A new exhibit at a Valley museum explores the connection between basketball and the American West.
"American Backcourts" is a collection of photos by Rob Hammer that shows improvised courts and hoops in places that would seem like unlikely spots for a pickup game. Hammer road-tripped more than 300,000 miles across the country to take his photos — the exhibit at Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West showcases some of them. It's open through April 2025.
Henry Terry, exhibitions coordinator at the Scottsdale museum, joined The Show to talk about what intrigued him about this series of photos and what about them seemed like a good fit.
Full conversation
HENRY TERRY: Well, the gallery we're in right now is the Old West New West gallery. And so we're always trying to find artists that would not typically be considered Western artists, even though as you look at all of these photographs, they're very clearly of Western scenes.
And so when Rob Hammer introduced himself to us a couple of years ago, I just kind of have always had these basketball images in my mind as something that might turn into a nice show.
MARK BRODIE: Was there something specific about the subject matter, about photographs of basketball hoops in maybe places you wouldn't expect them that seemed like a, a good fit or seemed interesting to you?
TERRY: Well, yes. I think what interested me about the having basketball hoops as Western art is the inherent ingenuity that comes out of these hoops. You have to be ingenious to live in the West. Historically, we think of pioneers in their wagons, the Sinagua people in their cliff dwellings, you have to have a certain level of ingenuity to live here in the West. It's a desert, it's high mountains. It's a rough place.
You also have to be ingenious on how you have fun, how you spend your time. And so these kind of were just really perfect encapsulations of how do Westerners use their ingenuity to live in this place.
BRODIE: Well, so it's interesting you say that because I think this photo that we're standing right in front of is a good example of that.
You have a hoop on what looks like a utility pole on, I assume it's red clay. There's obviously no lines, like there's no free throw line, there's no 3 point line or anything like that, with a single folding chair a little ways back and like this, this is not paved, this does not look like a basketball court. Yet, there is a basketball hoop there and somebody could very easily play well.
TERRY: Exactly. And to that point, these are pretty desolate places. I mean, you don't see any buildings and hardly any of them or they're in someone's backyard, on someone's ranch. And yet what Rob has done is captured kind of the arena aspect of these, who's watching this person play basketball, whoever is sitting on this chair, but also the mountains behind it.
Who's watching basketball on the photograph with the car? Well, it's the car, the mesa, the barns, you know. He's creating the basketball arena in this western landscape.
BRODIE: So you've mentioned the word ingenuity a few times. And that kind of, kind of comes to mind on this photo as well because this is, it almost looks like a part of Monument Valley. Where you have a hoop that's a little crooked on a pole, on what I can only imagine would be a field that would be very difficult to actually dribble a basketball on because there are rocks all over the place.
TERRY: Exactly. And, you know, with these hoops are people playing five on five full rule basketball? Probably not. But standard principles will still always apply. You can always shoot the, shoot a basketball, whether you're on gravel, clay, snow, asphalt. Maybe not snow, snow would be tough. But again, yes, it's ingenious that they would place that hoop in this area right next to the mesa.
BRODIE: Is there something about basketball, do you think, that makes this so interesting? Like, you know, you could put a soccer field. I mean, soccer is a universal sport, you know, throughout the world. You know, you could in theory, put a baseball diamond or, you know, some other sport field there. Is there something about a basketball hoop that like, seems to speak to people, that makes them want to put it up in the middle of nowhere, on the side of a shed, you know, with only the mesa to see it?
TERRY: Well, what I'd say, perhaps controversial. I don't think baseball is America's pastime anymore. I think basketball is. When kids go and play around the corner at their neighbor's house, they're not playing stickball in the street, they're shooting hoops in the driveway. And so I think basketball has just become such a cultural force in the United States that when people look to create recreation, basketball becomes one of the major drivers in that.
BRODIE: All right, let's keep moving down because the next photo is super interesting because it looks like somebody didn't even put up a hoop. They just put up a rim underneath a railroad crossing sign on a post. There's not even really a net, there's like the remnants of a net there. This is maybe the most primitive we've seen in this exhibit in terms of the equipment that somebody needed to, to make themselves a hoop.
TERRY: Absolutely. And going back to that word ingenuity, someone had this dream, had the vision and executed it. Is this hoop standard, of course not. It's not 10 feet tall to the rim. The backboard is not the standard backboard. Could you do a bank shot off this? I don't really know, but, you know, someone uses this hoop. Many people may use this hoop to play basketball. And that again goes to the ingenuity required to live in such a quite frankly dry, dusty place, but also have fun in it.
BRODIE: Right. I mean, the ground, as you point out it's just dirt and maybe some scrub brush around the hoop. But you know, this is, to somebody, this is their Madison Square Garden.
TERRY: Exactly.
BRODIE: So what do you hope that people who see these photographs take away from it? What do you hope people who see this exhibit take home?
TERRY: I think what I'd like people to take away from this exhibit is that people can be so ingenious with how they create their lives, how they influence their community, how they choose to live out here. And so I hope people look at this and come away with a sense that anyone can be a part of basketball and therefore anyone can also be a part of American culture.
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