-Shakespeare (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/william_shakespeare/index.html?inline=nyt-per) point guard who led the Golden State Warriors on an improbable run that was the dramatic highlight of the N.B.A. playoffs last spring.
And of course Nash, riding a flow unlike any he’d ever caught on the basketball court, as much a celebrity as an athlete now, his Q-score jacked up by photos with Sharon Stone (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/sharon_stone/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and Donald Trump (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/donald_j_trump/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and the M.V.P. shout-out in the lyrics of Nelly Furtado’s hit “Promiscuous” and the GQ “baller of the year” spread featuring an epicene Nash with overly sculpted hair. The fame that had recently produced the tribute of his face stenciled into an Arizona cornfield had also given him the power to “make a difference.” Befitting a point guard, he seemed to be feeling his way through celebrity, into that seam between his identity in a profession that had defined his existence since the eighth grade, when he prophetically informed his mother that one day he would play in the N.B.A., and whatever he might become or do next, out of uniform, away from the confines of the court and the quest for championships.
As the impresario who put the whole China show together, with crucial behind-the-scenes help from Bill Duffy and a team of people from his company, BDA Sports Management, Nash had suspended his mysterious Canadian reticence in hopes of improving the flow of a sightseeing trip to the Forbidden City. Nash broached the idea of the Beijing tour with Yao Ming (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/yao_ming/index.html?inline=nyt-per) after a game with the Rockets in Phoenix last March. Yao was thrilled by the prospect of Nash and a pick-up crew of players coming to China to help raise money for charity. Bing Hu, the Chinese founder of a high-end architecture development company in Scottsdale, Ariz., had offered to fly the cast to China on his Falcon 900 jet. Eventually an agenda was set, calling for a four-day barnstorm of press conferences, practices, luncheons, a charity auction and black-tie banquet, sightseeing, photo ops, random cultural encounters and unofficial karaoke pub crawls, along with a televised charity hoops match that would pit Western Hemisphere pros (the Nashionals?) against Yao and the Chinese National team, and would, as it turned out, draw a Chinese TV audience more than three times the size of the horde agglomerated by the Super Bowl.
The Nashionals had landed in China the night before, Sept. 12, and had come shuffling in glassy-eyed from the airport, luggage in tow, to a surreal press conference at the Regent Beijing. Backed by a drop cloth splattered with corporate logos, they sat Last Supper-style along a table onstage, peering out at a bank of eight TV cameras and some 60 Chinese journalists. An earsplitting remix of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” pumped through speakers.
“I just want to say that we’re here to help out the children in your community,” Nash said. He was wearing below-the-knee shorts, a gray shirt and, as he had in Washington Market Park, black laceless sneakers. “I think so highly of Yao as a person and a player that I asked if he’d be willing to host some of us to come over here and give back. I want to thank the guys for making the long trip.”
The proceeds would go to build schools and help impoverished girls in the Xinjiang Kezilesu Keerkzi Autonomous Region, a vast and sparsely settled area in Western China, which most people would be hard-pressed to find on a map, much less pronounce. This was Nash’s first trip to China, and it wasn’t unreasonable to wonder whether his interest in charity work thousands of miles from home in an alien culture where he doesn’t understand the language was really a heartfelt reflection of altruistic values. Pieties about the importance of Giving Back are so routinely coughed up you’d think that if N.B.A. stars didn’t have such wicked cross-over dribbles or a faculty for tomahawk dunks they’d all be following in the footsteps of Albert Schweitzer. The benefits that redound in P.R. brownie points and I.R.S. income-tax offsets are seldom mentioned.
But Nash often speaks of his interest in “the global village” and doing what he can wherever he can. The Steve Nash Foundation has focused on programs that help “under-served” children and promote worthwhile social and environmental causes, like low-impact development and eco-friendly construction. (The rugs in Nash’s new sports club in Vancouver are made of recycled athletic shoelaces.) His foundation has also set up safe drinking water projects in Nicaragua and Guatemala and recently underwrote a hospital ward for neonates in Paraguay, where Nash’s wife is from.
Most of the rooks and younger players on the trip were just curious to see a patch of China for the first time; some of the more established stars were eager to enhance their brand visibility in the largest basketball market outside the United States. One third of all hits to the N.B.A. Web site come from Chinese Internet users, and in recent years the N.B.A. has made a concerted effort to capitalize on what is already China’s multibillion-dollar love affair with basketball, going so far as to publish a partial list of N.B.A. players’ Chinese nicknames. (Nash is not on it, for some reason, perhaps because the Chinese haven’t solved the conundrum of his mysterious Canadian reticence, either. But Carmelo Anthony is known as Sweet Melon, and in what is clearly the most telling evidence of Chinese basketball acumen, Tim Duncan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/tim_duncan/index.html?inline=nyt-per), nemesis of Nash and his fellow Suns, is known as Stone Buddha.)
Nash was as happy to have the good publicity as the next multi-millionaire, but the trip was clearly part of a course in continuing education. He studied sociology at Santa Clara University, where he did enough to get by. “I basically majored in basketball,” he told me. He reads during the season when the team is on the road with time to fill, and he is eager to travel abroad during the off-season, pressed, it often seems, by a deep curiosity and thirst for knowledge that the strictures of his N.B.A. dream didn’t give him the luxury of indulging as a younger man. Of course it was a two-edged sword. The celebrity that made it possible to come to China also brought the unscholarly and flow-impeding distraction of having to stop every 10 seconds to pose for pictures or sign an autograph.
The microphone was passed to all the players, including the rooks. Suddenly flashbulbs went off in the back of the room and a hubbub broke out. Yao Ming, the colossus of Chinese basketball, had unexpectedly arrived. He thundered in wearing a white polo shirt as long as a crib sheet. Photographers herded Nash and Yao together, Nash, 6-foot-3, Yao, 7-foot-6. Side by side they looked like a comparative bar graph of Chinese and Canadian economic growth rates.
Now, a day later, fully provisioned with umbrellas, the Nashionals’ bus pulled into the traffic of Beijing’s Dongcheng district and headed west toward the Forbidden City. Arriving at the Divine Military Genius Gate, the players filed out into the toxic drizzle, and into the vast palace complex that is the heart of Chinese civilization. Nash stepped out of the flow of tourists at one point and stood under an umbrella by a parapet to make a phone call. When he turned around he was ringed by a semicircle of Chinese sightseers, more interested in him than the gargoyles on the Hall of Supreme Harmony. It was to be a recurring theme, the players constantly assembling for pictures with strangers and with one another, the last of the morning a semi-comical group portrait at the Gate of Heavenly Peace, where a giant picture of Mao looked out over Tiananmen Square.
