5 Sampson could have gone straight into the NBA after high school. Everyone knew this. They said the same thing about the other great high school senior from the class of 1979, Sam Bowie.8 But Sampson was a serious person who made serious decisions; he not only went to college but stayed all four years, despite the fact that he was projected as the league’s top pick following every season he completed.9 He won 96 percent of his games as a Cavalier, and his final season was designed as a worldwide showcase for Sampson’s Samsonian sovereignty. Following that nationally televised mid-December clash with Georgetown, Virginia was scheduled to play two games in Japan before finishing the journey with a stopover in Hawaii to play the Chaminade Silverswords, an unknown school with an enrollment of nine hundred. Sampson—who’d been slightly ill against Georgetown but played anyway—became intestinally sick on the flight across the Pacific. He barely participated in the two games in Tokyo.10 But by the time they hit Hawaii, Sampson felt better. The world assumed this December 23 game was nothing more than an excuse for the Cavaliers to hit the beach before crushing a bunch of pineapple-gorged nags by 40. The world was wrong. Chaminade clogged the lane defensively, pushed the tempo on offense, and pulled the biggest upset in collegiate sports history,11 defeating Virginia 77–72.
Within the scope of life, this should not have been a devastating loss for Sampson. It was a minor game played early in the season, he probably wasn’t 100 percent health-wise, the game wasn’t on TV, and only four thousand people were in the gym. Yet this is the night Sampson busted. We would not become collectively conscious of that rupture until 1988, but it happened in Hawaii in 1982. The Silverswords’ center, Tony Randolph, was a six-six tweener from Virginia who had played against Sampson in high school and supposedly dated Ralph’s sister. He was just a normal athlete who was slightly tall. But he was a person. And Sampson was not. Sampson was a monster who was going to change the language of his sport. He was beyond Goliath; he was the Goliath who was going to play point guard simply because he wanted to. He was David as Goliath. And you can’t be both. You couldn’t root for Sampson as an underdog, because that made no sense. He was favored against everybody. He was the greatest. But you also couldn’t root for him as a colossus, because he refused to become the colossus purists wanted; instead of backing Tony Randolph into the lane and dunking everything he touched, Sampson wanted to be “a seven-foot-four guard.” He was too pretty to be a soldier. Against the profoundly overmatched Chaminade, he took just nine shots and let his unbeatable team lose to a bunch of beach bum nobodies. He was the greatest, but he wasn’t that great.
2B I don’t know why what happened to Ralph Sampson bothers me, but it does. I fully understand that the way people remember Sampson doesn’t have any real impact on what he did (or did not) accomplish. He probably does not consider himself a bust, so why does it matter that other people do?
I don’t know.
But it does.
It does, because I want to think about Ralph Sampson the way I thought about him thirty years ago, and I cannot. It does not matter how hard I try or by what means I rationalize the specific details of his career. He’s busted to me. I am psychologically on his side, but I can’t deny that he busted. His inability to become the greatest player of his generation has been so relentlessly recognized by the media that it’s impossible for me to think about him in any context outside of that paradigm; this larger failure is now the only thing I think about when I think about Ralph Sampson. In 1986, he eliminated the L.A. Lakers from the playoffs by catching an inbounds pass and uncoiling a turnaround fourteen-footer in one motion, all within the span of a single second. This shot, technically, is the pinnacle of his basketball life. I am intellectually aware of this, as are most people who remember basketball from the eighties. But whenever that shot comes up in any conversation, it’s now a depressing addendum that immediately returns to the larger, sadder narrative—it only serves to remind everyone that Sampson was momentarily great. And that’s actually worse. Had he thrown his career away like Benny Anders, this entire essay would have been about how his failure was beautiful and interesting; as it is, it’s about how being the MVP of the ’85 all-star game is like being a brilliant pool player—sarcastic proof of a wasted life.
