WEDNESDAY CARDINAL COUPLE
- Gary Witherspoon explores Rez Ball
( CONTRIBUTING WRITER GARY WITHERSPOON BRINGS THE FIRST OF A
THREE PART SERIES ON REZ BALL. THESE WILL RUN ON WEDNESDAYS
FOR THE NEXT THREE WEEKS. WE HOPE YOU ENJOY THIS INSIDE LOOK INTO
THE PHENOMENON THAT HAS RECENTLY BEEN ASSOCIATED WITH SHONI
SCHIMMEL AND NATIVE AMERICAN INDIAN RESERVATIONS ACROSS THE LAND.)
Rez Ball
in a Three Part Series
Part I: The Origin and Essence of Rez Ball
Most people who have heard the term
rez ball but who have not seen or participated in it tend to think
of
rez ball as a style of play. While
rez
ball has many characteristic styles and patterns, the essence of
rez ball is an attitude toward the game
more than it is a combination of styles and attributes. The game is played as an act of joy and as an
act of celebration in competition. The
teams compete with intensity and ferocity but not out of hostility or
meanness. Those latter passions violate
the original spirit and essence of the
game, which has its foundation in community and religious performance and
celebration.
Basketball has its origins in the ball games played in Central
America more than two thousand years ago.
These games were split up between two teams and built on the idea of
putting a bouncing rubber ball through goals on each end of a court. Native Americans were the first to discover
the process of the vulcanization of rubber, and they had bouncing rubber balls
long before the Europeans first saw them in the Americas. The team and the goal oriented ball games had
a wide variety of patterns as they spread throughout much of North
America. Europeans who settled in North
America were introduced to these games in the Southeast, the Northeast and in
the Great Lakes region. The game of
basketball as it is played today began as a winter adaptation or modification
of lacrosse. One of the things that is
left out often left out of sports history in America is that James Naismith was
a lacrosse player. He had learned
lacrosse from the Iroquois in the Northeast who had been playing the game at
least a thousand years.
In order to develop an indoor winter sport, Naismith altered the
basic rules of lacrosse and invented a modified version of lacrosse that came
to be known as basketball. The original
version of basketball looked a lot more like lacrosse than the way the game is
played today. Originally the ball came
back to the center for a face-off or jump after every point scored, and not all
players on a team were allowed to play on both sides of the court. Hands and dribbling were substituted for
racquets as a way of advancing the ball toward the goal.
Lacrosse among the Iroquois emphasized the themes of joy,
celebration, unity, health and good will (what we call sportsmanship
today). Lacrosse is the name that the
French Jesuits gave to the Iroquois game that was actually played by virtually
all Indian Nations in the Northeast and Great Lakes region.
The Iroquois call lacrosse (they have different names for it in
their own languages) the Creator’s game, and
say the game was given to the
people from the creator for the joy and amusement of the creator, and the joy
and amusement of his children. Thus the
game is to be played with an attitude and sense of joy, celebration and
gratitude. The creator is said to
thoroughly enjoy watching the players compete in this game. The creator’s joy is enhanced when the players
play with more intensity, deception, creativity and joy.
The game is also to be played with a sense of thanksgiving for
all creation. The biggest lacrosse games
of the year were played as part of the Iroquois four day rite of Thanksgiving,
also called the Green Corn ceremony among many other tribes of the Eastern
US. I am going to quote from the website
of the Iroquois Nationals, the only Indigenous sports team from North America
to field a national team in international competition. The Iroquois Nationals made the final four of
the 2014 World Cup of Lacrosse. They
finished third in the World Cup behind the US and Canada and ahead of Australia
(fourth). 38 nations from North America,
Europe, Africa and Asia participated in the World Cup of Lacrosse.
“
Lacrosse
was a gift to us from the Creator, to be played for his enjoyment and as a
medicine game for healing the people . . . Before each game, players are
reminded of the reason for their participation . . . The creator has endowed
upon all human life, a game called dehonchigwiis (lacrosse) for all to
enjoy. The young men who participate in the creator’s game will generate a gift
of healing that we may have peace of mind.” (http://iroquoisnationals.org/the-iroquois/the-story-of-lacrosse/)
This is the real history and origin of ball games and team sports
in the Americas. It was from this
tradition that James Naismith devised the game of basketball. Rez
ball comes from this tradition, and the predominant essence of rez ball is joy - joy for the creator,
joy for the participants and joy, health and peace of mind for all the players
and spectators.
In the recent WNBA All-Star game, it appeared to me that Shoni
Schimmel finally felt fully free to play
rez
ball; and, in doing so, she let everybody see the joy with which she plays
the game and the joy she infuses into the game.
Shoni personifies playing for the joy of the game. She plays hard with passion and intensity;
she plays to win, but she does not fall down and cry a river when she
loses. Playing the game has given her
the joy of participation and the opportunity to entertain with skill, artistry
and creativity. She is thankful for
playing, even after a loss, and she moves on to the next opportunity to play
for the enjoyment of the creator and the people. While she may not be able to
articulate this in these words, she has in multiple ways imbibed this from the
sports traditions of Indigenous America, and she exemplifies and personifies
those traditions as well as any basketball player today. That is a big reason why Native American fans
and other fans as well have embraced and adored her. Her performances and the enthusiasm and joy
she brings to the game is captivating, and is completely in tune with the
ancient sports traditions of Indigenous America
At least twice and probably more than that, Rebecca Lobo has been
the color commentator on ESPN of games in which Shoni has played. I remember her specifically saying something
like this in the latter part of the Louisville/Tennessee game in 2013, and she
repeated it again in the WNBA All-Star game:
“Shoni Schimmel is absolutely fearless. She has no fear. She plays the game without fear.” I laughed when I heard that both times. What in the world is there to fear. Why would one play with fear, I thought. Shoni plays out of joy, not fear. Shoni plays for the joy of creativity and for
the joy of participating and winning.
