Real Ass Sports Names by Lard Alec

I have a document on my desktop titled “Real NBA Names,” though, in truth, it is something else entirely. For starters, it should be called “Real Sports Names (Mostly Basketball*),” but, titular inaccuracy aside, it is more than just a museum of bygone nomenclature. Owing to its scale (43 pages as of this writing), my daft list (list of lists really—there are subcategories within, e.g., “NBA Names of the 70s”) has transformed into a kind of deep history, a record of both my obsessive improvidence, as it grows to the approximate size and shape of my life, and, I dare say, the century that gave birth to it. For me, it is like The Warren Commission, but true.  

It all started**, as you might have guessed, during the early pandemic. Back in the spring of 2020, I was watching old NBA games on YouTube***, zinged and zapped out of my jitters by player names from wayward 80s Nets games. I gave people such as Otis Birdsong a long, hallucinatory look, as though seeing things for the first time. I felt like Thomas Pynchon’s Doc Sportello, frequently wondering if I’d merely thought my thoughts or had said them aloud. Did I intone “Otis Birdsong” to myself as my wife passed the TV room and gave me a worried look? Who knows? But at some point, I started writing things like Otis Birdsong down on a yellow legal pad while the rest of my family was working or in school or wherever they were.

Otis Birdsong led to Chubby Cox to Bruce Flowers and then somehow back in time to Bronze Age standouts like Pep Saul, Ray Lumpp, and Dick Groat. From there, it was all Whitey Skoogs and Easy Parhams and Belus Smawleys, with their putrid field goal percentages and occasional brilliantined profile pictures in underlit, 50-degree gymnasiums of olde. What was it like, I wondered, to pay your hard-earned Chicago meat-packing money to go see Wally Osterkorn or Bob Tough do inexcusable things to a basketball some 70 years ago?

I’ll never know, but the lists themselves, if read slowly and avidly, induce something like hypnotic transport—into history, or beyond it, who can say?  I read each aloud before emailing them to nonplussed friends. And here and there, I catch a whiff of Schlitz, Pall Malls, and peanuts, and hear the dog-track acoustics of perfunctory pregame lineup announcements, while the gathering multitudes harumph and chatter in anticipation of another 30-rebound performance from a 6’4” power forward who will be out of the league in three years because of an off-season forklift injury. To travel down litanies such as these is to stumble over the tripwires of history and induce a psycho-nautical glimpse of the past via the craggy outcroppings of appellations like Leo Mogus.

At one point early in my endeavors, I even drafted fictional player names, e.g., Julius Swann and Frank Bigtonski, as a means of reckoning with the poetry of an era. With a little research, though, reality won out. I never could have dreamed up Hank Finkel or Walt Hazzard, let alone hung a life on those names, so I stopped trying. Wah Wah Jones, Campy Russell, Foots Walker. They’re just lying around, waiting for someone to find them, disbelieve them, and then accept with a personal nod their righteous actuality.

Here are a few, in no particular order, and indeed spliced together from several sub-files—all hoopers, in this case—; perhaps you’ll find something you can use for your newborn, your pet rabbit, or your Twitter burner. If not, you can just enjoy the fact that these names once wore sneakers and dreamed of greatness, despite themselves.

Irv Bemoras
Lew Hitch
Max Zaslofsky
Dick Bunt
Kleggie Hermsen
Mo Mahoney
Bob Tough
Blackie Towery
Hoot Gibson
Johnny Lacknowski
Marv Winkler
McCoy McLemore
Bob Boozer
Stu Lantz
Tom Boerwinkle
Happy Hairston
Bingo Smith
Zelmo Beaty
Corky Calhoun
Phil Lumpkin
Larry Steele
Slick Watts
Tal Skinner
Butch Beard
Gary Brokaw
Len Kosmalski
Campy Russell
Foots Walker
Cliff Meely
Clem Haskins
Truck Robinson
Tom Kozelko
Hawthorne Wingo

___

 

*I’ve indexed ABA, NCAA, and MLB names too.

**And with some general inspiration, no doubt, from the delightful Deadspin segment called “Remembering Some Guys.”

***Actual live sports were all cancelled.

Three Poems by Lauren Mallett

Ask Your Father
 
 
Her cadence of I can’t be bothered.
The beauty of I did what she ordered.
 
Dad, why does Mom—?
 
Oh, my first-born perch.
Oh, this particular triangle propped
upon what I’d call stable.
 
Oh, sad little lice on my heart.
 
What are skunk shrimp
and where do you find them?
 
