The World According to Steve Nash Steve Nash doesn’t play basketball like other people. Take the way he brings the ball up the court. The Phoenix Suns point guard tucks his hair behind his ears and licks his fingertips between bounces. He casually pushes the ball ahead and then just-as-casually catches up to it. He’ll crouch so low he could slip between a player’s legs, his dribbling hand seeming to slap the floor, and then just as suddenly rear up, the dribbles now high and reckless. At times the ball appears attached to his fingers with invisible string. At other moments, such as when he returns it to the referee after some playful soccer dribbles – off his chest, thighs, knees and feet – it belongs to his entire body. Nor does Nash see that court like most point guards. In the eyes of the majority, professional basketball has become a dance floor so crowded with clubbers that only certain beats can be spun without sparking shoving matches and fisticuffs. The game has slowed to a mid-tempo rhythm of bump and grind, and the melody is mostly the trash talk and sneaker squeaks that accompany sharp elbows and power moves. Nash, though, looks down those same one-hundred-and-twenty feet of polished wood and sees a surface as vast as a soccer field and quick as a hockey rink. With so much space, beats can stay up tempo and rhythms can flow. As for melody, let it be the gasps of surprise from a player receiving a no-look pass and the ahs of spectators watching the sport being played with the abandonment of the school yard. When Steve Nash runs an offence, it is a different sort of dance. Consider a late 2004-2005 season game against the Los Angeles Clippers. It is mid-April, and the Suns are leading the national basketball association’s western division with fifty-nine wins. They are in this unlikely position – the team failed to make the playoffs the previous year – due almost entirely to their decision to lure Nash from the Dallas Mavericks, where he had played the previous five seasons. They did so with a six year, $66 million dollar contract that many experts thought optimistic for a thirty-year-old with a style conducive to injury and burn-out. Phoenix signed Nash, and then did a second smart thing: they assembled a starting-five that could keep up with him. For their daring, the team has been rewarded with the highest points per game average in a decade (110.4). The Suns are also three victories short of tying a franchise record. No less unlikely, Nash is the frontrunner for the league’s MVP award, despite scoring just fifteen points a night. His twelve assists per outing, of course, tell more of the tale. Against the Clippers, he starts off running and never stops. Nash likes the opposition back-pedaling from the opening tip. He dislikes walking the ball up the court and calling set plays. Receiving the inbound pass on the fly, he proceeds as though fleeing a rolling boulder. To all appearances, he is unconcerned about whether his equally swift team-mates – Amare Stoudemire and Shaun Marion, Joe Johnson and Jim Jackson – are on board for this latest assault. He is, in fact, already looking to lob the ball sixty feet to Marion or find Jackson behind defenders with a bounce pass. If these early options don’t pan out, Nash carries on into the Clippers laneway, where many small men venture but few stay for long. There, among the behemoths, with the basket likely blocked from view, he weaves around for several seconds, looking to create collisions or lure someone out of position. Finally sensing a breakdown in the defence, he flips the ball over to Stoudemire for a dunk or kicks it back through a halleluiah of limbs to Johnson for an open shot. He might even take his invariably bigger opponent – in this case, a muscular 6’7” Serbian named Marko Jaric — to the hole for a reverse lay-up that involves nothing more than Nash spinning the ball high off the backboard with his wrong hand, the angle severe and his back to the cylinder. “How can the other team possibly know what Steve’s going to do out there?” his coach Mike D’Antoni jokes before the game. “I don’t even know that.” Though Nash doesn’t shoot well tonight, he keeps the Clippers on their heels with his relentless, and relentlessly creative, strategies. The Suns win comfortably and the crowd, many sporting Nash jerseys and a few even wearing their hair a la Steve, chant “MVP!” “I’m honoured just to be mentioned,” Nash tells the crowd about the prospect of winning the award. “It’s a credit to my team-mates.” Nash’s candidacy for the MVP is causing some disquiet. An incident the previous fall, where Indiana forward Ron Artest went after a Detroit fan who tossed a glass of beer