Basketball on the Radio

I listened to some basketball on the radio this weekend.

I’d forgotten the urgency.

The accessibility of phone streaming probably hastens the practice’s decline, but I’d imagine many remember the feeling of scrambling to a radio. You learn a game is close. You are not near a television. You hustle to a radio, you get the thing tuned, and meanwhile the apprehension settles into a wispy block deep down around your diaphragm. The game always seems to be coming out of a timeout when you get it on, the broadcasters resetting the scene before play resumes, outlining the situation for people just like you.

That wispy block of apprehension—that deep, penetrative anxiety—is a hallmark of this experience, and I’m not sure it works the same on TV. On TV, timeouts mean TV commercials; on radio, timeouts mean radio commercials. The latter are shrill and irritating. They have an edge. The former are designed in a hundred-billion-dollar industry, designed to utterly captivate, designed to do their absolute best to briefly leave you not thinking of the occasion at hand. Watching on TV, timeouts are timeouts. Listening on the radio, timeouts leave you like a puppy trying to learn to stay. You can’t have the thing that you crave, and it’ll just be a moment ‘til you can, but you cannot hold yourself still in that moment.

It’s common and deserved to romanticize baseball on the radio. Radio baseball is a beautiful, traditional thing. Through some assortment of 162 games and—fate willing—a few more, broadcasters accompany us throughout our day, narrating a game that even in its faster days has always taken more than two hours to play. For three hours, six or seven days a week, many listen to their equivalent of my Pat Hughes, sitting with him past the two-way mirror, knowing him without him knowing them. It’s the forefather of the personable podcast—just as listeners know their favorite podcast hosts oddly intimately, hearing repeated small details from their lives and adapting to the cadence of their voice, listeners know their baseball radio guys.

Basketball is different.

Basketball has no idle pauses. It has pauses, but in its consequential times they’re laced with that unease. In basketball, the game comes fast, and the faster it comes the less emotion the commentator can inject into their narration. Just as the body shuts off blood flow to runners’ digestive tracts early in a marathon, prioritizing functions more immediately essential, a rapid string of basketball requires a rapid string of words, and a rapid string of words comes out short and quick and measured–but–frantic, pure information, a human—like that marathoner—reducing themselves to a machine, stepping or speaking as quickly as can briefly be sustained. The speed feels especially present on a highway. The ominosity feels especially thick a quarter hour after the sun goes down.

And so it was that I came to the Fairleigh Dickinson game last night, the Knights behind, the Owls ahead, the game entering its final stage. The moment was thick. The tension was rich. Play resumed, and the announcer slipped, betraying himself, letting the human leak in, declaring something a “gut punch” on national radio before hastily adding “for those cheering for FDU,” as though that category didn’t—understandably—include him. The game, as most games do this time of year, reached such a frenzy that even a timeout, void of commercials, became an exercise in simultaneously narrating a two-front war, things happening in each huddle, too much going on to be spoken by one human in any normal sequence of time. It ended, the game ended, the game reached its natural conclusion, but the haste did not go away, as now the peripheral noise was louder and the radio crew had the new task of wrapping up a game audially while viewers at home could see the arena emptying for their own eyes.

I had missed the radio broadcast. I had missed craning my ears for the score; I had missed mentally tracking which team had the ball when I didn’t recognize every name; I had missed coming back to myself from the game and finding my shoulders leaned forward, my chest leaned in, my chin close to the steering wheel as my car and those around it cranked and chugged and rumbled. I had missed the Kierkegaardian angst of a college basketball game on the radio, waves whirled out from far-off places to busy, dust-strewn interstates, everything and everyone in a hurry until the game fades out or the knob’s shut off and the world’s all quiet again, and even the car suddenly seems silent, no longer competing with its own speakers for the driver’s ear. The magic, miraculous, brief window into somewhere else is closed. The commentator, somewhere, rests. Locker rooms empty and buses roll, out onto the interstates the radio waves just bathed, and still bathe, just now invisibly again.

Radio once really was miraculous, before it turned normal, the same way smart phones were miraculous and then turned commonplace. There’s a cycle of technology happening here: We get nostalgic for things that very recently, relative to human history, were breathtaking and new. But whether it was tapping into the past or merely finding the most practical way to listen to the game, last night was nice. Last night was a little bit magic.