I know. My heart doesn’t ask
who eats the shrimp. The eel
doesn’t. The eel waits, agape
 
as the shrimp tears apart and swallows
lice after lice from the tongue,
its two pair of pincers
 
waving how good do I have it
the whole damn meal.
 
 

 
Over and Out
 
 
Of course we preferred baby alien,
before the teeth
and the aggression, before
we knew exactly what the outer moon
had given us,
specimen that grew a surplus mouth
to wreck us with,
our vacuum-sealed quarantines wheezed
open by the lat pull of
its primary limb. Today our final dispatch:
the ejected pod plummeting
to Earth, thermometer
making its slow climb to
life, cells frenzied
in their splitting dance,
splashing into the oceanic array
of their own floating cradle.

 
 
 
Blood Stays Put
 
 
I will not leave the not room
of my body.
No eye no bead creeping to its corner
not how it doesn’t sweat.
I like to lie down.
Wait for the runoff of my not thoughts
wade through the tunnels
of my not head.
Paddle to the bank grab the not mandrake
and hoist myself over
the terra cotta
aqueduct. I hadn’t considered not before
jumping how it is
I would traverse the not land.
Blood stays put
unlike sweat.  The way one does bird
of paradise is the not
way one does pigeon. I did not hear that
I was just trying
to starfish here not lose this gleaming
please excuse me
not my reach.

Lauren Mallett

Three Poems by Matt Dube

Concrete Fantasy

“Under the paving stones, the beach.”
Situationist slogan

They’ve been busy for two weeks,
the construction crew working on the street
to reveal the sewer lines below. They’ve done

a flawless job removing the rubble
their piledrivers created so you need to imagine
the mess they made. They’ve set orange cones
around the edges of these plots they’ve opened.

Ease around them slowly, pausing, always, to respect
oncoming traffic, or idle beside them like they’re gardens
and you a flower-sniffer, maybe, or you’re someone

choosing a piece of sheet cake. Not a checkerboard
but the squares Michael Jackson’s dance shoe lit up
when he danced across them. Or graves kept ready for
those whose deaths fill actuarial tables. They require

us to drive past them automatically, these invitations
to dream what might change by them being here
and us, but I turned the wheel. As wrecks go,

this one is barely enough to meet the deductible.
As a departure from the everyday, it’s priceless. 
 

 

 

Wolf at the Door

America, you and I have been testing
Ourselves, watching horror movies
And tv shows, to see if they

Still scare us, after everything
We've been through, serial killers,
Masked and unmasked

Menacing office buildings where
We looked for jobs, laid off
By the pandemic or else

Something worse, a disease
That turns you into a creature
That hungers for blood, and my father-in-law

Gets lost driving to the pharmacy
And finds himself in a coven of witches
Who want to monitor his heart rate.

And what about you, America? When
I drove by your apartment, I’ll admit
I had questions, but what I saw

Made me think that you need
Answers even more than me, the help
That the zombies were hoping

For when they said, Send more cops
And even stoned and seventeen I knew
They meant Brains. I’ll admit some mistakes

But when I showed you my new place and
You said it looks haunted, I heard it lacks
content and I had to disagree. I’m scared

how I’ll hold up if this isn’t it, not even a preview.
 
 

 

Table Manners

Young children and their curious eyes. I’ve seen them,
caged in high chairs or else sitting forward on their knees,
feet tucked under. They play with their food,
chicken nuggets can be dinosaurs, fire trucks, or building
blocks; the bowl of macaroni-cheese centered
on the plate, its golden corona a volcano waiting to be pierced
by the spoon stabbed bluntly from above.
These kids don’t recognize hunger
is a desire that can be sated. They regard food
warily, a distraction from pain, or boredom,
or the sense that nothing could possibly help.

Their eyes as dull as the oversized spoons they hold,
that pull their mouths into flat grins. They forget
about the food in their mouths or on the plate
to recline regally and observe their domain, chewing
when they remember. Jaws ruminate, the swallow
abrupt as a tantrum. Filled, their eyes turn to clouded glass,
guarded portals to a soul sovereign and absolute
until a server passes with a sizzling steelhead or a crash
of plates captures their interest. Once their gaze finds a focus,
they cannot be restrained; they raise their arms
to be lifted free; they’ll squall till we do it. They’re learning
how we are in the world, that it’s up to you to feed
yourself and to push back from the table when you’ve
had enough. When it’s safe to just look and when you need
to put it in your mouth and swallow it down.

Matt Dube