on him, initiating a melee that pitted black athletes against white spectators, has settled like a small storm cloud over the league. The only other serious contender for most valuable player is Shaquille O’Neal of the Miami Heat. There is already chatter that voters may select Nash over Shaq because of skin colour. Should this controversy erupt – as it does, mildly, when he is named the 2004-2005 MVP three weeks later – it will be to miss the point about how Steve Nash plays basketball. On the court, at least, he scarcely resembles Larry Bird, the last white player to win the award (for the 1985-86 season), any more than he does Shaquille O’Neal. He plays basketball like someone with very different ideas about the game, and himself. He plays basketball like someone who comes from somewhere else. I have flown down to Phoenix to meet Nash during the team’s final home stand. A publicist has explained that he will be too busy during playoffs for extensive interviews, but has put aside an afternoon on a rare day-off to chat. Forty-eight hours before I arrive the publicist cancels that slot, citing private reasons. Nash may be famously friendly, and been voted onto the “All-Interview” team four years running by the media, but he is also a marquee player having a newsworthy year. I wonder how much free time he will have. In the dressing room after the Clippers game I scan the crowd for the about-to-be MVP. Most basketball players sit for the reporters and camera crews who swarm their cubicles seeking sound-bites. Only when they stand up do their dimensions – freakish and astonishing, in equal degrees — become apparent. But Nash, who is slow to emerge from the shower, blends in with the staff collecting towels and preparing a meal trolley. He is dressed before anyone notices him. I wait until the cameras are done before approaching. Nash smiles, shakes my hand, and insists on clearing an extra chair of a stack of papers so I can sit down. Isolated from his team-mates, he is an impressive athlete, broad-shouldered and sleek, although his stringy muscles and thin legs seem more typical of a soccer midfielder built to run for hours without becoming winded. His hands are unprepossessing (ball players tend to have mitts) and he wears a size 12 shoe (the floor of the room is scattered with sneakers that could pass for bassinettes). He is listed at 6’3” and may be an inch short of that mark, and 195 pounds, which might also be inflated. A small boy, the son of a Suns trainer, is eyeing him shyly. “Give me a high five, Joey,” Nash says, flashing another smile. But Joey is too awed, and stays wrapped instead in his daddy’s arms. Now thirty-one, Nash is himself a new father. His companion, Alejandra Amarillo, gave birth to twin daughters, Bella and Lola, the previous October. When I ask a bland question about parenting, he responds with a real answer. “Things make a lot more sense to me now,” he says. “They’re a lot clearer.” Within a few seconds we are having a conversation about fatherhood. Steve Nash’s sincerity is equally well-known. Still, I am surprised by his willingness to engage with a stranger. As the dressing room is deserted, we resolve to talk more the next day. A team official asks Nash if he is planning to sign autographs. He says he’s signed a lot already today and will take a pass. The exchange only makes sense when I emerge from a corridor to find a hundred selected fans lined up along a barrier. Unless they want to circumvent the arena, players must negotiate the throng on game nights to reach their vehicles. Most of the Suns have already been by, a security guard tells me, but none of the fans have budged. None will, either, until told for certain that Steve Nash won’t be signing their programs and t-shirts. After a shoot-around in a practise gym, Nash sits with me by the main court. He walks stiffly this morning, as though the aches incurred during last night’s game have only just settled into his joints. He seems in a pensive, if still friendly, mood. He may simply be tired. The setting, too, could be a factor. The America West Arena is empty and dark, the air scented of floor wax. In repose, the building has the cavernous hush of a cathedral, a church built for the glory of professional sports and celebrity culture. Though implicated in both these businesses, Steve Nash is a high-profile sceptic, a stance that certain critics have attributed to him being Canadian. During our conversation he asks twice to go off the record in order to make a point dear to him but, he feels, impolitic to state in public. One of the remarks concerns religion, athletics, and money. On record, he remains blunt: “Celebrity,” Steve Nash