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      Union Work Runs in the Family for the N.B.A.’s Jaren Jackson Jr.

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      Jaren Jackson Jr. is active in the N.B.A. players’ union. His mother, Terri, works for the W.N.B.A. players’ union. When he was elected vice president, she did her best not to embarrass him.The National Basketball Players Association is the union for N.B.A. players, a group of adult millionaires, most of whose mothers don’t attend unit meetings.But Terri Jackson is no ordinary N.B.A. mom. She is also the executive director for the W.N.B.A. players’ union, and, in February, she was invited to the N.B.A. players’ union’s winter meeting. As she put finishing touches on the presentation she was about to deliver, her son, Jaren Jackson Jr. of the Memphis Grizzlies, was nominated to be one of the union’s vice presidents.He gave a short, impromptu speech, telling his colleagues he wanted to bridge the gap between established players and younger ones like him. He said he felt it was time for him to take on that responsibility.When he finished, Terri Jackson said, she wanted to get up and cheer; she was so happy to see the maturity he showed. Instead, she squeezed her fists tightly and kept them hidden behind her laptop screen, so as not to embarrass her 23-year-old son. When he was elected, she raised her arms in celebration.In becoming a union vice president, Jackson Jr. extended a family tradition of being involved in player unions and the future of the game. His father, Jaren Jackson Sr., a journeyman N.B.A. player from 1989-2002, was also a players’ union member.Jackson Jr., right, and his father, the former N.B.A. player Jaren Jackson Sr., traded jerseys after the younger Jackson played in a game in March.Darren Abate/Associated PressFive years into his career, Jackson Jr. has already exceeded what his father accomplished on the court. Last season, he was named the N.B.A.’s defensive player of the year, and he helped lead the Grizzlies to one of the best records in the Western Conference.“If you love the game, that’s what you’re really doing it for,” Jackson Jr. said of his union activity. “I want kids growing up, whether it’s my kids or other people’s kids, when they grow up and they want to play in the league, they’re going to have a good foundation.”Practically since birth, Jaren Jr. was destined to care about labor issues. He was born while his father, who had most recently played for the San Antonio Spurs, was going through a work stoppage during the N.B.A. lockout in 1999.Jaren Sr., whose father was also a union member as a longshoreman in New Orleans, was a free agent during the lockout, waiting for the Spurs to re-sign him.He would sometimes fly to New York to attend bargaining meetings, joining elite players like Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing, Alonzo Mourning and Mitch Richmond.“This was a tough time for me,” Jaren Sr. said. “I wasn’t sure about my future and I sat there and listened to these guys, you know, drop F-bombs all over the place and talk about these players getting paid and owners making this money.”Terri Jackson also has a family history of support for unions. She remembers a story about her father, who was a lawyer, speaking for better pay for teachers at a school board meeting.“When I think about getting to be the executive director for the W players, I just, you know, I think a little bit: ‘Wow. You know, my dad would be so proud of this’ — or he is so proud,” Terri Jackson said. “And that his grandson is a union rep? That’s amazing.”Terri Jackson spoke in support of the W.N.B.A. player Brittney Griner when Griner was imprisoned in Russia last year.Max Herman/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesShe and Jaren Sr. both went to college at Georgetown University, where she also attended law school. She has taught classes about women in sports and worked at the University of the District of Columbia as a legal counsel and later assistant general counsel.The family moved to Indiana in 2012 when Terri began working for the N.C.A.A; she eventually became the organization’s director of law, policy and governance. In 2016, when Jaren Jr. was in high school, she became the executive director of the W.N.B.P.A., where she has led initiatives for improved maternity benefits and better pay for players.His parents’ careers meant Jaren Jr. moved often, and that he had to learn to adapt to new people quickly.The Jacksons said they raised him to participate, to be comfortable in front of people he didn’t know.He was always bigger than the other children, and he learned early how to make his peers feel comfortable. At age 4, that meant sharing toys in a sandbox, and, as he got older, it meant speaking up for them in class or running for student council.“Given all that your life has been blessed with, all the opportunities that you have, there’s an expectation that you participate in the lives of others,” Terri said.His classmates elected him to student government, which taught him how to relate to his peers and to help them feel heard.He also learned how to perform in front of groups, a skill that transferred to his professional basketball career. At summer camps growing up, he would perform dances with friends. A hip-hop performance when Jaren Jr. was about 14 or 15 years old remains etched in Jaren Sr.’s memory.“I’m not allowed to share the video with anyone,” said Jaren Sr. “But he did a magnificent job.”Jaren Sr. reached the N.B.A. as an undrafted player and cobbled together a long career in pieces, making stops in lesser leagues and finding smaller roles with N.B.A. teams, including one championship season with the Spurs.Jaren Jr. was a highly regarded recruit coming out of high school, already nearly seven feet tall.This year, Jackson Jr. was an N.B.A. All-Star and the defensive player of the year.Petre Thomas/USA Today Sports, via ReutersHe played one season at Michigan State before the Grizzlies selected him fourth overall in the 2018 draft.Injuries have interrupted his first few years, but Jackson’s talent has been undeniable. On an exceptionally young Grizzlies team, Jackson has quickly become one of the leaders.He missed the first 14 games of the 2022-23 season while recovering from surgery, but he was still voted the league’s defensive player of the year.He learned the news when the TNT analyst Ernie Johnson announced it during a broadcast. Jackson sat back on a couch at home with a basketball between his knees. As soon as Johnson said his name, Terri, who was standing near him, started shouting in celebration.“WOOOOOOO! Yes! Yes! Yes!” she said, as Jaren Jr. smiled and put his hands over his eyes.“I just like to chill be quiet and relax,” Jaren Jr. said, “but she’s — you let your mom enjoy those moments.”This time, she didn’t have to hide her joy behind a laptop.When his peers elected him as an N.B.P.A. vice president, Jaren Jr. made sure they knew that he understood he had a lot to learn. He tries to keep his teammates abreast of how to take advantage of collectively bargained benefits, he said.He has worked with his teammate Ja Morant as Morant navigates the league’s punishment for a series of social media videos that resulted in a 25-game suspension. Jaren Jr. declined to give specifics, saying “that’s his business.”He had tried to be involved in the union even before joining the executive committee, he said, but having an official role means longer meetings and more responsibility.“It’s a lot,” Jaren Jr. said. “You have to look after the league — you’re like a big brother.”Jackson Jr. and his mother at the FedEx Forum in Memphis.Whitten Sabbatini for The New York TimesThe veteran players in the union’s leadership roles are helping him as he learns the league’s business machinations, he said.In his parents, he also has two more veterans of sports league union work to rely on if he needs them. But these days, Jaren Jr. doesn’t often do that. Their time together tends to be more family focused, the lessons of the past having been imprinted long ago. More

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      The N.B.A. and Its Owners Fight for Change. But Not Necessarily the Same Change.

