WINDOW ROCK, Ariz. — The Navajo teenagers scamper out of the locker room like their feet are on fire.  The Window Rock High School Fighting Scouts sprint across the arena floor, bounce up and down as if they are jumping invisible ropes and sprint to the hoops for layups.  Neither the Scouts nor their archrival, the Chinle High School Wildcats, will stop running until the final buzzer sounds. These teenagers — most are well short of six feet — will weave and cut, press full court and rain 3-point shots.  This is Rez Ball, a roadrunner, beep-beep blur of legs and arms and sneakers. The former N.B.A. coach Mike D’Antoni’s claim to fame is that his Phoenix Suns tried to shoot within seven seconds.  Navajos, who adore long-distance running and run-and-gun hoops, would view that as a slowdown offense.  Reservation basketball takes the form of obsession here. Baskets made of wire and garbage pails and small tubs hang off homes and garages and wood poles anchored in patches of red dirt. Window Rock and the nearby town Fort Defiance have about 6,000 residents. Beyond, the land of the Dine encompasses winding canyons and washes, forests and desert, isolated towns and hamlets filled with the traditional sacred dwellings known as hogans.  A knife-sharp wind pushes a veil of snow down off the high buttes this night. I turn my car into Window Rock High School two hours early and wonder if anyone will show up.  Hundreds of snow-dusted pickup trucks sit in the parking lot. Inside, the joint is packed, 4,500 strong: Navajo grandmothers wrapped in traditional blankets, young granddaughters in jeans fiddling with iPhones. Boys in team jerseys ogle the girls, who strive to appear oblivious.  The girls junior varsity is playing. The boys junior varsity will follow, then the girls varsity. The boys varsity game is hours away.  Albert Wagner, 56, sits five rows back. He has a ponytail of thick gray hair tucked under his cowboy hat and a turquoise belt buckle. Four of his 14 grandchildren will play this night.  Lots of people here tonight, huh?  “This is all the time,” he replies. “We really have nothing else to do out here.”  I had called Brandon Tso, coach of the Chinle Wildcats, to ask about the best night to see a reservation game. Every night, he said. “We got no bowling alleys and no movie theaters. We just have basketball; that’s our love.”  That was good enough for me. I drove up here weeks ago to escape too much manufactured Super Bowl madness in the Valley of the Sun. The highway curled through rawboned mountains and saguaro and prickly pine cactus before climbing past limestone escarpments into the Ponderosa pines and ancient red rock canyons of Navajo.  The air here, 7,000 feet above sea level, is ice-tinged.  My wife, Evelyn, and I once lived in this achingly beautiful land for six weeks, occupying a trailer in Fort Defiance. She worked as a midwife with the Indian health service, while I cared for our two young boys.  One afternoon I grabbed my basketball and set off in search of a game. Insulated by New York parochialism, I expected to find country ball, a little soft with lots of jumpers. Seven Navajo guys asked me to play; it was similar to being caught in the wrong lane with marathon runners. Up and down they went, cutting to the hoop with a juking vengeance, until this bilagaana (Navajo for white dude) had his hands on his knees.  Most years, Navajo teams come winding off the high plateau in buses and make the six-hour trek to Phoenix and its surrounding cities for the state finals. Thousands of fans follow them down.  Height usually wins out, particularly when Navajo teams clash with the Valley’s Christian academies that recruit with a holy fervor. But the native teams — the White Mountain Apache play an identical pell-mell style and draw no less rapturous crowds — often knock off favorites.  Before the game, I caught a coffee with Sunnie Clahchischiligi, a 29-year-old Navajo Times sportswriter. She is of the Many Goats clan and grew up in the tiny reservation village Teec Nos Pos. Her mothers and aunts played basketball, as she did.  “My mom played until she was eight months pregnant; she went into labor at a tournament,” she said.  Clahchischiligi plans to attend law school, but for now she roams the remote corners of this reservation and writes about basketball (you could drop Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts into the Navajo reservation and have room left over).  “The arena in Phoenix holds 18,000, and when our teams are in it, there’s nothing but people with brown skins in the stands,” she said. “If people don’t have cars, they hitchhike.”  The national anthem plays before the game in Window Rock. American and Navajo Nation flags hang in the rafters; cemeteries here are filled with military veterans. Everyone, even those in wheelchairs, stands and puts hand to heart.  The game takes off at a gallop.  Chritristen Blacksheep, a quick-handed Chinle guard with shake-and-bake moves, drives the lane. His sneakers squeak like a rusty hinge as he comes to a quick stop and dishes the ball out to his teammate Anthaniel Long.  Long strokes a 3-pointer. Half the crowd — fans are more or less split between the teams — goes wild.  “DEE-fense! DEE-fense! Cut, cut! Come on Brandon, Box OUT! And REBOUND!”  