says, “is something that allows people to take their minds off of nothingness. They’re bored. They don’t know what to do with themselves.” As for pro sports, it can function equally as a panacea. “The world has an unhealthy preoccupation with professional sports,” he remarks. Two incidents from his Dallas years remain raw. One involved a flirtation with dating other famous people. In 2001, Nash, a bachelor with grunge cool appeal, got tabloid splashed for supposedly squiring first Geri “Ginger Spice” Halliwell and then actor and model Elizabeth Hurley. “With Geri,” he explains, “it was through a friend of a friend. We never dated and we hung out on one occasion. With the other person, we met at a party and hung out for a night. That’s it.” The attention these brief encounters earned him still rankles. “It was ridiculous,” Nash says, “and that’s all I have to say about it.” Then, after a pause: “Really ridiculous.” Unsurprisingly, Alejandra Amarilla, a native of Uruguay who moved to New York as a teenager, was unaware her adopted city even had a basketball team. Nor did she know who Steve Nash was, when they were first introduced. Less ridiculous, but equally sobering, was a foray into the contentious business of post 9/11 American politics. At a press conference for the 2003 All-Star game Nash wore a t-shirt bearing the words “NO WAR. SHOOT FOR PEACE.” The decision wasn’t taken lightly – he consulted a high-school friend from Victoria whose judgement he trusts – and didn’t pass unnoticed. Nash earned catcalls in subsequent weeks, including cries of “Communist!” and “Go back to Canada!” He also received support from most of his team-mates. Two years later, his anti-war politics are unrepentant, if less likely to be worn on his chest. “You just can’t believe what’s reported in the mainstream media,” he says. “As a people, we should try to educate ourselves and make more informed decisions. We should be more progressive.” When I mention the honour guard marched onto the court for the national anthem last night, and the general trend towards militarizing sports events in the US, Nash chooses his words. “It’s a stretch to link sports with all this other stuff,” he says quietly. His hushed tone reminds me of a parishioner whispering during the service. How differently would Steve Nash talk outside this cathedral? Earlier, I asked the publicist if he might find have another hour free so we could get out of the arena. She said she would inquire. We turn to happier subjects. “I think it’s important to be this way,” he says of his uniformly humble responses to acclaim. “It’s healthy. I try and come early every day to work. I put in a lot of time. When I get asked about the MVP, I feel uncomfortable saying something boastful. It would seem self-indulgent.” But then he amends: “Maybe it’s my own insecurity. Maybe I’m afraid to be honest.” Athletes, Nash acknowledges, need to be cocky. “Cheeky,” he calls it. “You have to be willing to take risks, to be judged. Someone once said you can’t be a good player and also want to look cool.” He believes that is true. Nor should anyone confuse modesty for a lack of confidence. Nash’s younger brother Martin, who he considers a superior athlete, is a soccer player for the Vancouver Whitecaps. Does Nash, no slouch either at the sport bequeathed to the siblings by their father, ever ponder the vast gap between his brother’s income and fame and his own? “Maybe it’s the cheeky side of me,” he answers, “but with the work ethic I have, I think I could have made it in soccer as well.” By making it, he means at level of a David Beckham or the Canadian Owen Hargreaves, who is a friend. “Natural talent is only potential,” he continues. “You have to combine it with other things – confidence, hard work, even daring.” He was born to play point guard, he has decided, despite not discovering basketball until the age of thirteen. “It’s the most creative position,” he says. “In sports, you need both imagination and discipline. Imagination is actually a part of maintaining discipline. I challenge myself to be inspired by something every day. It’s one reason I continue to improve.” Then he adds: “My game comes out of my mind. Subconsciously, it’s a huge source of self-expression. I am making statements all the time on the court about who I am.” He uses a word to describe the nature of those statements, and though it is spoken in the context of the second off-the-record-remark, it can be mentioned in isolation. Nash wants his game to be joyful. He wants others to experience that joy along with him. He is off home to see his babies and take a nap. As we part he offers to go for a drink after the game. The rise of Steve Nash