Traveling the international court of basketball, passing on wisdom

The tiny Central Asian Kingdom of Bhutan was the perfect place for Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff '79 to strike up a conversation about basketball.

"Do you suppose that Michael Jordan has any idea that in the most remote part of the Himalayas, in the Kingdom of Bhutan, there are people who know who he is — people who care what he does?" asked Karma Lam Dorji, the country's only certified basketball coach and referee.

Wolff wanted to answer, "Of course, yes. He knows he's famous everywhere in the world."

But after spending a short while in Thimphu, the capital city of a kingdom of majority illiterate subsistence farmers, Wolff realized that Jordan may have never heard of Bhutan.

Wolff could only utter, "No. He'd have to be here, wedged between China and India, in a place without TV, without an Internet server, with only four digits in the phone numbers, to know that this place even exists," Wolff said, remembering one of hundreds of conversations he had while on his international quest to identify the ways basketball transcends cultural divisions.

"In the end, Karma Lam's question served as a kind of affirmation for me," Wolff said. "Basketball now binds us all."

Wolff says he believes athletic competition is a global unifying force, a common thread stringing together cultures and places. The appeal of basketball, in particular, supports that belief.

Basketball was first played just over a century ago in December 1891, when Canadian-born James A. Naismith, a theology scholar turned physical education teacher at Springfield College in Massachu-setts, had his students play a soccer-like game with their hands. The goal was to get the ball into the half-bushel peach baskets set up as targets.

Setting up the basic rules of the game wasn't Naismith's only legacy to the sport, Wolff claims. He also laid the groundwork for its universality by trying to use the new sport to reform men. Basketball, in its original form, was a marriage of sports and ministry, an athletic-based Christian mission to better men physically and mentally.

Though the sport was developed for American students, basketball is played on all corners of the globe. It's cheap — a low-overhead sport that requires minimal equipment. It's accessible to Polish kayaking champions, teenagers in war-torn Sarajevo, squatters in a garbage dump in the Philippines and children of Apache Native Americans on a reservation in Arizona.

Because of his wish to write about how basketball transcends borders, Wolff embarked on a journey of Marco Polo proportions, traveling through more than a dozen foreign countries and 10 North American states, talking to famous athletes and coaches, their adoring fans, and anybody else touched by basketball.

The product of those explorations is his travelogue narrative "Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure," published in January by Warner Books.

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In the range of research Wolff presents in the book, he conveys how for some cultures, basketball is not only enjoyed by the masses, but also a royal pastime.

For example, Karma Lam, the Bhutanese basketball coach, took Wolff to an outdoor basketball court in the center of Thimphu where Bhutan's King Jigme Singye Wangchuck challenged his royal bodyguards to a pick-up game.

Apparently, the king and his aides keep Bhutan's resident basketball guru on call, and Wolff was there when Karma Lam was tapped. The two were sampling a traditional meal of "ema datsi" chilis when Karma Lam's cell phone rang.

It was one of King Wangchuck's aides calling to confirm details for the upcoming Silver Jubilee Basketball Tournament.

For Wolff, his experience in Bhutan stood out because of the sharp juxtaposition between the exotic cultural traditions and familiar basketball rules and appeal.

As a writer for Sports Illustrated, Wolff often writes stories about wars, religion and education. Nearly all of his stories focus on a coach or athlete whose experience embodies the broader issue of his examination.

He has found a formula for generating awareness of far-reaching social issues among thoughtful sports readers.

"Sports is the spoonful of sugar that can make the medicine of something more grave go down," he said.

Because Wolff creates a palatable window into a prevalent social condition, "readers are willing to go there with me," he said.

In "Big Game, Small World," Wolff writes chapters about visits to Brazil, Japan, China and Poland, bringing the reader to those and other faraway places while highlighting his subjects' non-traditional hoop dreams. The story ends right where Wolff's own attraction began: at Jadwin Gymnasium in Princeton.

Wolff's fascination with basketball began early on while growing up in Princeton. From ages two to 12, he watched Tiger stars such as Bill Bradley, Mitch Henderson and former Princeton coach Pete Carril orchestrate signature plays.

At 12, Wolff's father took a job in Rochester concluding Wolff's blissful "passage through the Shangri-la" of Princeton, but he'd return to the University for college the fall of 1975.

As a Princeton undergrad, Wolff pursued a history major, helped found the Nassau Weekly and served as a stringer for the Trenton Times. He was close friends with several other campus writers and journalists, including David Remnick '81, current editor of the New Yorker and Mark Fischer '79, now an editor and columnist at The Washington Post.

Despite his promise as a writer, Wolff says he often collided with professors and preceptors over his approach to academic writing. Scholars complained his style was too casual, too personal and too funny, he says. Wolff recalls an overbearing instructor circling his use of the phrase "early on" in an English literature paper.

But Wolff never acquiesced, and he admits that his grades suffered. He wanted to write the way people talk, he said. "I never really bought into academic writing," he said.

"Academic writing is like armor," he said, contrasting the severe style imposed by Princeton professors to a more conversational journalistic voice.

Academics, Wolff said, think that whatever they write is going to be tested. In journalism, people aren't going to fight you. "[Readers] resent armor in your prose."

Instead, "serve your reader," Wolff advised, expressing impatience with academic writing and teaches his students to embrace a more natural style.

"Read the genre of writing you like to do. Read for inspiration, but slam on the brakes if your voice is being suppressed," he said.

Wolff admittedly has trouble providing the reader with a big picture. His mind is "microcosmic rather than macrocosmic," he says.

But patient editors and a seminar called "The Literature of Fact" then taught by Robert Massie during Wolff's sophomore year turned him around intellectually. Massie, a magazine journalist and easygoing teacher, was able to make history readable, Wolff explained. "He was a happy fit for me because he writes non fiction epics based on history," he said.

Massie's work inspired Wolff to pursue similar stories and develop his own style.

Wolff is now on the other side of the teacher's desk, leading HUM 444: Writing about Sports and the Wider World, a 16-person seminar in which he tries to flush out academic rigidity from his students' papers through reading work aloud in class and writing exercises.

Wolff said that he's had the idea of writing a book about basketball and its international appeal since 1980, when he began his professional career in journalism as a fact-checker at Sports Illustrated. He's been at the magazine ever since, a "traditional" career path, he says.

Reading Sports Illustrated while growing up, Wolff was always impressed by the length and range of the stories and the recognizable voices of the writers. "There seemed to be intelligence or aspiration their stories," he said.

By his second year at the magazine, Wolff garnered several assignments and by the third year wrote regularly. In his 20 years at Sports Illustrated, Wolff has covered the Tour de France, the Olympics, and Grand Slam Tennis. Wolff has also covered international basketball.

After completing the semester at Princeton, Wolff will relocate to Vermont with his wife and infant son. Wolff, due back at the magazine June 1, plans to continue writing for Sports Illustrated no matter where he ends up, "as long as there's an airport and a phone line."

Commenting on 16 papers every two weeks has helped Wolff reevaluate every word and sentence he writes. Because of his experience teaching at Princeton, Wolff's previous assumptions about writing have been changed. "I recommend teaching to any working journalist," he said. "It's a great professional opportunity."

For this reason, he says he is considering a teaching position at Middlebury College in Vermont next year. "There might be more teaching in my future," he said.