The Navajo do not emote a lot. They find strength in silence; a Navajo delivery ward in the hospital can be as quiet as a library.  Some fans watch stoically. But many more clap and chant and wave pom-poms and wiggle-waggle their fingers when a player from the opposing team steps to the free-throw line, in hopes their mojo will distract him.  They are hoop knowledgeable almost to a fault. Grandfathers talk of Bill Walton; fathers and mothers talk of Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley. (A reservation radio station broadcasts the N.B.A. playoffs, in Navajo).  It’s as if there are 100 coaches in the stands.  “Dive to the hoop, Brandon,” Aggie Davis yells to the Window Rock center, a burly kid of about 6-foot-2. “Dive to the hoop.”  “My favorite N.B.A. player is Kevin Durant,” she says. “Years ago, it was Larry Bird. Oh, I loved that boy. He passed so beautifully. Those Celtics knew how to run.”  Run and pass: No higher compliment to be heard.  Chinle’s team, a senior-heavy squad with an impressive record, is an unstoppable wave, its weaves and shooting a wonderment. Window Rock, which has a young squad and a record a few notches better than .500, responds with grinding defense and a slightly less manic offense. By halftime, it’s a 2-point game.  Gray-haired Raul Mendoza, by descent a mix of Native American and Mexican, is the Window Rock coach. Coaches tend toward short half-lives here. He has won more than 650 games and coached for 36 years, across a distant necklace of reservation and border towns: Holbrook, Coconino, and Alchesay on the Apache Reservation. He coached in Window Rock in the late 1970s and 1980s; his team had a three-year stretch in which it lost just a handful of games.  Then Window Rock had a so-so season and people grumbled and he left. Last year he was invited back. He moved in last summer, and people got out of their cars at the gas stations and laundromats to shake his hand.  He loves Rez Ball when harnessed to intelligence. Pass and run and shoot, yes, sure. Run plays, too.  “The kids run one option and get impatient,” he said. “They kind of play without thinking about it. Because they’ve done it since they were little kids, it’s not embarrassing.  “But it’s not what I want.”  Tso, Chinle’s first-year coach, relies on a motion offense. Last season his predecessor lost a close playoff game, 89-84, the best of the year everyone agreed. He soon left.  “Our kids are treated like rock stars,” Tso says. “But there’s lots of pressure. I’ve got gray hairs I never had before.”  Chinle sits at the lip of Canyon de Chelly. Years ago, I put my youngest on my back and hiked into that canyon, past red walls rubbed smooth by ancient rivers and millenniums of summer thunderstorms. A couple of Navajo farms sat along the river bottom, with rail fences and horses.  There was, of course, a basketball hoop.  Chinle has a grocery store, a post office, a restaurant and motel, and four Laundromats. There are 4,000 residents; its high school basketball arena seats 6,000, and some nights that is not enough.  “Before big games, people line up at 7 a.m. for tickets,” Tso says.  In the second half, momentum shifts to Window Rock. Two Chinle players, including its best ballhandler, are carried off with sprained ankles, and Window Rock’s attack is relentless. The Scouts’ Brandon Chickaway, the center, begins to vacuum rebounds.  Late in the game, a 5-foot-7 Scouts guard receives a pass on the run, turns, and, in a cross between shot and hurl, banks in a long 3-pointer.  Mendoza closes his eyes, opens them, and his legs go rubbery.  “Man, we might win tonight,” he says. “As long as we play defense, real defense, we’ll be fine.”  Then Chinle presses and the Scouts’ lead is sand running through their fingers. Window Rock clings to a 2-point win.  Afterward I talk to Chickaway, who for all the high decibel advice he received from the crowd, finished with 11 rebounds. Do you hear the fans? He smiles shyly. “I have a lot of aunts and uncles out there.”  Coach Mendoza tries to sluice off the pressure; let parents take out their frustrations on him. “It is unrelenting and can destroy a kid,” he says.  His team will finish with a 21-14 record. That is a big step up from last year, his players are sophomores and juniors and everyone wanted him back and he is beloved. That will buy him a year’s grace, maybe.  Afterward, a snake line of car lights trail into the inky darkness. Some nose up Blue Canyon, its red dirt road slick with six inches of snow. Others drive to a Denny’s for late-night pancakes.  The Wildcats face a long drive in a rattling bus to Chinle. (Chinle finished 22-11; last week they lost a tough playoff game in Glendale before a large Navajo crowd). “For as long as anyone can remember, it’s been this way,” Tso says. “It’s stressful; but these kids are rock stars.”  With that, Tso leaves for Chinle. Mendoza returns to his home behind the ridge in Fort Defiance. And the next morning, I return to Phoenix, descending out of the beauty that is the red rock land of Rez Ball.
Native American high schools like Window Rock and Chinle in Arizona play Rez Ball, or reservation basketball, an extremely up-tempo version of basketball with an intense following to match.