Suspending Narrative Engagements

Pick-Up Basketball

The pick-up basketball court is a particularly strategic site to study the narrative structuring of social life in general and the work of suspending and resuming in particular. For the past five years, I have been playing in informal basketball games in Los Angeles–area parks. Pick-up basketball is played in a public or quasi-public setting without oversight from formal organizations or institutionally sanctioned referees. While there are pick-up games at private gymnasiums, my data come from playing at two public parks ¹ where groups of men regularly arrive with the expectation of finding others to play with.

A day of pick-up basketball unfolds as players arrive, form teams, and compete against one another. Generally the first ten players split into teams of five and begin a game. As more players arrive, they form teams in a sideline queue where they prepare to play the winners of the current game. There is a structural incentive to win games, as winning yields continued play while a loss means going to the back of the queue and waiting for another turn (Jimerson 1996). A team wins by being the first to score either 11 or 13 points. Each basket counts for 1 point, and players are responsible for calling their own fouls, developing strategy, and keeping score.

These pick-up games involve a special kind of urban sociality. As described in Georg Simmel’s classic essay “The Stranger” (1908/1950), there is a “unity of nearness and remoteness” among the basketball players. While they recognize one another and come to know something about one another’s style on the court, their relationships tend not to extend much further. Paradoxically, abandoning a narrative engagement is relatively easy in both very close and very distant relationships. A family might stop a game of Monopoly knowing that they can start a new game on a different night. Even if they abandon the game in anger or frustration, reconciliation and forgiveness can be presumed. Total strangers are also free to abandon a game because they know they are unlikely to meet again. While collegiate and professional opponents are often total strangers, their leagues are organized to contain the possibility of abandonment through monetary sanctions or other kinds of penalties. League officials, referees, coaches, team management, stadium staff, advertisers, fans, and players know that if either team abandons the game, they will incur serious sanctions. Games must be completed and fit neatly into the categories of “win,” “loss,” or “tie.” All parties take suspension for granted during routine or unusual ² interruptions to the game.

Relationships in a pick-up basketball game fall somewhere between intimates and total strangers. Players cannot presume that abandoning would be cost-free; they must be concerned with how they come off to their fellows. But they lack the institutional resources of formal leagues and must constantly be concerned with structuring the gaming narrative themselves. Because abandoning is an ever-present possibility on the pick-up basketball court, suspending the narrative is an achievement.

Given the contingent nature of suspending, the game’s structure provides the players with important resources. Robert Perinbanayagam, drawing on Ricouer’s conception of narrative, says that “games are poetic and narrative structures that enable a human being to conceive time and experience it.” As “narrative structures,” games are played in reference to precise definitions of beginnings and endings. In the midst of a game, the specific outcome remains undetermined, but players move methodically through the narrative toward an anticipated endpoint. This situation contrasts with many everyday narrative engagements that remain relatively open-ended and indefinite (Perinbanayagam 2006, 38).

Furthermore, gaming structures provide participants with different ways of measuring how the game is progressing. In some games the narrative structure is constituted through various types of moves and countermoves. Chess matches proceed through taking an opponent’s pieces, baseball through a progression of outs and innings, and tennis through sets and games with their own subnarratives. Other gaming narratives unfold by traversing time as a clock counts down toward the end. Still other games are narratively structured through traversing space; races, golf, and board games demand moving along a specified path. Whatever the structuring unit, participants have a strong sense of how the narrative unfolds. The collective understanding of the gaming narrative on the basketball court means that players can actively play with the folk knowledge of its narrative structure. ³

Retrodicting Suspension in Pick-Up Basketball

My primary concern is showing how players do the work of suspending a game to ensure that it is not abandoned. I consider three phases in the process of suspending. First, I examine how players go about interrupting a game. Next, I look at the range of activities players engage in during the stoppage through which they treat the game as merely suspended rather than abandoned. Finally, I describe the ritualized process through which players coordinate their resumption of the game.

