hoops

I do not reside in a basketball powerhouse. In fact, outside of a handful of female superstars (namely in volleyball, surfing, and boxing), Peru is pretty awful at sports. Even the national soccer squad regularly finishes among the worst in Latin America, and we’re talking about a county where every boy, from the shoeless slum-dweller to the diplomat’s son, grows up playing the game. So needless to say, I didn’t expect to find much basketball when I moved down from the mountains to Ica several months ago, much less any decent players. But as it turns out, there is a group of guys that plays several times a week here, and shockingly, the level of play is not far off from what you’d find in your average pickup game in most of America.

Basketball in Peru can be pretty hilarious. And intense. And maddeningly frustrating. My father, who has played on public courts from the Bronx to Chicago to Sao Paulo, recently commented that “Basketball can be, and is, a window into life all over the world.” And I think he’s right; I’d bet most foreigners in Peru would have no objections about changing the first word of this paragraph to “Life.”

Here in Ica it’s a broad mix of ages and styles. There are the guys in their teens and early 20s who have grown up watching Kobe and Lebron, and try to model their moves on theirs – most notably, that jump stop-plus-two-steps-when-driving-the-lane garbage that the NBA says is OK, but which is just a blatant travel on a playground. (I can’t believe no one here ever calls that, especially the way fouls work in these parts – more on that in a minute). At the other end of the creative and athletic spectrum reside the guys in their 60s with their knees and ankles all wrapped up, and who, like old-timers anywhere, can hobble around for 10 minutes and then with no warning hoist an ugly but successful 15-footer. And then there are the chubby middle-aged guys who show up on Saturdays to sweat out the night before and make room for more beer that afternoon.

This smorgasbord underlines the most revealing culture-via-hoops axiom I’ve observed: the way these guys (some decades apart) interact with each-other, you’d think they all went to high school together. Both on and off the court, everyone is on the same playing field. In the States a lone 15 year old kid would rarely be found playing in a real game with guys twice or four times his age, some of them literally twice his size. (Unless he was some kind of athletic freak or blessed with prodigious natural talent, neither of which applies to the kids I’m referencing.) But on the courts here, it’s completely normal and accepted. The adolescents are extended no special treatment, either physically or verbally. Censorship is nonexistent; grown men hurtle stupefying combinations of words at skinny kids, and vice-versa. And then everyone laughs about it, no matter who wins. You might wonder what sort of youth culture this is fostering in Peru, but honestly, it just works. In a communal society where you live at home until marriage – and often stay there afterwards with your spouse and have babies – children are exposed to adult things very early. They grow up a little faster, maybe, but they also learn how to handle themselves, both on and off the court.

That said, I do have my qualms. In Peru you don’t actually have to make contact to have a foul called on you. In the States we talk about “touch” fouls; here, you literally just have to drive the lane with a defender anywhere in a 5-foot radius and you can get away with calling a foul. And they do. And it annoys the bejesus out of me. I don’t have any cultural revelation to draw in this case; I think it’s just the way ball is played here for whatever reason. I haven’t succumbed to it yet, although in the interest of winning games I probably should (if you can’t beat ‘em I guess you just gotta join ‘em.) But God, is it frustrating to have every single possession interrupted – sometimes several times in a row – by make-believe fouls.

Right up there with fouls on the list of things I can’t stand about basketball in Peru is the constant bickering. Sometimes the imaginary fouls are contested by the alleged offender, which can spark a minutes-long argument escalating from two guys yelling at each-other to nine (I abstain), and which then fizzles into one side’s grudging, expletive-heavy surrender. The other issue that causes frequent small riots is the score. Believe it or not, as much as everyone argues about things, no one ever seems able to keep track of who’s winning. Initially I tried, calling out the count after every bucket, and so on. But I’ve realized that my opinion is basically ignored when things get heated, so I’ve pretty much given up. The irony is that it works out pretty well from my perspective, because often the score will actually be something like 9-6, going to eleven, and you have to start over and say it’s 4-4 because no one really remembers (either that or an extended argument is resolved by calling it even.) I’m just there to play ball, and the longer the games the better time I have, even if it takes sitting through some childish bickering every so often.

This apparent unconcern for basic math does translate to a social phenomenon in my mind: the near absence of accounting by shopkeepers. I have a theory that a great many Peruvian shopkeepers are not motivated by profits, but rather open bodegas because it’s a way of keeping up with the Joneses, or just because they’re bored and want something to do. Either of these would explain A) why there are 5 stores selling the exact same stuff on every street, and B) (more to the point) their almost total disregard for expenses, revenues, or other such principles that volunteers from the Peace Corps small business development program frequently cite. To me this lack of both creativity and interest in economics is fundamentally linked to the extremely low quality of public education here (again, even in the context of Latin America, Peru is one of the worst), and also that the way things are taught in schools very rarely encourages any kind of critical thinking. The teacher writes on the board, the students copy it, and then are tested on the material. Discussion, debate, and even question-asking are not engendered as in most of the developed world, but rather flatly discouraged. This, combined with the laid-back nature of Peruvian society as a whole, creates an environment where filling out a balance sheet is not always the top priority. These may be issues for another day, but suffice it to say I’m not all that surprised that numbers don’t matter much on the basketball court, either.

Cynicism aside, though, it has been completely awesome to get to play ball here. You almost forget about the pure, raw joy of athletic competition when your workouts consist of solo running and pushups for three years straight, but fortunately I’ve seen the light. I also have a bunch of new friends close to my age, which is something else you tend to lack in the Peace Corps. They’re a good group of dudes; funny as hell, and you’ve gotta respect guys who get up at 6 or 7 every morning for work, but never think twice about playing past midnight if there’s a good game. The only tough part is that they are the one subset of Peruvian society I’ve come across who I consistently have trouble understanding. Their collective repertoire of slang is seemingly bottomless, they speak superfast, and they don’t use anything close to correct grammar. Someone starts telling a story, and before I know it they’re all laughing and I’m totally lost. It would be like coming to America as a Spanish speaker and trying to communicate with guys on the courts in Baltimore. (Minus the guns and drugs, but you get the idea.) But it’s definitely cool to be part of a group and feel included, even as an outsider. And if nothing else, I’m learning some new vocabulary.