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      The league embraces progressive causes supported by players. But some team owners pull in the opposite direction, as apparent in the Orlando Magic’s donation to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.In June 2022, on the same day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, released a statement jointly with the W.N.B.A.’s commissioner, Cathy Engelbert.Silver and Engelbert said the leagues believed “that women should be able to make their own decisions concerning their health and future, and we believe that freedom should be protected.”Less than one year later, one of the N.B.A.’s teams, the Orlando Magic — as an organization — wrote a $50,000 check to Never Back Down, a super PAC promoting Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, financial disclosures revealed this week. The Magic are owned by the DeVos family, well-known conservatives. Betsy DeVos, the daughter-in-law of the former Magic chairman Richard DeVos, who died in 2018, was former president Donald J. Trump’s education secretary.The check was written on May 19, according to a team spokesman. That was weeks after DeSantis signed one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, prohibiting the termination of pregnancies after six weeks, but days before he had officially declared he would run for the Republican presidential nomination.The donation “was given as a Florida business in support of a Florida governor for the continued prosperity of Central Florida,” the team said in a statement.The Magic’s donation to DeSantis, who is in his second term as governor, was not the first time an N.B.A. team had put its name on a political donation. In the 1990s, the Phoenix Suns, then owned by Jerry Colangelo, donated tens of thousands to the Republican National Committee. But the Magic’s check appears to be the first direct donation from an N.B.A. team to a group directly allied with a presidential candidate — or one, like DeSantis, who was widely expected to run.The N.B.A., under its commissioner, Adam Silver, has supported causes supported by players.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesThe donation was also a reminder that for all of the N.B.A.’s professions of support for progressive causes that its players believe in, several billionaire team owners — whose interests Silver represents — have deployed their own power to fight those very causes. (The N.B.A. declined to comment.)Owners like Dan Gilbert (Cleveland Cavaliers), Tilman Fertitta (Houston Rockets) James Dolan (Knicks) and the DeVos family have donated large sums to Republican politicians who oppose abortion rights, gun control, voting rights and police reform — all issues the N.B.A. has supported, either in public statements or through its Social Justice coalition.“Any time I have noticed in my research where the N.B.A. has responded to player activism and player demands, they’ve always been forced to do so,” Theresa Runstedtler, a history professor at American University and the author of “Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the N.B.A.,” said in an interview.She continued: “It’s always been something that they’ve been pushed into by the more vocal and militant players in the league.”In the summer of 2020, several N.B.A. players protested the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by police in Minneapolis, and the Milwaukee Bucks refused to come out for a playoff game against the Orlando Magic after the shooting of another Black man, Jacob Blake, by police in Kenosha, Wis. In response, N.B.A. owners agreed to form the Social Justice Coalition, which would emphasize voting rights, police reform and criminal justice reform — all areas that disproportionately affected Black people.On paper, the N.B.A. was moving beyond traditional philanthropy. The Bucks’ walkout compelled the league to shape public policy, a goal far beyond what other professional sports leagues intended to do.“Our goal is really simple,” James Cadogan, the coalition’s executive director, said in a social media clip introducing the group. “We want to take moments of protest, moments of people power like we saw last year, and turn them into public policy. We want to change laws.”In recent years, the N.B.A. has taken up the cause of Clean Slate initiatives, an effort in states to seal some records of those who had been incarcerated. Weeks ago, DeSantis vetoed a Republican-backed bill in Florida concerning the expunging of criminal records.The Social Justice Coalition has endorsed several bills in its nascent existence, though with limited success: The EQUAL Act, a move to end sentencing disparities in cases involving the sale of crack and powder cocaine, is not yet federal law. The George Floyd Justice In Policing Act, a police reform bill that passed the House in 2021, languished in the Senate.Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors warmed up for a game in 2022. He made a video urging fans to support the Freedom to Vote Act.Jeff Chiu/Associated PressAfter the 2020 election, Republicans made a significant push to tighten election rules at the state level, after which the Golden State star Stephen Curry made a video for the coalition imploring fans to connect with lawmakers to pass the Freedom To Vote Act. Separately, the coalition supported a voting rights bill named after the former congressman John Lewis. Both bills were blocked by a Senate Republican filibuster. The N.B.A. has not called for the filibuster to be removed.The N.B.A. is hardly to blame when a hot-button bill fails to pass a divided Congress. But it is harder for the league to effect change when some of its team owners have made it their mission to elect people who oppose that change.At the end of 2015, with Silver still relatively new to the commissioner job, the league partnered with Everytown for Gun Safety on an advertising campaign about gun safety. Stars like Curry and Carmelo Anthony spoke in personal terms about the effects of gun violence in commercials that aired during Christmas Day games, when the N.B.A. traditionally has a big national audience. The commercials didn’t call for specific legislation, but partnering with a political figure like Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor who founded Everytown, was an unusual move for an American sports league.The next year, the N.B.A. moved the All-Star game from North Carolina to protest a state law that critics said targeted lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Silver’s pulling the game had consequences for the local economy and embarrassed politicians that sports leagues typically want to mollify.The Republican governor of the state, Pat McCrory, blasted the N.B.A., saying that the league, and other critics, had “misrepresented our laws and maligned the people of North Carolina simply because most people believe boys and girls should be able to use school bathrooms, locker rooms and showers without the opposite sex present.”Silver would later tell an audience that the law was “inconsistent with the core values of the league.” (A frequent donor to liberal politicians, he is open about his own political beliefs.)Now, a franchise has written a large check to DeSantis, who has signed bills that critics say target L.G.B.T.Q. communities — which would go against what Silver would call the “core values of the league.” DeSantis has also been in a feud with Disney — which the N.B.A. does business with as a broadcast partner of ESPN. Disney is a sponsor of the Magic, though Disney did not respond to a request for comment on whether that partnership would continue. And the league is choosing to stay silent for now.What the N.B.A. should and should not campaign for isn’t an easy question. But since the league loudly stood up for transgender people in one instance and abortion rights in another, its silence is noteworthy when a franchise owner, using the team name, supports a politician with opposing views.The N.B.A. is, in the end, a business whose primary goal is to make money. If it is also genuinely interested standing up for some social issues, it will need to stand up to its owners too. More

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      Review: ‘Flex’ Hits the Right Rhythms on the Court and Off

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      The writer Candrice Jones and the director Lileana Blain-Cruz show a mastery of the game in this play about a girls’ basketball team in rural Arkansas.Their knees are bent, palms outstretched, eyes darting and alert.The young women of Lady Train, a high school basketball team in rural Arkansas, are training for every possibility on the court — which, in the beloved tradition of sports-powered coming-of-age stories, also means preparing for adult life.Perhaps it should be no surprise, then, that in the first scene of “Flex,” which opened at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse on Thursday, all of the players appear to be pregnant. As this tip-off to a slam-dunk New York debut makes clear, the playwright Candrice Jones excels equally in sly, sitcom humor and in the swift-tongued rhythms of teenage and athletic talk.The lumpy bumps beneath Lady Train’s various fly-casual printed tees (it’s 1997, and the spot-on costumes are by Mika Eubanks) are obviously fake, contraband from a home-ec class. But for April (a tender Brittany Bellizeare), the prospect of childbearing is no joke; she’s been benched since the team’s zero-nonsense coach (Christiana Clark) learned of her pregnancy. The bumper-belly drills are both a protest and show of solidarity.Threatening that bond is the requisite rivalry between two top players: the scrappy and headstrong team captain, Starra (a glowering Erica Matthews), who is trying to prove her mettle to her late mother, and Sidney (Tamera Tomakili, delightful), an eye-rolling, hair-flipping transplant from Los Angeles who talks smack with a smile. There’s a delicate romance, too, between the even-keeled Donna (Renita Lewis, the show’s subtle M.V.P.) and Cherise (Ciara Monique), a youth minister whose faith is at odds with her desires, and with April’s consideration of an abortion.Jones and the director Lileana Blain-Cruz (both former high school basketball players) demonstrate a dexterous mastery of the game, not only in narrated action sequences on the blond-wood, half-court set (by Matt Saunders), but also in the pass-or-shoot dynamics that bind these friends and teammates.The teammates bond while driving around in a dusty-blue Chrysler convertible and singing along to Aaliyah.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThere’s even an alchemy to “Flex” that conjures ardent home-team affinity from the audience (whoops and applause escalated in enthusiasm throughout the performance I attended). Maybe that’s inspired by Lady Train’s spelling-bee cheers (“big,” “bad” and “boss” are prominent), or their Aaliyah singalong with the top down on Donna’s dusty-blue Chrysler convertible (another impressive feat of design).But the special sauce is also in the careful economy of Jones’s character development, which offers just enough detail to inspire curiosity about who these women could become without claiming to know exactly who they are. (They’re teenagers, after all.) Whether Starra ascends to the W.N.B.A., she’ll have to wrestle with her ego. And Cherise doesn’t seem likely to let go of God, but what will happen if her devotion comes to feel like a trap?That “Flex” manages to garner such interest in its characters’ potential is a testament to the extraordinary synergy among Jones, Blain-Cruz and the cast members, who are as present and engaged in dialogue as they are nimble at the net.Tropes of the sports genre trotted out here — a betrayed purity pact, competition for scouts’ attention — are attended by the broader considerations that make young people and team sports such fraught and fertile ground. What do we owe ourselves, and at what cost to one another? Why learn the meaning of fairness when life is so unfair? To rebound when it knocks you down, and to savor the moments when it delivers on your wildest dreams.FlexThrough Aug. 20 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, Manhattan; lct.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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      Aliyah Boston of the Indiana Fever Has Officially Arrived