“I’m gonna do that,” Baron Davis said. “Buy me some property way out in the middle of nowhere and put up a big-ass picture of myself!”
That night there was a black-tie auction and banquet for six or seven hundred people. When the bus pulled up at the Diaoyutai State Guest House, where Richard Nixon (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/richard_milhous_nixon/index.html?inline=nyt-per) had stayed and met with Premier Chou En-lai on his landmark trip to China in 1972, the Chinese team was milling around the entrance.
“They’re probably thinking, ‘Goddamn Nash,’ ” said Nash, who was wearing a gray suit and black shoes. “ ‘If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t have to be standing here doing this stupid stuff.’ ”
It was a long night, especially for Nash. The suit. The play-by-play of gala stage business in Mandarin. The banquet board of bloodless beef, which, later, on the way back to the hotel, Baron Davis speculated may have been a flank of Snoopy or one of Michael Vick (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/v/michael_vick/index.html?inline=nyt-per)’s pit bulls. (“You bite into that meat you gonna be barking! You gonna grow paws!”) The jet lag seemed to be catching up with Nash. Arms clasped behind his back, he stood gamely on the stage while the crowd bid in a strangely prolonged and desultory fashion on a basketball holiday from China to Houston and passes to the opening of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Somebody bid $60,000 for a special one-off edition of a Yao & Nash-embossed Platinum Visa card.
“Although it is a beautiful card,” Nash said, “they don’t get to spend our bank accounts.”
Nash was bearing up as if he were the true Stone Buddha. He listened earnestly to a musical performance by the Moon, the Sun and the Star, a Mongolian family trio famous for having had the No. 1 ringtone in China for six months. Given how the sheer volume of people in China made everyone seem sort of faceless, I wondered if Nash’s fortitude, his willingness to stop again and again and again to pose and scribble his name and stretch out his hand, was in some way a measure of his ability to particularize an abstraction — that is, to know that everything he was doing to improve the lives of girls in that all-but-Platonic realm known as the Xinjiang Kezilesu Keerkzi Autonomous Region would give a real and particular child a real and particular book that would sweeten her day, or awaken an idea that would make a difference in her life. Whoever she was. . . .
Near midnight Nash climbed wearily aboard the bus and stood in the aisle.
“I know it was a long night, guys,” he said. “And the food was rough. But we raised almost a million dollars tonight. So thanks to all of you.”
At the Nashionals practice on Friday morning before the game with the Chinese team, Nash and Leandro Barbosa were locked into a fierce
H-O-R-S-E battle. It was a test of wits as much as skill. Making a key shot, Nash pumped his fist, as if victory in H-O-R-S-E meant as much as an N.B.A. championship. After the game, Barbosa unleashed a slam dunk. Nash gave it a college try, but the ball clanged off the iron. Nash’s college coach, Dick Davey, had told me he thought he could remember Nash dunking a few times in college, “but only on a really springy floor.”
I asked afterward who won the H-O-R-S-E games.
“We kinda split them,” Nash said.
“I won two,” Barbosa said. “The third one we tied.”
When the practice was over and the players were waiting to get on the bus, Yao, who had been practicing with the Nashionals, walked out and crammed himself into the passenger seat of an Audi A-8 sedan with tinted windows. People stared at the car in disbelief. The window came down and there was Yao, head sideways, cervical vertebrae pressed against the roof. He looked like a coal miner in a cave-in.
“It’s not my car,” Yao said.
The Flow He Knows
The venue for the Yao & Nash Charity Game was an arena in the west of the city called Capital Steel Plant Basketball Center, which looked to seat around 6,000 people.
“Why am I so tired?” Nash asked as the bus pulled into the traffic outside the hotel around 5:30 p.m. and immediately lost momentum.
“It’s, like, 4 a.m. in the morning in Phoenix,” said Aaron Nelson, the Suns’ trainer.
“It’d be O.K. if you made a few early turnovers so I have to bench you,” said Bill Duffy, a former player himself who was going to coach the Nashionals.
Nash lay down on the backseat and closed his eyes.
Even with the help of a police escort, we reached the arena a scant 15 minutes before the scheduled 7:30 start of the game. Throngs of people from China’s seemingly limitless supply of N.B.A. fans were massed outside around the gate and hanging out of the windows of temporary workers’ housing. The game was a sell-out, but apparently safety regulations required a certain number of empty seats.
In the visitors’ locker room, Nash began to get himself into the flow. He nipped at a basketball with his feet, and before long was booting it back and forth with Barbosa, over a table of bananas and Snickers bars and off the metal ceiling — bang! It was as if Nash and his brother Martin were kids playing hall hockey and seeing what they could get away with before they broke a lamp or drove Mom buggy. Bang! Nash had told me he always liked to be playing a game within the game, if only to keep alive that spark of whimsy and invention that seemed almost subversively opposed to the business of the pro game.
“When you go in, run around the whole arena,” said Duffy.
“Move the needle,” cried Bill Sanders, an agent with Duffy’s company.
“Remember, guys,” said Baron Davis, “this is just a charity game.”
After the film star Jackie Chan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/jackie_chan/index.html?inline=nyt-per) tossed the opening jump ball, the Chinese team raced out to the lead. The 6-foot-9 point guard Sun Yue, who had been drafted by the Lakers (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/losangeleslakers/index.html?inline=nyt-org), was dunking at will when not deigning to can 3’s from downtown. Of course the Chinese hadn’t flown halfway around the world, or been out till 5 a.m. singing karaoke, or fretting about the provenance of the banquet beef. Nash threw a dilly of a one-handed bounce pass down the lane to a cutting Carmelo Anthony, but Sweet Melon’s shot was blocked by Yi Jianlian, the 6-foot-11 first-round draft choice who would be playing for the Milwaukee Bucks (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/milwaukeebucks/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in the fall. Every time Yao made a basket, or even touched the ball, 6,000 of his countrymen broke into song, singing a little rising-falling ditty: “Yao Ming! Yao Ming!” Yao snared a rebound and held the ball out of reach like a father holding a piñata at a birthday party of leaping 3-year-olds. And at the end of the first quarter, the Chinese team led by 17 points.
But then the Nashionals began to get into the flow. Barbosa the Brazilian Blur got hot from 3-point land. Baron “Remember It’s Just a Charity Game” Davis went diving into the stands. Nash drove coast-to-coast and hit one of his acrobatic left-handed layups over Yao, and by the half the Chinese lead had shrunk to 42-37.
