freedarko.com

The Day Never Ended

2011-04-11T11:26:00.020-04:00

Shoals here. This is the final FreeDarko post. The store will be open through the playoffs; then it too will close. My Twitter and Tumblr will go on, and I'll be blogging about the playoffs on GQ.com.

For this final post, I asked everyone who has contributed to FreeDarko to tell me what the hell "FreeDarko" (adj.) meant to them, or what the blog meant to them, or something. What follows is what happened. Appropriately, I am not really sure how exactly to put a label on it.

Shoefly: Do you ever read comments on sports articles? I make that mistake occasionally, and other things I care about too – music, film, politics. They’re all kind of disturbing, but in many cases I just think about the people who write them as Martians and it makes me feel better. The people who write and follow sports seem more familiar and vicious and cruel and racist, and provincial. “How many championships has he won?” They might say, with the sneer of a swaggering bravo.

And is that really what it’s about? Not to me. Because if you’re a person of a certain type it’s important to know that loving sports is – of course – fundamentally ridiculous, but it’s fine to love it anyway. Because there is play, narrative, life, love, and fun in there. You can touch on the genuine, and even if your impressions may not be Truth, they are honest and meaningful to you, and that is ultimately fulfilling enough to care about losing battles and defiant last stands that are, still, play.

That’s why I’m proud of FreeDarko. Sports should be about people, I think. We follow it because we care about them. It’s not just the stately march of commerce across the heartland if you’re doing it right. Which Shoals always did – and does. Not just well, but often, to my abiding admiration and awe, a fierce advocate and soldier for meaning in sports. I expect he, and all of us, will find a victory in the end.

El Huracane Andreo: Free Darko is a mantra of friendship, human analysis, and taste. The collective devoured processed journalism and left fresh. Certainly, this calls for a toast for the future of sports coverage. It occurs to me that FD's core elements are three-quarters sartorial wit topped off by testosterone-laden athletic obsession. As the original webmaster and despot who insisted on picking this name, I doubt SkitaTime (as in Nicholas Tskitishvili) would have developed such a classy cult. As Danny Glover never said, artists that built an international network of style mastery have the right stuff. Of course, this is not the end.

Peter Schrager: Back in 2005, in the Wild Wild West days of online sports writing, I had a column on FoxSports.com called “The Wednesday Buffet” One of my favorites was a look inside the sick, twisted, and brilliant minds of the guys behind FreeDarko.com.

I forget exactly how I first discovered the site, but when I did, I know I had the same jittery energy and excitement I had when I first heard The White Stripes or saw Tom Green’s old MTV show. Sometimes, the posts would be daily 1,000 word missives. Sometimes, you’d wait a week. I’d print the articles out and read them on the treadmill. On the can. On the subway. Anywhere. Everywhere.

I interviewed the guys in 2005 and the column was fantastic. Bizarre. Funny. Mentions of Vikings, the Ukraine, and Topher Grace. The interview went “viral”, and in the pre-Twitter days, kinda sorta made the online rounds. A few weeks later, I got a blue tee shirt that said FREE DARKO across the chest in the mail.

I’d wear it around the streets of New York and get catcalls from garbage men and guys in cars. 'Free Darko!' I felt like a 22-year-old girl in a tube top with that shirt. I was never cooler.

My favorite Chaps button down from Marshall’s never got quite the same reaction.

Brickoswki: I was fortunate enough to find FREEDARKO in its infancy by way of a Billups link. At the time, I didn’t really understand the site and mostly just wanted to be belligerent about the Spurs. While recognition for my team would be nice, at this point I’m more interested in the “why.” Why does a team that embodies so many of the same traits as my favorite writers – smart, humble, generous, hardworking, diverse, progressive – get so little love from those same writers? Why do we value intelligence, nuance and technical brilliance in art, music and film and yet gravitate towards the most overtly physical players in basketball? I mean, I’m sure most 3rd graders love Bron and Blake but 3rd graders have the shittiest taste!

After years of trying to reconcile how my favorite basketball site could so thoroughly loathe my favorite basketball team, I think I’ve finally found an answer. Not surprisingly, the answer came from FD godfather Woody Allen. There’s that scene in Annie Hall where Alvy sneaks away from a party to watch a Knicks game by himself (a great move that I’m sure everyone reading this has pulled, though hopefully not for the Knicks). His girlfriend finds him and asks him an important question: “What is so fascinating about a group of pituitary cases trying to stuff a ball through a hoop?" Alvy, naturally, provides a pretty good answer to that question: "What is fascinating is that it's physical. You know, it's one thing about intellectuals. They prove that you can be absolutely brilliant and have no idea what's going on. But on the other hand, the body doesn't lie, as we now know." However, for the last 6 years FREEDARKO has provided an even more persuasive and exhaustive answer to that question, using the NBA as a prism from which to view race, culture, politics, and almost everything else that really matters. Physicality, sure. FREEDARKO has shown the other stuff is even more fascinating.

Favorite FreeDarko Moment: Being on a late night email chain trying to figure out how to respond to a cease and desist from Thurl Bailey over the Thursday With Thurl series (seriously) and getting an email from Shoals or Dr. LIC that read “This is a blog of plotting our next move against Thurl Bailey as the clock strikes midnight!”

ForEvers Burns: For nine incredibly painful years, I attended Jewish day school. By most academic standards, I would not consider myself a complete and hopeless idiot but during that span, I was unequivocally the worst Hebrew student in my grade. As we were supposedly expanding our vocabulary in class, I would routinely be called upon to use the “Word of the Day” in a sentence. That I had no idea what this new word meant, and I knew at best a handful of other words that could disguise my lack of understanding, I typically sat and stammered gibberish until my teachers felt that I had humiliated myself sufficiently that they could move on to a student with the capacity to do more than perspire.

In fourth grade, I discovered the word “Tzarich,” and it provided salvation from my stumbling. This object-requiring verb enabled me to construct a coherent sentence with virtually any noun. I used it constantly for many years and to this day I only vaguely know what it means. So it was with me and “FreeDarko.” Though my viewpoint at times seemed to deviate from that of the collective (supporting the age limit, hating LeBron from day one, etc.), I feel honored to have been a part of such a thoughtful and dynamic group that wrote for such an insightful readership. While the transition from “armchair psychiatrist” to “actual psychiatrist” proved too life-consuming to keep up with writing for more than a few years, FD was always one of the first sites I hit when I had a free moment. At least dailypuppy.com doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.

Eric Freeman: It's common to say that really good writing changes lives, but I've always been of the opinion that the best work clarifies and gives expression to opinions the reader already holds. My early relationship with FD worked along these lines. Since I was a young tyke, I've approached my favorite sports -- not just basketball -- as enjoyable for reasons other than the final score. At 10, I considered Roberto Clemente a personal hero for his style and personality as much as his greatness, despite his dying more than 12 years before my birth. As a lifelong Warriors fan, I was forced to appreciate small pleasures in the context of greater failure from an early age. And, while I wasn't exactly sure why, I always liked Steve Young more than Joe Montana while admitting that the latter was the far superior player. The problem was that I didn't know exactly how to express that appreciation, and my devotion to my favorite teams and athletes just registered as obsessive interest that bordered on psychosis. I felt like a different kind of sports fan but often fell in with the rowdy herd.

I came across FD late in my college years, at a time when I was pretty sure I wanted to be a professor, yet also gradually realizing that the academy wouldn't usually allow me to address the topics -- namely, sports and superficially stupid Hollywood movies -- that I really wanted to write about. The posts on FD felt like more articulate translations of thoughts I'd felt for years, and the site quickly convinced me that there was a way to write about stereotypically "unserious" topics with ferocious intelligence and enough of goofiness to let everyone know that they're still fun. The academy no longer seemed like the only way. Several weeks later, under the guise of names chosen from a "Mr. Show" sketch, my friend Nate and I started a blog that basically ripped off FD in as many ways as we could. After a few months and many turns in the comments section, Shoals sent us an email asking if we'd like to contribute to the site on a regular basis. I've considered it a home ever since and owe most every job I've gotten since to my association with it.

Still, I'm not terribly sad to see it go. Today marks the end of an era, sure. But the strength of FD has always been that it allowed a number of like-minded fans to meet in a virtual space and discuss the issues that make us love basketball. Due to the site's success, and also due to the fact that several of us write for a living, the FD ethos will live on. But, really, FD will still exist in spirit because this approach is a part of so many fans' love for the sport. At its best, FD explained why we care in a way that we weren't totally sure how to express previously. Now we know how to say it.

Nate Jones ("Carter Blanchard"): There was something about the tail-end of the '06-'07 season that just felt like it needed to be experienced communally, in a way that the budding NBA blogosphere was just beginning to make possible. Some combination of the "We Believe" Warriors, SSOL's high water mark, THE LEBRON GAME, Kobe's radio tantrums, and the looming Oden/Durant-ocalypse made the world feel wobbly enough that I was extremely grateful to have found kindred spirits in the FD community to help guide me through the chaos. As the season and my school year came to a close, I kept finding myself pulled back through the FD archives, trying to make better sense of the universes that were being simultaneously created and destroyed in front of me. Like how Odd Future makes me want to scale scaffolding or the Wire makes me want to become a social worker, reading and re-reading FreeDarko every day gave me overwhelming urge to write about the NBA with funny pictures and nonsensical titles. When Freeman and I got the call-up from Shoals to join the FD team, it would have been a dream come true if I hadn't been way too intimidated to ever imagine writing alongside my favorite writers out there, regardless of subject-matter or medium. I don't think I ever did fully overcome that sense of awe, but

I am extremely proud to have played some small part in the Great Mainstream Stat Wars of 2007, the Every Game Previews of 2008, and the Billups-starring 2008 Draft coverage.

While this is certainly the end of an era, thanks to FD I'm never going to forget that brief and glorious second when Arenas stood shoulder-to-shoulder with LeBron, when Marion was the key to unlocking everything, and when Hawks-Bobcats battles no one else was watching could make the world's axis stand still.

Joey Litman: The household in which I grew up championed individualism above almost everything else. (Marrying a Jew, never working for Donald Trump, and paying respect to Julius Erving might remain the only higher ideals.) Fierce pride in being a little different--even when that different is perhaps just one degree away from another person's similarly different--compelled my mother to coin the phrase "pro choice on the environment" (as in, she doesn't care if you want one, but she chooses otherwise) and my father to encourage his children to become notaries just in case our friends ever needed help with paperwork. It's an easy way to make some cash, he imagined.

The same resounding certainty of self pushed my sister out to San Francisco despite not knowing anyone west of Chicago, inspired my mother to attend Jon Stewart's Rally for Sanity while all of her friends were there in spirit but physically at second homes (Mom: "No one should have two until everyone else has one"), and made my father comfortable exercising in corduroy pants. If it makes sense to us, we just do it. Many people can conjure these kinds of personal idiosyncrasies, and my family is not really all that special. However, we are forever feeling ourselves (pause?), regardless of what anyone else says.

I am fortunate for this rearing, and all the ways in which it has guided my choices are too many to chronicle today. One, in particular, seems germane, though. Since forever, I have pursued my passions with a focus that can be obsessive. No matter if I stood alone for bringing in obscure college-basketball box scores to seventh-grade discussion hours, for calling women "so white" on first dates, for reading Shakespeare homework at 5 AM while in line outside of Footlocker. This life is rewarding, but at times lonely, and I have frequently sought out community that would at least celebrate, if not share, my lifestyle.

Few places have ever felt like home as much as FreeDarko, even if I never did fully come around on J.R. FreeDarko was always a place for high-functioning misfits intent on advancing ideas with conviction, and individuality was a foundational principle. That's hard to find. This site has taught me humility, challenged me to get better, and expanded my world while forever feeling like something of my own, even when I had nothing to do with it. I was grateful for it long before I really knew what it was. Through FD, I met incredible people whose work is as inspiring as it is intimidating. Steadily earning the friendships and writing opportunities I've enjoyed here not only filled out my adult life, but also validated my personal history. I can't say anything nicer than that.

Dan Steinberg: It was never about freeing Darko; it was about freeing the existential angst from our sports-loving spleens, letting it gurgle up and overflow and drip guilt and agony and joy and rancid yet liberating repression all over our keyboards and monitors and mouse pads. Well, that and freeing Darko.

Chris Sprow: FreeDarko’s motto, at the outset, could have been: “Opaque and roll.” It was hard to grasp — Is there a singular theme here, a loose web of truths that could form a religion if we could only agree on a deity, a rambling search for the hoop truth at a pace that has the scroll-makers worried? — but to try and grasp it made you the butt of the joke. So we played along. And how do you describe style, anyway? FD certainly had its own. But that’s not the most important thing.