A lot of the patterns and styles of Rez Ball make logical sense when you understand the attitude and
passion that infuses rez ball. When you understand that you play with joy
and for joy . . . the joy of the Creator, the joy of the people, the joy of the
players and the joy of participation, so it makes total sense that that joy is
expressed in and realized in creative and artistic plays, passes and shots.
The object of the game is to outscore your opponent, so the
emphasis in playing the game is on offense, on
scoring. Defense is just something
you do until you get back on offense.
The focus on defense then is on stealing the ball or causing a
turnover. If you cannot steal the ball
or force a turnover, then you can get the ball back by blocking a shot or
rebounding a missed shot. And, finally,
if you cannot steal the ball, force a turnover, block a shot or rebound a
missed shot, you can get the ball back when your opponent makes a shot. If you can force or entice your opponent to
take two point shots, you can still outscore them by making three point shots.
In regard to the emphasis on three point shots, it is relevant to
note that against Memphis this year, Shoni hit 8 three point shots in a row and
9 for the game. That was only exceeded
by one other player, Abby Scott, who hit 11 three pointers in one game in
January, 2014. Abby plays for New Mexico
State and hails from the Warm Springs reservation in central Oregon, not far
from Shoni and Jude’s Umatilla reservation.
Shoni hit another 7 three pointers in the WNBA All-Star game, and she
won the collegiate three point shooting championship over all the best three
point shooters in both men’s and women’s college basketball this year.
Because the goal is to score, you want to score as fast as you
can, so you fast break after a missed shot or after most made shots, after a
steal or a rebound, and you shoot as soon as you get a good shot. Long passes get the ball down court faster,
so you throw the long pass whenever anyone is open on the other end of the
court.
Because a bad shot or a bad pass gives the ball back to the other
team without your team scoring, you want to make passes that will help a
teammate score or take shots that will help your team score.
These aspects of
rez ball
lead to a lot of long passes and a lot of three point shots. Shoni is incredibly good with long
passes. She looks like she should have
been a quarterback. Coaches do not
generally like long passes because most players throw wild, off-target passes
when they attempt to throw long passes, but Shoni can often throw a one-handed
pass off the dribble from one end of the court and thread the needle to a
teammate at the opposite end of the court.
If you watch and count the success and failure of her long passes you
will see she rarely throws a pass off target. Turnovers almost always come from
interceptions when a player from the other team crosses in front of her target
or when a player leaps high and intercepts a pass that was online for its
intended target.
Shoni pretty much single-handedly disarmed the presses of Baylor
and Tennessee with her long passes. She
makes them look so easy, but they are not easy.
If most players tried them, they would likely turn the long passes into
a disaster, and that is why most coaches are against long passes. But Shoni has made those passes in rez ball games tens of thousands, if not
hundreds of thousands, of times. She has
great hand-eye coordination, and that coordination plus all the practice she
has had make her pretty lethal with the long pass. Long passes are as common in rez ball as dandelions are in the spring
The one aspect of rez ball
that drives traditional coaches crazy (and it did me too when I was coaching in
high school) is that players play defense with their hands and not their
feet. First they try to steal the pass
that goes to the player they are guarding.
If that does not work, then they try to steal the ball out of the hands
of their opponent, and next they try to steal the dribble of the player they
are defending. When the player they are
defending puts the ball on the court and begins to drive around them, they
first reach in to knock the ball away, and then they allow the player to go
around them and try to knock it away from behind the player. The result is that they will often stand
there like their feet are glued to the floor while the player they are
defending goes right around them. Lots
of coaches have to go to zone defenses because of this. It is a habit rez ball players have a hard time overcoming.
Finally, what follows from the premise that the game is played
with and for joy is the tendency to make creative and artistic shots and
passes. Clever, deceptive and artistic
shots and passes entertain the Creator, the participants and the spectators. They
enhance the joy of the game. But
the game only makes sense when you go all out to win, so you only do the
creative and artistic stuff when it has a good chance of succeeding and
improving your chance of winning, or when you are playing pickup ball and not
keeping score. There is no joy in making
a creative pass that goes array and causes your team to lose the game.
The styles and patterns of
rez
ball derive from the premises of the Indigenous philosophy of the
game. Non-natives take the game much too
seriously, and make winning the sole goal of the game that must be pursued at
almost any cost. This philosophy takes
the joy out of playing the game, and makes winning the only joy of the
game. Preparation for and the playing of
the game become drudgery that only pays off if you win. That is why players and teams play with fear
as Rebecca Lobo’s comments indicated. In
the case to which she alludes, player play with the fear of failure; they fear
missing their shot; they fear having their shot blocked; they fear making the
bad pass or losing the game. This
philosophy causes players to play out of a fear of failure, rather than play
out of the joy of participation, the joy of creativity and the joy of winning.
Shoni is putting the joy back into playing the game of women’s
basketball. Her Native American
following mostly understand that, and other fans are beginning to get a glimpse
of it as well. Many of her critics just
do not understand where her game is coming from, because her game does not come
from cultural premises and philosophies with which they are familiar.
Coming next......Part II: Showboating or Showtime...NEXT WEDNESDAY
--gdub--
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Did you know that voting is open for the WNBA All-Star Game? You can cast your ballot through July 12th at www.wnba.com
YACINE DIOP can improve her stock with a year under Walz and Company. 5'10" forwards aren't the first thing you think of on WNBA rosters, but she's shown great shooting and rebounding skills playing for a pretty pitiful Pittsburgh squad. Again, her key will be her graduate year as a Card. 
