Steve Bannon’s Navy Shipmates Reveal That He Was A Terrible Pickup Teammate

I ate a chicken foot, once, at a dim sum place on Doyers Street, in Manhattan’s Chinatown. I knew that it would be hideous, but I ate it anyway. There’s a thing that happens to people in dim sum scenarios, a sort of glutinous fog of war that settles over the proceedings, and it is from within that state of mind that decisions such as these get made. Everyone knows that what they are about to eat is a mistake—it has a fucking toenail on it, for one thing, and it is just as cartilaginous and faintly mucoid as it looks, it tastes fetid and somehow damp. But, because this is not an ordinary scenario and also somehow because of how obviously hideous it is, you eat the chicken foot anyway.

This is how I am with reading about Steve Bannon. There is nothing to look forward to in these stories, really, and after you’ve read a few you are mostly just going over the various and familiar intersecting disasters that make up this man’s heart, stations of the cross style. They are all the same because there is only one story to tell: how Bannon went from being an ambitious young man to the curdled bloodshot deep sea creature he is now, whispering sweet intimations of omnicidal apocalypse into the ear of the dumbest and most distractible man ever to be President. To read one of these stories is to read most of these stories; to read as many of them as I do is the purest masochism. This is a problem I’m working on, all this reading. But!

But, sometimes, you read a story about Bannon that does contain something authentically new. Most of the broad strokes in this Washington Post story about Bannon’s seven mostly uneventful years of Navy service are familiar—one of the big Bannon Story tropes is that people who knew him in his youth have absolutely no idea what the fuck happened to him that made him the raw ulcer he is today—and the attempt to locate the source of his present corrosion in his unfinished youth is necessarily tenuous. But credit where it’s due: this is the first time I’ve read anything about what a hero-balling wad Bannon was as a pickup basketball player:

Bannon is remembered as much for his skill at sports as for his work on the ship’s deck. When the Foster docked at ports in different parts of the world, the ship’s basketball team often lined up games against local competition. Bannon’s nickname was “Coast,” short for coast-to-coast, because on the basketball court he’d never pass the ball, Mickle said. Bannon also excelled at baseball, although shipmates ribbed him for being called out three times in one inning, recalled David Ziemba, who spoke warmly about his former roommate.

Let’s leave aside the bit about being called out three times in one inning, which is confusing. Let’s focus on the image of Bannon grabbing an uncontested rebound, swinging his elbows around for no real reason, and then heading on up the court, one man against all. Picture his teammates first running to spots or cutting and then in the next moment slouching or throwing their hands in the air as they realize what’s going on, which is “Coast” doing what he does, and that they will not see the ball no matter how open they are. Imagine the teammates realizing that they were invisible to Bannon, because his head was all the way down and because he couldn’t really see them anyway, being as he was so focused on getting all the way to the rim, and getting his.

The defense collapses on him, secure in the same knowledge; they have seen this before, from him or from other doomed hero-balling knights errant. This is not going to end well, and there are nine people on the floor know it. The one with the ball matters most, though, and he doesn’t care. He will get where he’s going, which really is the thing he wants most—more than the points for the team or even himself, more than whatever desultory congratulations he’d get if he can somehow force his way through and pull this thing off. The thing is not to pass, or to yield, or to stop; the thing is to do, just as you want it done. I like to imagine Bannon throwing up a wild scoop, and to further imagine the ball wedgie-ing into the crook between the rim and the backboard. The game stops. He is saying that he was fouled, now. That’s Coast. That’s our guy.