Seeing monsters

The limits of the "eye test", the slur of being a "casual", and why interpreting basketball by the numbers still comes down to our gut.

I’ve got a strange draw to islands.

I’ve been obsessed with Sable Island since I was a kid and felt a deep mourning, the quality of it almost fracturing, when I came across a job posting years ago for a researcher position to live and work alongside the island’s feral horses. I felt a sliding doors disappointment, even grief, for an alternate life I’d never have and all the steps — which I suddenly saw so clearly — I didn’t take to get there.

The most memorable and meaningful places I’ve been to are islands, and if there’s an island off the coast of or reasonably navigable from somewhere I’m going, I’ll figure out if there’s a way to get there. Hong Kong, Shikoku (well, all of Japan), Ischia, Po Toi, Sicily, Inis Meáin (well, all of Ireland) — I’m forgetting some but these are places that, in the scale of the wider world, are diminutive, but that I can bring myself back to in a visceral instant. Places I can picture existing without me in that exact second of projection, out at the fringes of the South China Sea, redolent with wild orange trees in bloom, or inching out every year, expanding slowly and deliberately into the Tyrrhenian, Ionian and Mediterranean Seas with volcanic spewn lava, ash and hurled hunks of core rock that predate the surface by a megaannum or more.

It was on one of these islands, Inis Meáin, where I experienced the sensation of total disconnect between my brain and my eyes for the first time. Where I didn’t understand what I was seeing to such a degree that after a roil of panic, then fear, my brain just backed out and left.

Dylan and I had spent half the day hiking around the southern cliffs of the island, hewn like honeycomb by the towering waves of the North Atlantic that, on the island’s sea-facing sides, can grow so tall they heave up over the edges of the cliffs, 275 ft high, spray reaching out like a beckoning finger and salting your cheeks, your lips. On the mainland-facing side the sea settles into a rough, jewelled chop, but the waves that crash onto the beaches there are still big as bungalows.

Later, lying on one of the beaches facing Galway, our elbows sinking into the soft sand with a wall of permanently windblown Marram grass at our backs, a dark shape rose up out of the water in front of us. The North Atlantic in October whips up some towering cumulonimbus clouds, which makes for a dramatic sky, but the wind keeps them moving. I remember because its skin flashed in the sun.

Do you see, I murmured. I do, Dylan said back. We had instinctively both sat up even though the shape, the figure really, had not moved any closer, only perched atop of the crest of each new, rolling wave. I remember how aware I became that I was in bikini bottoms, and that I was barefoot (I thought I’d go for a swim before I clocked the size of the waves up close). I reached for my sneakers and started unlacing them without taking my eyes off the shape in the water.

Was it a man, in a scuba suit? My brain offered. It was about that size. I rejected the idea, a person wouldn’t have been able to keep so still in those swells. A dolphin? I rejected that too — we’d just come from the island’s old pier and watched as a lone dolphin leapt from the water to crash its gigantic silvery body into the waves again and again.

As I slipped on my shoes a smaller shape popped up beside the big one, and they both bobbed side by side, watching us. Something about the side-by-side, seeing two of a thing you can’t make sense of and realizing that it’s not an anomaly, coaxed my brain back into the conversation. It was a seal, and now here was its pup. They continued to watch us as we stood up and walked to the water, ducking under and popping up again in tandem, and closer, in a way that mirrored our curiosity.

A little later, after the seals drifted back out into the open sea, we reluctantly lifted our borrowed bicycles from where we’d left them heaped at the foot of a dune. We laughed at ourselves. We were like old cartographers who drew sea monsters at the margins of maps. They had no reference for what their eyes were showing them, or else what returning sailors would describe. I get it now, they might as well have been seeing monsters.

---

I don’t know who coined the concept of the “eye test” in basketball, but I have not known peace since it happened. Less than a standalone phrase, it exists in continuous strain and contention with its opposite, numbers. Analytics, specifically. The eye test alone would just be watching basketball and then, you wouldn’t call it that because you aren’t measuring the experience against some personal pass/fail system.

Even if it was introduced with good to amiable intentions, it’s now warped into a one note dog whistle, an automatic signifier that someone is stupid. That’s dramatic, but not very. In its current iteration, if you admit to mostly verifying your basketball viewing experience through the eye test then you are copping to an ignorant one dimensionality of fandom and knowledge, practically cro-magnon. Again, that’s dramatic, but not very.

Why just watch, when you can compare what you’re seeing against numbers? Why take straightforward pleasure in watching an elegant three, an Old West-esque bank robbery of a fastbreak, a big, nasty block now rattling down through generations you’re sure can feel it, when you can instead turn these things immediately to data? Data, of course, the refined way to say numbers. Another dog whistle.