Words are the biggest part of my job. So the premise, to me, was the passion. It was a blog. It was writing. And it was free. And it allowed people who wrote for free to at some point write for money. It wasn’t always about basketball, but basketball was just an entry point. Is there a higher calling than a paycheck? You bet. But a set style can be like a broken clock — only right on if you’re willing to wait a lot. Utilitarian writing is hard, but it also can get you a new pair of shoes, or a FreeDarko t-shirt.

It keeps the clock moving. And the lights on so you can see it.

Spencer Ryan Hall ("Pichi Campana Aguanta"): Every successful revolution has to make the transition to governance. So while it's sad to see the end of an era, I'm proud to know that the interpretation of pro basketball will be influenced by the hagiography of Bethlehem Shoals, et al. and the iconography of (the original) Big Baby for a long, long time. There's a reason the roster of nearly every major producer of pro basketball writing reads like a list of early FD acolytes. Good luck to all and thanks for five incredible years.

WV: troitc - The forthcoming cabal of Kirilenko, Prokhorov, and a miniature giraffe.

Will Leitch: Free Darko made me see athletes not as heroes, not as villains, not as humans, but as mythic, god-like creatures, comic and tragic. I don't mean God in a big man in the clouds with a beard sense; I mean in a "release the kraken!" sense. Free Darko made their struggles, their failures, their triumphs, they turned them into something that was both bigger than all of us and also painfully vital to our sports fan well-being. They made it all matter. That's what Free Darko did for me.

Like Free Darko, like the rest of us, I am invested in that famous Class of 2003, the ones who were going to take over the league, the ones who were going to change it all. I had a feeling Free Darko might not be long for this earth when I read this paragraph, in this post:

"The Class of 2003 was supposed to take over the league, and instead, the principals have confused that narrative and, at best, put their ascent in dry-dock. Carmelo Anthony, too. Amar'e in New York isn't exactly a league-changing endeavor, and Gilbert Arenas, another slightly older fellow traveler, is trying to work his way back to being worthless -- not just pitiable. These were the figures that launched FreeDarko and all of them are suffering. Except the league as we see it is healthier than ever."

That's exactly right: Like the game, Free Darko evolved, and always landed in the same place: I love this motherfucking game.

Free Darko also made me realize the power of caring this much, of thinking this hard, and investing this much ... and how the Web could harness and unleash that power. I can't believe they're going away. I wish I could do them justice. But I can't. Darko's Mood Is Currently: Legend.

Josh Spilker: Tracking the details of when or how I first came across FreeDarko would be pointless, like trying to figure out the exact day and time of when an epic fish story took place -- the little things ruin the magic of the moment.

But I do remember a few heady weeks in 2005-2007 checking the site religiously everyday in my cubicle job for some element of the NBA I had never thought of before, mostly centered on the athletic allure of Gerald Wallace and Gerald Green, and the whole site a confirmation of my desire to always build teams of small forwards when playing NBA Live. I had mostly been a collegiate fan up to the point of reading FreeDarko. Shoals, Recluse and Dr. LIC, etc. turned me from an NBA fan into an NBA thinker.

In 2007 Shoals said would answer a few questions for a little print monthly arts mag I wrote for with very little web presence. This is no indictment on him, but I'm not sure Shoals would do an interview for a little paper like that anymore, halfway across the country, but I wouldn't expect him to. The mainstream has taken up FreeDarko, for better or for worse, evidence that this moment had come, that this moment was needed, that this moment changed a lot of perceptions. That moment is apparently over, but the change it has wrought is not.

The Assimilated Negro: Maybe the most criminally slept-on thing about Freedarko is how “hip hop sexy” it is. It’s like lo-fi, high-IQ, still-sorta-undervalued De La Soul Is Dead, Ego Trip, Liquid Swords, Stretch and Bob. Freedarko. The Real Hip Hop is over here type ~~shit~~ of sensibility. read it, young homeys and homettes!

I remember when they dropped the Macrophenomenal style guide illustrations. now there's a post that helps define a blogging era. That post was some classic hip hop shit. Like the Nasty Nas ‘91 demo. Or like Jay-Z’s second verse on Izzo/H.O.V.A. "I do it for my culture..." that was "Wiggle from the Lavendar Grave". Izzo is even more apt because you have Big Baby playing Kanye to Shoals as Jay-Z. Kanye produced Izzo, Big Baby was the genius illustrator that in Shoals words elevated it to a symphony.

That turn-of-the-century hip hop culture seems very similar to the circa-2006 blogosphere. Much like that hip hop era had industry leader types just about to cross-over and become establishment (Hov, Em, The Roots/Soulquarians, Outkast, Luda, etc) so too you had sites like Gawker shifting in a more mainstream direction. Jezebel getting started. Deadspin was becoming Deadspin. NY Mag started poaching bloggers for their site. The New Yorker started pushing their book blog. NahRight and TwoDopeBoys, etc. It's a similar cultural maturation. And the Style-guide post was a hit song in a peak era, one of those special moments.

Henry Abbott: "FreeDarko" has long spearheaded an insipid campaign whereby Mainers attempt to brainwash real Americans with the radical theory that they're not, in fact, Canadians.

The demise of this site is proof that they have failed, and we are all safer for it.

In all seriousness, this is dreadful. (Darko's mood: Lousy.) From day one, FreeDarko has flown the flags for the ridiculously smart and fun and edgy and ponderous of the online basketball world. From the day I told the actual Darko about it (the benched young Piston was confused and exhilarated) to the thousand times since that I have laughed or nodded along with the site, it has been clear the world is a better place with this blog. So soon?

Tom Ziller:

Chris Ryan ("Billups"): I recently got to witness my first basketball game from press seats. Sixers vs. Knicks, sitting behind the backboard with assorted media at the Wells Fargo Center. It was pretty revelatory, seeing everything from Carmelo Anthony repeatedly telling Toney Douglas to get the fuck out of his way to clocking the weird exchanges between the MSG and Comcast sideline reporters to the way, after calling a timeout, Mike D'Antoni would walk, quickly, to a very specific spot on the court and make a very sharp turn around to face his assistants. I've always been kind of nosy, so it's not like FreeDarko taught me to observe coach's tics or the inner life of sideline reporters (Tina Cervasio ... sad-eyed lady of the lowlands), but it did teach me to see stories and narratives everywhere, even if they were just products of my imagination. And it taught me that all those stories and narratives mattered; as much, if not more, than the one being told on the court.

Note: It has been determined that "Free Darko" was very likely lifted, if unconsciously, from this Billups classic.

Brendan K: I could never really be able to explain what “FreeDarko” means to me, even if I tried. So instead I’ll go to an opposite extreme: I’ll give you one word. It is the expression most beloved of critics of every stripe, the watchword of high-culture frontrunners and after-the-fact elitists alike. For people like you and me, FreeDarko was, “seminal.” The NBA writing renaissance, basketball hipsterdom, sports fandom as outsider art… no matter how it’s been quantified, the “FreeDarko” ethos has left its indelible mark on us all. FreeDarko is closing down in a place where it’s content with being simply what it is. But that’s the beauty of being a “seminal” work, rather than a culminating one.

Dan Shanoff: FreeDarko's essential tenet of "liberated fandom" dovetails with the essential foundation for our current media era -- the one in which sportswriting has never been better than it has been over the past few years. New platforms and new distribution have facilitated smart new voices to emerge, and it is hard to think of a greater poster-child for that than the FreeDarko collective.

Like FD acolytes given intellectual permission to pursue cheering for funky players with no position or stuck on the wrong team or otherwise bending the orthodoxies of the NBA, fans had a new choice of where to get their NBA perspective. That choice was never about "better/worse," just "more/wider." Liberated fandom extends beyond to appreciating Gilbert Arenas or "the next Julian Wright" or the 2007 Warriors -- to taking in a smarter range of NBA analysis.

Jon Bois: It was actually my associate Nick Dallamora who wrote that NBA Dugout on FD a while back; I didn't ever personally contribute to FD, but I'd figure I'd say something anyway.

Free Darko is one of the most important sports blogs we've ever had. The level of talent in sports blogging has exploded over the last couple of years. Part of the reason for that is that the industry is luring good writers, and part of it is because we learn from each other's work. We take ideas from what we read. But FD's blend of high-concept eccentricity, silliness, and genuine, passionate love of the subject matter really can't be emulated, so we're left simply to be inspired. We look at FD, we see something great that is unlike anything that came before it, and we know that it's still possible not only to stand out, but, to paraphrase Shel Silverstein, to put something in the world that ain't been there before.

Postscript: my personal favorite FD headline was "I Can't Bake Fealty," and I guess I will be left to wait eternally for its follow-up post featuring a photo of vegetarian bacon and the headline, "I Can't Fake BLT."

Mark Pike: I don't remember how I stumbled on Free Darko back in 2005, but I've devoured every post since then. As a fan of the League who grew up in an NBA geographical no-man's land, the tenets of Liberated Fandom really resonated with me. The Free Darko collective has done an expert job aestheticizing the game without turning it into a grad school paper, finding beauty outside box scores and writing narrative arcs between X's and O's. It's so hard to say goodbye, but I'm just happy this place ever existed.

Dallas Penn: I'm saddened to learn that FD.com won't be around to see the Nets bring their unique hybrid brand of hoops to my Brooklyn nabe. The Nets are currently an NBAAU team like no other. Drazen where art thou? Okay, we know the answer to that, sadly. Thank you FreeDarko for your love of the balls going hard into the rim. Keep your shorts tight and I'll see you at the post-game buffet.

Alejandro de los Rios: I never had the pleasure to write for you guys, but you kindly helped me out with at BlogofNewOrleans.com when I was trying to make something out of blogging for a small New Orleans weekly. If Free Darko has a legacy in my mind, it's that there is room for kind, hard-working and talented people to do something out of sheer passion and joy of it and somehow turn it into greater opportunities. Not to mention, you guys played a role redefining everything people thought was possible with sports writing online, which is pretty cool.

John Krolik: FreeDarko changed the way I thought about sports when I found it in high school. In college, it was where I learned to write. For me, FreeDarko wasn't one particular voice or set of values. It was a place where sportswriting could be something other than an argument. This is a beautiful and interesting game, and that was always more important to FreeDarko than trying to determine which players or teams reflected an acceptable set of values, be they moral or empirical.

FreeDarko was also where I floated out a bunch of weird theories about NBA basketball, and some of those theories turned into discussions, which remains incredible to me. I'm sure somebody else has written about this, but I don't think we'll ever see a comments section like FD's on another sports site -- nowadays it's all uninteresting people yelling at the writer or interesting people talking with each other. I can't overstate how much those commenters helped me out and made what I was doing feel worthwhile. FreeDarko came at the right time for me, and I'm extremely thankful for that.

Brian Lauvray: "And through the fog of the plague, most art withered into journalism."

And yet there it was. Brilliant, capturing and consuming art for all of us to behold. All of us to scoff at. All of us to, with damning knowledge, sit and be envious of. As a blight of too much information and too much access (thanks, ESPN) rendered that access and information into nothing but worthless sound bytes and yammering talking heads bowing to athlete's demands and corporations shills, there sat FreeDarko. FreeDarko armed with nothing more than keyboards for swords and shields forged from ideas fighting through the blustery manure to deliver truths. Truths that were wrought from the youthful exuberance all of us felt on seeing Shawn Kemp wreck another rim; truth made incarnate less from stats and box scores and more from what these scribes professed with a blistering cocktail of passion and razor intellect.

Matt Ufford: For the journalists who continue to speak ill of us bloggers, we need only one word to refute them: FreeDarko. Six years ago, the stodgy traditions of print media had no place for graduate students who wanted to compare the undeniably American art forms of pro basketball and jazz. The writers of FreeDarko could have only grown in a corner of their own creation, where their posts demanded a familiarity with everything from contemporary rap to Nietzsche to "The Wire" to Renaissance paintings to God knows what else. Most of it went over my head, but that's not FreeDarko's fault: it's mine -- for not being a more passionate fan of the NBA, for not being more cultured, for hating the Philosophy of Religion class I took (I'll say it again: fuck you, Kierkegaard).

Six years, two brilliant books, and countless better-paying freelance gigs later, we're losing FreeDarko, and it is a goddamn shame. True, given its NBA focus and demanding prose, there was no way that FD could ever get the traffic or recognition of Deadspin or countless inferior sports blogs, but within these archives is the inspiration for an entire generation of sports bloggers. FreeDarko was never meant to be the Rolling Stones; it was always Captain Beefheart. Or the Pixies. Or a rapper I should probably know about.

Brian Philips: Sportswriters of a certain vintage, if you ask them what it's all been about, will tend to reply that sportswriting is the greatest job in the world because it gives you "a window on the culture." What they mean by this is that writing about sports is also a way of writing about the stuff that intersects with sports, the big issues, which are bigger than sports and which, unlike sports, are important. Race, poverty, the American dream, celebrity, even the culture-transcending human stuff like hope and tragedy and despair--it's all wonderfully mixed up in the games people play with a ball, and writing about the games can, therefore, be a way of easing into the rest of it, voyaging into the green expanse in a sort of purpose-built golf cart.

