Rhythm is fundamental for point guards and poets alike.
Andrea Gibson was both.
The renowned spoken-word poet and Maine native exuded a mastery of timing and cadence — not only in their career as a performance artist, but also on the basketball court.
Gibson, who died last Monday at age 49 after a years-long cancer battle, captivated the literary world with their deeply personal work delving into subjects such as life, death, gender identity and love.
They also left an indelible mark on the Maine basketball community during the 1990s. That enduring hardcourt legacy is especially pronounced in their hometown of Calais, where they helped deliver a high school state championship, and at Saint Joseph’s College in Standish, where they were a two-year captain at the collegiate level.
“Andrea was the quintessential point guard,” their Calais High School coach, Bob McShane, told the Bangor Daily News last week.
Gibson played “tough, hard-nosed defense,” ran the offense and never missed practice according to McShane, who called Gibson “just a joy to coach.”
Years before Gibson left audiences speechless with their command of the English language, proving the power of a well-formed verse and a compelling delivery and rising to become poet laureate for the state of Colorado, the former point guard was electrifying gymnasiums and providing structure for the 1993 Class C state champion Calais basketball team.
Gibson and their Blue Devils teammates achieved perfection that season, and later immortality, with a 22-0 record that eventually landed them in the Maine Basketball Hall of Fame last year. A Bangor Daily News report from February 27-28, 1993 said that Gibson “had a hand in each and every aspect” of that championship season.
The 1993 Blue Devils squad not only helped start a Calais girls basketball dynasty that won state titles in four of the next eight seasons, but even helped end a bar fight as the team returned victorious to its Down East hometown on the Canadian border that championship night in 1993.
As townsfolk lined up to welcome the conquering heroes home, a fistfight spilled out of a local bar and onto the street. A ring had formed around the combatants, until the basketball team arrived, McShane recounted.
“The fight stopped and they even clapped,” McShane said. “And when we drove by, the people behind us told us the two guys shook hands and then everybody went back in the bar.”
That was just one example of the way that the Blue Devils basketball team brought people together during that magical run — a run that Gibson anchored in 1993 to start a decade full of titles in Calais.
McShane said Gibson “just knew when to slow us down, when to speed us up” and was a nonstop “poetry in motion machine.”
Both he and Mike McDevitt, who coached the Saint Joseph’s Lady Monks team when Gibson played on the basketball team and studied English, credited the former point guard for a relentless work ethic that inspired those around them. And both coaches agreed that there was an interesting comparison between the poetry Gibson created on stage and the flow they orchestrated on the basketball court.
“I think that’s a pretty cool correlation to be honest with you,” McDevitt said on Friday. “We talk at times, like a kind of poetry in motion type of thing — I think you could draw some parallels to the way they played and their poetry journey, sure.”
McDevitt said Gibson was a highly respected member of their college team who also brought a sense of fun to the group.
“I knew if we were lucky enough to get Andrea to come to Saint Joe’s, we were getting a very good player,” McDevitt said. “They led by example, they played hard.”
There was a duality in Gibson’s ability to play hard while also providing some playfulness to lighten the mood for the program. Saint Joseph’s teammate Denise Treadwell Smith said that Gibson was able to bring some levity to an otherwise intense atmosphere.
“Everything was really intense and Andrea was the person who could crack that a little bit,” Treadwell Smith said on Friday. “They were the one who could joke a little bit with coach.”
Several past teammates and coaches alike would not have predicted Gibson’s specific rise in the slam poetry world, as they didn’t see that side of Gibson while setting the pace for Saint Joseph’s on the court. But those who knew Gibson as a basketball player also weren’t altogether surprised at how they went on to express themself and captivate others off the court.
“I wasn’t surprised that they were very successful at it because I knew pretty much anything that they chose to do, they were gonna be successful,” McDevitt said about Gibson. “It was just the type of person that they were.”
Saint Joseph’s teammate Neile Joler Nelson was awestruck by the reach and power of Gibson’s work.
“Who thinks in the early mid-nineties that your teammate’s going to become a famous poet or a famous writer?” Joler Nelson said on Friday. “I’m just so proud of Andrea. I’m proud of the voice that they have used to make the world better.”
Both Joler Nelson and Treadwell Smith said Gibson’s legacy will continue to live on.
“My all-time favorite quote is a quote from Andrea, which is, “Even when the truth isn’t hopeful, the telling of it is,” Treadwell Smith said.
Joler Nelson also pointed to the way that Gibson maintained their love of basketball even through their cancer battle, highlighting a video Gibson posted last year sharing their excitement during the NCAA women’s basketball Final Four.
“Basketball is poetry, y’all,” Gibson said, describing the abilities of several marquee players like Paige Bueckers, Kamilla Cardoso, Aziaha James and Caitlin Clark.
Gibson went on to talk about women’s basketball becoming “as popular as I always knew it should be, back when I was 15, face pressed to a 10-inch TV, trying to memorize every move Dawn Staley made, so I could get the first thing I ever put on my bucket list: to play college basketball.”
The ties between Gibson’s experiences on the basketball court and abilities as a poet were no coincidence. There was a direct connection between the two.
In their piece, “How I Became a Poet,” Gibson speaks of an early pair of basketball shoes that their mother bought them at an Ames department store in Calais.
In the poem, Gibson shares how they loved those shoes and had begged their mother to buy them. But when another player made fun of them during fifth grade basketball tryouts for being plastic rather than leather, Gibson went along with that “chest pass of words” and pretended that the shoes were just holdovers until their real ones arrived.
From that point, once their coach blew the whistle, Gibson’s response was to run. They ran up and down the court for eight years, all the way to a state championship.
“And the next week in the mail, I got a letter from a college I had dreamed of playing ball at ever since the ball had been bigger than me,” Gibson continues in the poem. “And because I knew I wasn’t allowed to spend four years studying only my jump shot, I said, ‘I guess I’ll learn to write some poems while I’m here.’”