The explanation I offer draws on the analytic inductive strategy that some ethnographers have called “retrodiction” (Becker 1998; Katz 2001). To retrodict the social process of suspending, I start from the assumption that the game is successfully suspended and look back at the process of suspending. Unlike a predictive explanation, the point of this analysis is not to explain the suspension itself but to outline the path through which suspension occurs. This explanation allows for the possibility that players may diverge from that path and in various ways fail to suspend.

For example, I observed a game in which Len’s team was winning 10-9 and needed just one more basket to achieve victory. With the ball in his hands, Len made a verbal grunt that some defenders interpreted as a foul call, an indication that they should stop playing. With his opponents no longer trying to stop him, Len easily laid the ball through the hoop and claimed he had scored the game-winning basket. His opponents vehemently disagreed. When one of Len’s own teammates suggested that they play the point over again, Len yelled out, “Speak for yourself, homie! That was a win! I’ll run it back, but I ain’t playin’ that over!” Len was willing to begin a new game, but was unwilling to resume the same game after discounting his basket. The day ended on a controversial note as Len’s opponents refused to start a new game without finishing the previous one. With neither side budging, players began leaving the park. This disagreement resonated with a concern for where they were in the game’s narrative. Some finished the day of basketball believing that the game had been interrupted and abandoned, while Len and some of his teammates believed the game was legitimately completed.

This case is relatively unusual. In failing to resume play, the trouble seen here highlights the routine work of suspension that is regularly accomplished on the pick-up basketball court. With this kind of failure representing an alternative, the following analysis is grounded in the active work of the players to structure and sustain the basketball game.

Interrupting

A game of pick-up basketball proceeds through a series of possessions. First one team has the ball and attempts to score on one side of the court. Then the action switches to the other side of the court while the team that was on defense now tries to score on the opposite basket. Spectators and participants witness the narrative unfolding through this back-and-forth movement. As the game progresses, players call out the score. The score serves not only to remind players which team is ahead but also to pinpoint their place in the game’s narrative structure. A score of 12-12 means both that the game is tied and that it is almost over.

Any stoppage in the unfolding narrative constitutes an interruption. Players stop running, faking, or responding to their opponents’ movements. They launch shots toward the rim that others treat as mere practice. They walk to the drinking fountain or, not knowing how long the game will be out of commission, jog to the restroom. A game has been effectively interrupted when players’ actions are treated as something other than the game itself. ⁴

The most common form of interruption on the basketball court is the announcement of a foul or other rule violation. A player can, at any point, communicate that some play has occurred that is not formally allowed within the rules of basketball. Play comes to a halt as players seek to address the apparent violation. Because fouls are expected, they can be the least disruptive kind of interruption. Players can call violations expecting relatively quick resumption of play. Sometimes, however, these calls lead to long and heated disputes that jeopardize the continuation of the game.

Despite the ritualized and expected nature of these interruptions, players maintain expectations about when in the unfolding narrative a foul may properly be called. The most common objection is that the call was made too late relative to the incident. In some plays it may be possible to gain an advantage by not calling a foul right away. If a player thinks that his teammate is about to score a basket, he may not want to interrupt the narrative. If he does not announce the violation and his teammate fails to score, it is regularly treated as too late to make the call. A player should not be able to wait to see how a play turns out before calling a foul. Even when such a call is honored, it is common to hear gripes of “late call!” Indeed, on my first day playing at a park, I was chastised for failing to call a foul when I had missed a jump shot: “Come on, Mike, you gotta call that shit!” Although I would have loved to interrupt the game by calling the foul, I knew it was already too late.

The situation has parallels with conversational repair through which interlocutors express trouble with speaking, hearing, or understanding. Emanuel Schegloff (1992) notes that following every utterance is a small “repair opportunity space.” If repair is not initiated in that space, the opportunity to correct breakdowns in intersubjectivity may be lost. On the pick-up basketball court, we may conceptualize a “foul call opportunity space.” As the next possession unfolds, it takes an increasing amount of work to pull the narrative back to the point of an earlier violation. At some point, players treat the opportunity to call a foul as altogether lost.

