The Ideological Basketball Association


I finally found Rothchild’s name among a scattershot list of player accomplishments. He was from the Bronx, I learned. He wasn’t a fantastic player. He played power forward but had a tendency to foul a lot and spent most fourth quarters on the bench. I was disappointed. I’d built Rothchild up to be the team star. Ferber didn’t strike me as the type to worship just anybody. This was a man, after all, who wrote a novel about why he couldn’t be a priest, and I figured if Ferber couldn’t worship Jesus for life, at least he’d be a little discriminating in picking a secular hero.


As for Ferber, there was absolutely no mention of him in college basketball history.


Disappointed, I stuffed the heavy book back into the stacks and returned to my real job.


I had yet to figure out what the hell “Tis a Pity She’s a Metaphor” would be about.


On a whim a day or so later I mailed a letter with a quarter taped inside the envelope to City College in New York City. I asked the librarian to kindly photocopy me yearbook pictures of Arnold Rothchild and Herbert Ferber. As I waited for a response, I began to suspect there was more to Herbert Ferber than just a bald head, a love for basketball, and a sincere devotion to formalist criticism. The more I saw of him, the more my suspicions were confirmed. I started indexing his odd habits, which seemed more the products of nerves than eccentricity. The man visibly shuddered whenever anybody called out his name in the English department hallway. He checked his mailbox more often than other faculty. In conversation, he made it a point to turn his head, scan the hall or the classroom or wherever he happened to be. These were minor things, I knew. I could easily be imagining them, I told myself. But I didn’t think so.


Hot on the trail, I spent a lot of time in the library’s newspaper archives. There I unrolled hoops of


Kirk Curnutt


microfilm, trying to guide them through draconian machines. I went through months of the New York Times’s sports section, convinced that somewhere, deep in that inky slur, there was something about Ferber—only there wasn’t. I scrolled my way through the story of the 1950 season, discovering plenty about the capricious playing of the City College team. I read of Holman’s faith in his team’s ability, in the aftergame analyses of different players talking about the pressures they put on themselves. I even came across the occasional tidbit on Rothchild—twelve points here, eight there, some good rebounds, but nothing spectacular. I was beginning to doubt my faith in my own intuition.


Then, the subsequent Sunday morning, my father called again.


“Everything okay?” “Yeah. How about things there?”


“Oh, okay.… Hey, did you get all the information on that basketball stuff you needed?” I mumbled a yes.


“I can’t believe I forgot all about that monkey business. It was a pretty big deal when I was a kid, you know. There was a lot of the same talk about college athletes being corrupt.”


“What do you mean, corrupt?”


“You didn’t find out?” I sensed him questioning what kind of education I could possibly be receiving. “Holman’s team shaved points. A lot of the players were taking fixes. A couple of even went to jail.”


“But they were NAACP champs.”


“That’s NC-Double-A, son. One year they were; the next, they were under investigation. I think a couple of games from that championship season were even fixed.”


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