Nash’s one-handed bounce pass reminded me of a story I’d heard from Dick Davey, the Santa Clara coach, who had been the only man in college basketball interested in recruiting the future two-time M.V.P. They were having lunch a couple of years ago, and the coach had a bone to pick with his former protégé.
“I said to him, ‘Dammit, Steve, you penetrate the paint and you kick the ball out with one hand, you gotta do it with two hands.’ And he said, ‘If I do it with one hand, it’s about three-tenths of a second faster, and my teammate is going to have a better look at the basket.’ Do you want to know how smart he is? If he had a guy on the right wing in transition who he knew couldn’t shoot the ball, he’d throw a pass that was just good enough to include the guy in the fast break, but just bad enough that the guy wasn’t in a position to get off a shot and would have to pass the ball back.”
At the start of the third quarter, in front of a CCTV audience estimated at 250 million, Nash stripped off his shorts. He posed a moment in his black compression underwear, as if ready for another GQ shoot, and then climbed into a pair of red shorts, thus defecting to the Chinese team. Perhaps he felt it was the most charitable thing he could do, not just for the girls of the Xinjiang Kezilesu Keerkzi Autonomous Region but for all of China. But, alas, all the tension went out of the game. Flow without meaning. By the end, a bunch of players had changed sides, and after a flurry of empty whoop-de-do dunks, the final score of 101-92 in favor of the home team was hardly worth remembering.
Back in street clothes but still drenched in sweat, Yao ducked into the visitors’ locker room. “Thank you for doing this for the Chinese people,” he said. The Nashionals spontaneously broke into the signature singsong chant: “Yao Ming! Yao Ming!”
Nash had gotten the numbers. “We raised $2.5 million,” he told the players. “That money will build 70 schools. That’s 35,000 kids who’ll be able to go to school. So to all of you guys, thanks a lot.”
Sweet Melon emerged from the shower with a towel around his waist and said: “I know about five or six schools in Baltimore that need help, y’all.”
A Basket with His Arms
I stopped off in Phoenix on my way back from China and spent a few days watching Nash and his Suns teammates scrimmage on the practice court in the US Airways Center. The scrimmages were unofficial, as training camp wouldn’t start for a couple of weeks, but there was no shortage of intensity. Among the players running with Nash were Suns regulars Barbosa, Amare Stoudemire and Marcus Banks, along with their new teammate Grant Hill (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/grant_hill/index.html?inline=nyt-per). There were some good players from Europe trying to catch on. They kept the flow going with a 24-second clock and got into arguments about the score and whether on one possession one team had been unfairly denied an extra four seconds. During breaks when players flopped down onto benches and threw back cups of water, often the only person on the court, practicing shots, was Nash.
Three years ago, newly repatriated to Phoenix, which had traded him to the Dallas Mavericks (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/dallasmavericks/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in 1998, Nash’s back went out during practice, the result of a congenital displacement of his fifth lumbar vertebra. To relieve the muscle tightness, he now will often lie on the court during rests and timeouts. And though Nash may be getting better and better as a player, his body doesn’t recover from exertion as fast. Nash’s preferred method of treating his sore muscles and swollen joints is to lever himself into a 53-degree ice bath, wearing thermal socks to keep the frostbite out of his toes.
“I can’t even pull a beer out of water that cold,” says the Suns’ assistant coach Alvin Gentry.
Over the summer Nash opted not to take a spot on the Canadian Olympic basketball team, wanting to rest and conserve his energy for the upcoming run at the championship he covets. He has two years left on his contract with the Phoenix Suns; barring a catastrophic injury, he could certainly get another deal if he desired. (The Hall of Fame point guard John Stockton (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/john_stockton/index.html?inline=nyt-per), with whom Nash is often compared, played until he was 41.) How long he plays in the N.B.A. seems as much a matter of a willing mind as an able body.
“I’ve always said when Steve retires, I’ll retire,” Coach Mike D’Antoni said. We were sitting in a little gallery off the practice court watching the scrimmage. “I don’t want anyone to be able to figure out whether our success is because of my system or Steve’s ability to make it work. There’s a period in a player’s life where the novelty wears off. You’ve got kids and money, and sometimes your basketball flame begins to flicker. And then a few years later, you realize you’ve got a limited amount of time and this is the best it’s ever gonna be. I think Steve is one of those guys who has always lived for the game. You can have all the money in the world, but for the great players the only thing that matters is winning a title.”
When Nash was done with the scrimmage and some work in the weight room, we headed over to Kincaid’s near the US Airways arena to get some lunch. He ordered a couple of salads.
“There are nights when I ask myself, ‘Am I really playing basketball?’ ” Nash said. “But that’s mostly from the stuff around the game: talking to the media, taking the bus, getting warmed up. Once I’m out on the court, in the game, the game is great.”
I asked what drove him, beyond the obvious goal of a championship.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have a lot of energy and a lot of motivation. I have a hard time sitting still. I guess in a way I can’t live with the alternative to being driven, which is sitting around being bored. If I’m going to go for something, I’m really going to go for it. I think I realized as a kid that I would keep going when other kids stopped. If my legs are there, if my quickness is there, I can have a good game. If not, I try to find other ways of making plays without being quick. Making smart plays. Making the game simple.”
Like he had the last day in China, when the Nashionals were literally mobbed at a fitness-club opening with Yao Ming and Jackie Chan. When they were all safely back on the bus, waiting to be shuttled to the airport for the long flight home, the die-hards in the crowd milled around on the sidewalk, taking pictures and waving at players behind the windows. All except one kid, who was about 12 or 13 years old. He wore glasses. He wasn’t tall. He was draped in a purple-and-white Steve Nash Phoenix Suns jersey, No. 13. He stood outside Nash’s window and pantomimed jump shot after jump shot, like he was Steve Nash. He had Nash’s form down pat — the slight gathering before the jump, the leap straight up, elbows squared, the impeccable wrist-break that left the hand lingering a moment high overhead like it was pleased with itself. Even the way Nash sometimes crimped his lips when he shot. “Look at this dude, he’s wiggin’ out,” one of the players said. Everyone in the bus was falling apart laughing. Again and again, as dogged as a gym rat with a dream, No. 13 launched an imaginary ball. Nash for three from the sidewalk! Nash from half court! Nash from downtown Beijing! And then he untied one of his sneakers and began to fire off shots with it, hopping on one foot, form still constant. Nash went to the window and made a basket with his arms.
“Right here, dude!” he said through the glass.
But the kid just slung the sneaker straight up in the air.
“No, right here,” Nash said again, tapping the pane, and again he made a basket with his arms. The kid saw what Nash wanted; he jumped and sent his sneaker arcing toward the hoop. If there hadn’t been glass in the way, it would have gone in.