Consider the situation documented in my field notes in which Larry called a foul relatively late.

Larry struggled to maintain possession of the ball without one of the defenders ripping it from his grasp. He held it under his chin with his elbows sticking out while pivoting back and forth trying to clear space to make a pass. All of a sudden Johnny knocked the ball free and ran in the other direction for a wide-open lay-up. Larry stood in place and made a comment to a bystander on the sideline. Johnny scored an easy basket, and while he ran back to play defense Larry said, “Aw, come on, man! You know you fouled me!” Johnny’s teammate commented that he had never called anything, and Larry responded quickly, “When the foul is that obvious I shouldn’t have to call shit. You should just know it was a foul and stop playing!” Larry’s team resumed playing with the ball, and Johnny’s basket didn’t count.

When Larry was chastised for having not made the call promptly, he was quick to account for his lateness. By claiming that this foul was so blatant that play should have stopped without any call at all, he implicitly upholds the expectation that normally foul calls ought to be vocalized on time. Larry verbalized the foul in what must have been the final moments of the foul-calling opportunity space. Had his team started playing offense after Johnny’s basket, the game would have continued to unfold, and the opportunity to call a foul might have been lost. At the very least, to call a foul after this moment would have required even more work to resist accusations of lateness. This instance involved a suspension of play that almost did not happen. If Larry had failed to convince others that a foul had legitimately interrupted the game, the narrative would have continued to unfold.

Foul and violation calls are the most common and expected kind of interruption, but sometimes the interruption comes from outside the game. Children and dogs run onto the court. Players are injured or receive important phone calls. These kinds of interruptions are generally treated as idiosyncratic and relatively easy to resolve through quick resumption. Yet because players know that any interruption risks abandonment, they may resist interruptions that seem especially threatening.

One day two police officers arrived at the court in response to a call from a park staff member about two players, Arthur and Rashad, who had previously been fighting. The officers arrived during the day’s first game.

The police officers stood with their hats in hand watching us play. Eventually, one of them called out, “Arthur! Which one of you is Arthur?” We were running back on defense, and Arthur looked over to the sideline and raised his hand. “Just a minute sir,” he replied as he got set to play defense. We played two more possessions before the officer said anything else. Eventually he yelled, “Arthur!” Arthur looked over and this time the cop waved him over. Arthur hesitated for a moment, seemingly unsure if he should interrupt the game or ignore the officer for a little longer. When the cop motioned with his hand again, Arthur called out “hold up” and walked over to the sideline.

Arthur’s resistance to the police officer’s interruption stands in contrast to the vast majority of foul calls, where the game is halted immediately. Even when there is intense disagreement about the legitimacy of a foul call, there is rarely any disagreement that the announcement “foul!” should interrupt the game. In resisting the officer’s summons, Arthur anticipated what might come next. He knew that the summons was aimed at a sanctionable event (Schegloff 1968, 1083) and that a conversation with the police officer had the potential to draw him out of the game entirely. By resisting interruption, he resisted the possibility of abandonment.

It is equally interesting that the police officers momentarily accepted his delay. However great their formal authority over this public setting, the game was treated as a legitimate activity that ought not be interrupted haphazardly. They allowed Arthur some leeway in selecting the proper moment to interrupt play. When Arthur delayed interrupting the game for too long, they exerted more pressure on him.

Suspending

Once a game is interrupted, players organize their interactions in ways that treat the game as merely suspended. If they fail, the interruption to the game may come to be seen as the moment of abandonment.

Ronald’s team was on the verge of achieving victory when he called a foul committed against him by a player named Shawn.

Needing only one more basket to win the game, Ronald made a special effort to get all the way to the rim and score on a close shot. The first time he tried this, Shawn ran across the key and hammered his body as they elevated together. Ronald called out that he was fouled, and Shawn helped him up immediately. Shawn announced that he would not allow an easy game-winning basket. In the next play Shawn fouled him hard again, and again the shot missed. Ronald showed no visible sign of being upset about this play and nodded appreciatively when Shawn helped him up off the ground. The game restarted quickly once again.