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      Boston, the Indiana Fever rookie forward and center, has already become a face of the W.N.B.A. just months into her professional career.Aliyah Boston said she usually keeps it cool when she faces the star basketball players she grew up watching on television. But her poker face slipped last month.Boston, a rookie power forward and center for the Indiana Fever, was in a close contest against the Las Vegas Aces and she was shoulder to shoulder with her childhood idol, Candace Parker.“It was unreal,” Boston said. “We’re standing on the free-throw line, cracking jokes. And I’m like: ‘Aliyah, don’t laugh. This is serious business.’”Fifteen years ago, when Boston was just 6 years old, Parker won the W.N.B.A.’s Rookie of the Year Award. Now Boston is on track to do the same.She was the first rookie to be named a starter for the W.N.B.A. All-Star Game in nine years and only the eighth rookie ever. The achievement added to what has been an impressive season for Boston, who is drawing comparisons to greats like Brittney Griner, A’ja Wilson and Elena Delle Donne just weeks into her professional career.“She’s going to be a great one,” said Aces Coach Becky Hammon, who also coached Boston in the All-Star Game in Las Vegas on Saturday. “Indiana has a centerpiece, literally a center piece to build around.”Aliyah Boston, second from left, started in the W.N.B.A. All-Star Game after leading the league in field-goal percentage.Jamie Squire/Jamie Squire/Getty ImagesBoston is averaging 15.4 points per game, the most of any first-year player, and she is shooting a league-leading 61 percent from the field. The No. 1 pick in this year’s draft, Boston has swept rookie of the month award honors so far this season.“I never thought I’d be an All-Star my rookie season,” Boston said on Saturday. “It’s just a blessing to be in this position right now.”Boston exudes confidence. As the All-Star lineups were announced, she danced out onto the stage to the delight of her veteran teammates. And she is poised on the court. With her Indiana Fever down 3 to the Liberty last week, Boston knocked down a 3-pointer at the buzzer to send the game into overtime. The Liberty eventually won, 95-87.“She is going through uncharted territory a little bit,” Liberty forward Breanna Stewart said, “but still making sure that she’s able to have an impact on the court and play her game.”Boston is known for having an impact. While playing for Coach Dawn Staley at South Carolina, Boston was a four-time all-American and set several team records, including in rebounds, double-doubles and triple-doubles. In 2021, she led the Gamecocks to their second N.C.A.A. Division I title in program history. Now she’s trying to make her mark on a Fever team that has struggled for years. Wins are still hard to come by, but Boston has already proved her value.“It’s a smooth transition for her,” Staley said. “She makes it look easy. And I know it’s not.”Boston became known for her multicolored braids in college and has continued the style in the pros.Steph Chambers/Getty ImagesThat transition from college to the W.N.B.A. includes myriad challenges, from the pace of play to the constant travel to the increased physicality, said Liberty guard Sabrina Ionescu, the No. 1 draft pick in 2020.“It’s hard, and hats off to her and the entire Indiana organization for helping her do what she does,” Ionescu said. “That’s why they drafted her at 1, because they know what she’s capable of doing.”Boston said her basketball I.Q. is the main skill that has translated from college to the pros. Staley agreed.“She makes the right basketball decisions,” Staley said. “And when you’ve played that way your entire life, nothing changes. It’s only the people that change.”One of the new people Boston has faced is Delle Donne, who was named the rookie of the year in 2013. Delle Donne said that one of the trickier aspects of joining the league is how quickly players need to get used to a new program, new coach and new teammates, but said that none of that seems to have slowed down Boston. Last month, against Delle Donne’s Washington Mystics, Boston scored 23 points and grabbed 14 rebounds in the Fever’s 87-66 win.Boston with her Indiana teammates.Steph Chambers/Getty Images“She’s so dominant,” Delle Donne said. “I mean, she crushed us the other game. She’s a rookie that requires veteran defensive schemes.”Delle Donne added that it can be hard to manage the pressure of coming in as the No. 1 overall pick. Last season, the Fever finished at the bottom of the 12-team league with a 5-31 record.“To know the expectation that you’re supposed to come and completely change a team is hard, but you can do it,” Delle Donne said. “Coming into the league, there’s always so much excitement about a new player who’s going to continue to raise our game and make it even better. So night in and night out, people are watching what you’re doing.”For now, Boston seems unfazed by the attention.“Something that I always take with me is, never get too high with the highs and too low with the lows,” Boston said. “Stay levelheaded.” More

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      Why Basketball Is So Popular Off Broadway

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      Basketball is central to the plot in new shows, including “Flex” and “The Half-God of Rainfall.”In Inua Ellams’s new play, “The Half-God of Rainfall,” the gods play thunderous games of basketball in the heavens. For Candrice Jones’s “Flex,” high schoolers practice their defensive stances while scraping by in rural Arkansas. Near the end of Rajiv Joseph’s “King James,” the two main characters play a one-on-one game of basketball using a crumpled up piece of paper after waxing poetic about the greatness of the N.B.A. star LeBron James.Basketball hasn’t just been on the playgrounds of New York City this summer. Hoop dreams are also playing out onstage, highlighting a theater, ahem, crossover that has become more pronounced in recent years.While basketball is not as popular as, say, American football, its cultural reach surpasses that of other American team sports because its players are among the most publicly recognizable. (Three of the 10 highest-paid athletes in the world, when including endorsements and other off-field endeavors, according to Forbes, are N.B.A. players.)