I was seven years old when my father first taught me how to play blackjack.
Whether that is a particularly normal thing to teach a child of that age is perhaps a conversation for another time, but it is, for me, a formative and happy childhood memory.
Having spent the better part of a week vacationing at my father’s boss’s coastal vacation home, we were beginning to run out of card games to play. Old Maid, Go Fish, Kings In the Corner, Spades, Cheat, Spoons, and Uno had all been played ad nauseam, and the beach-house (very purposely) lacked a television set, much less a VCR.
We had only ourselves, and our diversions, and the ocean at the shore. It was, in retrospect, a remarkably lo-fi moment in our lives, preceding the technological onslaught to come.
We read books out loud, and wrestled on the living room floor, and spent time on the beach until our burgeoning sunburns drove us back inside like vampires fleeing the dawn. We marinated in the scent of spices and fresh crustacean boiling in the cavernous kitchen, and sprawled about the dining room table telling all the jokes we knew, and making up worse ones. And then, after the meal, it was down to business.
“Remember, the dealer has to take a hit on 16 or lower”, my father reminded me, as I asked for a somewhat inadvisable hit on a 17 of my own.
“What’s a hard 17 again?”
“A 17 with no aces.”
“Oh, I have an ace. What does that mean?”
“That means you have a soft 17. Your ace can be an 11 or a 1.”
“It’s a 1 if I go over, right?”
“Right. But right now I’m showing a 6, which mean I’ll probably have to take a hit unless I have an ace too.”
“Because the dealer has to stand on 17, right?”
“In our game, yes. But not in all games. In our game, if I have an ace, we’ll push. We’ll tie.”
“I don’t wanna tie. I wanna win. I want a card.”
The card came off the deck and revealed itself as a 2.
“Ok, that’s 19. Do you want to stay?”
“The next card will be high, right?”
“Maybe. It’s not looking good for me.”
“Yeah, I’ll stay.”
My father flipped his second card. It was also an ace.
“Well, that’s 17. I have to stay.”
“I win?”
“Yep. But only in our game. In a casino maybe not. I’d get to take another hit.”
“Good thing we’re not at a casino.”
“Mhmm. And that it’s not your money. It’s harder when it’s your money.”
“How is it harder?”
“Well, do you have any money?”
“No. I spent it all.”
“I guess you’ll just have to find out one day.”
We spent the rest of the vacation playing blackjack when we were indoors, until I was certain I’d mastered the game. I knew when to take a hit. I knew when to stand. I’d gotten good at anticipating what might be coming based on what was on the board. It wasn’t card counting per se, but it was the best I’d ever been with numbers.
We ended up playing blackjack on a lot of subsequent vacations, and I was delighted to find in adulthood, in my first encounter with Las Vegas, that I’d retained the knoweldge.
Maybe that shouldn’t have been so surprising considering how I took to compiling and accumulating box scores in the years just after that first brush with Vingt-et-un.
I’d cut them out of newspapers the night after games (when the paper had been fully read) and keep them in my room, sometimes on my walls (like Tim Duncan’s Game 6 masterpiece against the New Jersey Nets), but more often in piles on the top of my dresser, or the tiny square of laminate ‘wood’ with legs that I called a desk.
It felt like there was more information than the information I was getting, as I tracked the ups-and-downs of important Spurs players in my spiral notebooks. Having gone through much of my mother’s storage, I suspect that they are long-lost at this point, but I still fantasize about finding the notebook that I dedicated to Stephen Jackson, Malik Rose, and Speedy Claxton, as I tried to figure out which one the Spurs should make an effort to keep.
I’m not 100% sure why these were the memories that San Antonio’s thrashing of the Minnesota Timberwolves triggered for me. I was certain that the game was over halfway through third quarter, in the midst of the 3rd straight 36+ point frame from the Silver and Black, just on the conscious side of dozing with the comforting weight of my daughter sleeping on my chest.
(Her sole contribution before passing out was to remark that 100 is a big number)
With every closing flicker of my own eyelids came a memory. With every opening, the massacre of reality.
How am I going to write about this? Do I just say that everyone played well?
I mean, they really did. Kelly Olynyk, Jordan McLaughlin, and Lindy Waters III all played two thirds of the fourth quarter. Only one member of the regular rotation played more than 27 minutes.
With eight minutes left in the game and a 30 point deficit, the valiant but ailing Anthony Edwards personally congratulated Spurs players before retiring to rest his banged-up knees for next season, the opposite of the comportment of the extra-physical ‘Jordan Rule’ Pistons that they were sometimes exasperatingly compared to at the start of the series.
In the end they were more paper tigers than the superstar thwarters so many outside the fan-base had hoped they’d be. Whether by dint of injury and/or inferior roster flexibility, they were forced to stand on 17.
The Spurs were playing with house money, deeper and more advantageously capable of adjusting, and lacking a certain weight of expectation due to the seasons preceding this one.
And while I have spent most of this year’s postseason blowouts reminding myself and others not to put the cart before the horse, I couldn’t help but look ahead to the match-up on the horizon, and the reality that expectations are about to really and truly change.