Given how often players react negatively to foul calls against them, it is notable that Shawn did not contest the call’s legitimacy or attack Ronald’s moral character for calling the foul. By accounting for his own physicality, Shawn chose a less conflict-resonant line of action (Emerson 2010) and implicitly accepted Ronald’s foul call. In explaining that he would not allow an easy game-winning basket, Shawn was responding to a question that was never verbalized: “What the hell kind of foul was that?!” He accounted for his action in the interest of negating interpretations that could have led to a heated argument or even a fight.

Shawn resisted the potential for abandonment of the game in two ways. First, he transformed the physical foul into a compliment for Ronald. After resorting to an intentional foul, Shawn recognized Ronald as a skilled player by admitting an inability to stop him within the confines of the rules. Then, by lifting him up off the ground, Shawn marked Ronald as a player worthy of respect and esteem. Second, Shawn saved face by highlighting the strategic nature of his foul, framing it as a “guided doing” with strategic overtones (Goffman 1974, 24). His strategic physicality stemmed from a self-conscious decision to treat this play differently based on its place within the game (Emerson 1983). Since Ronald’s basket would end the game, Shawn’s intentional foul can be seen as expressing a desire to prolong the game rather than as a moral offense. As a player who is wise enough to foul on purpose, Shawn’s aggression can be understood as evidence of the skill and respectability of both players.

Consider alternative interpretations of Shawn’s foul: Ronald is a pushover who can be thrown to the ground; Shawn is incapable of controlling his own physicality; or Shawn is willing to harm an opponent to keep him from scoring. These possibilities carry a risk of heightening emotions that could lead to the game’s abandonment. Shawn spontaneously offered an interpretive framework that contributed to easy resumption of the game. Indeed, his account was so successful that when he performed a similar play in the very next possession, others saw it as the same kind of foul and moved quickly to resume play.

Equally subtle ways of treating interruptions as mere suspensions are displayed in more heated disputes as well. In the next example, there was vehement disagreement about whether Mark’s basket should count.

Melo immediately called a traveling violation. Mark said the call was “bullshit” and ran back to play defense. Arnold, Mark’s teammate, said that Mark had lost control of the ball while in the air, thereby discounting the possibility of a traveling violation. After some discussion, Melo suggested that Arnold’s team “check it up top” and redo their possession. Mark resisted at first, but eventually conceded.

Upon hearing Melo claim that he had traveled, Mark immediately organized his behavior so that this call would not generate anything beyond a brief interruption. By claiming the call was “bullshit,” he dismissed the need to discuss the violation at all. Simultaneously he put his body in the physical position that would be required for the next play. Though Mark invited other players to join him in instantaneous resumption, they treated Melo’s call as worthy of discussion. Arnold and his teammates remained on their offensive side of the court and found a compromise solution that avoided a protracted disagreement. Rather than deciding whether Mark had actually traveled, Melo proposed they simply redo the last possession. When Mark attempted to pull other players forward into the next possession, he ended up being pulled back physically to the other end of the court and narratively to a point before the interruption occurred.

Invoking the language of Kenneth Burke’s dramatism, players take up physical positions around the court that modify the scene in ways that implicitly contain the quality of the act they find most preferable or most likely (Burke 1945/1969, 11). Through their physical positioning, they show an orientation toward abandonment or resumption. By sitting down on the sideline, players involved in a dispute display a willingness to abandon the game; those not involved in the conflict may sit to show that they have given up in the face of likely abandonment. Alternatively, they may pressure those in conflict to come to an agreement by standing on the court in play formation. I witnessed a heated dispute in which one player sat underneath the eastern basket threatening to quit the game while the other nine players stood ready to play on the western half of the court. When it became clear that the players on the court might continue to play without him, the seated player quickly rejoined the game.