“Watching a basketball game is the same excitement I get from watching great theater,” said Taibi Magar, the director of “The Half-God of Rainfall.” “It’s like embodied conflict. It’s executed by highly skilled performers. When you’re watching Broadway, you feel just like you’re watching N.B.A. performers.”For Joseph, who grew up in Cleveland, basketball is the most culturally important sport partly because so many international stars play in the N.B.A., like the Denver Nuggets’s Nikola Jokic, who is Serbian, and the Milwaukee Bucks’s Giannis Antetokounmpo, who’s from Greece.“It’s drawing from every place on the planet, which means that the sport has become a really important athletic pursuit globally,” said Joseph, whose play “King James” just ended its run at New York City Center.In Inua Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” at New York Theater Workshop, Demi (played by Mister Fitzgerald) is a half-Greek god who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd basketball’s prevalence in pop culture — including in the worlds of hip-hop and fashion and more recently in film and television — has also penetrated the theater space. Dwyane Wade, who retired from the N.B.A. in 2019, was among the producers of the Broadway shows “American Son” and “Ain’t No Mo’.”“Even if one hasn’t played on a team or hasn’t played organized ball, we all have access to basketball,” Jones, who wrote “Flex,” said in a recent interview. “You go in any hood or any small town, someone has created a basketball goal.”In casting “Flex,” which is in previews at the Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, prospective actors recorded themselves playing basketball as part of the audition process. Jones and the show’s director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, who both played basketball in high school, said they wanted the basketball being played onstage to look authentic.“People have different styles, different ways of shooting, different personalities, different kinds of swagger,” Blain-Cruz said. “We care about the individual in the role that they play and how they’re playing it. And I think that aligns itself to theater.”Jones’s play, set in rural Arkansas, tells the story of a girl’s high school basketball team in 1998, which aligned with the second year of the W.N.B.A. So as the audition process advanced, the actors were asked to dribble, shoot and do layups for the creative team. Once the cast was set, some rehearsals weren’t about staging at all: The cast had basketball practice at nearby John Jay College.“There’s a kind of ensemble quality to it,” Blain-Cruz said about the sport. “Like an ensemble of actors playing together, a team of basketball players performing together. Together, they create the event.”Minutes later, as Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing)” blared, Blain-Cruz led a warm-up with the cast that included hip openers and upward arm stretches. It could have doubled as pregame preparation. The set itself had a basketball hoop hanging in the rear, and a basketball court painted on the floor. “Flex” refers to a type of play basketball teams run, and the staged work features several instances of game play.“There’s a real rigor. It is real,” Blain-Cruz said. “That’s what’s so satisfying, I think, about sports onstage. There’s an honesty to it, right? Dribbling the ball is actually dribbling the ball. We’re not performing the idea of dribbling the ball.”After a recent outing to a New York Liberty game, the actress Erica Matthews, whose character, Starra Jones, is the 17-year-old point guard of the fictional team, said watching the players reminded her of watching live theater.“Basketball is very intimate. You can play a one-on-one game in a small amount of space,” Matthews said. “They’re actually performing on a stage and with the way the audience is surrounding them, the way they’re cheering, it’s basically storytelling.”Downtown at the New York Theater Workshop, Ellams’s “The Half-God of Rainfall,” a Dante-inspired “contemporary epic” about a half-Greek god named Demi who becomes the biggest star in the N.B.A., is in previews and is scheduled to open July 31. While “Flex” deals with down-to-earth issues, such as teen pregnancy, “The Half-God of Rainfall” transports basketball to a mythical world for immortals to deal with.At a recent rehearsal, cast members pantomimed slow motion basketball movements at the direction of the choreographer, Orlando Pabotoy. The actors Jason Bowen and Patrice Johnson Chevannes worked on setting up a proper screen, and Bowen later practiced a Michael Jordan impersonation — complete with the tongue wagging. (Jordan is referenced in the play.)As Ellams and Magar, the show’s director, looked on from desks cluttered with tiny inflatable basketballs, they worked on reallocating lines as the choreography required. Though this version of Ellams’s poem has a cast of seven, he said it can be staged with as many or as few performers as the production desires. (A 2019 production at the Birmingham Repertory Theater in England had only two actors.)Ellams, a Nigerian poet and playwright, who has played basketball since he was a teenager, said he created the character Demi to “do all the things that I never could” on the court. He mused that basketball has a greater draw to the stage because it is “a far more beautiful sport.”In Rajiv Joseph’s “King James,” which just ended its run at New York City Center, Chris Perfetti and Glenn Davis play two men who bond over their love of LeBron James.Jeenah Moon for The New York Times“There’s something humbling and mortal about basketball in the sense that there’s a simple equation,” Ellams said. “The ball bounces; it comes back up to your palm. You can break that down. This is solitariness, which invites the blues and what it means to play the blues. There’s a longing.”