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Hello, this is the LRB podcast. I'm David Rundsenman, and today I'm talking with Benjamin Markovitz.

We both have essays in the new collection of sports writing from the LRB. It's called Anyone for Gully Dander.

You'll have to buy it to find out what that means.

Ben is a novelist writer. He's a regular contributor to the LRB. And Ben, your essay is about basketball

and Michael Jordan. My essay is about cycling and Lance Armstrong. I am not qualified to write mine.

I cycle to work in Cambridge. I think my distance

from professional cycling is about as far as it is from whale hunting. How's your doping?

Yeah, my dope. Well, when I cycle in each day, I think it would help, but it doesn't. You have played

professional basketball, which means you're writing about your sport in a really different way than I'm writing about mine in this collection. So maybe if we start there, just tell us a bit about when you played, how you played, how good were you? It must have been quite good. I wasn't really good, otherwise I wouldn't be stuck talking to you. I played, so it was my first job coming out of university. I didn't want to go to grad school. I didn't want to go to law school. And I'd always love playing basketball and I had a German passport. And so as soon as I graduated, I flew to Hamburg, stayed with my uncle and saw if I could sign on with the team, which I eventually managed to do. And it produced what was

probably the six unhappiest months of my life. I just, I couldn't take it. And this we're talking,

so this is the mid-90s, right? This was 1996, yeah. And it just was really hard being a basketball

player, because that's all you did. I was stuck in this

small town outside Munich. There was nothing to do there. There was no university there. The only

people I knew were the basketball team. And if you're on a team, you're part of this fairly

oppressive hierarchy of talent. And I was at the wrong end of this hierarchy. So the only connection I had to other people was with people who thought I sucked. And it turned out that when you're 22 years old, this isn't what you want from life. And you were doing it for a living. I mean, you were straight out of college, some of them, presumably, this was their job, right? Yeah, it was a job. They really depended on the income. Yeah. I mean, you did too, presumably, but you were young and you might end up doing other things, but these were journeymen. I was, so they were journeymen. Like a lot of these sort of minor leagues, it was a mix of people who were making fairly good money at it and precocious high school kids who were doing it for fun.

I made 1,800 marks a month at the time and they gave me an apartment to live in for free.

And that was what I cleared.

I'm fairly sure people on the team making 50, 60,000 marks a month, but I don't think anyone was getting

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