We used Ralph Sampson. I am using him right now, almost in the exact same manner I’m bemoaning. He is the post-playing piñata it’s acceptable to smash. It’s acceptable to fixate upon the things he did not do well enough, simply because all those personal catastrophes still leave him in a position of power. This is not an example of the media building someone up in order to knock him back down; this takedown was far less satisfying. Sampson busted big by succeeding mildly. That was the only role he ever played for anyone. There is no alternative universe where Ralph Sampson is a beloved symbol of excellence. There’s no Philip K. Dick novel where he averages a career double-double and gets four rings. He could never be that guy. He was needed elsewhere, for other reasons. He was needed to remind people that their own self-imposed mediocrity is better than choking on transcendence.
My affinity for Ralph Sampson was a product of my age, but not in the usual way. It was not that I was too young to remember the outstanding players before him, and it was not because I was too young to see his flaws. It was that I was too young to envy a stranger for a life that wasn’t mine. I did not subconsciously resent the fact that Sampson was born bigger and smoother than the rest of society. I had no idea that being six foot four is something a seven-foot-four man should not want. A ten-year-old boy doesn’t want a hyper-dexterous giant to choke, just as a ten-year-old girl doesn’t feel good when Britney Spears has a nervous breakdown on live TV. Only an adult can feel good about someone else’s failure. I was not in a position to enslave Ralph Sampson, but other people were. And now, today, I can’t erase those chains from my brain. I agree with the haters, against my will. They’ve enslaved me, too.
Q: Did you ever read that book of Sting’s lyrics? I think it’s just called Lyrics or something. Lou Reed published his lyrics as poetry, too. What do you think of that idea? Is that something you would consider?
A: Those books are balls. I hate them. I never give a shit about what a song is supposed to be about. I’m never amused by misheard lyrics, either. I tend to be more interested in people who hear lyrics correctly and still get them wrong. Like, are you familiar with the first song on Teenage Fanclub’s Bandwagonesque? They open that record with this great song called “The Concept,” and its first two lines are “She wears denim wherever she goes / Says she’s gonna get some records by the Status Quo.” When I initially heard that song, it never occurred to me that they were talking about the band Status Quo. ’Cause who the fuck listens to Status Quo? I always assumed that line meant this girl was buying records by “the status quo,” which implied that she was buying all the records that scenesters felt an obligation to own. I thought she was buying records by Captain Beefheart and Gang of Four and Slick Rick. That’s what I thought the term bandwagonesque referred to—jumping on the bandwagon of something that isn’t even popular. Every time I learn the truth about something, I’m disappointed.
Through A Glass, Blindly
1 Standing at the window, I am inside my home. But windows are made of glass, so I see through other windows and I see into other homes. I see other people. They are baking bread and watching Deadwood and using a broom to get their cat off the air conditioner. They’re doing nothing of interest, but it’s interesting to me. It’s interesting because they assume they are living unwatched. They would not want me (or anyone else) to watch them, despite the fact that they’re doing nothing of consequence. Yet if these windows were TV screens—if these people had placed cameras in their apartments and broadcast their mundane lives on purpose—I would immediately lose interest. It would become dull and repetitive. So: These people don’t want me watching them because they aren’t aware that I’m there, and I wouldn’t want to watch them if my watching was something they were aware of.
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Everyone knows this, and everyone feels the same way. But does anyone understand why?
2 One of the minor tragedies of human memory is our inability to unwatch movies we’d love to see (again) for the first time. Even classic films that hold up over multiple viewings—and even those films that require multiple viewings—can never deliver the knockout strangeness of that first time you see them, particularly if parts of the story are willfully designed to momentarily confuse the audience. When a film becomes famous and its theme becomes familiar, that pleasantly awkward feeling is lost even more. Sometimes I want to unknow things. An easy example is Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. By now, the theme of Vertigo is understood by all people interested in watching it, often before they see it for the first time: It’s about every man’s inherent obsession with attractive, psychologically damaged women. But for its first twenty minutes, Vertigo is about something else—it’s about surveillance, and about how not knowing what’s happening increases the phenomenon of attraction.
In Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart plays an ex-cop who’s hired to follow a man’s wife. As he watches her, the woman (Kim Novak) does a variety of strange, ostensibly meaningless things—she buys some flowers, stares at the portrait of a dead woman, and drives to a distant hotel for no clear reason. As the story unspools, we learn that she’s possibly possessed by the spirit of a dead woman; later, we come to realize this is all a psychological con job (with Stewart as the mark). Because the plot is so complicated (and because the imagery is so beautiful), most people’s memory of Vertigo focuses on the middle third of the movie—the psychology of the murder. But the reason Vertigo is effective is due to those opening twenty minutes. We watch Novak’s mysterious behavior through Stewart’s eyes, so we see her in the same way as he does. She makes all these (seemingly) bizarre decisions that are devoid of perspective, and it becomes far more compelling than logic would dictate. By surreptitiously watching the actions of a beautiful woman without the clarity of knowing her intentions, we stop caring about what those intentions are. Some might argue that Novak becomes interesting because the watcher can project whatever he desires onto her form, but that’s not really what happens; what happens is that she becomes interesting simply because it’s interesting not to know things. It’s the unconscious, emotional manifestation of anti-intellectualism. We end up having the same response as Stewart’s character: We fall in love with Kim Novak. That’s why the absurdity of Vertigo’s premise1 never becomes a problem—it doesn’t feel unreasonable, because a person in love cannot be reasoned with. And we are that person. We are in love. Hitchcock’s portrayal of surveillance is so effective that the audience never really recovers from the sensation; it carries the rest of the film.
So this, I suppose, is the first thing we can quantify: Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know, the less we are able to feel.
2A Ignorance is not bliss. That platitude is totally wrong. You will not be intellectually happier if you know fewer things. Learning should be a primary goal of living. But what if ignorance feels better—not psychologically, but physically? That would explain a lot of human incongruities.
There’s a visceral, physiological charge that only comes from unknown pleasures. Think back to ordinary life situations where the outcome was unclear, and try to remember how you felt during those moments: You’re introduced to someone you’re immediately attracted to, but you don’t know why. You attend a party where various guests dislike each other and everyone is drinking heavily. You’re playing blackjack and the entire game rests on whatever card is drawn next. You wake up, but you don’t recognize where you are. Mentally, these situations are extremely stressful. But—almost inevitably—the physical sensation that accompanies that stress is positive and electrifying. You are more alert and more attuned to your surroundings. Endorphins are firing like revolutionary guerrillas. Adrenaline is being delivered by FedEx. Unknowing feels good to your body, even when it feels bad to your brain—and that dissonance brings you closer to the original state of being. It’s how an animal feels. Take the wolf, for example: I suspect it’s unbelievably stressful to be a wolf. The world would be an endlessly confusing place, because a wolf has limited cognitive potential and understands nothing beyond its instinct and its own experience. Yet the wolf is more engaged with the experience of being alive. A wolf isn’t as “happy” as you, but a wolf feels better. His normal state of being is the way you feel during dynamic moments of bewilderment.
When you secretly watch the actions of a stranger, you’re living like the wolf. You have no idea what could happen or what will happen. And while it’s possible you enjoy that experience simply because you’re nosy, it might also be because this makes you feel good for reasons unconnected to your curiosity. In reality, you probably don’t want to know what’s happening in someone else’s life. You merely want to continue not knowing. And most of the time, that’s exactly what happens.
