Foul Shots: A Clinic

for Paul Levitt Be perpendicular to the basket, toes avid for the line. Already this description is perilously abstract: the ball and basket are round, the nailhead centered in the centerplank of the foul-circle is round, and though the rumpled body isn't round, it isn't perpendicular. You have to draw 'an imaginary line,' as the breezy coaches say, 'through your shoulders.' Here's how to cheat: remember your collarbone. Now the instructions grow spiritual -- deep breathing, relax and concentrate both; aim for the front of the rim but miss it deliberately so the ball goes in. Ignore this part of the clinic and shoot 200 foul shots every day. Teach yourself not to be bored by any boring one of them. You have to love to do this, and chances are you don't; you'd love to be good at it but not by a love that drives you to shoot 200 foul shots every day, and the lovingly unlaunched foul shots we're talking about now -- the clinic having served to bring us together -- circle eccentrically in a sky of stolid orbits as unlike as you and I are from the arcs those foul shots leave behind when they go in.