“Yeah! Atta boy!” said Nash, and when the bus pulled out, he blew the kid a kiss. .
Chip Brown is the author of “Good Morning Midnight” and “Afterwards, You’re a Genius.” His last article for Play was on skiing in the Italian Alps.
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October 28, 2007
Not to Get Too Mystical About It
By CHIP BROWN
Steve Nash sat down on a playground bench in Washington Market park, like all the other tired Manhattan fathers.
It was a summer evening, late in August, and somewhere in the scrum of kids roiling under the monkey bars was one of his 3-year-old twin girls, Lola, and her nanny. A rubber ball came bounding by with a pre-K hotshot in hot pursuit. He seemed like the sort of kid who in a few years would be shooting baskets behind a school, pretending he was Steve Nash. Nash from the corner!
Nash driving the lane! Nash in the media room talking to a reporter!
At the sight of the kid, the wariness melted out of Nash’s blue eyes. It was easy to imagine the N.B.A. star himself at that age, before he had his paper route, before the local newspaper clips began to trickle in, and the trophies, and the fans, and the Sports Illustrated covers, and the instructional DVDs, and the $11-million-a-year contract and now the 11 seasons as a pro in which he has enjoyed every success but a championship, his one remaining goal as a professional athlete. The hint of sweetness that crossed his stoic face said he knew how joyful and profound the rapport of a boy and a ball could be. Nearly all the canonical stories of Nash’s ascent to the pantheon of N.B.A. point guards feature some kind of ball, whether it is the round mound of wadded-up tape he and his younger brother Martin used to play hall-hockey with, or the basketball he took out to shoot on Christmas Eve in the rain at the junior-high-school court behind his parents’ house in Victoria, British Columbia, or the tennis ball he once dribbled around Santa Clara University on his way to class, or the soccer ball he once kept aloft for 600 consecutive kicks until he collapsed. A ball had been the talisman of what he called “my dream.”
Then again, maybe what the ball-crazed kid provoked had as much to do with the fact that Nash often found himself in the position of pretending to be Steve Nash, too: “Steve Nash” the brand pushing the ball up court on the Wheaties box or hawking watches and sneakers and bottles of Clearly Canadian water; “Steve Nash” the white, non-dunking, four-time all-star whose back-to-back Most Valuable Player Awards won him the unwanted role of minority-race champion in a predominantly black league; “Steve Nash” the self-effacing Canadian long shot whose life story had been puréed into an edifying fable about Chasing Your Dreams and Working Hard and Always Giving Back, and in some parts of his home country had been polished to such a saintly sheen that people called him Can-Je, short for “Canadian Jesus.” Nash himself sometimes seemed flustered by this double team of person and persona, struggling to reconcile his sardonic sense of humor and lethal competitive instincts with the humanitarian concerns that obliged him to ladle out all kinds of canned corn at charity events and celebrity appearances. What can you say without playing yourself false, or leaving your body completely, when zoo officials who have paid you the compliment of naming a 12-pound female Bengal tiger cub in your honor put the razor-clawed kitty-cat in your arms and stick a microphone in your face? (Shrewdly, Nash channeled Tiger Woods (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/w/tiger_woods/index.html?inline=nyt-per): “It’s pretty special.”) Or for that matter, what about the play-killing questions routinely lobbed by sportswriters after the game?
“It’s always the same three questions,” Nash said. “ ‘What do you think about the game tonight?’ ‘How do you feel about the game tomorrow night?’ ‘What do you think you’ll have to do differently next time?’ I started off trying to answer honestly, and then I tried being ironic, but that didn’t really work either. . . . ”
In the park, a stranger approached, hand extended.
“Steve Nash!” the man said.
“Hey, man,” Nash said, shaking his hand after a quick assessment.
“I love your game.”
“Thanks.”
Nash’s game had been on the shelf for three months, since the Phoenix Suns (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/phoenixsuns/index.html?inline=nyt-org) were muscled out of the second round of the Western Conference playoffs by the San Antonio Spurs (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/sanantoniospurs/index.html?inline=nyt-org), who went on to win the N.B.A. championship against the overmatched Cleveland Cavaliers (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/clevelandcavaliers/index.html?inline=nyt-org). It was a bitter end for the Suns’ championship hopes, and for Nash especially. A Game 1 collision with Spurs guard Tony Parker had split his nose so badly that Nash had to leave the court at a crucial moment in the fourth quarter. It took six stitches to close the bloody gash. In Game 4 the Spurs forward Robert Horry forechecked him into the scorer’s table, and the ensuing melee cost the Suns their big men when Amare Stoudemire and Boris Diaw were suspended one game each for leaving the bench. Losing the series 4-2 was a defeat that would “forever haunt us,” Nash said at the time. In the months since, he’d consoled himself with the distractions of New York, the adopted off-season city where he has spent the last three summers with his wife, Alejandra, and their twins, Lola and Bella.
“I’ve had a great summer,” he was saying now as he stretched out on the bench. He was wearing cargo shorts, a gray T-shirt and laceless black Converse sneakers. “I watched Tiger Woods and Roger Federer (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/f/roger_federer/index.html?inline=nyt-per). I went to movies and restaurants. I had great conversations.”
He stayed in shape mainly by working out with a trainer and playing soccer at Pier 40 off the Hudson River with a team sponsored by Phebe’s Tavern & Grill in the East Village. When he took up basketball in the eighth grade it was for “social reasons,” a means of hanging out with his friends. Being able to use his hands felt almost like cheating, because the sport he loved best was soccer. “ ‘Goal’ was my first word,” he told me, a vintage Nash brand detail found in nearly every profile of him. Nash’s English father, John, played soccer professionally in South Africa, where Nash was born; his Welsh mother, Jean, had various careers as an airline ticket agent, secretary and special-education teacher. Sickened by apartheid, they emigrated to Canada when Steve was one, eventually settling in Victoria.
“We had one little TV you had to turn on with tweezers, and even on Christmas Day we would watch the N.B.A.,” recalled Joann Nash, who was born after Steve and Martin. “When I was eight, I could recite the audio commentary on the Michael Jordan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/j/michael_jordan/index.html?inline=nyt-per) highlight video. It was burned into my mind.” Joann, who recently married Manny Malhotra, a center for the Columbus Blue Jackets (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/hockey/nationalhockeyleague/columbusbluejackets/index.html?inline=nyt-org) of the National Hockey League, had been captain of the University of Victoria soccer team. Martin still earns his living as a midfielder for the Vancouver Whitecaps, a first-division team in the United Soccer League. In the family, the source of the kids’ competitive fervor is not ascribed to their pro-athlete dad but to Mom, who can be counted on to dig deep for victory whether the game is tennis, Pictionary or simply beating other shoppers to the only open checkout lane at the grocery store.
