I Want To Live Right Through You

Sunday, May 9, 1995
Garnett
Freshman, Advertising
Springfield, OH

His name is Matt Funke, and on the basketball court he is a god. A left-handed,
fleet-footed, calf-sock-wearing god with a blink-and-you’re-his-bitch crossover and a thirty-foot jump shot that can only be described as a flawless piece of perfect performance art. He comes in on Monday and Wednesday evenings, usually around eight o’clock, and sometimes on Saturday mornings, if there wasn’t a party at Snowden or a sorority-sponsored something at McKenzie’s or Mad Hatter’s the night before. I try to time my rounds so I pass the gym while he’s on the court, and if the front desk is sufficiently manned and Dennis Taylor has the day off, I’ll stay for a few minutes and watch him play. Because Matt Funke is a god, and to watch him play is Heaven.

Today is Sunday. It’s all-day intramurals day at the Blatt P.E. Center, which means no pick-up games are allowed. Matt does not play intramurals, and I’m pretty sure Matt knows this rule, which is why I’m surprised to see him on the court this morning, complete with signature blonde bed-head and signature calf socks. He’s wearing white shorts today, instead of his usual light blue Minnesota Timberwolves shorts, and a navy blue t-shirt, “Hopewell All Stars” across the front in yellow script, the number “18” in yellow on the back.

I’m standing on the sidelines on Court 2 when I first see him. I’m swallowed in the center of a circle of adorably clueless Alpha Chis with matching green t-shirts and blonde hair, in the middle of my second attempt in explaining to them the rules of the same game they’ve played every Sunday for the last month and a half, so he doesn’t really register at first. The girls tilt their heads to the left, slant their eyebrows downward, crinkle their foreheads, tilt their heads to the right. I swear to God I actually hear the bubble-wrap pinch of their brain cells popping as I explain the win-by-two rule for the second time in ten minutes. I slow down, enunciating every word. My head throbs, and I silently curse what might be the beginnings of a hangover from the what I thought was only moderate alcohol consumption from the party Mike and I went to in Lucy Floyd’s room at Gambrell last night. These Alpha Chis nurse my headache like a jackhammer, and I rub my temples and briefly glance upwards, towards the ceiling, towards the heavens, and mentally ask God why, why he has forsaken me so on this Sunday, this holiest of days, and just as I do, I catch the immaculate arc of a pristine jump-shot, looping from left to right. My eyes widen and my jaw hangs. The loft is immaculate. The spin is hypnotic. The shot is miraculous—rapturous—all the proof I or anyone would ever need of God’s existence, a basketball fan’s equivalent of a Christian seeing Jesus’ face in a tortilla chip, and I swear I can faintly hear angles sing as the shot whips through the net. A jump-shot that glorious could only have been born from the hands of one man. I lower my clipboard and stand on my tip-toes, peeking over that bleached blonde horizon, and there he is. Matt Funke, in the gym, on a Sunday. I hope—need—to see just one more shot. And I do. And it is bliss.

In my months of watching him play, I’ve noticed that when Matt Funke shoots a basketball, everything and everyone else on the court, in the world, seems to quiet and fade. Today is no different. The babbling of Alpha Chis, the empty, soulless stares of their I’ll-fuck-you-for-a-Zima eyes, the golden glow of panty I saw for a fleeting second on the blonde A-D-Pi on the hip flexor machine downstairs, the Psychology 201 test I should be studying for right now, whether or not I’ll be able to afford food for the last week of this month—suddenly these things not only become trifles, but things I can’t believe I actually lent importance to in the first place. They become a late-night infomercial with the volume turned down. They become the fat Delta Zeta at Jungle Jim’s who sassily told me I wasn’t her type, oblivious to the fact that I was only speaking to score an “in” with her hot independent roommate. When Matt Funke steps on the court—sandy blonde hair always spiked up and out at impossible angles by some Zeta’s fingers the night before, his diamond-sharp Details-cover cheekbones permanently flexed, everything else in my entire life instantly and unavoidably becomes insignificant. I told myself I wasn’t that bad looking in my room last Friday as I tucked my Hilfiger polo shirt into my khakis, and I thought my suspicions were confirmed by the cute Kappa Delta who smiled at me in the Russell House cafeteria and I smiled back—until I see those cheekbones. Until I stand next to Matt and realize I am a good five inches shorter. I was James Bond suave when I was lying in bed last Sunday night, planning out the paragraph I was finally going to blurt out to that blonde Alpha Chi in my Advertising 103 class I’d been checking out all semester—until I see Matt’s black hole stare: vacant and infinite and yet intriguing and indiscriminately inescapable. But most of all—worst of all—is that I consider myself pretty okay at basketball until I see his jump shot. His glorious jump shot. But I don’t really see it, as much as feel it, in my stomach, in my knees, in my ego. Because Matt Funke hits jump shots no man should ever hit. And Matt Funke never, ever misses. 