“There’s a natural melancholy about it,” he added, which makes it “easier to pair with the human spirit.”Of course there have been other basketball-related plays. In 2012, “Magic/Bird” explored the friendship and rivalry between the 1980s basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird on Broadway. The 2011 Broadway musical “Lysistrata Jones,” inspired by Aristophanes’s “Lysistrata,” followed a group of cheerleaders who withhold sex from their boyfriends on the basketball team because they keep losing games. Lauren Yee’s 2018 Off Broadway play, “The Great Leap,” also directed by Magar, tells the story of a teenage basketball prodigy who travels to China in 1989 to play in an exhibition game between college teams from Beijing and San Francisco.Daryl Morey, now an executive with the N.B.A.’s Philadelphia 76ers, commissioned a musical comedy called “Small Ball” that played in Houston in 2018. It depicts a fictional character named Michael Jordan — not the Jordan — as he finds himself playing in an international league with teammates who are six inches tall.“I think basketball is just the most important of all of the sports among the up-and-coming directors and playwrights, at least the ones I’ve spoken to,” Morey said.Not that basketball has a lock on the theater. Baseball has long been an object of fascination for playwrights, including classic shows like “Damn Yankees.” Richard Greenberg’s Tony-winning 2003 play, “Take Me Out,” about a baseball player who comes out as gay, had a Tony-winning revival on Broadway last year. In 2019, “Toni Stone,” written by Lydia R. Diamond, depicted the life of Marcenia Lyle Stone, who became the first woman to play in a men’s baseball league when she took the field for the Indianapolis Clowns in the Negro Leagues.Football and boxing, too: “Lombardi,” a biographical play based on the life of the legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, ran on Broadway in 2010, and 2014 brought a stage adaptation of “Rocky,” the famous 1976 underdog boxing film, to Broadway.But for the moment, it is basketball that is having a renaissance in theater. Or to put it in basketball terms, playwrights who take on the sport currently have the hot hand. More

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      Different Sides of Bill Walton and Wilt Chamberlain in New Series

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      New documentaries explore the star-crossed careers and delicate spirits of Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Walton, two of basketball’s greatest.Pity the poor 7-footer.That’s the message of two new documentary series about storied basketball players: “The Luckiest Guy in the World,” about Bill Walton (available in the “30 for 30” hub at ESPN Plus), and “Goliath,” about Wilt Chamberlain (premiering Friday at Paramount+ and Sunday on Showtime).Serious and thorough, “Luckiest Guy” and “Goliath” are positioned to draft on the success of an earlier basketball biography, ESPN’s popular Michael Jordan series, “The Last Dance.” But while they are also portraits of men with supreme physical gifts, they are less focused on their subjects’ on-court exploits and more determined to get inside the players’ heads. The sportswriter Jackie MacMullan delivers what could be a thesis statement for both in “Goliath”: “I’ve found that big men are much more sensitive than we realize.”Chamberlain, who died of heart failure in 1999, and Walton both have well-defined personas, which they participated in creating. Each series spends a lot of its time picking apart the received wisdom about its subject while also indulging, for the sake of dramatic impact and storytelling shorthand, the very stereotypes it wants to deconstruct: Chamberlain the unstoppable, insatiable giant; Walton the goofy, fragile flower child.The four-episode “Luckiest Guy” was directed by the accomplished documentarian Steve James, always to be remembered for “Hoop Dreams,” and was made with the full cooperation of Walton, 70, who revisits old haunts and sits down for an entertaining round table with Portland Trail Blazers teammates like Lionel Hollins and Dave Twardzik. It’s engagingly introspective and personal, in part because James pushes back against Walton’s incessant recitation of the title phrase. How can Walton call himself the luckiest guy in the world, James asks from behind the camera, when his career was utterly ravaged by injuries that eventually crippled him and drove him to consider suicide?That, broadly speaking, is the idea that haunts both documentaries. The conundrum of Walton’s and Chamberlain’s careers is that they were marked by success — college and professional championships, statistical domination (in Chamberlain’s case), reputations for unmatched athletic skills — and defined by disappointment. Neither won as often or as easily as he should have, in Walton’s case because of injury and in Chamberlain’s because of the dominance during the 1960s of the rival Boston Celtics and their center, Bill Russell, enshrined in sports mythology as the hard-working Everyman to Chamberlain’s sex-and-statistics-obsessed egotist.“Goliath,” directed by Rob Ford and Christopher Dillon, is a more workmanlike and conventional project than “Luckiest Guy.” But across three episodes it makes a persuasive case for Chamberlain as a generous, sensitive soul who was both blessed and constrained by his stature and his extraordinary all-around athletic ability.It does its sports-documentary duty, laying out Chamberlain’s triumphs and more frequent setbacks on the court. But it is more interested in the trails he blazed as a Black cultural figure and self-determining professional athlete, and it favors writers, pundits and scholars over basketball players in its interviews. (The scarcity of images from Chamberlain’s younger days in the 1940s and ’50s is compensated for with shadow-puppet scenes reminiscent of the work of Kara Walker.)Watching the series side by side, the differences between the two men are less interesting than the sense of commonality that emerges. Both were self-conscious stutterers who learned to endure, and perform under, the most intense scrutiny. Chamberlain may have been more flamboyant, but Walton, in “Luckiest Guy,” is just as conscious of his affect — there’s an ostentatiousness, and no small amount of ego, in the way he performs modesty. (James also challenges Walton’s lifelong, generally debunked claim to be only 6 feet 11 inches tall.)The veteran sports fan might see another commonality: As good as they are, neither “The Luckiest Guy in the World” nor “Goliath” is as exciting to watch as “The Last Dance.” This is a bit of a conundrum, because both Chamberlain and Walton are, quite arguably, more complex, interesting and moving figures than Michael Jordan. But Michael Jordan is a nearly unparalleled winner. And while winning isn’t the only thing, it is, for better or worse, the most compelling thing about the subject of a sports documentary. More