I use analytics to prove points in my writing, but the numbers are never what lodges the urge in my head to write about someone or something they’re doing. I also wonder whether I’d use numbers as much or as often if I didn’t submit to the handshake logic they instil in a particular kind of reader, a specific sort of fan. Numbers that do the work of vetting a piece because at a glance the person reading recognizes their sharper outlines, their inherent authority. Numbers that ironically say as much or more than the words do — you can trust this, you can take these facts and repeat them, you aren’t wasting your time.

I have learned to love numbers better where they prove an anomaly my eye’s picked up, or to backdrop a funny bit of history. Like how, in his first six NBA seasons, Russell Westbrook basically treated triple-doubles as a foreign language. A capability of his we now treat automatic as a regional accent that he didn’t really have the twang of until 2015-2016. Or that Draymond Green has a better career three-point percentage than Anthony Davis (by a lot).

Still it’s my eye, and I suppose in some more stubborn or stoic sense, my gut, that I trust most, that grounds my experience with and in watching a game. Eyes that, despite what data purists will tell you, are still connected to the brain.

---

On the last episode of this newsletter’s podcast, Alex floated the hypothetical question of whether we’ve turned basketball into too much of what we can’t see. That the experience of just watching a game, and by extension the experience of fandom, isn’t complete or robust enough without a full dataset. It could just be bad timing, but it strikes me that the rise of this perspective also comes with the rise of rampant social distrust — in government, in cultural institutions, in social frameworks, in science, in one another.

That it’s also become a slur to be a “casual” of something underscores this obsessive but ultimately useless need to know everything about it. In entertainment, politics, and sports, the drive to be the smartest in the room isn’t prompted anymore by the basic pleasure of knowledge, or enjoying the time it can take to really and fully learn something, but to know as much as possible as a backup, a social safety. You can’t be called a casual if you can list the deep linear notes of an album’s production, or Jalen Williams’ true shooting percentage from last spring.

Storing up enough stats to use as a shield — as a baseline requirement for engagement — doesn’t make me feel like we’re getting collectively smarter, only more scared. Plus, it all rests on the house-of-cards toppleability of our short-term memories which, since becoming existentially attached to our phones and shortened further with the pandemic, are shot. We’re like idiot squirrels, stuffing trees and burying our stores, only to immediately forget what we’ve secreted away. At least a side effect the squirrels can boast is encouraging biodiversity with what they’ve lost.

---

I’m not data-averse. Nor do I think people who prefer to interpret games via their numbers are joyless dorks. What I am against is the idea that there is only one way to engage with something, and that any one way is inherently “better”.

What’s so interesting to me about basketball, and probably why I continue to want to cover and write about it, is as much the nuance of the sport as its interpretations.

The most engaging conversations I’ve had with athletes, postgame or recalling sequences and plays, are the ones where we both realize we were interacting with the same game, but their sense of what happened differs from my own. It’s nice to be right, but in this context it’s more interesting to be wrong.

Beyond the obvious of them playing and me watching, the differences come in what they saw or heard, why they decided to act or didn’t, what felt right or urgent, what they consider a mistake or inevitability — the list goes on. The difference can come in how they choose to explain these things, too. In body language, being guarded versus contemplative and curious; or in their voice, like being clipped with their answers or loose and ranging. I’ve learned the most by asking athletes to explain things to me, step by step, as if I didn’t know anything, because the truth is I don’t — at least to the degree that everything they’re doing is originating from within a body that isn’t mine.

In a game played by people, with 10 sets of eyes scoping the floor, at least a dozen more watching from the coaches’ bench, tens of thousands peering on from the stands in various states of attention, and however many watching out beyond the arena and its action, the interpretations are endless.

We know the adage, seeing is believing, but the original quote, from 17th century English clergyman Thomas Fuller, was, “Seeing is believing, but feeling is the truth.”

Feelings might be the most inaccurate basis for our interpretation of all, but whether we’re searching for certainty by the numbers or through staring it down, feelings are what we come back to as a baseline. It’s why a number can stand alone, like Wilt Chamberlain’s record “100” scrawled on paper (and why this has become tradition now when players break scoring records), or speak volumes about a team’s overarching situation, like the Warriors, when Steph Curry and Draymond Green posted tandem record plus/minus lows (minus-41 and minus-42, respectively) earlier this week.

It’s why I believe time slows, just a bit, with a really good dunk, even if I’ve asked the players who do them best and the answer is, thus far, a 50/50 split. I’ve seen it. Plus, there isn’t a stat for that.