The problem I've always had with this view is not that it's untrue but that sportswriters tend to have a phenomenally specialized idea of what culture is. Culture in sportswriting is, not coincidentally, the news as viewed from the back page of the paper: a blurry amalgalm of social-issues headlines filtered through a set of feature-writing formulas, material you can pilot straight down the middle of a mainstream magazine piece. The high-school basketball team in a racially divided small town. The linebacker struggling to keep his focus after his father goes to jail. You can write a lot of this before you read it. Whereas in my view, and I think in most people's lived experience, culture is very seldom broken up into neat snippets of significance--all those anvils that fall from the sky whenever Muhammad Ali comes around--but is a weird and alluring mix of steampunk websites, obscure soul music, motorcycle fan clubs, flavored Chapstik, Dickens novels, psychic breakdowns on Facebook, and people who keep alligators as pets. It's a mess, basically, because it's whatever people do.

It took a first-time reader, I would guess, about eleven seconds of staring at this website to realize that this was the view of culture it brought into sports, and once your neurons lined up, it was a revelation. I will always be grateful to FreeDarko for making me think I wasn't crazy to see all of this magazine-award-unfriendly flux--steampunk websites et. al.--as also having to do with sports and as liable to produce its own surprising meanings when you drew out the connections. (So, say, run a picture of somebody's Dungeons and Dragons group in the middle of a story about the Heat, or, and they really did this one, stage a mock draft for your favorite dinosaurs.) But the thing I admired most about the site was that, for all the postmodern-seeming juxtapositions you get when you take your mandate as "whatever people do," precisely because that was its mandate FreeDarko was always about people, and avoided better than anyone else the almost unavoidable trap of writing about athletes like they're fictional characters, or worse, like they're memes. The authors respected everybody's brains, even the people's they were writing about. Amid all the interstellar lunacy, it was a fundamentally compassionate place. I am seriously going to miss it.

Alana G: There are certain brands that are so strong, their names take on a meaning of their own. No one thinks of actual third world banana republics when they enter a Banana Republic retail store, and KFC no longer has anything to do with Kentucky. "Free Darko" is so much about intelligent basketball analysis that those of us who have been fans of the site forget what the name actually refers to. (Rasheed Wallace does not.) I feel honored to have been a small part of something whose legacy will be far more important than anything to do with Mr. Milicic.

Dan Filowitz: It's hard to believe FreeDarko ever existed. How did something that intelligent and unusual exist in the world of sports, or anywhere? I'm sure I wasn't the only one to feel a sense of shock and elation when I first stumbled across it. How amazing that there was something out there that spoke directly to that part of my brain, the one that wanted to think beyond sportscaster over-simplications and jock platitudes and tired truisms that weren't really true.

That they stuck around as long as they did, instead of disappearing into the void, like so many thousands of blogs created a thousand times a day? That they achieved the level of success they did, publishing books (books! more than one!) and Reebok commercials and everything? Truly incredible.

That I was lucky enough to be invited to be part of the family? I can remember the day Ken and I got the email asking us to join forces. It was a similar sensation to finding out that girl you always had a crush on wanted to go to prom with you (if prom was filled with mostly hyper-intelligent like-minded jokers.) And, unlike how a lot of those stories go, this one didn't end up being disappointing. These last couple of years have been a blast.

Now FreeDarko is going away. And as time goes on, it will be harder and harder to believe that it ever existed. Who would be convinced that such a thing could be?

We're keeping the name, and Ken and I will keep doing the podcast for the foreseeable future. So we'll be a signpost, a marker, a reminder that once, something beautiful and strange lived and flourished here. And won't be easily forgotten.

Kenneth Paul Drews: When Kevin Pelton was on the DOC podcast earlier in the season, I asked him to name an easily identifiable number to indicate that a young player was due for a dramatic improvement. His immediate answer was a high rate of turnovers, which seems counterintuitive but really means that a young player who frequently gives away the ball is doing so because he is attacking the game with imagination and fearlessness. From an antectodal perspective, I suggest that you watch an unabridged Celtics game from the 1980’s on YouTube and take not of how many of Larry Bird’s passes to teammates flashing through the lane wound up bobbled or deflected; yes, the traffic in the lane and the speed of the cutter made such passes difficult, but it's kind of a good thing that that Bird was always willing to reward an aggressive cut.

I am in love with the notion that failure-with-gusto is an important element of success; it seems like the primary bit of wisdom that I should pass along to my son after we get the whole “aim your pee at the bowl” thing sorted out. When anybody on FreeDarko failed, it was never for a lack of fearlessness or imagination. They wrote strange things about strange basketball subjects and the fear of being exposed to criticism or failing to execute never seemed to throttle that strangeness. At different moments I have found articles at FreeDarko to be self-congratulatory, long-winded, needlessly complicated, over-simplified, oversimplified yet cloaked in needless complexity, boring, or just plain dopey. You may have bailed on a post or three after 200 word. The site was a salon for writing nerds and guest writing nerds to freaking go for it because, well, why the hell not?

Rafe Bartholomew: Basketball media seem to be subject to the invisible hand. It ushers reporters, columnists, commentators and bloggers towards certain themes, whether it be old-school notions of "character guys" or the recent hysteria over advanced metrics. If you want to be heard, it pays to stay within those boundaries. FreeDarko was a refuge from the market forces, a place where writers could scribble outside the lines and still be reTweeted, even if we were mostly preaching to a choir of like-minded--or is it self-styled?--hoops deviants.

Regardless, if you wanted to lay the seeds for your eventual book-length defense of Bonzi Wells's genius; or if, even better, you came up with a half-legitimate parallel between the lives of Orson Welles and Bonzi Wells (early splendor followed by bloated decline, perhaps?); or if, as in my case, you were fascinated with the culture and tradition of the sport in a Southeast Asian nation that's better known for a transcendent boxer, karaoke-rage killings and government graft than basketball, FreeDarko was home.

Jack Hamilton: FreeDarko was, for me, about that rush of finding something you’d known you’d always wanted but had never quite been able to visualize, that rare and wonderful feeling that’s really speaks to the best of the internet. It was an obsessive playground for people who care more than they should about things most others find frivolous, but also for people who care exactly as much as they should about things about which others should care more: race, cultural politics, aesthetics, shit, even just critical thinking and analysis. It gave a voice to those of us who see through baseball’s vapid sentimentalism and football’s bullying aspirations to hegemony and hold professional basketball—despite of and because of its myriad imperfections—to be the best we have to offer.

If people don’t get that then we’re sorry for them, but we also kind of think they can go fuck themselves, and it was this twisted position that FreeDarko articulated more beautifully than any of our wildest dreams. It was the smartest site about sports I’ve ever read, and often the funniest, but it’s the writing that I’ll take with me, the kind that made you copy and paste entire paragraphs into emails to send to friends and sometimes even had you typing paragraphs into emails just to feel the jealous rush of them emanating from your own fingers. My own contributions to FreeDarko rank among my favorite pieces of anything that I’ve ever written, it was a privilege to serve in every clichéd and un-clichéd sense of that word, and I’m pretty sure everyone else who ever wrote here feels the same way. All best in Slovenian farm league analysis and reporting since 1968 aside, FreeDarko is all one hell of a legacy.

Ethan Sherwood Strauss: FreeDarko means carving a niche into an invisible mountain. Since it happened, anything is possible. Smart people can dream up an entire medium from scratch, and gain an audience--provided the work is good. And that notion is helping to fuel my own grandiosity, narcissism and desire to re-appropriate basketball into a camera I shove inside my guts. Oh well, all great revolutions have some nasty unintended consequences.

I owe a debt of gratitude to Shoals for prompting my Ricky Rubio article. Over the course of editing, he looked out for my interests in a way that may have preemptively saved a career. Thank you.

Gordon Gartrelle: Because winning/losing is its ultimate arbiter of value, the realm of sports often attracts the kind of black/white thinking that thinking people abhor. Generally speaking, mainstream sports discourse is as uncritical, stale, retrograde, and conformist as mainstream political discourse. Five years ago, I was consumed with the latter as a Political Science Ph.D. student feeling not quite right about my choice to pursue academia.

Part of what grounded me was writing like mad about the pernicious racialized elements of sports writing and rap criticism, subjects that interested me but that were, at best, only tangentially related to my dissertation. When I should have been reading Habermas and Bourdieu, I was spending my time seeking out writers who bashed middle-aged white guy sportswriter and rock critic clichés. My search led me to one established giant, Ralph Wiley, and one nascent cluster of genius, Freedarko. Of course, Wiley and Freedarko weren’t the only ones offering nuanced sports narratives, but more than anyone else, they spoke to me.

I marveled at Wiley’s passion and style, but I read his archived material chiefly for the content: the brilliant mix of contempt, insight, and humor that somehow slipped through the cracks and made it into a mainstream sports outlet. My attraction to Freedarko was, like the writing on the site, more nebulous. Their methodology was alien, but intriguing. Their approach was so captivating, they actually made me more sympathetic to (post)modern literary criticism, which I loathed at the time, but now merely dislike.

I grew up in a place with no pro teams and have resided in 4 major cities, so I have no regional or emotional attachment to any team. I’ve always rooted for individual players and weirdos. I still root for the athletes the mainstream sports media vilify. That a group of hyperliterate hoop savants could define my sports-watching ethos--“liberated fandom”--so perfectly was just icing on the cake.

And that style? Let me put it this way: if George Gervin’s game could be translated into written word, I’m convinced it would read like Freedarko.

Pasha Malla: Recently I met up with an author I admired but had never met to talk about soccer. Beforehand, I described myself to this person over email: "Not very tall, badly shaven, worse haircut, hooded sweatshirt probably, glasses." The guy wrote back: "I'm the same -- but aren't we all?"

I met Shoals once, in New York. We went to some famous restaurant and ate brisket or smoked meat or something. Shoals wasn't wearing glasses (maybe contacts?) but he otherwise fit the bill. It's sort of disheartening as an adult to realize that you're a type, but then once the shame fades I guess there's something nice about it too. What I'm saying is that our lunch was sort of gay, but gay in the way that the gay teenager from rural Saskatchewan runs away to San Francisco and wanders down Castro Street in a sort of daze like, "Holy fuck, there are other people like me?!"

I think any "community" is sort of bullshit, but it'd be hard to think of FD as anything else. Or at least a sort of communal hub. Or at least a sort of rec centre with NBA League Pass on the bigscreen, except everyone watches games with the sound down because they're funnier than most of the announcers and talk about players in terms that bring them to life better than points-in-the-paint graphics and corporate-sponsored replays.

Someone I know once described FD as "a bunch of semiotics majors who went to Brown." I wasn't really sure what that was supposed to mean, and when I asked Shoals he said, "You can be a semiotics major?" I don't know. But, in some way, aren't we all?

Zac Crain: At its best, and it almost always was, FreeDarko seemed to me like one of the worlds inside the world that Don DeLillo wrote about. (And while I'm here: a place where you could casually make reference to DeLillo and writers and other things much more obscure, and it made sense.) Or, I guess, a conversation inside the conversation. Or a [something] inside the [something]. I will not give up on my self-generated meme. It elevated the game by reducing it, to a team, or a player, or an idea, or some intersection. I would have loved, just once, to have seen/heard a broadcast of an NBA game as mounted by the FD team. I suppose there is still time.

Bob Bjarke: Reading FreeDarko got me through a divorce, three disastrous haircuts and the 2006-2007 NBA playoffs. Without the insight found on these pages, I would be lost in a sea of Gene Wojciechowski and also probably a Knicks fan. There's nothing quite like the time spent trying to figure out why a particular image has been selected to begin or end and particular blog post. Thank you, FD.

Rough Justice: I’m not prone to letting the first person seep into anything I write. I get too self-conscious too quickly. However, though I have no interest in trying to quantify the specific impact of FreeDarko on the basketball (and general) sports discourse, it know changed the way I let myself think about sports. I cut my informed fandom teeth on baseball, where following Bill James and his disciples down the rabbit hole of statistics was the key to slipping beyond the received wisdom of ex-athletes and vapid talking heads.