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      Inside the NBA’s Version of Comic-Con

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      Promoted as a celebration of the league’s cultural relevance, the convention also highlighted the N.B.A.’s business ambitions.Somewhere under the lights of the Mandalay Bay Convention Center over the weekend, the Jabbawockeez danced during a television special that could have been an email as part of the “most culturally relevant basketball experience on the planet.”That’s what the signs called it, anyway. It was the first-ever N.B.A. Con, the league’s riff on Comic-Con. The basketball-themed Lollapalooza was a three-day smorgasbord of fashion, music and basketball.But seen through another lens, the convention was an intriguing window into how the league sees itself as a business.The first-ever N.B.A. Con drew more than 25,000 attendees.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesThe event was a three-day festival of fashion, music and basketball. There were also arcade games.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesFor the N.B.A., stars are bigger than the games — cultural presences far beyond the floor. The N.B.A. took advantage of that by holding the convention during its summer league in Las Vegas, when scores of stakeholders from the union, retired players, owners, general managers, players, sponsors and fans descend on Nevada.“When you ask people about the N.B.A., for them, it’s not a company,” said Mark Tatum, the league’s deputy commissioner. “It’s life. It’s their culture. The N.B.A. is this culture of music and fashion and entertainment and style.”More than 25,000 fans attended, mostly paying $30 to $250 to get in. But really, cultural relevance is priceless, especially when sponsored by Michelob Ultra. (They were there too.)The convention floor was set up to evoke the spirit of New York City, with park benches, Jenga, cornhole and pickleball courts. There were neighborhoods titled the Drip, the Collection, the Network, the Park and the Convos.The Drip, where sponsors set up shop, was the real core of the convention.Sure, a convention does help the league reach fans in a way it otherwise wouldn’t at a time when LeBron James isn’t playing every night. On Saturday, N.B.A. Commissioner Adam Silver detailed a new in-season tournament during a bloated television special. But throwing an N.B.A. Con meant the league also created an opportunity for new intellectual property. It sold N.B.A. Con merchandise and created a new Twitter account, though the account had fewer than 2,000 followers on Monday compared with nearly 44 million on the league account.There was an AT&T booth, where a sign read, “Step into the spotlight and show off your fire fit.” Fans lined up and shot slow-motion videos of their outfits under a fancy spotlight.Attendees swarmed the former Knicks star Carmelo Anthony for photos and autographs.Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesAnother booth, run by a memorabilia company, MeiGray, sold game-worn jerseys. Its main podium showed a mannequin wearing a jersey that Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic wore in Game 2 of the N.B.A. finals last month. It sold for $150,000. Next to that was a smaller podium with a jersey that Miami Heat forward Jimmy Butler wore during Game 3 of that series. It sold for $17,500. To the victors — the Nuggets — go the bigger boxes and higher prices.Tucked in a back corner of the convention space was an exhibit called “Rings Culture,” from the jewelry store Jason of Beverly Hills. It displayed several replicas of championship rings. It might’ve been the perfect place for a heist in a movie like “Ocean’s Eleven.”The night before the convention, the N.B.A. held a walk-through for journalists. Tristan Jass, a YouTuber known for trick basketball shots, displayed some of his skills on a temporary court. But before doing so, he described his ascension to fame.“When you ask people about the N.B.A., for them, it’s not a company,” said the league’s deputy commissioner. “It’s life. It’s their culture.”Bridget Bennett for The New York TimesFans measured their vertical leaps near the Drip, an area of the convention where sponsors sold merchandise.Bridget Bennett for The New York Times“We just left a trail of inspiration around the world,” Jass told the crowd.His first shot was a heave from a spot adjacent to the court behind a chain-link fence. He missed the first two attempts, but hit the third. It was impressive. His second shot was a full-court launch from the opposite corner. This one didn’t go as well. After at least 20 misses, some observers — the uninspired ones, clearly — moved on to the rest of the tour. When a shot rimmed out, Jass muttered, “Those ones hurt.”The biggest draw for the weekend was a panel discussion with Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar moderated by Isiah Thomas, the former Detroit Pistons star. There were a couple hundred seats, but a long overflow line for viewers trying to catch a glimpse of a basketball torch being passed. Wembanyama was the much-heralded No. 1 pick in the N.B.A. draft last month.There was a larger backdrop too: Abdul-Jabbar’s conversation with Wembanyama in that 30-minute panel was more time than he had spent chatting with James in the last two decades combined. Last month, Abdul-Jabbar told reporters in Los Angeles that he had “never had a chance really to talk to LeBron, other than two or three minutes.”At N.B.A. Con, Abdul-Jabbar said he was struck by how much the game had changed.“The different duties and what is expected of various players in various positions,” he said. “It’s really been through a tremendous change, and for more than a few minutes, I just sat there and wondered, ‘Would I be able to compete?’”Abdul-Jabbar spent 20 seasons in the N.B.A. and retired in 1989 as the career scoring leader. James surpassed his record in February.“Sure would have been nice, though, to be able to fly from city to city in a charter jet like these guys do,” Abdul-Jabbar said. “I didn’t get to do that. I could have played longer.”To that end, the convention served not just as a branding exercise for the N.B.A., but also the players themselves. Scoot Henderson, the 19-year-old who was drafted third by the Portland Trail Blazers last month, is part of a new generation of stars with a marketing reach that players from Abdul-Jabbar’s era would find unrecognizable. Most players are active on social media, which has given them expanded ways to build an audience. Henderson was interviewed in a panel by the former Knicks star Carmelo Anthony — delivering a signal that the league viewed Henderson as next in the star lineage.“I’ve been thinking about myself as a business for a minute,” Henderson said afterward. “The name. A corporation — that’s who I am.”Most fans paid $30 to $250 to get into N.B.A. Con.Bridget Bennett for The New York Times More

