With the 17th pick in the Basketball Feelings Feelings Draft, Kelly Dwyer selects... OBSESSION

To say, “What can I say about so and so that you don’t already know?” is a cop-out, of course, but with Kelly Dwyer, everything you do know — two decades and counting meandering through NBA Talk, SI, Yahoo, Behind the Boxscore (est. 1999) and now, of course, The Second Arrangement covering the NBA and its every nuance — is flipped back to you as something you don’t. Kelly is the most candidly enigmatic person I know in and around basketball. On the phone, on podcasts, he will absentmindedly run his fingers over guitar chords, faint snatches of melody, usually blues, occasionally funk, running behind the rhythm of his voice on a meandering tangent as it walks through the most obscure and insightful stories about any given player now, ever. He is supportive. He reads and boosts. He was the one to encourage me to move Basketball Feelings over to Substack. I know it can’t be entirely true but many of the conversations we’ve had I’ve pictured Kelly writing his replies as his car sits in an arena parking lot in the stretch from Indiana to Texas to Oklahoma, the action of a game quieting in his ears like echoes after a live show. He wrote some of his pick, Obsession, longhand on a beach in Michigan, returning occasionally to the parking lot for a bar of cell service. He got rained out and finished the rest on the way home. I hope he doesn’t mind my sharing his process but it’s Kelly in movement, which is how I best imagine him and read his writing, ranging and reaching out beyond himself, happy to roam. How lucky we are to have glimpses and bursts of his brain coming back to us like postcards, coffee ring stained, words smudged from writing so fast the ink never dries right. How lucky we are to have Kelly, steady at the horizon.

I mean, I thought I was obsessed until I ran into Beezer Carnes.

That wasn’t his real name, and we had no idea why that wasn’t his real name, how the family that we never saw came to settle on “Beezer,” or why whatever was on his birth certificate wasn’t what the teacher called Beezer in class.

I lived in front of Beezer, his family lived in back of ours, one row behind us in the subdivision. Now, I lived in back of Dale and Adam, they lived in houses right next to each other on the same block, but my bedroom window had a view of the mailbox-end of the driveway on the Carnes house.

Everyone had to do homework before they could go back out, except for Beezer’s parents, which was weird, because his mom was a teacher at the high school.

This meant I could hear and sometimes see the Beezer in action, when his shots didn’t go the way he wanted, when the ball would leak out toward the street and he’d go chase it down — the movement was in my line of vision, while struggling through long division — suddenly Beezer was in full view and he had the ball and he wasn’t happy.

I’d watch him when he’d get this way, the only reason I could see him at all was because a shot of his rebounded long, and to the left. His shots didn't rebound often.

Trailing the rebound to the sack-end of his cul-de-sac meant his entire block witnessed his misfortune, in Beezer’s head at least, and it showed. I never told him I could see everything from the desk in my bedroom.

Eventually Dale and Adam, shitty students, finished homework. I knew this because I could hear basketballs slapping on their respective driveways, fighting for rhythm at the opposite end of what Beezer was working through. This meant I had to hurry up, 463 divided by 81, before Beezer concluded that none of this was worth the trouble.

The trick was to get the four of us on the court before we lost the sun, or before Beezer lost interest.

Dale and Adam were going to fight the entire time, this space had to be accounted for, fights over which driveway to play on (Dale’s, or Adam’s) or whose ball was better (Dale’s, or Adam’s) or which father said the fewest words (Dale’s, or Adam’s) or who’s first name had more letters in it (Dale’s, or Adam’s).

It was my job to grab Beezer, which meant running to the spot where our backyards shared corners, and yelling.

I didn’t want to yell, I’m sure my parents thought it was hillbilly, but Beezer hated it when you’d walk all the way to his driveway.

“BEEE-ZER. WE GOT A GAME GOING.”

In the beginning, right after we moved there, I waited for him to nail his last shot, then slowly jog his way around the side of the house to meet me. After a couple of these trips I discovered that Beezer was the sort of kid who didn’t want to show up somewhere with any other kids. Instead, I used the time to sprint to Dale’s driveway, promising that the next game would be played at Adam’s. We promise.

Our warmup was no warmup.

Dale would bring up the time Adam had to play a rec league game with a shirt on under his uniform because he scratched up his arm up in a bike accident, Adam’s dad hated it and refused to come to that game even though one night in Adam’s den Adam’s mom pointed out that some of the boys on Bobby Knight’s team had t-shirts on underneath.

Adam’s dad thought about this for a second before saying “sissies,” because Adam’s dad didn’t use a whole lotta words.

Beezer bought his own ball but he never used it, he'd walk it up beside’s Dale’s garage and pin it on the grass, almost on Adam’s side, the ball would sit watch us play like a baby in a car seat, unable to squirm away and presumably not happy with any of it.