If sabermetrics shepherded me into a Mario 2-esque netherworld, where RBIs told you less than walks and OPS was a shibboleth, stumbling onto FD did nothing less than kick down the artificial walls I had constructed between my aesthetic appreciation of athletic endeavor and my broader opinions of what it meant. It had simply never occurred to me that I could approach the sports I cared about the same way I do the books, movies, and other sundry entertainments that clutter my mental life. I have never felt the need to disassociate myself from rooting for specific teams, but freeing myself from the constraints of received sporting wisdom was dizzying. If you stop taking the intentional fallacy that gets packaged with highlights on SportsCenter at face value, things really get interesting. So even though the blog is shuttering its doors. I’m not sweating it. The FD team is just taking its game elsewhere, and Internet discourse is one big balkanized playground. Plenty of people these days are more than happy to train their personal lens on whatever game and/or league moves them. You can’t unliberate fandom.

Matt Kreishner: If pro basketball, as I’ve been told, is the closest metaphor for life we can find in sport,then Free Darko is its over-dubbed narrator. With the voice of a Jewish Morgan Freeman, we are taught the inherent tragedy begetting success or the often hypocritical view of disappointment. We've learned to embrace Monta in his quiet vigor, Delonte in his tragic struggle, and Hakeem in all his glory. We, the basketball obsessed, have come to view FreeDarko as our sounding board, as well as our reality check.

The life of the basketball obsessed is a trial by disappointment. We wait for moments of transcendence we know are possible; game-winners and other feats of heroics, even juicier if produced through sacrificing of one's body, are evidence of the perfection of form and timing, athleticism and grace we so long to observe. We look to and rely upon our own insight to predict the fleeting instances when basketball ends and art begins because it is here, sports fan as Nostradamus, where the justification of our obsession lies. It is in this schism between expectation and reality where FreeDarko has found importance. After all, the beauty of life, and basketball, is seen not in its moments of aleatory perfection, but in the daily existence of hope and pain, of comedy and tragedy inherent in its daily grind. In the timeless words of Sammy Hagar- "you miss the beat, you lose the rhythm."

Corban Goble: With Free Darko, the lucid outsider lens became not only an acceptable angle through which to cover sports, it’s now the preferable way to do it. I was insantly hooked; it’s like zine culture applied to sports and blown out on the Internet, and people dug it on a really cult level. Radical shit, for sure. I will miss the site, but its spirit survives in all the weird, left-field sports blogs that Free Darko inspired. Special thanks to Shoals for keeping tabs on me, and I’ll be obviously following your flowering careers as you engage different projects.

Kevin Pelton: I was always FreeDarko; I just didn't know it. Like many NBA fans, I glorified in oddball players who failed to fit neatly into the league's bucketed roles long before there was a website devoted to them, but it was only once I realized that FreeDarko was not in fact dedicated to tracking the progress of Darko Milicic's career that I realized there were so many like-minded individuals out there. FreeDarko legitimized the combination of literary writing and sports, previously the near-exclusive province of baseball, and proved that appreciating aesthetic beauty was compatible with being aware of bottom-line statistical value. For that, I will eternally be grateful.

Plus Shoals gave me a ride back to my hotel on Saturday, so that was convenient. Thanks.

Sebastian Pruiti: As far back as I can remember, I was always someone who watched basketball with an eye towards teams as a whole and Xs and Os, instead of looking at individuals. I had my favorite players sure, but when I watched games I focused on how they interacted/worked within the philosophy of the team. When I came across FreeDarko, their fantastic writing (both online and with their first book) got me thinking about and appreciating the individual style of the players in the league. Even though I still mainly focused on the Xs and Os, I can still appreciate the individualism of the game thanks in large part to FreeDarko.

Randy Kim: As an editor who started out in this business as an aspiring writer, Free Darko makes me think of a scene from Mike Nichols' horrible-but-terrific 1994 film, "Wolf". There's one scene -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- where James Spader, playing a sleazy New York book editor, tells one of his publishing house's talented authors: "I always wanted to be a writer. Until I read your work. Then I realized I'd never be good enough." As an actor, Spader sells the line well, making his character's own personal mix of disappointment and respect feel genuine.

The line always stuck with me because at some point along the way, you will have at least one (or in my case, two or three) of those moments where, no matter how much you trust in your own abilities, you will encounter others who are so much better than you at what you had always hoped to do, that their mastery of the craft could threaten to send you into a tailspin if you let yourself dwell upon your own relative insufficiency for too long.

Free Darko was always a place I would go not just to read about hoops, but to bathe myself in the glorious, scratchy shame of inadequacy.

I'm just thankful they let me play along. I wear the wool shirt with pride, Nathaniel. Thank you.

Paul Flannery: I came late to the party, long after the theories were hashed out in the public realm, and to be honest I still don’t really know what FreeDarko actually means. I can accept that because to me FD has always worked better as a concept than a strict set of guidelines. It was a place to explore and let the mind wander and that is an infinitely more valuable thing to have created than a nebulous philosophy about weird basketball players.

Over the last few years I’ve had Dr. LIC speak at my journalism class, shared tapas with Shoals and enjoyed a mighty fine sandwich with Freeman while discussing Thomas Pynchon. That quite honestly blows my mind when I stop to think about the feeling of wonder I had when I encountered the first book in a shop in Harvard Square. I decided two things immediately. First, this was fucking brilliant and, second I had to find out more about these dudes. Now that I have, I find the whole FD experience even more amazing. There was no reason for it and yet it somehow became essential. Like Mission of Burma, or something. We were all richer for its existence and now I suspect we will be that much poorer without it. Long live FreeDarko, whatever it was.

Dan Devine: Years before I became incredibly famous, I was a scared-ass stan who looked at this place with slack-jawed wonder, staring through my monitor like it was a department store window at something I couldn't quite describe but desperately, desperately wanted. The idea that you could like things because they were awesome, independent of geography or tribalism, without being somehow less-than, was transformational to me. The prose, the stats, the Z-graphs, the pictures -- those beautiful, beautiful original ones and those curious, curious repurposed ones -- everything about this site just sang.

I feel privileged to have gotten to write something here that I'm still really proud of when I re-read it today. I feel lucky to have made a couple of friends (or at least fond acquaintances) here, and that I get to continue to work with a member of this crew every day. I feel grateful -- seriously, with-all-my-heart grateful -- that Shoals made me realize how trying to tie "Jordan was a different animal" to "G.O.A.T." and actually meaning it was tantamount to basketball-writing suicide. (That was a life-saving edit.)

I feel sorry to watch this place go, but thrilled beyond the telling of it that it ever existed, because it needed to, and I don't think the rest of us would have ever known how to create it if it didn't. Thanks for everything, guys.

Wayne Washington: It was a similar feeling to watching Adult Swim for the first time. What the hell did I just read? That was my first impression but I was instantly a fan. It was refreshing to read basketball written with different tone. The emphasis of style, creativity, and being unique gave the reader more than the usual statistics and catch phrases that comprise a majority of sports journalism. I would like to thank FreeDarko for opening the door and allowing a player/writer such as myself to contribute to the site. The intelligent humor and peculiar observations will most definitely be missed. Thanks for the memories.

Jason Johnson: When given the opportunity to share what Free Darko means to me, my first inclination was to focus on the adjective, because frankly, I geek out over shit like that. Ascribing a nebulously defined and completely subjective traits to people I’ve never met has long been a hobby of mine (for what it’s worth Allen Iverson is the only person in history to be Hip-Hop and Punk, and Free Darko). Unfortunately for me, this blog has explored Free Darko, the adjective far more thoughtfully and eloquently than I’m capable of doing at this time, or dare I say it, on my best day. That leaves with no choice other than sticking to the assignment, so here it is: FreeDarko is music criticism from a bizarro universe where basketball actually is jazz.

Yago Colás: The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History provided a structuring backbone to my Cultures of Basketball course. It also served as a rich, beautiful literary text the close reading of which helped me clarify and develop my own reflections on hoops history at Go Yago! The History exemplified for me and my students a way of thinking about the game that pays thoughtful attention to its social, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions without sacrificing smart analysis of what happens on the court. And Bethlehem Shoals has been a generous interlocutor and even a friend over the past several months. Among other things, he also lent his position and credibility to my own fledgling blog and in so doing sharing that premium internet commodity: the attentive reader.

William Blake says that “He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence.” In relation to basketball, until late last summer, I was desiring and acting not, and I was breeding pestilence. My fiancée Claire, my playground posse in St. Louis, my students at Michigan, and Free Darko all helped me learn to act. So Free Darko.com, in some way, will always stand alongside a few others in a group of those who remind that I’m not alone in my struggle to act on my desires and who by their own example inspire me to carry on in the effort to put more, rather than less, of myself into a world that often seems inhospitable. I’ll miss Free Darko and the particular promise of possibility that it offered. But I have firmly in hand the most important thing that it provided me: the sense that I can make a home in the world for my visions and maybe, in the process, make the world more of a home for someone else as well.

Fat Contradiction:

I remember when we shared a vision, you and I.
--the Mountain Goats, "Estate Sale Sign", All Eternals Deck, 2011

I'm not even sure I should be here. I'll bellow about having been a fellow traveller, but in point of fact I contributed exactly one piece to the FreeDarko oeuvre, and it came at an end-stage moment, when the site qua site could probably best have been described as "moribund" (neither dissing nor dismissing the many triumphs of Yago Colas). I know it is neither appropriate nor accurate to bemoan the shutdown frozen loss of the site: young men with free time become married men whose musings need to turn into words that can be exchanged for cash money, and I do not begrudge that (of the men, anyway: the world yet must answer for its wrongs). I do not begrudge it and yet I fear that the FreeDarko content (superstructure)--spread out into the wider world, perhaps not even tendrils anymore, perhaps just diffuse, atomized...vibes--will suffer from not having a hub (base). The smart and wise components of FreeDarko are in the world, to be sure, and sure they comprise a genre won't be lost. My fear is that without a locus and emblem, the genre'll end up more marginalized and largely forgotten power pop, rather than here-vital, there-misappropriated punk. There's no retreat or surrender.

The future will always hold a space for making a detailed and passionate case for interpretation and analysis beyond brute wins/losses, for arguing that these athletic exhibitions can mean on levels biographical and historical, for championing engagement beyond jingoism, for all the intelligence and joy, all the ferocity and levity, the in-group pandering and the friendly winking, for strident insistence and patient hints and for, maybe most of all, celebrating overlooked wonders in the face of the oppressive hegemonic dullardry that constitutes most public talking-and-thinking-about-sports. There will always, always (now) be a space for FreeDarko. But there are things only happen on the playground and never in the marketplace. That's why I'm frankly angry and sad about the closing off of the FreeDarko site as a venue for FreeDarko work. Maybe I shouldn't be here on this day, but this is a funeral, and you can't ask me to act like it isn't.

--Fat Contradiction, townsman of a stiller town

Eric Nusbaum: I'm bummed to see FreeDarko go but thrilled to have had the belated chance to contribute. When I started my own blog, it was because I wanted to write. Baseball was just a topic. FD opened me up to think a blog could be something fresh, literary, non-derivative -- and actually popular. We even made jokes about changing the name from Pitchers & Poets to FreeGarko. (I like to think we're of the same spirit, but you know, not plagiarizing.)

If the site of FD hasn't influence my prose style, it has definitely influenced my perspective and emboldened my ambitions. More than any other blog, book, entity of any kind, FD has influenced the way I think about sports. What does it mean to me? FreeDarko means liberal arts education for the sportsreading public. FD isn't about the facts you learn or the texts you read, it's about learning how to think.

David Roth: It feels odd, contributing to the particular bit of meta-history, given that these are the first words I've ever written at Free Darko. (I might've left a comment on the long-ago discussion of whether or not Elie Seckbach's I-got-to-be-semi-bullied-by-Kobe-Bryant videos were Bad For The Jews, but I'm not going to check that right now) But I think I've nonetheless written a few Free Darko words, and I've certainly tried to. What that means to me is both very clear in its generalities and a little opaque in its specifics. I know when I see it, though, and I know I'm proud when I see myself managing it -- it's a dead seriousness anti-seriousness, and a sort of manifestly engaged and passionate distance.

As someone who has to read a lot of sportswriting for (one of) my regular freelance gigs, I can attest to the fact that, as influential as the FD outlook has been to those who care about this sort of thing, it is not at all widespread in the broader discourse. Writing about sports is still dominated by hysterical overreaction and dour fake seriousness and bad, bad prose. There is a lot of witless, unself-aware grumping going on, still, and an around-the-clock outrage-manufacturing apparatus pumping reeking columns of bummer-y pollution. In a macro sense, Free Darko has not changed this, and much of what's out there to read is not appreciably more Free Darko for the work that has been done here at Free Darko. But of course that's not at all it.