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      Victor Wembanyama Gets Introduction to N.B.A. Fame and Game in Las Vegas

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      Wembanyama had the anticipation of fans and a turn in the tabloids, yet a more modest showing as he learns his new team.The walls around Victor Wembanyama, as he sat for a news conference Friday night at the Thomas and Mack Center, were plastered with images of past winners of the Las Vegas Summer League tournament. There were N.B.A. stars who played there in the early days of their careers and a photo of LeBron James from 2018, when he showed up wearing gold shorts that said “Lakers” on the front in his first public appearance after signing with the team.The summer league debuted the year after James’s rookie season, so its first marquee rookie was Dwight Howard, the top pick in 2004. As Wembanyama spoke with reporters, a picture of a smiling Howard could be seen on a wall to his right.“The Beatles?” one team executive had joked earlier that night when asked what he would compare to the hysteria around Wembanyama, whom the San Antonio Spurs selected first overall last month. The closest real comparison is to James’s entry into the league in 2003.Wembanyama had just finished his debut performance in a Spurs jersey, when he scored nine points with eight rebounds, three assists and five blocks. He made 2 of 13 shots and sometimes looked tired.None of this will matter for his long-term future, nor does it predict what his career will be. But Wembanyama’s first few days in Las Vegas didn’t just introduce him to N.B.A. play, they also introduced him to the absurdity of fame’s glare. He came out of that experience a bit subdued, but still smiling and poised as his journey continued.Wembanyama only finished his French season three weeks ago, the week before the N.B.A. draft. That he would be selected first overall was a foregone conclusion, but it still brought him to tears when it happened.The Spurs immediately began molding him. He went to dinner the next day with some of the organization’s legends — Tim Duncan, David Robinson, Sean Elliott and Manu Ginobili — to start learning from them.They knew his body needed a break, so they had him skip their games in Sacramento last week to save his debut for Las Vegas. He will also skip the World Cup this year, where he would have bolstered the French national team.And when Wembanyama began playing and practicing with the Spurs’ summer league team, together they focused on learning again.“There is an eagerness that’s very clear as a coach,” said Matt Nielsen, who is coaching the Spurs’ summer league team. “He’s wanting to do the right thing.”Friday night’s game featured Wembanyama and the Spurs against the Charlotte Hornets and Brandon Miller, the second overall pick in June’s draft.The Thomas and Mack Center is a worn-down arena on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas that once a year dresses itself up as the center of the N.B.A. world.All 30 N.B.A. teams show up a couple of weeks after the N.B.A. draft for the summer league with rosters that include their most recent draft picks, whom they pray won’t get injured during the exhibition games. Scouts, team owners and executives dot the lower bowls and every so often the league’s biggest stars take a break from casinos, clubs and sponsorship appearances to stop by and sit courtside for a game.A typical summer league crowd might fill half the lower bowl, and a good crowd packs it and maybe spills into the upper decks. On Friday night, the entire arena was filled to the top with nearly 18,000 spectators hoping to see something spectacular.Wembanyama had some bright moments, but did not produce the kinds of moments the crowd had waited breathlessly for. He missed a layup and a dunk, in all 11 of the shots he took. He was not the focal point of the Spurs offense for most of the game. Defensively, his natural size and 8-foot wingspan meant he could block jump-shots even when he was late getting to the shot.At least once, his victim was Miller, who scored 16 points on 5-of-15 shooting with 11 rebounds.After the game Wembanyama talked about wanting to improve his conditioning, and said he was “exhausted” every time he came out of the game. He needed to better understand the plays called by the point guard, and the team’s defensive system, he said.“I didn’t really know what I was doing on the court tonight, but I’m trying to learn for the next games,” Wembanyama said. “The important thing is to be ready for the season.”It was a levelheaded response from Wembanyama, who seemed less effervescent but still poised.That didn’t stop observers from drawing conclusions about his future or fans of the pop star Britney Spears from mocking his performance.Yes, Britney Spears.She had tried to approach Wembanyama from behind on Wednesday night and was stopped by a Spurs security guard who swung his left arm in her direction. Las Vegas police said the security guard’s actions caused Spears to hit herself in the face, but Spears said the response was overboard and asked for an apology.Wembanyama said he never saw her face during the encounter, but her fans, nonetheless, remained irritated. The police said no charges would be filed.That minor controversy had marked the start of Wembanyama’s time in Las Vegas, and highlighted the absurdity that can come with fame. It passed, though, just as the memory of a mundane start can, too, as Wembanyama’s career progresses. More