Ghost Stories
Every story told about basketball is, in one way or another, a ghost story, where jump scares, haunted houses, latent demons, tortured heroes, wayward spirits, buried secrets, and witches’ spells prominently figure. Never mind the fundamentals, or game plans, or statistics. The court—any court, every court—is a portal, and like any portal, the rules governing time, being, and matter are different on the other side of that portal. It doesn’t matter whether the court in question is the local playground or a several-thousand seat arena. Every basketball court ever constructed has the potential, on any given day, to be the Castle of Otranto, the House of Usher, or the central branch of the New York Public Library on the afternoon when Bill Murray and company show up to bust some ghosts.
Think of the old Boston Garden, the Overlook Hotel of the NBA, where so many inexplicably awful things happened to visiting opponents in the playoffs—John Havlicek’s steal in the 1965 Eastern Conference Finals, Gerald Henderson’s steal in the 1984 Finals, Larry Bird’s steal in the 1988 Eastern Finals, for starters—that players and coaches alike spoke about the place as if it were in need of an exorcism.
Or think of the Los Angeles Sports Arena, former home of the long-cursed Los Angeles Clippers, an arena that, when it was finally torn down in 2017 caused my father to remark, “Not even the Salem Witch Trials played host to more horrors than that place.”
Not all ghost stories, however, involve terror. Sometimes they’re romantic. Other times they’re humorous. And still others they’re, well, it’s difficult to say what, exactly, they are, except that they involve a combination of beauty, innocence, magic, and wisdom that leaves the audience feeling as if the world is a far more mysterious and exhilarating place than they’d previously allowed themselves to believe.
Would you like to hear one of those stories? It’s one of my favorites, even though I still don’t know how it ends.
I am ten years old. It is late in the summer of 1987. It’s nine p.m., and I’m still at the court across the street from our apartment complex, shooting jumper after jumper and hoping that my mom waits a few more minutes before walking over to tell me that it’s time, for the love of all things good and holy, to come in for the night. Already I’m displaying obsessive-compulsive tendencies that will, by the time I’m a senior in high school, turn mundane acts like lacing up my sneakers into rituals so complex that even the Catholic Church might feel I’m overdoing things.
For instance, on this night I’ve told myself that I have to make three shots in a row from seven different locations on the court. And if I should miss at any point during the drill, not only do I have to start all over again, but I will live one full year less than I would have previously lived. Basically it’s a Ray Bradbury story, except I haven’t read Ray Bradbury yet, and I don’t know what obsessive-compulsive means.
The first time through, I make six in a row before missing.
The second time through, I make four.
Then seven.
Then nine.
Then two.
Then sixteen.
If you’re keeping count, it means, by this point, that six years have been taken off my life because of my inability to make twenty-one shots in a row.
However, just before I return to the first spot on the cycle to begin again, I hear bagpipe music begin to play. And not, I should clarify, bagpipe music that is coming from a radio somewhere, but bagpipe music that is clearly being played live, and somewhere nearby, even though there is no one within my line of sight who is playing bagpipes.
But as anyone who has ever heard bagpipes being played in person knows, the bagpipes are one seriously loud instrument, and not exactly the type of instrument whose sounds are going to appeal to the average adolescent listener.
So rather than resume my shooting drill—and inevitably risk removing another year from my lifespan—I begin to dribble my ball in the direction that leads deeper into the school, and ultimately around the side of the school, past the baseball field, and into the parking lot on the other side.
No sign of anyone playing the bagpipes, even though the song has only gotten louder and sadder as the minutes have passed.
I do another circle of the perimeter of the school before seeing that a side gate into the school’s outdoor quad area has been left unlocked, and after slipping inside, I head for the stage part of the quad where I begin to make out the silhouette of a man standing in the middle of the empty stage and playing the bagpipes.
I stop dribbling and continue my approach. The man eventually notices me, and he nods in my direction while continuing to play.
Once I’m within fifteen or so feet of him, I take a seat on one of the lunch tables, and listen to the rest of the song. The man, who looks to be somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty years old, and who is sporting the kind of beard that Al Pacino wore in Serpico, can really play. The song, yes, is sad, but it’s also gorgeous, even though nothing about it resembles the types of melodies I’m used to hearing on Top 40 radio.
As the song plays, I find myself thinking about a great many things: the boat my grandfather’s family (on my mother’s side) took from Ireland to arrive in New York; the look of longing in my father’s eyes every time he talks about growing up in Iran; the beauty of rain falling onto the over-chlorinated swimming pool in our apartment complex; the aftermath of a fatal car wreck my mother and I had driven past on the 5 Freeway several years prior; the second side of my favorite Bob Seger album, Stranger in Town; the last quartet of lines of the Our Father prayer; the name of the pet that I never had; the names of my friends who’d moved away and whom I knew I would never see again; the sight of the great Pearl Washington leading a fast-break in the second half of a game between Syracuse and St. John’s.
And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the song ended, and with it the montage of images that had been scrolling through my mind.
“What is that song called?” I asked the man.
“It doesn’t have a name,” the man said. “Or if it does, I’ve never learned it.”
“How long did it take you to learn the bagpipes?”
“I’m still learning.”
“How—”
“No,” he said. “My turn.”
“Okay.”
“Okay. You shouldn’t be out alone so late.”
“I just live across the street.”
“Still. I’m sure your parents are worried.”
“My mom probably is. My dad isn’t home.”
“Well, you wouldn’t want to worry your mother.”
“One more question and I promise I’ll go.”
“Deal.”
“What’s the song about?”
“I can’t answer that.”
“How come?”
“Because music doesn’t work that way.”
“I lost six years of my life tonight.”
“What do you mean?”
I explain it to him.
“Well, you’re in luck,” the man said.
“How so?”
“The song I played gives people back everything they have ever lost.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to. But you’ll see.”
“Don’t you think your mother might be worried too?”
“Why would she be worried? I’m a grown man.”
“Yes, but you’re playing bagpipes alone in a middle school at 9 o’clock at night.”
“Maybe it’s time for both of us to go home then.”
“Will I see you around again?” I ask as I’m leaving.
“No.”
“I understand,” I say.
“You don’t,” he says. “But you will.”
KAREEM TAYYAR’s most recent book, Keats in San Francisco & Other Poems, was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2022, and his work has appeared in a variety of literary journals, including Poetry Magazine, Prairie Schooner, and Alaska Quarterly Review. His poem, “Two Poets,” received the 2022 Atlanta Review International Poetry Prize, and his novel, The Prince of Orange County, received the 2020 Eric Hoffer Prize for Young Adult Fiction. In 2020 he was awarded a Glenna Luschei Poetry Prize, and in 2019 he was a recipient of a Wurlitzer Poetry Fellowship.