is fast entering Canadian sports lore. In the usual telling, the story is of the little-engine-that-could variety. There is the adolescent jock, reared on soccer, hockey, baseball and lacrosse, who informs his parents that he actually intends to play professional basketball. There are the dozens of grainy game tapes mailed to US colleges by a senior from a school called Mount Douglas Secondary in a town called Victoria, British Columbia. There is the exactly one non-dismissive reply to those queries, from Santa Clara University in California, and their then-assistant coach, Scott Gradin, who later remembers that the tape caused him to laugh out loud at how “guys were falling all over the place” trying to cover this senior named Nash. Subsequently, there is the scholarship to Santa Clara, where Nash, who admits to me somewhat ruefully that he “majored in basketball” (his degree is in sociology), beats the odds to make the starting five his freshman year and beats them again to lead the team into the NCAA tournament. More unlikely results include being named West Coast Conference player of the year twice and a first-round draft pick by the Phoenix Suns. (He was traded to Dallas after two seasons on the bench.) For Canadians, there is the additional inspiration of his performances with the national team, especially at the 2000 Olympics. Nash didn’t only insist on flying economy to Australia and sharing a room; he also provided each non-NBA player on the squad with $3000 out of his own pocket to enjoy Sydney. For the tears he wept after the quarter-finals loss to Yugoslavia alone, he would be folk hero material. Figure skaters shouldn’t be our only athletes willing to shed public tears of delight or disappointment. But most versions of the Steve Nash story neglect what is most remarkable about his career, and what distinguishes him from other Canadians who have made it into the NBA, including Jamaal Magloire and Rick Fox. As he says himself, his game emerges from his mind. In its wildness and daring, its triumph of creativity and will over size and brawn, Nash basketball resembles a childhood sports reverie matured improbably into an adult reality. Moreover, as that Victoria teenager was shooting hoops on his own for hours, slowly dreaming the game he would eventually play at the highest level, he wasn’t thinking only about Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan. He was also thinking, for instance, about Wayne Gretzky. Nash revered the 1980s Edmonton Oilers squads that Gretzky shaped from his imagination. The two share much in common. Both seem able to visualize what will occur several frames ahead of everyone else, and flip through scenarios before finding the right one to apply. Both manage this at high speeds and under extreme pressure, displaying what commentator Jack Armstrong calls the “inner calm” of great athletes. Armstrong also believes Nash has a “huge basketball I.Q,” a genius-claim often made of Gretzky. He was thinking about soccer as well. Nash is, after all, the son of a former professional player. Equally, he came of age during the ‘total football’ ethos of the 1970s. Dutch coach Rinus Michaels encouraged his teams to aspire to constant movement and individual expression on the field. Nash is, in this sense, a stringy midfielder on the perpetual go, and his commitment to improvisation is almost spiritual; one more fast break to achieve that joyfulness; one more unexpected pass to sustain it. Finally, Steve Nash grew up thinking about what he might bring to basketball in a very particular Canadian household. The Nashs of Gordon Head, Victoria, may be what sets him apart the most. I find John and Jean Nash in the media room before the Saturday game against the Sacramento Kings. Nash’s parents had been wintering in a Phoenix condominium for several years before his return to the city, and now hold season tickets a dozen rows behind the Phoenix bench. John, 59, is a retired marketing manager for a credit union. He immigrated to Canada from England during the twilight of his own soccer days. (Steve was actually born in Johannesburg during his father’s stint with a team there, though he ‘lived’ in South Africa for only the first eighteen months of his life.) Jean, 54, worked as a special-needs assistant in a Victoria elementary school. She is currently helping operate the Steve Nash Foundation, along with Nash’s sister, Joann, and another high-school friend, Jenny Miller. The Nashs are attractive and fit, burnished from afternoons of tennis and golf in the Arizona sun. Nash’s regular features and easy smile are clearly inherited. So is his sandy-brown hair, although the fabled ‘style’ – a cross of Pete