Because for the people who care about this stuff -- of whom there are a lot, and who care a lot -- this site and these ideas did change a great deal. Not just about how we understand positionality or being fans or watching basketball or whatever, but about how we care about and how we feel about caring about all this BS. Because all the sour half-assery and fake huffiness and grumpy grumpiness I just mentioned has for so long defined the way we talk about sports, and because so much of the ostensible voice-of-the-fan stuff that has come along and supposedly challenged it since does not really sound like the voice of any fan I'd want to hang out with, Free Darko was that much more necessary and welcome and bracing. It's not quite as simple as Free Darko demonstrating that it was possible to write about sports in a Free Darko way, one that was intelligent and aware and amusing and liberated (I know, I know) from the strictures of the old ways, and demonstrating it in a way that was fun enough to make others want to do it. But it's not a lot more complicated than that, either. And while I'll miss Free Darko as a venue for all this, I don't imagine I'll have a chance to miss Free Darko in its adjectival sense. This style and idea and approach are not going anywhere, and long after this site is swallowed by the void -- or bobs around in it and gets embarrassing, a la the Space Jam website -- people are going to be trying to do this. I will be, at least.

Silverbird5000: It's been an honor to be part of FreeDarko since it's earliest days, though I regret my contributions have been increasingly infrequent. As a resident statistician here and in print, I suppose I conceived my role to be the mobilization of empirical data in support of FD's moral, spiritual and aesthetic agenda. When it comes to the statistical analysis of sports, the overwhelming share of man’s energy has been devoted to problems of evaluation, ranking, measurement. All are entirely worthwhile concerns, yet buried in the same data are countless other insights and mysteries in need of excavation, and that, for me, is what FreeDarko is/was about. Conceptual insights that bubbled up from blog posts and their comment threads – ideas like Liberated Fandom or The Positional Revolution – have empirical referents that need to be quantified, tabulated and visualized.

Then there are the players and teams themselves. Every television show, radio program, or debate among friends on the subject of sports almost always boils down to a single conversation topic: who’s the best and why. FreeDarko was no different, except the conversation lasted more than half a decade and instead of “best” we substituted our own eponymous superlative. And like the idea of the Positional Revolution, the question of "Who is FreeDarko and Why" had a statistical answer as well as a philosophical one. Arenas’ propensity to take unnecessarily deep 3’s, or Sheed’s singular appetite for technical fouls – these were among the qualities that made such players our own. To discover that these qualities were not simply accidental but had a statistical rationale both confirmed our affections and deepened them. Or so I like to believe.

Still, there is more work to be done. Since the blog began in 2005 and the books were published, several stats-oriented sites have been born that share a kindred spirit with our own. I believe there’s room for at least one more, and so (IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT), in the next couple months, I hope to launch a new FD spin-off stats site, in collaboration with Big Baby Belafonte/Jacob Weinstein, with the goal of continuing the statistical and visualization project that began with our blog and books. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for several years now I'm hoping to finally launch a Beta version sometime during the playoffs. So keep an eye of the FD Twitter feed for updates.

Brown Recluse, Esq.: As proud as I am of everything FreeDarko has accomplished over the past six and a half years, I still feel something like Eddie House popping my jersey at the end of a blowout victory in the NBA Finals--these aren’t really my accomplishments. But, even Kobe’s 81-point game was a team victory, so I’ll take the W and bring out the championship ring for special occasions such as this. We all know that Shoals is a gifted writer with a very specific, sometimes incomprehensible worldview, and he has written many brilliant pieces both in this space and elsewhere, but it’s the team efforts that I’ll remember most fondly--the epic Every Game Preview, the absurd game chats, psychoanalyzing each other based on our favorite players, somehow making the playoffs a battle between Asians and Jews. Personal and professional commitments (including my commitment to being lazy) have made it difficult for me to write much lately, and I’ve been effectively retired for a while now, but it’s nice to know that the blog will remain here, so I can come back to visit, stroll through the locker room, and think about how we changed the game.

Dr. LIC: In 2004, I was walking around Berkeley with a friend from college telling him about a new type of sportswriting I wanted to try, except I wasn’t making any sense to him. I didn’t know myself exactly what I meant, but I knew it was somewhere to the left of Bill Simmons (whom I read obsessively pre-2004 World Series), somewhat DFW-inspired, but with shorter words, and something that allowed me to work in references to Gravediggaz. I really couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew there was a gap to be filled in the (at the time) internet wasteland of sportswriting.

Then I started reading Chauncey Billups’ inimitable blog, and saw a world of possibilities greater than I could have ever imagined. Through the comments section on Billups’ site I reconnected with Bethlehem Shoals, someone I knew through internet exchanges since I was 16. It turned out Shoals and his college/high school friends had their own plan for a blog that was creative and new in its own right, and he invited me to join. The early crew that consisted of Shoefly, Brown Recluse, Esq, Big Baby, El Huracan Andreo, Silverbird, and Shoals had this outsider humor among them that only develops between friends if you’re like, the Beastie Boys or something. I tried to catch on and soon got my own groove going, but it was only through following Shoals’ lead. The irreverent titles, the wacky pictures, the writing like you’re driving off of a cliff, this was Shoals’ genius branding that continued through the present day and has inspired countless people to write about sports with some soul.

I can’t believe it resulted in two books, getting to watch the Recluse ask Thabo Sefolosha about South African jazz in the Bulls locker room, fanmail and shout-outs from people like JA Adande and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, helping to produce a t-shirt that just says SWAG on it in 2007, getting to write for outlets ranging from The Crier to Sports Illustrated, getting to hang out with Will Leitch, attending the best wedding ever (Shoals’), and this post, which is my favorite thing I have ever been a part of. I can’t believe how many genius people have written for this site over the years and how many opportunities it has opened up for us. Thank you Free Darko for making me a happier, less depressed, less anxious person.

April 11, 2011 — The following is a statement from Big Baby Belafonte, née Jacob Weinstein, regarding his retirement from FreeDarko and basketball

After a great deal of thought, as well as discussion with my family and friends, I have decided to retire from basketball. This is a difficult decision, and it is an emotional moment for me.

Ever since I was a small boy, I dreamed of collaborating with my friends while illustrating strange athletes at the highest level of competition. I dreamed of being part of a strange basketball blog. I dreamed of working on strange basketball books. Thanks to my teammates and the support of many other people, all of these strange dreams have come true.

My physical skills are as strong as ever. But the mental aspect is not the same—the challenge is no longer as great. I promised myself—and I have said many times publicly—that when the mental challenge began to fade, I would leave. That time is now here.

I thank all of the teammates and coaches I have been associated with throughout my career, and especially my teammates here at FreeDarko A blog such as this is first and foremost a team game. We have won championships at FreeDarko because of teamwork and team unity. I cherish those championships with FreeDarko more than anything else.

I am grateful to the FreeDarko organization for providing me with so many great opportunities. But most of all, I thank the fans. You accepted me the day I arrived as a young illustrator from New Delhi. Your support has always given me added inspiration and motivation.

In the coming months, I look forward to spending more time with my family, something that was not always possible because of the demands of FreeDarko. I also have other things I hope to accomplish, especially in the world of table tennis. I hope, too, that you will respect my privacy, and that of my family, in the days ahead.

I wish the very best to my FD teammates in all of their future endeavors. I'm sure many of us will meet again on the court, in some shape or form. I will always be a part of FreeDarko and a FreeDarko fan. My family and I have made FreeDarko our home, and we have a special place in our hearts for the blog and its people.

The basketball blogging community is the strongest professional sports blogging community in the world. The league and the game are bigger than any one blog—FreeDarko included—and they always will be. I hope that today's bloggers—especially our young bloggers—continue to recognize that simple fact. Nothing is more important than the game itself and the fans who support it.

I am privileged to have been a part of FreeDarko.

Bethlehem Shoals: When we started FreeDarko, we thought we knew everything. We had doctrine, catch-phrases, invented theories, and an extensive list of heroes and villains. There was even an uncompromising house style, one whose major influence, as far as I could tell, was Babelfish. I guess you could say we were ideologues, or fancied ourselves a movement, except we didn't. It just seemed like the only reasonable way to charge in and start making bold, possibly faulty, points about professional sports. We were wrong as often as we were right, and we knew it, but part of the fun was never letting on that we cared—or even noticed.

At some point, that started to change. Maybe it was when we took on a few new writers; realized the comments section was probably a better read than some of the posts; or first started getting approached about outside work. The pretense started to fall away, we tried to stake out some middle ground, occasionally. And when necessary, we would reverse our judgments, sometimes even acknowledging that the teams we liked the least might have something of value to offer the world. Certainty has always been an important part of the FD experience. But we were at our best when we drew it from, say, the Believe! Warriors or LeBron in Detroit. The original SSOL squad, our first heroes, didn't need us to prop them up. They were pushing us all along, and it's because of moments like these—or any number of Gilbert Arenas game-winners—that FreeDarko has reached the heights is has. It was never about us. We did it because of, maybe even for, them. Liberated or otherwise, this always was a fansite at heart.

Now, when I look back at the first year or so, or even try to make peace with an idea like Liberated Fandom or the Positional Revolution, I find myself less certain than ever. That's not to say the game no longer inspires me, or that I've run out of ideas. Nor is a commentary on the tremendous letdown—aesthetically, competitively, politically, and anything else you can think of—that the Heat's season has come to represent. I think it's more that, after six years, I'm trying harder than ever to just listen to the game, and take those scraps of truth and insight where I can. This kind of decentralization may not be as fun, but it's more honest, and certainly more durable. And really, it's taking the real point of FreeDarko and casting aside all its former egotism. Or, if you want, realizing that revolutions and movements either burn out, go underground, or fade into what's next. Whatever it is, I blame basketball.

You See What You See

2011-03-31T02:06:00.008-04:00

Hi, I'm Eric Nusbaum. I write a baseball blog called Pitchers & Poets with my friend Ted, and sometimes other friends. I've also written for Slate and been an anthology, one time each.

Forgive me. I'm primarily a baseball writer and as such I can't help but turning to childhood memories and nostalgia. It's a reflex. It can also be a coping mechanism. I can be wrong about basketball statistics or strategy or the finer points of its history. But if I'm wrong about myself, then at least you can't prove it.

For example: I was born in 1986 in Los Angeles. I was a sports-obsessed kid. I never cared about Michael Jordan.

Instead, I loved Nick Van Exel. When I shot hoops at the park, Van Exel was the player I pretended to be. This was true from his debut in 1993 until his departure from the Lakers in 1998. My interest may have lingered into one or two of Van Exel's Denver seasons. I don't remember.

Michael Jordan did not belong to me. He was a grimacing bald villain who wore villainous colors and played in a villainous distant city. He was an East Coast player, an Eastern Conference player. In my imagination, East Coast and Eastern Conference belonged to the same amorphous and distant reality. It was cold there and it had nothing to do with Showtime, which was what basketball was supposed to be, and in the mid-1990s, what Los Angeles still wanted it to be.

I grew up in the aftermath of Showtime. We were aware of it, my friends and I, but we only knew Showtime as some inexplicable ideal that the adults of the world placed firmly in the past. Showtime was shadows. It was a mystery. At one point, I must have thought Showtime was a person. Then I thought all fast-breaks were Showtime.

Michael Jordan was fodder for the unimaginative half of the playground. He was too easy to like, too easy to worship. It was too easy to stick out your tongue. Jordan was a brand. He was a constant. And he bored me. I realize now how absurd it is to write that. But what's so interesting about greatness? Why settle for distant beauty when there's something surprising and dynamic and kinetic happening just down the street at the Great Western Forum and on TV every night?

When I started writing this I didn't remember much about Nick Van Exel. I remembered that his nickname was Nick the Quick. I remembered that he feuded with Del Harris and that I never liked Del Harris after that. I remembered Eddie Jones, because Nick Van Exel and Eddie Jones were like the Batman and Batman of those Laker teams. I did not remember how exciting he was to watch. Or that he once shoved a referee. I don't think I ever knew that he was from Kenosha, Wisconsin, that he played one season at a community college in Texas, that his first name Nick is short for Nickey, not Nicholas.

Take fifteen minutes to watch him on YouTube. You'll see him passing up a wide open Vlade Divac for a transition three. You'll see him throwing half-court alley-oop lobs to Shaq. You'll see him putting Kenny Smith on the floor with a spin move and then popping a mid-range jumper. Nick Van Exel spun circles – not around anybody necessarily, just in general.

But maybe that wasn't the only thing that drew me to Van Exel. His name was fun to say and his superfluous point guard stylings were easier to emulate than soaring slam dunks. His game was joyous, zealous even. He shadow-boxed after big shots. He took his free throws from a few steps behind the free throw line – the kind of quirk that doesn't have to make sense because in sports things don't have to make sense.Nick Van Exel smiled when he hit big shots.

Van Exel was a second round draft pick. Character concerns. But I didn't know that until I wrote this story. He behaved like a first round pick. He acted like he belonged not just on the court, not just with the ball in his hands and the game on the line, but on SportsCenter in perpetuity. And this was before you were supposed to act like that. I was a child. I knew nothing of questionable decision making. I knew nothing of efficiency. I knew nothing of his draft position. But it didn't matter to me.

