the destroyer > reviews > On the False Duality of NBA Jam and the Grant Brothers / Brian Oliu

The game is an experiment in duality: basketball is not meant to be played like this. One-on-one is the game that romance was based upon: sons challenging their fathers, fathers using their height to grab every missed shot. 3-on-3 is how the game evolved when exchanging hardwood for blacktop—a natural half-court game when the other half of the pavement is taken up by kids like me hitting the underside of the rim. Two-on-two was never the plan: when the game was pitched, it was meant to be five-on-five, regulation—as realistic as we can possibly get, a true simulation. It is because of the game we use the word “arcade” to describe anything less real, yet more hyperreal: fewer players but with more muscles, rocket-boots for cleats, zero gravity. A world that runs parallel to our own.

Two-on-two is a game of absences: friends who promised to show up decided to go to the movies instead, their parents refusing to give them a ride down to the park. You can’t run fours—you’ll get blown off the court by the kids with the Air Max’s that flop out from the ankles. You never have the right shoes, never the ones that lit up, never the pumps, never anything but white-on-white, scuffed to hell, grass stains on the toes because this is the world you lived in and you wouldn’t dare go barefoot.

The game is a game of twos. You buy the game for the dunking: the ability to do flips in the air that could never be imagined, to leave from the free-throw line and spin like a figure skater, to deliver the ball with a satisfying chunk. To rack up twos after twos, to try to pull off something that has never been seen before, that if you press the buttons at the right time, you can rotate for one extra spin. There were rumors that you could dunk from half-court—that your character could leap the length of the screen, nothing could get in your way. There were rumors about a lot of things, which never stopped us from trying to unlock every nuance: how certain players couldn’t dunk, how every layup and finger roll was an insult to the game.

Here’s how you win at the game: you do not dunk the basketball. You do not select the biggest stars, you do not try amaze your friends with what the game leaves up to chance. You shoot three-pointers—you counteract every dunk with a long shot from a short porch. Here’s how you win at NBA Jam: you shove every player that comes near you. There are no fouls here, there is no blood. There are no free throw attempts, no stoppage in play, no time outs, no chances to catch your breath. You take every extra one you can get

The Washington Bullets have no wonder: the following year, they will have Chris Webber, and the kids will have his shoe, the ones with a rat’s tail down the side. Here, we have a recycled sprite: Harvey Grant, twin brother of Horace. Harvey wore goggles too, though they were not his signature look—that was already reserved for Horace, slyly putting his finger on every fault.

When the Bulls play the Bullets, all you hear is Grant: the name repeated in the same frozen exclamation, every crackled bark a repetition of what came before. It’s the voice that is haunting; the fact that two people can look identical seems like an act of science, whereas two people sounding the same seems otherworldly—like some unholy transfer. My grandmother is a twin. When I was a child I would stare at my grandmother’s sister despite only meeting her for the first time a few minutes earlier. I can tell the difference now: my grandmother’s voice higher, her hair a bit taller.

I wore goggles too: my glasses were too often knocked off of my head on an errant elbow, which sent them skidding across the gym floor. The best game I ever played was with one eye open, my right-eye scratched by a fingernail, the white turned red. I got every roll, every spin in my direction.

In a year, Harvey is gone, where Horace stays—replaced by Chris Webber, who is traded from Golden State. The Bullets, soon, will be gone as well, the owner believing that bullets are violent things that kill people in his city, that the murder rate is too high, that the only thing that can save everything is some sort of mystic shift beyond the power of having two people exist in the world with the same body. The logo is replaced by a singular being: a wizard mid-finger roll, insulting all that we know of the game. Gone is the logo: two hands coming out of the twin Ls, reaching towards the ball, either to receive it as it comes down off the rim, or being thrown forward towards the sky, a prayer on the sky wondering if it will be granted.