“Steve makes a mockery of Pictionary,” Joann said with a forlorn note in her voice. “He won’t take it seriously.”
Nash’s soul-salving summer had already included a trip to Thailand, and some time back home in July, where he opened a sports club and hosted a charity basketball game in Vancouver. He had spent three days in New Jersey tutoring college and high-school point guards at a camp organized by Nike. He also produced a video for Nike, with a crew shooting him as he legged around Manhattan on his skateboard. He sat for an interview with Charlie Rose (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/charlie_rose/index.html?inline=nyt-per), confiding in his self-deprecating way that there were other N.B.A. point guards who “are more talented than me physically. . . . I say to myself, ‘How do I have the same job as this guy?’ ”
At 33, Nash has defied the actuarial trends of point-guard mortality. He has gotten steadily better with age and insists he is now not just smarter but quicker than when the Phoenix Suns, amid a crescendo of boos, made him the 15th pick in the first round of the 1996 N.B.A. draft. The statistical evidence bears him out. Last season Nash put up his finest numbers, better than some of those he posted in his two M.V.P. years. He may not have the obvious physical gifts of some point guards, explosiveness or vertical leap, but his repertoire of inventive shots and ballhandling skills, his break-neck transitions and barn-swallow zigzagging through the tall timber of big men in the paint bespeaks exceptional body control. “His core strength is off the charts,” the Phoenix Suns’ coach, Mike D’Antoni, told me. “Steve’s balance is so good he can stand on an exercise ball.”
I’d been struck by Nash’s poise, the mental counterpart of his physical balance. Talking to Charlie Rose, the word Nash had picked to describe his ideal state of mind on court was “unflappable.” Had he always been able to cast a cool eye at pressure?
“My first and second years in the N.B.A., I used to get really nervous in a tight game,” he said. “But now I wait for that moment when things are really close — that’s what I really love. Having the ball in my hands and the responsibility makes me feel calm and open. Not to have that, not to get to that point in a game, would feel really. . . .” He paused to find the precise word. “ . . . Really confining,” he said.
“Was there one shot or game when you first felt that way?”
“Probably it built over time — I don’t want it to sound like there’s anything too mystical about it.”
In a few days he was flying to England to visit relatives and meet with the officers of the Tottenham Hotspurs to discuss business opportunities with the soccer club. “I’d like to be an owner,” he says. “It’s something I could do for the rest of my life after my little window of popularity dies.” In September he was leading a group of N.B.A. players to China for a series of charity events.
We had been talking in the park for almost an hour now, and I was beginning to appreciate the elusive quality that the author Jack McCallum, who spent a year with the Phoenix Suns for his book “:07 Seconds or Less,” described as Nash’s “mysterious Canadian reticence.” Even though Nash is one of the more introspective and intelligent athletes in the N.B.A. — a player who got a lot of criticism for speaking out against the war in Iraq in 2003, and had the sportswriter fraternity in a dither because his winter reading list included bodice-rippers like “The Communist Manifesto” and Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” — it didn’t seem that what made him interesting was coming out in conversation. Part of the reason may have been that what made Nash exceptional was his temperamental inclination to downplay what made him exceptional. In interviews he often conveys a mix of humility and politic self-restraint.
As Nash began to fidget on the bench — maybe his back was tightening up, or he was thinking about Lola’s supper, or he was just tired of answering questions and the full-court press of chores entailed in being “Steve Nash” — I remembered something his agent, Bill Duffy, had told me: “With Steve it’s all about the flow.” Flow, of course, being shorthand for that state of mind that artists and athletes strive to enter into, and which in full flood entails an ecstatic expansion of consciousness that releases them from confines of the self and produces crowning moments of creation and performance — not to get too mystical about it. Maybe the truest picture of Nash depended on seeing him in motion, in the flow; whether he was threading a half-court bounce pass or exploiting his small window of fame to get potable water to third world villages or practicing surreptitious acts of generosity, like slipping spending money to the coaches to give to his less wealthy basketball teammates at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Enacting himself, as it were, as opposed to talking about himself.
Three-Point Land and Beyond
“Hey, rooks,” Nash shouted from the back of the bus idling in the garage of the Regent Beijing hotel. “What time does the 9:30 bus leave?”
It was a trick question, of course, but the “rooks” — D. J. Strawberry Jr. and Alando Tucker, both new members of the Phoenix Suns — froze.
“They told us to go back and get our umbrellas,” said Strawberry, a shooting guard and the son of the former New York Mets (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/baseball/majorleague/newyorkmets/index.html?inline=nyt-org) star outfielder Darryl Strawberry (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/darryl_strawberry/index.html?inline=nyt-per).
“Let’s go!” Nash hollered to no one in particular. Apparently more stragglers were still fetching umbrellas. It was nearly 10 a.m., a rainy Thursday in mid-September, though in truth you couldn’t be sure what time it was from the coal-and-car-fume miasma obscuring China’s capital.
Among the two dozen or so passengers on the bus — agents, trainers, friends, a reality-show film crew — were eight N.B.A. players: the rooks Strawberry and Tucker; the 20-year-old Detroit Pistons (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/detroitpistons/index.html?inline=nyt-org) forward Amir Johnson; Paul Davis, a 23-year-old center with the L.A. Clippers (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/losangelesclippers/index.html?inline=nyt-org); Chuck Hayes, a 24-year-old forward with the Houston Rockets (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/houstonrockets/index.html?inline=nyt-org); and the established stars like the Suns’ Leandro Barbosa (the “Brazilian Blur,” who last year won the N.B.A.’s Sixth Man Award); Carmelo Anthony (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/carmelo_anthony/index.html?inline=nyt-per), the outstanding forward for the Denver Nuggets (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/denvernuggets/index.html?inline=nyt-org) who was one of the top scorers in the league last year; and Baron Davis, the street-Shakespeare (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/william_shakespeare/index.html?inline=nyt-per) point guard who led the Golden State Warriors on an improbable run that was the dramatic highlight of the N.B.A. playoffs last spring.