At first, they didn't matter to Jerry West either. “I thought we had found a player who was going to be there for ten or fifteen years,” he says in Van Exel's Beyond the Glory Episode (available on Youtube.) “I rooted for him so much because I saw the rough edges going away.” The truth is, I saw the edges but not as rough. I saw them as dynamic. People talked about Van Exel. He merited opinions. He was a lot like my favorite Dodger player at the time, Raul Mondesi.

Raul Mondesi's career mirrored Nick Van Exels. He broke in at the same time, winning the 1994 Rookie of the Year Award. He swung at every pitch. He butted heads with managers. He showed off. There was a tattoo of a cannon on his right bicep, and sometimes between innings after he finished playing catch with a ball boy, Mondesi would toss a ball into the crowd and then show off the cannon. His arm was volatile. In the same way that Nick Van Exel might throw the occasional unnecessary no-look pass, Raul Mondesi would take the occasional unnecessary headfirst dive. Van Exel was traded after the 1998 season. Mondesi after the 1999 season.

Do the players we are drawn to as ignorant children say something about the kinds of fans we will become as less ignorant adults? I didn't know any better when I decided that Nick Van Exel was my favorite basketball player or that Raul Mondesi was my favorite baseball player – if it was even a decision at all. They weren't my favorites because they were the best – they weren't even the best players on their teams. But they were local and they were compelling. . I was just a kid in LA in the 90s seeking something exciting.

Boston, Stand Up

2011-03-27T18:02:00.003-04:00

Y'all,

It's been a while since I rapped at you. Here goes. In lieu of a Free Darko Boston appearance, I, Dr. LIC will be giving a talk at Boston Nerd Nite on hoops and social science, Monday night (tomorrow). It's going down at 8pm at the Middlesex Lounge in Cambridge. Details are here, hope to see you there.

Shoals All Around You

2011-03-24T15:54:00.002-04:00

-I'm covering the Bonds trial for The Daily. Will be in the court room next week; for now, here's one of my preliminary columns. Let them know if you enjoy my work for them!

-For TheAtlantic.com, a piece titled, simply, "Deconstructing Jimmer".

-The formidable Jonah Keri had Eric Freeman and me on his podcast, and we brought with us some haunted spirits that messed up the technology. Nevertheless, a spirited (ha!) and thoroughly enjoyable conversation.

Got a few other things in the works, too.

Where To Find Shoals

2011-03-18T13:58:00.001-04:00

Busy week for me. Check these out:

-For the Poetry Foundation, a consideration of OFWGKTA and shock language.

-Dropping by Page 2 to list my Least Important 2011 Free Agents.

-I learn to love March Madness over at TheAtlantic.com.

-My take on Onion News Network for AlterNet.

UPDATE: At Good Sports, I explore my strange and entitled relationship with UNC fandom. The Recluse will hate this.

Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: Exquisite Corpse (Day 15)

2011-03-13T20:07:00.003-04:00

I'm tense. Whenever something good happens (like being asked to play last week), I'm immediately afraid it of it breaking. So I'm tense. Not only is Shoals about to come to Michigan to visit class and give his talk, but the Big Ten Tournament was to begin on Thursday and, while my students weren’t actually scheduled to play until Friday, I’d already received the form e-mail informing that they’d be traveling to Indianapolis for the tournament on Thursday. Still I gripped tightly to the vain hope that they’d be there on Thursday. After all, we had so much to talk about: our intra-class game had evolved in my mind into an intra-class World Cup style 8 team two round tournament complete with jerseys, nicknames, team names and logos and a ping pong ball lottery to round out the eight teams (each of which would be headed by a UM player).

Alas, as I walked into the room, my heart sank: no players. The e-mail had spoken truth. There were more important things in their lives than this class and the intra-class tournament … more important things than me. It’s weird to me, but I guess I can understand it. And anyway, my heart didn’t sink too far, because the flipside of the players being gone is that there’s more room in our classroom and it’s easier to keep the discussion focused and, particularly, to keep it on the text. I’m sure it’s partly just that the lower numbers are easier for me to handle. Partly also that I am more properly teacherly when I’m faced with students who do not simultaneously embody a fantasy that decades I once harbored of what I might, but failed, to become. But also, though I hate to say it, it is because those damn players giggle and whisper to each other like 6th grade schoolgirls at recess. What’s up with that?

Still, even without the players, it took us a while to settle down. We had to discuss their chances in the Big Ten Tourney, plus the various projections about where they might be seeded in the NCAA tournament. Then, of course, we had to talk about our tournament – lots of announcements there. And then finally, we had to discuss Bethlehem Shoals upcoming visit to our classroom and his public lecture at Michigan. Then, Oh God! they actually proposed that we should hold our St. Patrick’s Day class meeting, which in all likelihood would also be Michigan’s first day in the NCAA tournament at a bar with beer, or, in class with beer where, it was proposed, we could watch tournament games via the projector in the classroom. I’m thinking that this class has gotten away from me. I’m thinking that I never had this class in the first place. I’m realizing that I have gotten away from me.

As usual, I regain a grip on myself by ruthlessly repressing them. “Settle down,” I intone, repeating the phrase as if they were preschoolers, “settle down now.” I feel like a phlebotomist jabbing at an elusive vein. Except I’m trying to jab at that button that I thought a repressive educational system would have installed in these students long ago: you know, the one that infantilizes them, makes them afraid of authority and humiliation and incapable of thinking for themselves.

"Go to your cubbies, take out your mats, It’s time to have a short nap. After that we’ll have snack and then we’ll watch clips of the young Michael Jordan to go along with Shoals’ chapter on the subject.” I know they’re not the only ones who are excited. In fact, they didn’t even start it today. Well, maybe they did. The truth is I don’t remember. I just know that we’ve burned a good twenty minutes on fun, happy-go-lucky, laissez-faire bullshit and it feels like what the announcers call a “turning point”. I need to get a stop right here. I do, they settle in to watch the video, but I think it’s less out of fear, or even respect, and more just out of a kind of bored indulgence in my fantasy that this is actually a university classroom and not an annex of Good Time Charley’s that just happens to be located on campus.

We watch the 4:35 seconds of NBA sponsored, pre 1990 MJ highlights. I feel like I’m at a Fireworks show. Darkness, silence, expectation, restlessness – each in his or her own private world from which we emerge periodically, briefly, to exchange a collective “ooh.” It is, it strikes me, as though we are staging a skit about the birth of language and society. Or perhaps it is more than that because we haven’t rehearsed or planned this ahead of time and we are surprisingly unselfconscious. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that in these sporadic, exchanged exhalations we are spontaneously living a moment like the ones from which language first emerged.

The lights come on and as always they break the spell. But somehow it seems gentler this time around. Maybe because even though the darkness has been dispelled, the silence pervades. I take a second to unhook cords, let the big screen roll back up, turn off equipment. Then I ask them what they saw besides elevation. Here is what they said:

1.Lots of run outs
2.Lots of isos
3 Few passes
4.Few jumpers
5.Everything at the rim
6.How adept he is at using his large hands and his body control to protect the ball in order to get a clean shot off in traffic.

All of these were accurate observations. In fact, I counted. The clip showed 24 different made baskets. Those 24 baskets came on 2 jump shots, 8 variations on the lay up, and 14 dunks. Tactically speaking, 11 of the 24 baskets came on fast break run outs, 9 came on half court isolation sets, and 2 came on give and go’s in the half court. And I myself had felt moved to write, when I was first watching the clip myself, that the way Jordan uses his body in mid air it is almost as though he is setting moving picks for himself.

Now, there are several students in the class from Chicago whose first basketball memories – as mine are of Clyde, Big O, and the early 70s Bucks – are of Jordan of the second three-peat era from 1996-1998. We call them Jordan babies. By no means were they the only ones to participate in the discussion but they were, I would say, perhaps, the most invested. For these students, this young Jordan really stood out. Don’t get me wrong: these are knowledgeable Bulls fans and they’ve seen this younger Jordan on video before. All the more reason why, perhaps, they were so clear and emphatic on the difference between this Jordan and the one of their early childhoods.

Which brought us perfectly to the FD chapter, written by Bethlehem Shoals, on “The Invention of Air: The Brash, Brilliant Doodles of Young Jordan.” The first comment a student made was that it seemed to him that Shoals was almost trying to “villainize” Young MJ. I felt the student was perhaps himself uncertain about his word choice, but I knew what he was getting at: that: Shoals’ chapter seems to be trying to keep alive for memory a rougher-around-the-edges, more confrontational Jordan, on and off the floor, than the one that these students grew up idolizing.

I had worried there would be resistance to this in class and this first comment put me a bit on my guard. I meant to ask him: “Why might this be so? What is the value of this move? Why does Shoals devote two chapters to Jordan, the young brash Jordan and the six title winning Jordan?” But instead, I immediately defended the choice. I pointed out that within the ethical universe of FreeDarko, a Jordan who isn’t always an obedient and polished corporate spokesman is less a villain than a hero, or perhaps best of all “an anti-hero” (which was cool, because that after all is the topic of Shoals upcoming lecture). He’s the one shaking up the comfortable, and their comfortable narratives. So I kind of spilled the beans.

But the students weren’t resistant to the idea anyway. On the contrary they seemed into it. They unanimously agreed that it was a good idea to split Jordan up into two Jordans. And they seemed intrigued by the characterization of the young Jordan; maybe the way some teenagers are intrigued by stories of the time their parents first got drunk, or smoked weed. I told them some stories about the Bad Boys and the rivalry between Isiah and Michael, which seemed to interest them more than any other stories I’ve ever shared with them.

Toward the end of class we got the point in the text that most fascinates me (and, I was pleased, fascinated them as well). But we didn’t get as much time on it as I wanted, so I want to do a bit more thinking about it here. Speaking of the transition, where Jordan began to give up the dunk for the jump shot, Shoals writes: “The dunk takes an instant and an eternity; it’s both completely frivolous and totally domineering, a flash of light so blinding and brief that it might as well have never happened. A shot was the stuff of narrative; it was itself a story with a built-in arc, climax, and resolution. It also served as the perfect punctuation to any possession, game, season, or career.”

The first thing the students and I both thought about this was that it was a stroke of hoops culture genius to yoke together two kinds of shot – dunk and jumper – with two forms of expression: the exclamation, let us say, and the narrative. Within the overall argument of the chapter, Shoals point is that Michael made a choice to alter his game, and his image, not only to win titles but to become the stuff of official NBA history.

It is to say that Michael’s transition from the high-flying solo dunker that we watched in class – all run-outs and isos – to the Triangle-playing, Phil-obeying, jump shooting team player that won 6 titles in 8 years was not only effective on the court in making his team more successful and not only more effective, thereby, in cementing his place as the consensus Greatest of All Time. It was also effective as a – admittedly probably unintentional -- poetic tactic whereby he made his game more amenable to narrative; narrative, which, after all is essential to the circulation of legend and its transmutation into the concrete forms of Official History.

I think about the fireworks. I think about the “oohs” and “aahs” in class. And I see perfectly what Shoals is saying. There’s no way to build a history out of those exclamations. They are, as I had felt in class, little more than a baby’s first words. Significant as such, but with little staying power, like leftover pieces of a puzzle we have lost; or the screws leftover after assembling some piece of furniture.

In this case, as Shoals already pointed out earlier in the chapter the Story of Michael’s Greatness borrows a specific narrative trajectory, well known to lit crit types like me: the bildungsroman, or novel of formation. In that novelistic form, the protagonist, usually a talented and energetic, but raw, provincial comes to the big city, to the center of culture in his universe. There, little by little, he is formed, shaped at once by his own ambition to be recognized by that culture and by the demands that culture makes of those who would be recognized by it. In the end, the individual accepts the prevailing ethos of the culture in exchange for recognition by it and that ethos is thereby affirmed.

According to Shoals, Michael, the brutally talented individual, eventually works hard, learns (from the Master Phil Jackson no less) how “less is more” (see the graphic in the chapter that shows how the Bulls win totals rise each year as Jordan’s scoring average drops), subordinates himself for the team and, in the end, wins titles and the eternal admiration of all.

As Obi Wan says to Darth Vader, “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Something like that is the deal the young Jordan strikes with the old Jordan. If you agree not to score 37 points per game for your whole career (which is an abomination to the game), then you can win titles with obscene ease, drain a few legendary game winning jumpers, and we will never, ever forget you. Young Michael lowers his light sabre, folds his hands across his chest, and is launched into hoops immortality.

I’m totally down with all this and think it does a brilliant job of rescuing some promising castoffs from the side of the road of history. I’m reminded of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s recognition that there is “no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” He meant that all that we remember, all that we celebrate as triumph is simultaneously a defeat for someone else, a record of something or someone having been crushed and tossed to the side. Accordingly, he recommended a way of thinking about history whereby those fragments might be gathered up. They might not ever form a standard narrative, but they could, with care, be held together, and presented as a kind of alternative to that standard narrative and a reminder that what took place was neither inevitable, nor one sided, nor without some struggle and violence.