We all named names — Isiah, Jordan, Bird — but Beezer actually looked like the part. If we didn’t know, he’d remind us, not bragging, just, “you can do this, too.”

Quick drive toward the absolute front of the rim, nobody is dunking here so Beezer leaves the ball in the middle of the lane for a teammate to pick up and lay in.

“Isiah.”

Bad miss and the ball rebounds well past the free throw stripe, so far we don’t even have to dribble out to check the possession. Beezer chases the rebound and he’s basically in the grass, but he lifts up, perfect arc, all net.

“Bird.”

All game long he’s working with fingertips. Suddenly Beezer is dribbling with the heel of his hand, daring Dale to take a swipe. Dale never does, he’s a shitty student, but Beezer still reacts as if someone reached. Hard dribble with the hardest part of your hand, pull-up, line-drive jumper.

“Jordan.”

He was even better at baseball. He wasn’t taller or broader or quicker than any of the other guys (except me, he was taller than me), but his was a different game. It was like Beezer needed to skip a year at school, but for sports.

That’s why it wasn’t a shock to hear that he didn’t play on the same team as Dale and Adam. Next year, when I was around for the whole school year and could make the team, still no Beezer.

We just thought there was another team, a better team, somewhere. Beezer was off wearing a blue uniform with taller and much cooler kids, while we were stuck in the same gym, wearing our greens.

Compulsion came easy to me. I didn’t have to script the perfect grades or collect every baseball card in the set, but the junk that did stick, stuck. This meant practicing, before school, on courts that weren’t attached to driveways.

On my walks to shoot free throws, in the cold, with some of my homework left to do on the bus, I’d convince myself that Beezer was running the same racket. Nobody got that good at basketball by practicing angrily for an hour after school prior to a game to whatever with Dale, Adam and the kid that just moved in.

It wasn’t that I wanted to shoot alongside him — maybe I did, I don’t know — more than it was the belief.

I was doing the right thing, practicing all this time, therefore Beezer must be elsewhere, executing the same. Of course, this was all shot to hell once I stayed home sick for a few days and watched out my window as Beezer’s mom drove him to school each morning.

Nobody ever asked him about the name, nobody ever asked him why he didn’t play. The grades started to grow long — sixth and seventh — the years when girls take over, the time in your life when you need to establish order, cliques, patter, jive. I still played sports, just not with Dale and Adam.

By this time, Beezer was gone. We thought he skipped a grade at first, not for sports, just because of smart. Then Aaron’s brother told us he hadn’t seen him at the high school.

For a while we thought he went to Moeller, that’s where Brandon “Byrd” Schea went and that’s where Beezer’s dad wanted him to go. It wasn’t where his mom taught, but someone saw a Moeller decal in the shape of a baseball on the back window of Beezer’s dad’s van and we just assumed.

I don’t think he went to Moeller.

By this point I was cutting through the back and side yards to either walk to school, or pick up a much later bus, and a basketball wasn't ever with me. One morning I drew a breath full of guts and hard-angled over to the back of the van in Beezer’s driveway, and that baseball sticker wasn’t from Moeller. Same colors, blue and gold, but for a little league team. Beezer’s dad was coaching other kids.

I did see Beezer before we moved, though.

He and his buddy Danny swore it went like this.

They were walking past Ivans Ct., the cul-de-sac where Roger lived, and managed to spot a $20 bill wedged underneath the tire of a parked car. The car must have been hundreds of feet away.

Whatever the source, Beezer and Danny went to Stop-and-Shop and bought a Black Sabbath tape and eight bucks worth of cinnamon gum. That’s how they showed up at my door, cheeks full, Saturday afternoon and nothing to do.

They asked me to come over to Beezer’s house, which was rare, I’d barely been over there in four years. Beezer’s mom got him an acoustic guitar for his birthday that he and Danny kept calling “Applesauce,” he wanted to me to see if Applesauce was any good, he probably wanted me to teach him how to play “Paranoid,” he’d definitely heard me practicing “Paranoid” on my electric guitar through the bedrooms.

Applesauce was fine, the name on the headstock actually said “Applause,” but this wasn’t nearly as funny, so we called it Applesauce. Beezer picked up on “Paranoid” without much complication, but when I tried to show him some other rockin’ fundamentals, he waved me off.

“Nah man, you did that with basketball. You used to wake me up dribbling to school.”

“It just makes it more fun for me.”

“Fun for you.”

This shoulda closed a book, instead it opened 142 doors and 94 windows.

It was my difference between perfect grades, the kindest temperament.

“That’s just fun for you.”

Beezer kept playing the Sabbath song I taught him. He was perfect.