2B When I lived in Fargo, I had a boring, curious apartment. It was a four-hundred-square-foot efficiency on the third floor of a three-story building. The only two windows were on the north wall, and they were both massive. By chance, the cable TV hookup was directly between these two windows. What this meant was that it was impossible to watch my thirteen-inch television without seeing directly into the opposing third-story efficiency apartment that was fifty feet to the north and identically designed. Everyone who visited my residence commented on this. Unless you had retinitis pigmentation (the source of nonmetaphorical tunnel vision), you could not avoid seeing what was happening in another apartment exactly like mine. This wasn’t creepy, or at least it didn’t feel like it at the time; it just felt like being unrich.
Because of this architectural circumstance, I had a nonverbal relationship with the twentysomething woman who lived in the apartment across the way. I never met her, but it was kind of like having an extremely mysterious roommate. For a while I thought she was schizophrenic, because it often looked like she was dancing with a houseplant; I later realized she owned a NordicTrack. I never witnessed anything sexual or scandalous. The lone intense moment happened while I was watching an episode of My So-Called Life: My neighbor was wearing a cocktail dress and cooking a (seemingly complex) meal. When her date finally arrived—a man whom I’d seen over there on multiple occasions in the past— they immediately had an argument, punctuated by her heaving a book at him from across the room. He left and she ate alone. Whenever she watched her own TV, I could see her peering into my apartment as well. I think she saw me throwing up one night, but that might have been a dream.
Now, as a writer, popular mythology would suggest that I should have taken these glimpses of my neighbor and created a fantasy world about what her life was like. I should have been stealing details from these fleeting voyeuristic moments and extrapolating them to their most absurd extreme. And I think that might have happened, had I seen her only once or twice or thrice. But this happened all the time. I accidentally saw her every day I watched television, which was every day I lived there. And the reason she never stopped being accidentally fascinating is because I never knew what was going on over there. I was clueless. The most commonly asked question within my internal monologue was always, “Now what is she doing?” To this day, I have no theory about what she did for a living or even what her regular hours were; I only know that she must have had the kind of job that required her to live in a place where the rent was $160 a month, because that’s what I was paying, too. There is nothing she could have done that would have surprised me because I had no expectation as to how she was supposed to act. This is how it was, all the time. For two years, I watched a revolving door of nonevents that never stopped intriguing me. What’s ironic is that this voyeurism coincided with the period of my life when I was most interested in MTV’s The Real World. In fact, I can recall a handful of situations where I could glance into my neighbor’s daily life while actively watching a show designed for that very purpose. As a critic, I h
ave more things to say about the depiction of reality on MTV than about the depiction of reality in reality. But as a human, my boring neighbor felt infinitely more watchable, regardless of how little she did. So why was that? I think it was because I knew less. Even though MTV was actively trying to keep me interested, there were certain things I knew I would always see, because reality programming is constructed around predictable plot devices. There were also certain things I knew I’d never see, because certain types of footage would either be impossible to broadcast or broken as gossip before making it to the air (for example, we might eventually see a suicide on The Real World, but never a suicide we won’t expect). The upside to knowledge is that it enriches every experience, but the downside is that it limits every experience. This is why I preferred watching the stranger across the way, even though she never did anything: There was always the possibility she might do everything.
2C Vertigo might be the best Hitchcock movie (or so Hitchcock himself sometimes implied), but Rear Window is my favorite (and for all the reasons one might expect). With the possible exception of Goodfellas, I can’t think of another movie that’s harder to stop watching whenever I stumble across it on broadcast television. There are a number of incredible things about this film, most notably the preposterous (yet still plausible) scenario of Grace Kelly needing a copy of He’s Just Not That Into You until she becomes obsessed with a neighbor’s murder, thereby prompting Jimmy Stewart to think, “Wow. Maybe I should consider marrying this smart, beautiful, ultra-nurturing woman—I had no idea she was into true crime!” The pacing, set design, and atmosphere could not be better. You can easily watch it twenty times. But the one thing Rear Window gets wrong is the quality most people remember most: the sensation of surveillance. The fact that wheelchair-bound Stewart becomes fixated on his neighbors makes sense; what doesn’t compute is the way he engages with the content of his voyeurism.