Shoals here has presented the fragments left behind, the McDonald’s wrappers that Jordan and the NBA and hoops culture as a whole threw out the window as they tore town the Interstate at breakneck speed toward individual immortality and league global domination. It reminds me of the difference between Old Elvis and Young Elvis, between Old Marx and Young Marx and makes me think that Jordan, thanks to Shoals, gets like so few others to have it both ways: to have died young and so become immortal, and to have lived out and fulfilled his promise in the established world and so to have that immortality narrativized. Jordan is James Dean and Laurence Olivier; Maurice Stokes and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Maybe that is what it is to be the Greatest of All Time: to dunk and shoot the jumper. And I can’t really improve on that version of the story.

But I’d like to extend it with some wondering. I’m thinking of the dunk as the monosyllabic exclamation. And I’m thinking of the smooth, inevitable jump shot as the narrative of ineluctable triumphant conformity. But then I’m thinking of the video we watched. 14 dunks, 2 jump shots. But there were 8 other shots that were neither dunks nor jump shots. What is their discursive equivalent?

They were Jordan taking off somewhere within the general vicinity of the basket, leaving behind some earthbound defenders, encountering other, rising, obstacles in mid flight, fragments of bodies – arms, and hands – floating into his space, and Michael’s response: the body beginning to turn away from the basket and the defender, or, the knees drawing up toward the abdomen and the ball extending in one hand, he may begin to float beneath the basket; in either case, Michael designs and creates a physical space that he occupies alone, as he designs and creates it, in order to get the clear shot. Really, it is a space just for his left or right hand and the ball since that is all he needed to have cleared.

These plays, which are what I most remember of Jordan’s career, seem to me to carry the power of narrative unfolding, like a jumper, but without the foregone, prewritten character of that more predictable and repeatable shot. If these are part of what Shoals means by the “brash, brilliant doodles” of the chapter’s title, they might also be seen, in poetic terms, as Surrealist exquisite corpse prose exercises in which the story begin by one individual is continued by another and finished by yet another and nobody really knows how it will end until it has ended and then, and only then, will it have looked inevitable.

And that makes me realize that, whatever their differences, both the early Jordan dunk and the late Jordan jump shot share a sense of inevitability. But before one of the myriad variations on a layup that he improvised bounces around and drops in, before Michael lands in a cat like, thief like crouch, surrounded by defenders shaking their heads befuddled, before space once again becomes one, and grounded, and shared by us all – before all that, there is the dilated moment of extended exclamation, and wonder, and invested uncertainty: we don’t know how it will end, but it doesn’t matter, because we already care, it is already amazing, just as it is, a perfect slice of pure invention in process.

FD at University of Michigan

2011-03-11T12:09:00.000-05:00

Strange but true. I will be giving a public lecture at the University of Michigan next Tuesday, as well as paying a visit to Yago Colas's "Cultures of Basketball" course. Hope to see you there!

Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: The Serpent's Tale (Day 14)

2011-03-09T19:12:00.004-05:00

This is a hallowed day. They asked me to play. They actually asked me to play. Okay, well it wasn’t exactly that they asked me to play, but pretty much. Walking across campus to class from my previous class, the fantasy image flashed into the slide projector of my mind: an intra-class pickup game. The still image sprang into motion: all of us going up and down the court at Crisler Arena. I tried to push it aside, tried to stop it. No way I’m going to propose this in class and have the players break into uncontrollable sneering laughter. But then, I walk into class and I’ve barely put my stuff down on the desk when one of the players, having very courteously asked me how my broken hand was doing, said, “We should have a class game.” Moments later, another player walked into class and said the same thing.

I feel I shall burst with joy and excitement. If God himself, donning sweats, had parted the gray Ann Arbor skies, and entered the class on a Golden Litter, born by Clyde, the Hawk, Dr. J, and Wilt, and said, “you know what, that tree of knowledge thing, I was j/k!”, I could have been no happier. A weight of decades has been lifted from my shoulders. It was an auspicious way to begin the home stretch of Cultures of Basketball, after a two week hiatus, and leading in to the much-anticipated visit of none other than Bethlehem Shoals himself to our Ivory Tower next week.

We all began to babble excitedly about the match-up. “Players against the rest of us!” someone shouted. Oh no, I thought to myself, I didn’t wait nearly thirty years to play Division I ball in order to get clowned by a bunch of college kids. If you wanna go players and teacher against the rest of the class, I’m down, but otherwise we’re splitting the players up. Buoyed by my sudden surge of popularity among the players, and the riotous atmosphere of the room, I took a wild risk. I explained that I’d just been thinking the same thing on the way over to class and added, “But in my fantasy of this game, we’re playing at Crisler. So I want to give the players a special group assignment: make that happen.” I’m thinking that’s an impossibility, but that just saying it will curry even more favor. But lo, another player speaks up and says he thinks that shouldn’t be a problem. What! Verily, yea, I will tread the same hardwood as my forefathers CWebb and Jalen, and their forefather, Cazzie, did before them.

An evening of feverish tweeting and e-mailing ensued in which yet another player and I worked out the details of 1) a class lottery, presided over by David Stern, in which the eight players would draw names to round out the rosters for each of their teams and 2) the field of eight three-player teams would be seeded and compete in an April-Madness extravaganza culminating in the crowning of the first ever Cultures of Basketball national champion. My fiancée then tops it all off by suggesting we have the game on a weekend so that she can come up from St. Louis to witness, testify, and oversee the national media hordes that will certainly converge on Ann Arbor for the Blessed Event. So y’all can just get in touch with her about securing your media passes. I’m pretty sure that Ernie and the TNT gang already have their hotel reservations, Dicky V. called to make sure he wouldn’t be excluded, and the Goodyear Blimp, flown by Captain Jon Conrad and crew, has already secured airspace.

Talking to a student later during office hours, he shook his head with dread: “Maybe the players just wanted to play us so they could destroy us.” “Who cares?,” I said to him, “I just wanna play. It’s like when you’re little,” I explained, “you just want your big brother to play with you, you don’t care that he’s gonna beat your ass. It’s just about the attention.” My student smiled and said, “I was the big brother.” Well, okay, but you get the idea. I know I’ll actually be shitting myself on the day of the game, and I’ll probably dribble off my foot, shoot a couple of air balls, and – horror of horrors – be single-handedly responsible for decimating the ranks of next year’s Michigan basketball team by somehow injuring each and every one of the eight players through some clumsy display of aged overreaching. But really, who cares? It’s the sort of moment when it all comes together and several lifetimes’ worth of minor slights and trivial but embittering disappointments are swept away by a deluge that leaves your soul as brand spanking new and clean and naked as Adam and Eve in the Garden.

Speaking of paradise, today’s class was devoted to the section of FreeDarko’s history on Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, the first segment of Chapter 4: “The Gold Standard: 1980-1990.” But before we got to Magic and Larry Legend, and after we’d settled down, we had one more bit of topical business to address: the controversy over the Heat “allegedly” crying in the locker room after their 1 point loss to the Bulls the other day, at the time their fourth straight loss. I asked them what they thought and they told me, but then I realized that I didn’t so much want to know what they thought as tell them what I thought they should think, or at least what I thought they should bear in mind as they formed their own judgments of the event.

So we briefly discussed the possible meanings of tears and of emotions in general, the role that emotion plays in sport and in human life more generally, and the way that culture and upbringing, especially as coded by gender, shape the way we judge – and that we feel entitled to judge – public displays of emotion by other human beings.

One of the more interesting points was raised by a student, who pointed out that the gender double-standard also works against female athletes who show anger or swag in the course of competition. In both cases, culturally set parameters of appropriately “masculine” or “feminine” relationships to particular expressions of emotion wind up underwriting thoughtless critical judgments of particular athletes for crossing the boundaries of emotional expression.

It’s sad, really, that young men and women, athletes or not, should be subject to such constraints. And sadder, still, perhaps, that other young men and women should participate in limiting the scope of what it is possible to be and to feel and to show you feel as a young man or young woman. Nothing was resolved, of course, but I think that students by the end of our little conversation were equipped to do more than just accept the terms of the discussion as provided by ESPN or the guy next to them at Buffalo Wild Wings.

Having completed my pontification on the topic of emotion, gender, and athletics, we rode the FD time machine back to Bliss, the Gold Standard, the Paradise of the NBA in the 1980s. The religious, specifically Edenic, lexicon that I’ve been trying to weave into this post is neither accidental, nor really of my own invention. The illustration that fronts the Magic Bird chapter shows the two players, in iconic poses, emerging from a garden lush with sunflowers, ferns, daffodils and tropical foliage.

An unpaid student query about the significance of the image gave me the opportunity to say a few words about the myth of Eden and the kind of cultural work it can do in Judeo-Christian societies. I don’t want to go biblical on your ass, or be too dweebishly unsubtle about it (especially, in view of the compact subtlety of Jacob Weinstein’s visual argument), but it’s worth acknowledging, at least, the force and pervasiveness of that myth in the way that we lace often overly simplistic judgements of good and evil into narratives of memory and history. It’s not that Eden is always invoked explicitly, but rather that it doesn’t have to be because by now it is almost second nature (a distinctly un-Edenic concept, or maybe it is Edenic). Everytime you hear someone talk about the good old days, nostalgia, you know the routine, once upon a time – always, there Eden is at work.

In the case of Magic, and Bird, and the 1980s, it’s certainly understandable, and close to my own heart’s experience, that the myth of Eden should appeal. As FD writes in the brief Introduction to the chapter, the decade saw a truly awesome influx of talent into the game: not just Magic and Larry, but Isiah, Worthy, Jordan, Barkley, Akeem, Stockton, Malone, Ewing and others entered the league in the period. Moreover, unlike, say, in the 1960s, that talent was properly showcased by the rise of ESPN and other forms of media exposure and endorsement deals, all carefully overseen by the – whatever else you want to say about him – far-sighted and shrewd PR vision of Commissioner David Stern. The play on the floor was brilliant and more people than ever were getting to see it. FANtastic was born.

But there’s more to it than that. In Magic and Bird, of course, you had two players with a ready-made rivalry established in the 1979 NCAA title game (itself a watershed moment in most accounts of the college game), and a rivalry amped up by the storied history of the Lakers and Celtics, the franchises they joined. Moreover, as we discussed in class after watching clips of the two players, Magic and Larry truly showcased a remarkably complete (and remarkably similar – a fact I think that is often undernoticed) set of basketball skills.

Though neither was an exceptional athlete by NBA standards, each had the intelligence and put in the work to maximize the gifts they did have and so to turn themselves into astonishingly creative passers and effective rebounders, ball handlers and shooters (more Magic than Larry for the handle, more Larry than Magic for the shot). Both were capable of scoring from unpromising angles and traffic situations, both capable of unselfishly raising the game of their teammates, both clutch and both winners, and both driven to lead by example in squeezing every last drop out of seemingly every play on the floor.

In their styles of play, both players, as Brown Recluse, Esq. (BRE) notes, embodied the happy marriage of ABA creativity with NBA stability. BRE even concludes by correctly observing that Magic and Larry left us as a legacy the freedom that would evolve into positional revolution with oversize point guards, and bigs who can hurt you inside or step out and hit the three. And finally, of course, one was black and one was white. Put it all together and that’s hard to top if you’re looking for Paradise in the history of the NBA.

The myth of the Garden of Eden, though, is more than just an emblem of unadulterated bliss. It describes a tricky pseudo-contract in which submissive ignorance is the price exacted for that bliss. Moreover, it tells us that pain, labor, and sexuality are punishments for the violation of that contract. You remember, right? Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, aspiring in the process to have their blind eyes opened and to see as God sees and, as a result, are cast out of the Garden. Ultimately, the narrative carries for me a dark side by which we are commanded to remain in a childish state -- lacking knowledge, desire, experience, and agency -- if we are to be happy.

I’m not the first to point this out, of course. John Milton in Paradise Lost (perhaps in spite of himself) and William Blake (very much not in spite of himself) long ago suggested or argued outright that it’s not so clear who might be the good guys and the bad guys in the story of our “Fall.” And I've even written about how Baruch Spinoza had a different take on the whole episode. More recently, the British author Philip Pullman rewrote the whole story in his remarkable trilogy His Dark Materials. There Pullman conceives that our “Fall” was really a kind of elevation, a growing-up of the species if you will, prompted by angels rebelling against a God who was really just the first angel, but had usurped authority, styling himself the Creator of the rest, and establishing a tyrannical Kingdom of Heaven in place of the immanent Republic of Heaven.