The physical alignment of bodies is also consequential when there is a risk of fighting. One day Neil became furious with an opponent for insulting his son, who was also playing in the game. Neil and his opponent began exchanging hateful words during the game, but it was not until they assumed a face-to-face fighting stance that other players jumped in to separate them. Once they aligned their bodies in fighting position, others could see that the abandonment of the game was a real possibility. Meanwhile, Neil’s son took his shirt off and circled around behind the opponent with his fists raised and yelled out, “I’m gonna light this nigga up!” Once tensions cooled, Neil told his son to concentrate on basketball and not get involved in physical confrontations. With the game stopped, concentrating on basketball was an instruction to prepare to resume the game. In doing so, he would treat the game as suspended and allow Neil to deal with the unruly opponent on his own.

If the game is to be resumed, players must organize their behavior in particular ways during the interruption. They treat physically violent fouls as stemming from the game’s situation rather than as indicating hostility. They orient their bodies toward their preferred conditions of resumption and induce others to do the same. If players fail to organize their behavior in ways that treat the interruption as a mere suspension, the game may never actually be resumed.

Resuming

To understand how games are resumed, we must appreciate that suspending play is an action that is only known retrospectively; until the game is actually resumed, abandonment remains a possibility. Resuming play crystallizes what might have been an ending as a mere suspension.

Resuming is different from both starting from the beginning and from restarting, or starting over again. Players resume the narrative by starting again from where they left off. Doing so requires agreement about where in the narrative the game should be resumed. They call out a score and line up in play formation, one team on offense and the other on defense. As a dispute over a foul call comes to conclusion, a player yells out, “Fine. Your ball then. It’s 7-5. Let’s play already!” If just one player expresses disagreement, resumption is delayed, and there is renewed effort to generate the necessary agreement.

Even with agreement achieved, players must collectively come to recognize that actions and movements are once again meaningful within the game. A ritualized procedure called “checking the ball in” or “checking it up” structures the transition back into the game. A player on the offensive team (the “checker”) stands between the half-court line and the three-point arc, facing his offensive basket with the ball in hand. He passes the ball to the nearest defender (the “resumer”) and says “check.” The resumer catches the ball and, when he deems his team ready to play, passes it back to the checker, saying “ball in.” ⁵ The resumer will often take a moment before passing it back, looking around to make sure his teammates appear ready. Once the checker has the ball again his teammates begin moving around the court. The game framework once again structures the action.

Offensive players understand this ritual and attempt to exploit it. They may begin moving before the resumer has actually passed the ball back to the checker, anticipating the moment of resumption. They cut across the court to separate from their defender so they will be available for a pass as soon as the checker has the ball. Realizing what they are up to, the resumer may hold onto the ball for a few additional moments, rendering those anticipatory movements meaningless. The offensive players find themselves open only to realize that the resumer still has the ball and play has not actually begun. Through the checking ritual, players communicate final agreement on conditions of play, display their readiness for play, and coordinate reentry into the gaming narrative.

This procedure is not unlike a summons-answer sequence in ordinary conversation. A summons works as a check to see if a coparticipant is available to listen (Schegloff 1968). If the summoned party is not ready, the summons lets the other know that their attention is being requested. Answerers respond with phrases such as “What is it?” or “Can I help you?” The summoner is then obligated to go on to the substance of the matter. Similarly, once the checker receives the ball back from the resumer, he is obligated to produce a next action within the gaming framework. To refrain from beginning play after receiving the ball from the resumer would be understood as a meaningful nonaction. Play is resumed out of the obligation embedded in the checking ritual.

Emanuel Schegloff noted that interlocutors may be seen as insolent if they fail to perform the obligated actions in the summons sequence. On the telephone, a failure to respond to a summons may be explained away by referring to a bad connection. In face-to-face interaction, however, the absence of an answer may be interpreted as giving the person the “cold shoulder,” “insulting” them, or “sulking” (1968, 1089). This is precisely what happened when the resumer failed to pass the ball competently to the checker.