And of course Nash, riding a flow unlike any he’d ever caught on the basketball court, as much a celebrity as an athlete now, his Q-score jacked up by photos with Sharon Stone (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/sharon_stone/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and Donald Trump (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/t/donald_j_trump/index.html?inline=nyt-per) and the M.V.P. shout-out in the lyrics of Nelly Furtado’s hit “Promiscuous” and the GQ “baller of the year” spread featuring an epicene Nash with overly sculpted hair. The fame that had recently produced the tribute of his face stenciled into an Arizona cornfield had also given him the power to “make a difference.” Befitting a point guard, he seemed to be feeling his way through celebrity, into that seam between his identity in a profession that had defined his existence since the eighth grade, when he prophetically informed his mother that one day he would play in the N.B.A., and whatever he might become or do next, out of uniform, away from the confines of the court and the quest for championships.
As the impresario who put the whole China show together, with crucial behind-the-scenes help from Bill Duffy and a team of people from his company, BDA Sports Management, Nash had suspended his mysterious Canadian reticence in hopes of improving the flow of a sightseeing trip to the Forbidden City. Nash broached the idea of the Beijing tour with Yao Ming (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/m/yao_ming/index.html?inline=nyt-per) after a game with the Rockets in Phoenix last March. Yao was thrilled by the prospect of Nash and a pick-up crew of players coming to China to help raise money for charity. Bing Hu, the Chinese founder of a high-end architecture development company in Scottsdale, Ariz., had offered to fly the cast to China on his Falcon 900 jet. Eventually an agenda was set, calling for a four-day barnstorm of press conferences, practices, luncheons, a charity auction and black-tie banquet, sightseeing, photo ops, random cultural encounters and unofficial karaoke pub crawls, along with a televised charity hoops match that would pit Western Hemisphere pros (the Nashionals?) against Yao and the Chinese National team, and would, as it turned out, draw a Chinese TV audience more than three times the size of the horde agglomerated by the Super Bowl.
The Nashionals had landed in China the night before, Sept. 12, and had come shuffling in glassy-eyed from the airport, luggage in tow, to a surreal press conference at the Regent Beijing. Backed by a drop cloth splattered with corporate logos, they sat Last Supper-style along a table onstage, peering out at a bank of eight TV cameras and some 60 Chinese journalists. An earsplitting remix of Queen’s “We Will Rock You” pumped through speakers.
“I just want to say that we’re here to help out the children in your community,” Nash said. He was wearing below-the-knee shorts, a gray shirt and, as he had in Washington Market Park, black laceless sneakers. “I think so highly of Yao as a person and a player that I asked if he’d be willing to host some of us to come over here and give back. I want to thank the guys for making the long trip.”
The proceeds would go to build schools and help impoverished girls in the Xinjiang Kezilesu Keerkzi Autonomous Region, a vast and sparsely settled area in Western China, which most people would be hard-pressed to find on a map, much less pronounce. This was Nash’s first trip to China, and it wasn’t unreasonable to wonder whether his interest in charity work thousands of miles from home in an alien culture where he doesn’t understand the language was really a heartfelt reflection of altruistic values. Pieties about the importance of Giving Back are so routinely coughed up you’d think that if N.B.A. stars didn’t have such wicked cross-over dribbles or a faculty for tomahawk dunks they’d all be following in the footsteps of Albert Schweitzer. The benefits that redound in P.R. brownie points and I.R.S. income-tax offsets are seldom mentioned.
But Nash often speaks of his interest in “the global village” and doing what he can wherever he can. The Steve Nash Foundation has focused on programs that help “under-served” children and promote worthwhile social and environmental causes, like low-impact development and eco-friendly construction. (The rugs in Nash’s new sports club in Vancouver are made of recycled athletic shoelaces.) His foundation has also set up safe drinking water projects in Nicaragua and Guatemala and recently underwrote a hospital ward for neonates in Paraguay, where Nash’s wife is from.
Most of the rooks and younger players on the trip were just curious to see a patch of China for the first time; some of the more established stars were eager to enhance their brand visibility in the largest basketball market outside the United States. One third of all hits to the N.B.A. Web site come from Chinese Internet users, and in recent years the N.B.A. has made a concerted effort to capitalize on what is already China’s multibillion-dollar love affair with basketball, going so far as to publish a partial list of N.B.A. players’ Chinese nicknames. (Nash is not on it, for some reason, perhaps because the Chinese haven’t solved the conundrum of his mysterious Canadian reticence, either. But Carmelo Anthony is known as Sweet Melon, and in what is clearly the most telling evidence of Chinese basketball acumen, Tim Duncan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/tim_duncan/index.html?inline=nyt-per), nemesis of Nash and his fellow Suns, is known as Stone Buddha.)
Nash was as happy to have the good publicity as the next multi-millionaire, but the trip was clearly part of a course in continuing education. He studied sociology at Santa Clara University, where he did enough to get by. “I basically majored in basketball,” he told me. He reads during the season when the team is on the road with time to fill, and he is eager to travel abroad during the off-season, pressed, it often seems, by a deep curiosity and thirst for knowledge that the strictures of his N.B.A. dream didn’t give him the luxury of indulging as a younger man. Of course it was a two-edged sword. The celebrity that made it possible to come to China also brought the unscholarly and flow-impeding distraction of having to stop every 10 seconds to pose for pictures or sign an autograph.
The microphone was passed to all the players, including the rooks. Suddenly flashbulbs went off in the back of the room and a hubbub broke out. Yao Ming, the colossus of Chinese basketball, had unexpectedly arrived. He thundered in wearing a white polo shirt as long as a crib sheet. Photographers herded Nash and Yao together, Nash, 6-foot-3, Yao, 7-foot-6. Side by side they looked like a comparative bar graph of Chinese and Canadian economic growth rates.
Now, a day later, fully provisioned with umbrellas, the Nashionals’ bus pulled into the traffic of Beijing’s Dongcheng district and headed west toward the Forbidden City. Arriving at the Divine Military Genius Gate, the players filed out into the toxic drizzle, and into the vast palace complex that is the heart of Chinese civilization. Nash stepped out of the flow of tourists at one point and stood under an umbrella by a parapet to make a phone call. When he turned around he was ringed by a semicircle of Chinese sightseers, more interested in him than the gargoyles on the Hall of Supreme Harmony. It was to be a recurring theme, the players constantly assembling for pictures with strangers and with one another, the last of the morning a semi-comical group portrait at the Gate of Heavenly Peace, where a giant picture of Mao looked out over Tiananmen Square.
“I’m gonna do that,” Baron Davis said. “Buy me some property way out in the middle of nowhere and put up a big-ass picture of myself!”
That night there was a black-tie auction and banquet for six or seven hundred people. When the bus pulled up at the Diaoyutai State Guest House, where Richard Nixon (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/n/richard_milhous_nixon/index.html?inline=nyt-per) had stayed and met with Premier Chou En-lai on his landmark trip to China in 1972, the Chinese team was milling around the entrance.