 “So how many halves do we play, again?” number 25 asks me.

“Four,” I answer, still on my tip toes, still staring at Matt, and I honestly believe this girl’s head is full of Rice Krispies. I watch Matt’s release. I follow the ball as it spins in slow motion through the air, and I can unbelieveably make out the word “Spaulding” on every rotation as it sails towards the net. 

WHOO-CRASH!

All around me the sound explodes off the walls and echoes from the rafters. The swish of a basketball net is probably my favorite sound in the world, except for maybe the sound of a beer can opening, but Matt Funke’s jump shots—they don’t swish. They crack, like a bullwhip sound effect in an Indiana Jones movie.

“Wait…five girls on the court? I swear there were ten last time.” 

WHOO-CRASH!

Jesus Christ. If this girl had another brain, it’d die of loneliness.

“How much time until…”

WHOO-CRASH!

So beautiful I must see more. Now.

I press my palms together in a forward-pointing prayer gesture and part the sea of green-shirted Alpha Chi’s, making a beeline towards center court, not really caring what happens to them from this point on, not really capable of considering the consequences. The bullwhip crack of Matt Funke’s jump shot is my guiding beacon—the possible tease of just maybe watching him play an entire game is my only hope of salvation.

Because of actual job obligations that go along with being an employee of the Blatt P.E. Center—manning the weight room, giving facility tours, maintaining the most forcibly determined eye contact while reminding old, naked Lit professors that they can’t shave in the sauna—I’ve never seen Matt Funke play an entire game of basketball. I’ve only been able to hide out in the gym long enough to see him play in three-minute bursts, but every one of them is a highlight reel. All I’ve ever seen him do is dominate: effortlessly and unapologetically. He knows you’re going to cross over before you do. He doesn’t jump for rebounds, but he’s somehow always there when they drop. He dissects defenses like a Biology major, and he does it better than anyone I’ve ever seen, in person or on TV.

I’ve developed a theory about Matt Funke as I’ve watched him play throughout the year. I have no empirical or scientific data to back this up, but from my own field studies and observations, I’m absolutely convinced that Matt Funke isn’t human. I think he’s something much more existential and ethereal. Not an apparition, or even an angel, but a force. Something unexplainable, like a human-shaped manifestation of a fleeting twist of fate or a coincidence to spooky to write off as chance. He beats you at basketball like him beating you was just something the Universe had planned for you that day. You could’ve accidentally slept in that day and gotten to the gym an hour later than you had planned. You could’ve caught every green light on the way to the gym and ended up on the court 15 minutes earlier than you planned, causing you to get in on one pick-up game earlier then the one you would’ve ended up in had you just been stopped by one of those red lights, but it wouldn’t have mattered. You were destined to lose at basketball that day, and whatever time you would’ve gotten there, 8:00 at night or 8:00 in the morning, Matt would’ve made sure it happened. He would’ve been there waiting for you, ready to shut you out 11-0, care of the Cosmos. That’s what Matt’s ass-kickings are. Cosmic.

Having said that, as remarkable as Matt’s inherent talent for basketball is, it’s not what he does on the court that fascinates me most about him. It’s not how he does it, or even how easily he does it. It’s why he does it that makes it impossible for me to pull my eyes away from him. I can’t really explain it, but there is definitely a something lingering in the air when Matt is in the gym—something heavy and imposing—and I’m sure anyone else in the gym at the time will confirm this as fact, were you only to ask. It’s something I’d most liken to the presence of a fight at a hockey game, and the almost morbid disappointment you feel at the end of a game in which one didn’t break out. It’s that feeling that makes you reflexively stand up in your seat every time Mike Tyson lands a thunderous left hook to the body of his opponent. In all my years of watching him play, I’ve never once seen Matt smile. I’ve never seen him laugh, and I’ve never seen him acknowledge a teammate’s praise or slap a teammate on the ass after a bucket. I’ve never seen him—this is kind of hard to explain—but I’ve never seen him there. I’m even more sure that what Matt does on this court is not something I’d ever describe as playing a game. At least, not for him. Matt’s not playing basketball. He’s extracting vengeance. For him, basketball is a torture device, and it’s his socially acceptable way of torturing people as brutally, efficiently and publicly as possible, without any worry of recose or retaliation. With every glorious jump shot he hits he’s boiling blood, eviscerating egos, slicing up self-esteem, and there are two things I’m absolutely sure of: he likes doing it, and he has to do it. It’s the mysterious yet apparent depth of his hate that draws me to the gym whenever he’s there and my unsuitable need to understand it that forbids me from leaving. Watching him is intriguing like concentration camp photos, hypnotic like a knife-fight. It’s his play that puts you under, but it’s the containment of that hate and the possibility of it one day escaping that keeps you under, keeps you watching, until the game-point snap of the net whoo-crashing jolts you awake like the snap of a hypnotist’s fingers.