Instead of just passing it back to the offensive player, Board Shorts flipped the ball high into the air over his head and it bounced toward the opposite basket. A couple of guys on the sideline called out “ooohhhh!” as the ball trailed away. When his opponent realized how far the ball rolled, he turned toward Board Shorts, pointed over his shoulder, and said, “Naw, fuck that, I ain’t chasing after that. You go get it.” Board Shorts called out to an older black guy who was shooting practice shots on the opposite basket. “Hey Old School, can you toss that ball back?” Old School looked up, noticed the ball bouncing toward him, and passed it back to the offensive player.

When Board Shorts tossed the ball over his opponent’s head, the players on the sideline recognized the implicit insult. Given the ease with which he could provide a competent response to the check, Board Shorts’s pass is understood as blatant disregard for his obligation to resume the game. This deliberate gesture provided a morally justifiable frame for the opponent’s refusal to retrieve the ball. Had the ball trailed away after bouncing off Board Shorts’s foot, the accidental quality of the failure might have changed the meaning of running after it. Without apologizing or fetching the ball himself, Board Shorts skirted the issue of his culpability by calling on another player to return it. Conveniently, Old School—who had not been watching, and so had no idea how the ball got away—was there to toss the ball back.

Resuming play is accomplished by players who have a folk sociological understanding of how to maintain narrative engagement. Offensive players strategically attempt to exploit this knowledge by moving early, while defensive players try to keep them honest. The moral obligation embedded in the performance of the checking ritual ensures that players jump back into the game together. Once completed, the checking ritual marks the period of nonplay as a suspension. Although it happens almost instantaneously for the players on the court, resuming must be seen as a phase of narrative suspension with its own ritualized sequence. It is part of the known but unspoken organization of the pick-up basketball game.

Conclusion

The narrative structuring of social life is a routinely accomplished feature of everyday interaction. Social actors have folk sociological knowledge of how narrative engagements are supposed to unfold. Even when the narratives are not completed, people abandon them in ways that show recognition that the ending is coming earlier than usual. When a narrative is interrupted, participants regularly do the work of ensuring that the stoppage is merely a suspension. Participants actively structure their experiences through their own intimate understandings of narrative engagements.

In pick-up basketball, participants manage interruptions by holding one another accountable for proper foul or violation calls that routinely stop the game. When play stops, they organize their behavior around their sense that the interruption need not end in the abandonment of the game. They treat the game as merely paused and subtly induce others do the same. Finally, the checking ritual used to resume the game provides a routinized way for all players to jump back into the game together. Players use their knowledge of the ritual strategically in an attempt to gain an advantage. Once the game is resumed, the recent interruption to play can be understood as a mere suspension.

Robert Perinbanayagam (2006, 35–36) likened games to myths in which antagonists clash with the “narrative other” and legendary heroes emerge. But unlike other mythical media, the narratives of games are constituted in the present. In informal games, indeed, the resolution of narrative tension depends entirely on the active management of the players. In doing so, new meanings emerge. I observed players using their folk sociological knowledge of this narrative strategically and playfully. They hold off on calling a foul as a way of calling an “obvious foul,” they use the unfolding narrative as a way to resist the police, they show a willingness to abandon the game to bolster their argument, and they attempt to gain strategic advantage in the moments before a game is resumed. If the fun in games is based on an uncertainty of the outcome, as Erving Goffman (1961) suggested, pick-up games provide an extra layer of uncertainty. Without formal oversight, the fun is also based on the ways in which players put the game’s narrative into play.

While the basketball court has particular features, the study of narrative structuring is applicable to other sites of social interaction. Regardless of the grounds or substance of the engagement, in doing things together our understanding of narrative is a powerful locus of meaning. Once we appreciate narrative structuring as an ever-present and live concern for social actors, we can use this framework to scrutinize emerging as well as familiar forms of social action. Whether in games or in other domains of social interaction, we structure and organize our lives through lively and meaningful narratives that often sit just beneath the surface of awareness.