“They’re probably thinking, ‘Goddamn Nash,’ ” said Nash, who was wearing a gray suit and black shoes. “ ‘If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t have to be standing here doing this stupid stuff.’ ”
It was a long night, especially for Nash. The suit. The play-by-play of gala stage business in Mandarin. The banquet board of bloodless beef, which, later, on the way back to the hotel, Baron Davis speculated may have been a flank of Snoopy or one of Michael Vick (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/v/michael_vick/index.html?inline=nyt-per)’s pit bulls. (“You bite into that meat you gonna be barking! You gonna grow paws!”) The jet lag seemed to be catching up with Nash. Arms clasped behind his back, he stood gamely on the stage while the crowd bid in a strangely prolonged and desultory fashion on a basketball holiday from China to Houston and passes to the opening of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Somebody bid $60,000 for a special one-off edition of a Yao & Nash-embossed Platinum Visa card.
“Although it is a beautiful card,” Nash said, “they don’t get to spend our bank accounts.”
Nash was bearing up as if he were the true Stone Buddha. He listened earnestly to a musical performance by the Moon, the Sun and the Star, a Mongolian family trio famous for having had the No. 1 ringtone in China for six months. Given how the sheer volume of people in China made everyone seem sort of faceless, I wondered if Nash’s fortitude, his willingness to stop again and again and again to pose and scribble his name and stretch out his hand, was in some way a measure of his ability to particularize an abstraction — that is, to know that everything he was doing to improve the lives of girls in that all-but-Platonic realm known as the Xinjiang Kezilesu Keerkzi Autonomous Region would give a real and particular child a real and particular book that would sweeten her day, or awaken an idea that would make a difference in her life. Whoever she was. . . .
Near midnight Nash climbed wearily aboard the bus and stood in the aisle.
“I know it was a long night, guys,” he said. “And the food was rough. But we raised almost a million dollars tonight. So thanks to all of you.”
At the Nashionals practice on Friday morning before the game with the Chinese team, Nash and Leandro Barbosa were locked into a fierce
H-O-R-S-E battle. It was a test of wits as much as skill. Making a key shot, Nash pumped his fist, as if victory in H-O-R-S-E meant as much as an N.B.A. championship. After the game, Barbosa unleashed a slam dunk. Nash gave it a college try, but the ball clanged off the iron. Nash’s college coach, Dick Davey, had told me he thought he could remember Nash dunking a few times in college, “but only on a really springy floor.”
I asked afterward who won the H-O-R-S-E games.
“We kinda split them,” Nash said.
“I won two,” Barbosa said. “The third one we tied.”
When the practice was over and the players were waiting to get on the bus, Yao, who had been practicing with the Nashionals, walked out and crammed himself into the passenger seat of an Audi A-8 sedan with tinted windows. People stared at the car in disbelief. The window came down and there was Yao, head sideways, cervical vertebrae pressed against the roof. He looked like a coal miner in a cave-in.
“It’s not my car,” Yao said.
The Flow He Knows
The venue for the Yao & Nash Charity Game was an arena in the west of the city called Capital Steel Plant Basketball Center, which looked to seat around 6,000 people.
“Why am I so tired?” Nash asked as the bus pulled into the traffic outside the hotel around 5:30 p.m. and immediately lost momentum.
“It’s, like, 4 a.m. in the morning in Phoenix,” said Aaron Nelson, the Suns’ trainer.
“It’d be O.K. if you made a few early turnovers so I have to bench you,” said Bill Duffy, a former player himself who was going to coach the Nashionals.
Nash lay down on the backseat and closed his eyes.
Even with the help of a police escort, we reached the arena a scant 15 minutes before the scheduled 7:30 start of the game. Throngs of people from China’s seemingly limitless supply of N.B.A. fans were massed outside around the gate and hanging out of the windows of temporary workers’ housing. The game was a sell-out, but apparently safety regulations required a certain number of empty seats.
In the visitors’ locker room, Nash began to get himself into the flow. He nipped at a basketball with his feet, and before long was booting it back and forth with Barbosa, over a table of bananas and Snickers bars and off the metal ceiling — bang! It was as if Nash and his brother Martin were kids playing hall hockey and seeing what they could get away with before they broke a lamp or drove Mom buggy. Bang! Nash had told me he always liked to be playing a game within the game, if only to keep alive that spark of whimsy and invention that seemed almost subversively opposed to the business of the pro game.
“When you go in, run around the whole arena,” said Duffy.
“Move the needle,” cried Bill Sanders, an agent with Duffy’s company.
“Remember, guys,” said Baron Davis, “this is just a charity game.”
After the film star Jackie Chan (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/jackie_chan/index.html?inline=nyt-per) tossed the opening jump ball, the Chinese team raced out to the lead. The 6-foot-9 point guard Sun Yue, who had been drafted by the Lakers (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/losangeleslakers/index.html?inline=nyt-org), was dunking at will when not deigning to can 3’s from downtown. Of course the Chinese hadn’t flown halfway around the world, or been out till 5 a.m. singing karaoke, or fretting about the provenance of the banquet beef. Nash threw a dilly of a one-handed bounce pass down the lane to a cutting Carmelo Anthony, but Sweet Melon’s shot was blocked by Yi Jianlian, the 6-foot-11 first-round draft choice who would be playing for the Milwaukee Bucks (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/milwaukeebucks/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in the fall. Every time Yao made a basket, or even touched the ball, 6,000 of his countrymen broke into song, singing a little rising-falling ditty: “Yao Ming! Yao Ming!” Yao snared a rebound and held the ball out of reach like a father holding a piñata at a birthday party of leaping 3-year-olds. And at the end of the first quarter, the Chinese team led by 17 points.
But then the Nashionals began to get into the flow. Barbosa the Brazilian Blur got hot from 3-point land. Baron “Remember It’s Just a Charity Game” Davis went diving into the stands. Nash drove coast-to-coast and hit one of his acrobatic left-handed layups over Yao, and by the half the Chinese lead had shrunk to 42-37.
Nash’s one-handed bounce pass reminded me of a story I’d heard from Dick Davey, the Santa Clara coach, who had been the only man in college basketball interested in recruiting the future two-time M.V.P. They were having lunch a couple of years ago, and the coach had a bone to pick with his former protégé.