Townsend circa Quadrophenia with GQ model – is his own doing. While he didn’t internalize his parents’ accents, his speech retains subtle mid-Atlantic inflections. Between his English mother and father and Spanish-speaking companion, his South African birth certificate and Canadian citizenship, Steve Nash is a one-man international contingent in Phoenix. He speaks Spanish at home with Amarilla and in the locker room with his Brazilian team-mate Leandro Barbosa. As parents, John Nash grants, they emphasized the importance of fitness for the overall well-being of their children. “But we tried to be balanced,” he adds, mentioning that Steve studied saxophone and Joann the flute. (Nash still likes to pluck a guitar.) “You don’t want any of them to feel too golden,” Jean Nash says. Her husband rhymes off the accomplishments of his daughter and other son: Joann’s captaincy of the University of Victoria’s soccer team and three time selection to the western all-stars; Martin’s tenure in Division One soccer in Britain and more than thirty appearances with the Canadian squad. “Neither of them was overawed by each other,” he remembers of the two brothers. The thrum of player announcements lifts Jean Nash from her chair. “I can’t miss the introductions,” she says in parting, “even though I’ve seen them a hundred times.” John Nash lingers for a few minutes. “Steve is a good human being,” he tells me. “That’s important. He’s going to be a human being a lot longer than he will be a player.” He shares an anecdote, one he doubts his boy would want made public. Several years ago the father, who advises Nash on his finances, informed him that he’d already donated a half-million dollars to charity. Steve responded by saying there was so much more he could do. “That was the proudest moment for me as a parent,” John Nash declares. He is no less proud of his son’s social graces, including his loyalty to old friends and capacity for new ones. “Steve collects people,” he says. Nash asks if I’d mind having dinner instead. He already seems more buoyant than earlier today, and approaches the corridor autograph seekers with a smile. They shout “Steve!” and “MVP!” and hold out their programs and basketballs. Attired in jeans, gold sneakers and a non-logo t-shirt, he signs at a rate of maybe twenty signatures per minute. He also poses for photographs. One fan hoping to get her picture taken with Nash is Jessica Lynch. She is the Virginia army clerk whose capture and rescue in Iraq in 2003 — a rescue many believed was staged for its PR spin — has already been turned into a made-for-TV movie and the insta-book *I am a Soldier, Too: The Jessica Lynch Story.* Lynch was introduced wearing a Steve Nash jersey during the game, and received a standing ovation. Now just twenty-two, she appears impossibly young to have already gone to war, and acts no differently than the giggling girls keeping her company. Nash takes a minute to talk with Private Lynch, his friendliness unforced. He is, in short, all social graces. His father would be pleased. To exit the arena, Nash must steer his car, a convertible Mercedes AMG with the top down, through another crowd waiting outside the garage. They, too, shout his name and wave signs. Once on the street, Nash checks text messages and dials his house, apologizing for doing so in my presence. He is at ease being recognized – other vehicles in the garage were mostly tinted SUVS – and even smiles back at admirers, assuming he can do so without crashing the Mercedes. Meanwhile, he spells out the names of samba singers for my benefit. “Martinho Da Vila,” he says. “Also, Zeca Pagodinho. Brazilian music is awesome,” he adds. At a pizzeria in a block of historic buildings marking the original Phoenix town site, we drink beer outside while waiting for a table. He grins at his father’s remarks and calls him “the coolest Dad in the world.” He is, he readily admits, a mamma’s boy as well, and feels only gratitude for the childhood his parents gave him. I mention John and Jean Nash’s slight discomfort with describing their experiences in South Africa. Nash, though, thinks judgement should always be passed cautiously. “When I feel I’m about to judge,” he says, “even about a place like the old South Africa, I first try and consider the reasons why people behave as they do. It’s not as simple as just saying ‘you’re a bad person.’ You have to say, ‘I can’t believe you think that way.’ Then you have to find some common ground.” A reader of philosophy, he seems to relish the chance to think aloud about such matters. Apartheid, though, is too dour a topic for a Saturday night. Over salads and pizzas, Nash chats about everything from living in the United States – “Subconsciously, I know I’m behaving like a Canadian all the time” – to his passion for travel, including off-season spells in Asia and South America, where until recently, at least, he could wander unrecognized. “Whenever I travel,” he says, “I feel almost calm. I love people. I love the world.” He is reading Solzhenitsyn’s *One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,* and wonders aloud why he still struggles with Dostoevsky. On the subject of music, he is voluble, reiterating his adoration of Radiohead, including a rapturous concert he attended a couple of years back. Over a second beer, and while finishing my pizza – he hasn’t eaten since early afternoon — he launches into a defence of The Smiths and their former lead singer Morrissey, a favourite of Alejandra’s. “After everything else,” Steve Nash summarizes, “it’s still the Stones and Bowie for me.” He is interrupted four times during the meal. When a woman asks to get her picture taken with him, Nash wonders if it can wait until he finishes eating. As she and her friends are leaving, he obliges. An older gentleman who almost gave him a hug when we first entered the restaurant, proclaiming how pleased he was that Steve Nash now ran the Suns offence, returns to clarify his remark. Nash dutifully stands and shakes his hand a second time. “It’s because you’re another little guy!” the admirer says. The man is actually six inches shorter than Nash. That, however, probably isn’t what he means. Nash’s height may well put fans overly at ease. So, too, might his skin colour, and his mild, regular-guy demeanour. (The restaurant patrons all happen to be white.) But the truth is equally that Steve Nash insists on playing basketball like a giant while comporting himself like an ordinary-sized person. Once they get over their shock, people of every sort can’t hide their delight at this. He insists on dropping me at my hotel. Back in the car he offers an unprompted critique of the Mercedes for not being “especially environmentally friendly.” He bought it on impulse, he says, after his friend and former team-mate, Michael Findley, said Nash could snag the final one left in the dealership if he was willing to pay list price. He admits as well that the house he purchased last summer in the suburb of Paradise Valley is large, with a spacious lawn and a pool, and is a big change from the townhouse he rented in Dallas. In the hotel driveway, while dutifully signing jerseys for *my* daughters (he isn’t safe even in his own car), Steve Nash apologizes a final time for breaking our original agreement to meet on Sunday. A friend is having troubles, he says, and has checked into a rehab centre in Tucson. Nash will be using his day off to drive two hours to pay him a visit. In late July I chat again briefly with Nash at the Air Canada Centre in Toronto. Much has happened since April. At the MVP ceremony he invited the entire team to accept with him, insisting it was a group effort. The Suns cruised past Memphis and Dallas in the early play-off rounds on the sensational play of Nash and Amare Stoudemire. While they then ran hard into a San Antonio squad that could both match their up tempo beat and grind to a more conventional NBA rhythm, the season remained a huge success for both the franchise and Nash. The Spurs went on to defeat Detroit in the championship. He is in the city to host the inaugural Steve Nash charity game, which he hopes will become an annual event and help finance the basketball centre for underprivileged kids that he plans to build in the city. (In Phoenix he confessed that his post-career ambition is to be a philanthropist.) His official return to Canada is treated as a coronation, with Prime Minister Paul Martin on hand to declare him “one of our greatest athletes.” In the dressing room I congratulate Nash on his marriage to Alejandra Amarilla in June, and ask if he’s done any travelling this summer. “Just hanging around New York,” he answers happily. The game itself is pure summer school yard. Nash runs the floor tapping the ball off his feet and offers a highlight reel of outrageous passes, including a high bounce that careens off the backboard and into the hands of a soaring forward for a dunk. He keeps upping the ante for innovation, and players who aren’t accustomed to this approach slowly begin to respond with their own wildest imaginings. By half-time the event has become a kind of cartoon version of how basketball, according to Steve Nash, can – and should be – played. He is all smiles for the rest of the night. END NOTE: Space constraints obliged TORO to cut 1000 words from the published piece. This version restores the omitted material.