Would you pick this man for your basketball team?
He stands 5 foot 8 and weighs 135 soaking wet. His vision is hampered by repaired retinas in both eyes, from injuries suffered despite the protective rec specs he’s worn like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for decades. The range on his jump shot doesn’t extend past 14 feet. Inside that distance, though, he is automatic. He is a dog on defense, never stops moving his feet, barking out screens to his teammates. He can’t shoot a 3, but he can recall for you the invention of the 3-point line.
Kids these days may hardly know, but people used to speak about having a “basketball jones,” a fever for the game that distorted all of a person’s life to orbit around the rock. My dad, Paul Feldblum, who passed away on October 6, 2025, from ALS, had it. He fell in love with basketball at a tender young age, in schoolyards with other Jewish boys on Long Island, and carried that love with him through his life, playing whenever he could and watching whenever he couldn’t play. To find something you love with a can’t-quit-you desperation is lucky enough; to be able to orient life around it is a dream.
But my dad was hardly alone in his reverie. His move from New York to the Triangle for graduate school in 1977 took him from one basketball-crazy corner of the country to another, where he fell into a harmony with his time and place. He danced to the rhythms of Tobacco Road.
Paul was a Heels fan. In our younger years, he took my brother and me to the Dean Dome for a handful of games each season, and we watched the program and the ACC evolve. We saw Chris Paul and Wake down UNC in triple overtime in 2003, saw David Noel knock out mighty Gardner-Webb with an early-season buzzer-beater in 2005, and watched Wayne Ellington pour in seven 3s in a half against Miami in 2009. More than he loved the Heels, though, my dad hated Duke. Coach K—his stiff authoritarian approach, his joyless discipline—represented everything wrong with basketball.
A few years ago, my brother gifted my dad a set of glasses embossed with the score of UNC’s 2022 Final Four victory over Duke in Coach K’s ignominious last game, petty chalices from which he drank with glee. We watched that game together during a trip my parents took to visit me in Los Angeles; afterward, we found the West Side’s UNC bar, where he slung his arm around polo-shirted yuppies and regaled them with tales of the program decades earlier. (“Dean Smith—not just a coach, but a mensch. We used to think he’d run for governor!”) We knew, even then, it was the finest victory in program history; I hope he can rest easier knowing Duke will never be able to even that score.
But Paul was never just a spectator. He used to grumble, watching college or professional players moonwalk to the hoop, that “I couldn’t get away with that on Sunday,” as if what he was doing with his graybeard friends at the Jewish Community Center was equivalent to these masterful feats of athleticism and grace from the highest echelons of the sport.
But in his way, he was right. The games he played and the games he watched were sometimes made up of the very same players. Paul is among a vanishingly small number who can claim to have shared the court with ex-Wolfpack great Hawkeye Whitney, now 68, and Durham native and current Philadelphia 76er Ricky Council IV, 24. A long life of playing around here will do that.
My dad played ball with at least two former Durham mayors; he’d tell stories about one of them, Wib Gulley, and Wib’s twin, Dub, demanding to guard each other before beating the hell out of each other all session, their intrafamily brutality saving all the other players from trouble.
He played at UNC’s Woollen and Carmichael gymnasiums; he played at New Hope Elementary in Orange County and at the Duke Faculty Club; he played at Oval Park when it still had a full court, and the downtown YMCA Cage before it was desacralized. He has surely shared the court with hundreds of INDY readers, possibly thousands. He played wherever there was run to be had and could map for you the region’s hardwood geography in a 20-mile radius.
He squeezed every bit of juice from his body. By my count, beyond the detached retinas, he tore and repaired the rotator cuffs in both shoulders, dislocated at least two fingers, and had meniscus surgery. I was awoken in fright one teenage morning to drive him to the hospital with his dislocated ring finger bleeding through hastily applied gauze from one of the injuries. (Luckily, there were always plenty of doctors on hand in his Jewish Community Center games.)
In recent years, he had begun cortisone injections for a mysterious knee pain. It terrified my mom, lately, when he would leave to play. Yet still he was working toward what he was calling his “final” comeback when he fell ill last spring, at age 71. It’s hard to imagine he wouldn’t have come out of retirement again: The treatment goals he listed included getting back to basketball. His failing motor neurons would finally do what no defender could.
As long as he could jog, he could play. And as long as he could play, there was room for dynamism, a need for growth. I remember, in his late 40s, his focus on adding both a left-handed layup and an improved spin move, ostensibly part of his plan to teach me both. (Careful readers may ask, fairly, how he had gone so long without being able to score with the left.) His return from a pickup game would occasion reflection on how his team had moved the ball, how he’d fit into the offense’s flow, such that each week became a chance to figure out the game one degree more. Basketball nirvana was always just around the corner.
The basketball commentariat has taken lately to speaking about “ethical” hoops, an aesthetic brand of ball that eschews manipulating rule minutiae and honors the beautiful game.
His vision of basketball was strongly ethical in a different sense: There was a right way to play (say, the Steph Curry Warriors) and a wrong way (the Carmelo Anthony Knicks). You can always make yourself useful: If you’re unsure of where to position, keep moving off the ball. He liked to flash across the baseline, springing open in his preferred midrange sweet spot when the defense lost track of him. If your shot isn’t falling, set screens to get your teammates free. Keep the ball moving, don’t let it stick too long in any one place. When a teammate sets you up for a bucket, give an appreciative point on your way back down the floor. Failing everything else, you can always play defense.
He abhorred moving picks as an affront to the game itself. Sometimes, this sense of propriety would get him into trouble—a Woollen Gym standoff with a body builder, a stout big man, at whom he screamed, “You cannot stand in the key as long as you f**king want to!” became the stuff of legend around our house. Though in all fairness: You cannot.
My dad was no expert, really—he coached a few seasons of YMCA basketball, but what he knew of the sport he picked up from six decades spent on the court, figuring the game out by playing it. What he left to us youngsters he likewise passed on not through any institutional forum but through the freewheeling democratic engagement of pickup ball; showing up, week after week, to improvise with a shifting set of friends and strangers in orchestrating a percussive poetry in motion.
Paul would roll his eyes to hear me interpret it this way. He never had much truck with theorizing basketball. He just loved playing, coaching, and watching the game, and then followed what he loved, even when it brought him more agony than joy. He spent this millennium in misery obsessing over his hometown New York Knicks, their many and glaring failings—Eddy Curry! Andrea Bargnani!—and would extol the glories of the team’s high times in the 1970s and ’90s.
I hoped that he would live to see them do like his beloved Heels and break through for another championship. Last year, the Knicks added top-level talent but found their promising run through the playoffs truncated by spotty defense from their star point guard and star center. What to say: He couldn’t even get away with that playing pickup at the JCC.
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