“I said to him, ‘Dammit, Steve, you penetrate the paint and you kick the ball out with one hand, you gotta do it with two hands.’ And he said, ‘If I do it with one hand, it’s about three-tenths of a second faster, and my teammate is going to have a better look at the basket.’ Do you want to know how smart he is? If he had a guy on the right wing in transition who he knew couldn’t shoot the ball, he’d throw a pass that was just good enough to include the guy in the fast break, but just bad enough that the guy wasn’t in a position to get off a shot and would have to pass the ball back.”
At the start of the third quarter, in front of a CCTV audience estimated at 250 million, Nash stripped off his shorts. He posed a moment in his black compression underwear, as if ready for another GQ shoot, and then climbed into a pair of red shorts, thus defecting to the Chinese team. Perhaps he felt it was the most charitable thing he could do, not just for the girls of the Xinjiang Kezilesu Keerkzi Autonomous Region but for all of China. But, alas, all the tension went out of the game. Flow without meaning. By the end, a bunch of players had changed sides, and after a flurry of empty whoop-de-do dunks, the final score of 101-92 in favor of the home team was hardly worth remembering.
Back in street clothes but still drenched in sweat, Yao ducked into the visitors’ locker room. “Thank you for doing this for the Chinese people,” he said. The Nashionals spontaneously broke into the signature singsong chant: “Yao Ming! Yao Ming!”
Nash had gotten the numbers. “We raised $2.5 million,” he told the players. “That money will build 70 schools. That’s 35,000 kids who’ll be able to go to school. So to all of you guys, thanks a lot.”
Sweet Melon emerged from the shower with a towel around his waist and said: “I know about five or six schools in Baltimore that need help, y’all.”
A Basket with His Arms
I stopped off in Phoenix on my way back from China and spent a few days watching Nash and his Suns teammates scrimmage on the practice court in the US Airways Center. The scrimmages were unofficial, as training camp wouldn’t start for a couple of weeks, but there was no shortage of intensity. Among the players running with Nash were Suns regulars Barbosa, Amare Stoudemire and Marcus Banks, along with their new teammate Grant Hill (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/grant_hill/index.html?inline=nyt-per). There were some good players from Europe trying to catch on. They kept the flow going with a 24-second clock and got into arguments about the score and whether on one possession one team had been unfairly denied an extra four seconds. During breaks when players flopped down onto benches and threw back cups of water, often the only person on the court, practicing shots, was Nash.
Three years ago, newly repatriated to Phoenix, which had traded him to the Dallas Mavericks (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/sports/probasketball/nationalbasketballassociation/dallasmavericks/index.html?inline=nyt-org) in 1998, Nash’s back went out during practice, the result of a congenital displacement of his fifth lumbar vertebra. To relieve the muscle tightness, he now will often lie on the court during rests and timeouts. And though Nash may be getting better and better as a player, his body doesn’t recover from exertion as fast. Nash’s preferred method of treating his sore muscles and swollen joints is to lever himself into a 53-degree ice bath, wearing thermal socks to keep the frostbite out of his toes.
“I can’t even pull a beer out of water that cold,” says the Suns’ assistant coach Alvin Gentry.
Over the summer Nash opted not to take a spot on the Canadian Olympic basketball team, wanting to rest and conserve his energy for the upcoming run at the championship he covets. He has two years left on his contract with the Phoenix Suns; barring a catastrophic injury, he could certainly get another deal if he desired. (The Hall of Fame point guard John Stockton (http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/s/john_stockton/index.html?inline=nyt-per), with whom Nash is often compared, played until he was 41.) How long he plays in the N.B.A. seems as much a matter of a willing mind as an able body.
“I’ve always said when Steve retires, I’ll retire,” Coach Mike D’Antoni said. We were sitting in a little gallery off the practice court watching the scrimmage. “I don’t want anyone to be able to figure out whether our success is because of my system or Steve’s ability to make it work. There’s a period in a player’s life where the novelty wears off. You’ve got kids and money, and sometimes your basketball flame begins to flicker. And then a few years later, you realize you’ve got a limited amount of time and this is the best it’s ever gonna be. I think Steve is one of those guys who has always lived for the game. You can have all the money in the world, but for the great players the only thing that matters is winning a title.”
When Nash was done with the scrimmage and some work in the weight room, we headed over to Kincaid’s near the US Airways arena to get some lunch. He ordered a couple of salads.
“There are nights when I ask myself, ‘Am I really playing basketball?’ ” Nash said. “But that’s mostly from the stuff around the game: talking to the media, taking the bus, getting warmed up. Once I’m out on the court, in the game, the game is great.”
I asked what drove him, beyond the obvious goal of a championship.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I have a lot of energy and a lot of motivation. I have a hard time sitting still. I guess in a way I can’t live with the alternative to being driven, which is sitting around being bored. If I’m going to go for something, I’m really going to go for it. I think I realized as a kid that I would keep going when other kids stopped. If my legs are there, if my quickness is there, I can have a good game. If not, I try to find other ways of making plays without being quick. Making smart plays. Making the game simple.”
Like he had the last day in China, when the Nashionals were literally mobbed at a fitness-club opening with Yao Ming and Jackie Chan. When they were all safely back on the bus, waiting to be shuttled to the airport for the long flight home, the die-hards in the crowd milled around on the sidewalk, taking pictures and waving at players behind the windows. All except one kid, who was about 12 or 13 years old. He wore glasses. He wasn’t tall. He was draped in a purple-and-white Steve Nash Phoenix Suns jersey, No. 13. He stood outside Nash’s window and pantomimed jump shot after jump shot, like he was Steve Nash. He had Nash’s form down pat — the slight gathering before the jump, the leap straight up, elbows squared, the impeccable wrist-break that left the hand lingering a moment high overhead like it was pleased with itself. Even the way Nash sometimes crimped his lips when he shot. “Look at this dude, he’s wiggin’ out,” one of the players said. Everyone in the bus was falling apart laughing. Again and again, as dogged as a gym rat with a dream, No. 13 launched an imaginary ball. Nash for three from the sidewalk! Nash from half court! Nash from downtown Beijing! And then he untied one of his sneakers and began to fire off shots with it, hopping on one foot, form still constant. Nash went to the window and made a basket with his arms.
“Right here, dude!” he said through the glass.
But the kid just slung the sneaker straight up in the air.
“No, right here,” Nash said again, tapping the pane, and again he made a basket with his arms. The kid saw what Nash wanted; he jumped and sent his sneaker arcing toward the hoop. If there hadn’t been glass in the way, it would have gone in.
“Yeah! Atta boy!” said Nash, and when the bus pulled out, he blew the kid a kiss. .
Chip Brown is the author of “Good Morning Midnight” and “Afterwards, You’re a Genius.” His last article for Play was on skiing in the Italian Alps.