The NBA: My Constant Improv and Storytelling Teacher
As a kid and then a teenager, I grew up watching Michael Jordan become the idiomatic expression for something or someone who is the greatest at what he/she does. I also played some basketball all the way until my first couple of years at university. Then, life happened. I started just following NBA news instead of waking up in the wee hours of the morning to watch a playoff or a finals game. And with time, I missed out on a good 5 - 7 years of the NBA as I was building my life in improv.
Photo by @tjdragotta
A few years later, the game started changing. I was already in my flow of performing and learning improv. And my curiosity to check out how a 190cm (which is on the shorter side of humans in the NBA), skinny guy with weak ankles was changing the way the NBA played basketball took strong hold of me. I was back to waking up in the wee hours of the night/morning to watch games. Now, I wasn’t only under the mercy of the network stations that aired the games at their own times. Now, I could stream every single game of the 82-game per team season, as well as the best-of-7 playoffs and finals that followed. Not only that, but I could also watch post-game interviews with the players and coaches. I could have a peak into the players’ lives on social media. Not only was Stephen Curry changing how the game of basketball was played, but the whole NBA and the way it was consumed had changed immensely since the last time I was a fan.
I was a different person now, too. The way improv had changed and was still changing my life was and still is immense. As a matter of fact, the way improv affects my life is the whole reason this blog exists with all its posts - past, present and future. It is the reason I may one day write a book (or something) about it. One of the things those changes did was give me a different way to perceive life and everything in it, including basketball and the NBA.
In parallel, I had been performing improv every opportunity I got (I lost count, but at the time of writing this, I have performed in 300-350 improv shows and had smaller appearances in about a 100 other shows in which I was improvising). I had been learning improv from teachers and trainers in festivals or workshops all over the world. I had also been learning immensely from leading training sessions and workshops (I have been part of training or a workshop or a master class or a lab or coaching in one way or another the whole time, almost non-stop, since 2009). And even though I strongly believed that improv (and almost all the skills we learn in life) is an ongoing, non-stop life journey, like going to the gym (more on this later in this blog, but also in many other blogs I’ll try to remember to come back here to link to them when I write them), I was starting to feel saturated.
The NBA gave me a breath of fresh air. I restarted watching the NBA not just for the entertainment value in it, but also for all the improv and storytelling lessons it provides. I had always (and still do) compare and liken improv to sports, in general. I had probably taken that over from Tim Orr, as he used to coach a sports team while performing and teaching improv, but I think I did it more than him because I always find myself in a situation to explain improv to people who had never seen it or to answer the question of “Why do you train, practice, or rehearse if you’re making it all up anyway?” in Lebanon much more than he had to do it in the States or in Europe. My usual answer is “Improv is just like sports. You don’t know what is going to happen in a game. You still practice and prepare every day. As a matter of fact, it is because you don’t know what’s going to happen in the game that you have to practice and prepare more. Improv is just like that.”
Of course this made sense to improvisers, but more importantly, it was an easy way to explain improv to non-improvisers and more importantly to people who have never seen an improv show before.
However, the NBA became more than just something I use for analogy. It also became a school of improv and storytelling in itself. It’s a high-level performance sport. It requires an elite level of athleticism as well as an intricate understanding of playing systems. It is also extremely demanding; every team plays 82 games every season, travels all of the way around the USA to do it, and tried to get a spot in the Playoffs. In that process, you can see how the players are using their skills and developing them, you can see how they’re communicating with their teammates, how their responses to success and failure are, what their narrative about a certain win or loss is, how their narrative aligns (or not) with that of their team and/or teammates, their relationship with their coaches, the coaches’ narratives and opinions, the fans, the referees, and so many other things that not only resonate with improv and storytelling but also act as an intensive master class in them. And it is all unscripted and in real time (of course, there are many conspiracy theories that suggest that the NBA can be rigged and “scripted”, but isn’t that part of the meta story, too?).
Every time I watch a game and the interviews with the players that follow, I feel that everything can be translated to a lesson in improv and/or storytelling; the development of the players, the team strategies, the changes in strategies throughout the game and the season, the trades, what is causing the game to change and why, etc… I will not list everything here because it’s really everything. I will hopefully remember to draw more tangible parallels with the NBA in other blog posts that deal with improv or storytelling concepts. But for now, I have a post-season interview (narrative) to catch.