Before the opening of the season, even the most ardent of Spurs supporters and journalists considered the Western Conference Finals to be the absolute and remotest peak on the horizon. Most agreed that avoiding the Play-In and defeating a first round opponent would be an acceptable and reasonable limit.
But now the Spurs are on the doorstep of a Finals appearance in Victor Wembanyama’s 3rd season, and facing a team they went 4-1 against in the regular season.
The rules have changed. All things considered, the Thunder are more flexible and more talented and healthier than the Timberwolves were, and just as (if not more) physical, with a habitually favorable whistle to boot.
The Spurs can’t count on them to stand on a soft 17. The Thunder are going to take the hit. They’re going to have home-court advantage. They’re the house, and the house has the odds in their favor.
It’s almost guaranteed that the Spurs will have to make the exactly right play at the exactly right time, and this time, they won’t be able to afford the lapses they had against the Trailblazers and the Timberwolves.
They are no longer playing with house money. The cost will be their own, and that of the city that supports them. A loss here might haunt them, and that can go two very different ways. They’re too young to know better, and I sincerely hope that they get to stay that way.
Playing in Vegas with my own cash at stake, I found myself second-guessing moves that I would never have thought about twice in the past. It was money that I had set aside for exactly that purpose, but the brain can have expectations in direct opposition to that of the nervous system in the same way that Spurs fans can intellectually hold reasonable perspectives about how this team has exceeded all expectations and still become unmoored by the not-unreasonable desire for more.
It’s strange to be experiencing this all over again at the age I am now. I’ve seen variations of this story play out before, and I can see most of the plot points before they arrive, and yet it’s somehow a new experience all over again, except that now instead of the youth being soothed by the experience of the adults on the court, I find myself carrying hopefully anxiety for the prosperity of youth. I wonder how much more of my life will become that way.
And yet, I find that the wonderful chaos of this season and postseason has revealed itself as an ace in a soft 17.
Hit me. I’m ready for whatever card is next.
Takeways
- We have to talk about the masterclass that Stephon Castle and Devin Vassell put on against Julius Randle in this series. Prior to the series, Randle was the obvious mismatch for a Spurs team that struggles with size at Power-Forward specifically. My thought was that the Spurs should let Randle shoot himself into a hole while the Spurs spent most of their time and energy on Ant Edwards. And there’s a reason that I’m not coaching in the NBA, because Sean Sweeney pulled out his previous playbook against the Wolves, and decided to alternate sending doubles at both of them. This was incredibly affective against Randle, who had lost his favorite passing target in Donte DiVincenzo against Denver, and his inability to anticipate these doubles seemed to shake him somewhat, as he was a turnover machine and forced some very ill-advised shots. But, most tellingly, he seemed to decline taking shots at all over the last two games, as Castle and Vassell smothered him in equal measure. This was, at least to me, a big, big deal, with teams in the Thunder and (potentially) the Knicks also being capable of exploiting what I was previously concerned would be a fatal flaw. Both of those teams are now going to have to figure out a way to deal with that when/if they face the Spurs.
- As it turns out, when the Spurs three guards combine for 68 points very efficient points, San Antonio becomes an absolute juggernaut. This game served as yet another perfect example of why all three of these guards are critical to what the Spurs can do, and how they can absolutely unravel defenses with some of the best rim-protectors and perimeter defenders in the league. All previous elaboration and hedging aside, if the Spurs do this regularly, it just will not matter who they’re matched up with. Wemby opens up everything for these guards, and each one is different enough to pose varying challenges for the defense in such a way that it opens it right back up for Wemby and the perimeter snipers. Stephon Castle was absolutely irresistible in this one, but the filthy varieties of perimeter penetration from the other two had Minnesota’s defenders seeing ghosts by the middle of the second quarter, and only a spate of turnovers and defensive mistakes really let the Wolves back in the game at all.
- Carter Bryant has this really funny thing going on, where when I see him on the court, he looks amazing even when his shot looks awkward, and then shows confusingly little in the box score, and then looks almost as amazing in the advanced stats. There are some thing about his game right now that don’t easily convey, but he’s been on Luke Kornet’s level when it comes to doing the dirty work and making the effort play, and he gave both Randle and Edwards trouble while gobbling up rebounds like Pac-Man after eating a power-pellet. If that shot comes along in the off-season, I’m willing to go out an a limb and say that he could transform into a reasonable facsimile of another forward who came to the Spurs with an awkward shot and staggering athleticism. The Spurs don’t even need to draft outside of best pick available at the rate that Bryant is improving. He’s overshadowed by the majestic poise and maneuvers of fellow rookie Dylan Harper (who I personally like to refer to as ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’), but he’s doing shocking work in the postseason for someone who got very little playing time comparatively-speaking, and I think this draft could go down as one of the best in Spurs history.
Playing You Out – The Theme Song of the Evening:
All I Wanna Do is Play Cards by Corb Lund
