The secret to happiness is playing pickup basketball. Just ask this 81-year-old

Richie Zweigenhaft plays pickup basketball once a week, and when people ask him to describe his game, he usually lands on three names: Muggsy Bogues, John Stockton and Dave Twardzik.

Zweigenhaft stands 5 feet 4 inches tall, so he found inspiration in Bogues, the shortest player in NBA history. He also loves to share the ball, which explains his admiration for Stockton, the NBA’s all-time assists leader. His appreciation for Twardzik, a tough and cerebral floor general for the Portland Trail Blazers in the 1970s, is a deeper cut. But there’s a good explanation for this.

Zweigenhaft is 81.

He started playing regular basketball in the early 1970s, when he was a doctoral student at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Then he basically never stopped. For the last 51 years, he has organized a weekly pickup game at Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C., where he’s professor emeritus in the psychology department.

The Guilford game is likely one of the longest continuous pickup runs in America. It has survived nine presidents. The players are mostly in their 60s and 70s. A few years ago, as the players slowed down and the pace deadened, the game became halfcourt, and Zweigenhaft came up with a new league name: “Geezer ball.”

“Every time I have a birthday now, I think, Jesus Christ, I’m so fortunate to still be playing ,” Zweigenhaft told me. “There’s no telling how much time I have left.”

I reached out to Zweigenhaft in the hopes that he could help me with an emerging life crisis. Earlier this year, I was playing in a pickup game when my man caught the ball and drove hard toward the lane, which caused me to slide quickly to my right and stop abruptly.

The awkward plant caused the ligaments in my right knee to stretch to an undesirable degree, which limited my ability to walk or run for weeks. The experience was jarring.

My 40th birthday was just a couple months away, and for the first time, I realized: I could not play forever.

I once tried to explain to a friend why my pickup game at 9:30 p.m. on Monday nights could be the most joyous 90 minutes of the week. It was a source of creativity and improv, a high-intensity workout that supplied endorphins and soothed anxiety, a collective state of flow in which we all existed fully and purposely in the moment.

It seemed to offer modern life’s most precious commodity: the ability to quiet my mind and just be. A pickup basketball game was a direct portal to momentary enlightenment.

“It has a therapeutic quality in that respect,” Zweigenhaft agreed.

That’s why I reached out to Zweigenhaft. After 50 years, I figured he would have some wisdom about this thing we shared.

Our conversation revealed a lesson in happiness built on a half-century of trips to the gym, a guide to the good life based on back-door cuts, help defense and the perfect extra pass.

When you are 81 years old, there are certain things you cannot do on a basketball court. Here is one: Zweigenhaft cannot shoot a pull-up jump shot.

He used to be able to stop on a dime and unleash a feathery jumper. But as the years piled up, his muscles stopped cooperating. He could shoot, or he could drive, but he could not do them simultaneously.

Other than that, the Guilford game is surprisingly lively. It’s still twice a week. The average age is around 64. The players have stopped counting hip and knee replacements, and over the years, the run has lost participants to injury, retirement and, on occasion, death.

Yet, just a few weeks ago, Zweigenhaft was on the floor inside Ragan-Brown Fieldhouse, matched up with a smallish guard who played fierce defense, crashed the boards and generally played with the aggression of Jose Alvarado of the New York Knicks. Which, of course, made sense.

“He is 40 years younger (than me),” Zweigenhaft said.

The most amazing part of the game is its longevity, and Zweigenhaft credits a slogan he borrowed from the Chinese during the Cold War: “Friendship First, Competition Second.”

“We didn’t have many lawyers,” Zweigenhaft said. “That’s another reason the game lasted so long.”

It began in 1975, when Zweigenhaft was a fresh-faced faculty member researching the American power elite. At first, it was just a classic noontime pickup run, the players gathering inside an old-school gym nicknamed the Crackerbox, which looked like something out of “Hoosiers” and featured the kind of soft rims that every player loves.

By the mid-1980s, the run was in a new facility and featured three full-court games, three times per week.

In a way, it was a thriving community experiment that academics call a third place, a social space separate from home or work. It was a culture unto itself, complete with its own rules, norms and language.

In fact, it was exactly the kind of culture that interested a sociologist in Chicago.

In the early 1990s, Jason Jimerson was a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Chicago who had spent the previous decade playing pickup basketball on college campuses.

Inspired by his personal experiences and a book about basketball culture, Jimerson set out to begin the first qualitative academic research on pickup hoops, examining games in suburban Chicago and West Lafayette, Ind.

There is a reason sociologists have spent decades studying pickup basketball. The sport is naturally physical, aggressive and competitive. The stakes are clear: The winner usually gets to stay on the court and play again. Yet, the activity is orderly, efficient and overwhelmingly positive, the players almost solely concerned with the collective whole.

“What makes a good party is not just that you have fun but that other people have fun as well,” said Jimerson, now a sociology professor at Franklin College.

The weekly game I play in New York fits the description: it has existed in some form for more than two decades and years before I started playing. The roster is in constant churn, though the bloated email list exists as an unofficial archive of former pla...

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