In Pullman’s reading, the rebel angels did us a favor and every time we think for ourselves, enjoy our existence as beings with minds and bodies, and make independent decisions, every time we assert the right to determine the course of our own futures, we are embodying the empowering legacy that the Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall would have us lament and repent for unto eternity.

Offering this counter-vision doesn’t mean that I think the myth of a fall from grace, or innocence, is useless or bad. Just that it’s a more complicated tool for organizing our understanding of ourselves than might appear at first glance. In my own case, the bliss ushered in by Magic and Bird’s appearance in the NBA (which was indeed a paradise for me: my room was plastered with Magic posters, and I still have a scrapbook I started keeping in 1979 with Magic clippings from the local papers and Sports Illustrated) coincided with my exit from the innocence of childhood via a number of doors simultaneously: I learned to shoot a jump shot, my parents separated, and I entered puberty.

So it was a complicated Eden for me, that: one that sends my mind and my emotional memories snapping back and forth wildly like a standard in a strong wind. But I wouldn’t trade that complicated and painful time – and all that grew from it – for the relatively less complicated, ignorant bliss of pretending to be Clyde in the driveway at age 7.

By now you might be imagining that I am of the Devil’s party, as Blake once said of Milton. Maybe that’s true in some sense. It is certainly true that the serpent is for me the most interesting character in the story. And, in relation to this Golden Era of NBA history, I certainly wonder where (or who or what) the serpent is.

About fifteen years ago, in a first futile stab at doing this kind of writing, during a leave year in which I received tenure at the University, I became fascinated with Dennis Rodman. Around this time Terry Pluto published a book called Falling from Grace (1995). Its subtitle was “Can the NBA Be Saved?” In it, if I remember correctly, Pluto characterized the then-current crop of young players as brawling, trash-talking thugs whose basketball fundamentals were decidedly underwhelming. I’m pretty sure Dennis was singled out in that book, along with a few other players as symptomatic of all that had gone wrong with the game.

At the time, I wrote an essay – now long lost – on the joy of being Dennis Rodman. I wasn’t interested so much in defending Dennis’ style choices (or behavior), so much as pointing out that in his play on the court (tenacious defense, hard-nosed intelligent rebounding, good passing), Rodman embodied many of the values that Pluto himself was nostalgically associating with a different, now bygone era (not to mention race, I remember feeling upon reading the book).

I’m not sure what I’d think of Pluto’s book or of my own argument now. Maybe I wouldn’t stand by it any longer. But I definitely do stand by the impulse I acted on to complicate simple notions of human history that characterize it as either a steady progress toward something good or a steady (or precipitious) fall from something good. That much, perhaps, is the serpent in me.

In fact, maybe the serpent isn’t so much a character in the story, or not only a character in the story, but a role we all step into whenever we question the story and read it against the grain; whenever we take the childish dichotomies we are offered – and which, make no mistake, can be quite useful in limited cases – and begin to poke at the boundaries separating them.

So when I think of the NBA since Magic and Bird’s time, back, when, as they recently wrote, “the game was ours,” I think as much of Bird’s legendary trash-talking, I think of the image of Magic posterizing some chump with a tomahawk jam and then pointing to him as he lay splayed on the floor along the baseline. He wasn’t beaming. Sure I think of and marvel at their amazing array of skills and their run of titles. And I’m genuinely moved by the way their rivalry evolved into friendship and love. But I also think of their personal lives, seriously troubled at times like those of any human being. I think as well, as Brown Recluse, Esq. advises, of the marvelous players that have come after them in a more or less continuous stream since that time, patterning their unusual combination of skills and size and styles of play on some permutation of Magic and Bird.

And when I think that way, the gate at the Eastern end of the Garden of Eden, the one guarded by the angel with the flaming sword, the one that Adam and Eve left through, and that supposedly clearly marks the line between paradise and our own sorry existence starts to blur and fade.

I like that moment because the alternative offered by subscribing to the Eden story is to spend all of existence trying to make up for something I didn’t do and that I don’t think was wrong in the first place. It is to hate actual existence in the name of a time that has long since ceased to exist and that I don’t think ever existed in the first place.

So when the gates swing open, and I can acknowledge the splendor of Magic and Larry Legend in all its complex shadings, then the present and the future open back up and I am once again in a position, as one of Phillip Pullman’s characters urges: “to build the Republic of Heaven right here, because for us there is nowhere else” and to appreciate those in the game and the world today who are laboring to build it too.

TWO SNAKES

2011-03-08T17:44:00.004-05:00

TWO SNAKES
or
one reporter's opinion

0. the world according to nouns

I've seen some shit that nobody else has. A willowy poet putting up either 7 or 8 points every quarter of every game for a decade, turning nonce-jumpers and floaters from a defense's seams into inevitability incarnate. A 6-3 would-be shooting guard running a team, leading it in assists, rebounds, steals, teleportation, dark conjurings, impossibility. Piles of high-post centers, I've seen. One-skill specialists in a league of multitaskers, a decade of drafting I can prove was the worst any NBA team ever perpetrated, thick veins of talent and relevance shrouded by distance and awful uniforms, buried under injured, old and overrated players. I've seen what I know to be the fourth-winningest team of the 80s, the highest scorer of the 80s; I've seen other satisfactions of and from the margin, not exactly 9 in a row nor 11 of 13.

I've seen rookies frag overwhelmed coaches like a savvy sergeant would a lieutenant, and I've seen pillars of the community drummed out of their profession for spectacularly unwise moments of verbal abuse.

I've seen a ton of shitty coaches make difficult-to-defend decisions and I've seen enough reclamation projects to last any sports fan a month of drunken arguments. But I never have quit on watching the Nuggets.

1. futurism restated

"If you grew up in the 70s, you liked Aerosmith."
--R.E.M., liner notes for Dead Letter Office

Or, as others have pointed out, if you came up in the 80s, you liked either the Lakers or the Celtics. In the beginning, I kind of liked them both. My then-stepdad hipped me to Dr. J, just in time for his precipitous decline and eclipse by the irresistible round mound of rebound. Reading Giant Steps put me on Team Kareem for life. But really, my basketball fandom is and always has been bound up with the Nuggets.

Two anecdotes about the early days of my NBA fandom.

Sometime in 1985, for no reason I have ever understood, my family was visiting LA. To shut me up, the truth box was clicked on, and I was duct-taped to the couch in front of the Lakers game. An announcer--I remember it as Brent Musberger, but that's almost certainly wrong--was explaining the Lakers' opponent;
You may not know this team, but keep your eyes open for #2, Alex English, one of the league's truly great scorers
Hip to the ways of watching TV, I bent my attentions to the task. The game ended, and I had not perceived this #2 at all. "Ov-er-rate-ed," I thought, smugged "The Lakers are better" just before the TV mentioned that he'd put up 30-some points.
"I gotta get better at watching this stuff," I realized.

We moved to Denver. I continued to watch every game I could; I'd listen to games on the radio and score them with a home-brewed technique that tried to count misses as well as makes; I bought Strat-O-Matic NBA for the 85-86 season and played hundreds of games (against myself), keeping box scores and inventing ranking and rating systems, sitting alone on the floor of my room.¹

First game of the 86-87 season, all was rosy and surely the team would rebound from the frustrations of 85-86, maybe surge all the way to the west finals again. That lasted less than a half.
Calvin Natt, face-down and screaming. Banging his fists against the hardwood.
Calvin Natt shredded his Achilles tendon opening night, cratering the team's chances; that is what it means to be a Nuggets fan.

Natt was an undersized but rugged player, a meaty power forward once name-checked by Larry Bird, who said of the 6-6 frowning enforcer, "If he was 6-9, he'd be illegal." His was the kind of toughness-aura that was only enhanced by constant injuries; seeing him helpless in teary pain? like suckerpunching the Champ and getting away with it. Certain fantasies you can never entertain, after.

2. suburban dialectic

"BOURGOISIE DENIED!"
--KARP, "meet me in Lacey"

Shoals once mused "why aren't the 80s Nuggets a cult favorite"² and the actual reasons are depressingly external-conditions-conditioned; the Nuggets were never on TV, and a bunch of other shit that contributes to that. I mean, the Velvets may be the ultimate cult band, but fuck: they were on Warner Brothers, you know?

They're not a cult band b/c they never had a chance to be: you never saw them. But what you didn't see in the 80s was a Nuggets team you would have liked. You really would.

For me, the Platonic ideal of a basketball team was that 85-86 squad, a scrambly adhocracy; a high-post (offensive) shotblocking (defensive) center (4th in the league!), a pair of guards pressuring the ball (both in the top 5 in steals!), a transcendently wonderful set of starting forwards, both .500/.800 men who put up better than 20 a game, scoring anywhere inside the three-point line.³

The Nuggets were a running team--perhaps the league's greatest proponent of pushing the pace--without a single player you'd identify as particularly fast. They were a high-scoring team--perhaps the league's best--without a single player who could consistently create his own shot. They were a team with a clear defensive strategy--revolving around relentless ball-hawking and guard pressure in the backcourt, a team you could not dribble against and whose forwards glided (English) and collided (Natt) through the passing lanes, funneling everything toward a shot-blocker--who were thought to play no defense at all. This was a team whose own coach caricatured his finicky, delicate system as "just rolling the balls out at the beginning of the game". A team, then, of contradictions, if not quite one of paradoxes; and they won more than they lost--you would have liked them. How could you not?

And then, out of nowhere, there was Fat Lever.

3. Bob Dylan wrote propaganda songs

There is, I would argue, no such NBA thing as being transcendently versatile. Them what are held to be the primary exponents of everything end up with epithets like "greatest second banana" or "underrated overachiever" or some such horseshit. Beyond a certain level, there's no category of anything like good-at-everything, there is only a category of being-great; I claim that Fat Lever, from 1986 to 1990, was great.

There will be those who claim that Lever's achievements were an epiphenomenon of a bad team where somebody had to put up numbers, or perhaps an artifact of a system whose accelerated pace allowed (f)rank scrubs to accumulate hated, fetid "counting statistics". And yet two things are indisputably the case.

Fat Lever, for four years consecutive, had points-rebounds-assists numbers associated--and associated exclusively--with the following names:Larry Bird (5x)
Oscar Robertson (5x)
Ervin Johnson (1x)
Wilt Chamberlain (2x)
John Havlicek (2x)
Billy Cunningham (1x--in the ABA)
Grant Hill (2x)
While this system was attempted in other places at other times, nobody else ever attained these heights.

(I have seven other counterarguments.)

And there was watching him, which the numbers only hint at. A small, scrawny guard, he was no spectacular leaper grabbing his 7+ boards. He wasn't a particularly gifted ballhandler, nor did he have that weird intuition the best point guards have, and yet he cranked out assists. His own desires embodied the conflict: nothing at all like a dead-eye shooter, he craved being a scorer, but was asked to run the team--thus perceiving a promotion as a demotion.

His greatness was not in the way of the world's greatest jack-of-all-trades: his greatness was the not-that-common-anymore phrase "nose for the ball" at its apotheosis. And watching it was like nothing else I have ever gotten to see. I don't expect to see its like again.

4. the politics of time

There's a bad memoir or a worse novel to be written about the rest of something like the meaning of the Nuggets 85-11.⁴ From the GM locking his ~~beloved~~ prized free agent in the arena and bullying him into signing to catastrophic injuries to coaches bellowing in crunch time merely "EXECUTE!"⁵ to players refusing to report to GMs letting free agents walk without extracting compensation to GMs mastering the new salary cap era and getting fired for it to having two of the league's most central figures of an era and somehow remaining peripheral, there's a lot I've been thinking about (and occasionally writing about) for a long, long time. I'm enough of a hack to want to suggest that if your team has "a Bernie Bickerstaff era", you are an ABD of despair-of/from-mediocrity, but, now and forever, oughtn't we use this Internet to celebrate the worthy, rather than to savage the busted?

I've seen things like Fat Lever appear anywhere he might do some good, and only slowly, over an entire quarter, be overwhelmed by a cresting Lakers team capable of posting up a point guard taller than our power forward--when they tired of going to the single most potent halfcourt option the game has ever known.⁶ I've seen an 8 seed beat a 1. I've seen the most important player of the decade go to my team, and I've seen an entire season when it was plausible--and compelling--to argue that Carmelo Anthony was better than LeBron James. I've seen a rainbow skyline and a god-awful attempt to co-opt the terrible-in-its-own-right baby blue of UCLA.

What I've seen is a franchise supporting two writhing snakes of my fandom, one of attentiveness and (yes) love, the other of loss--in both its aspects, sometimes not-win and sometimes thing-taken. The snakes crawl over each other. Time passes. I never saw a championship, or an MVP, or even a rookie of the year⁷. But I saw things you never did.

I still think about Bill Hanzlik, fan favorite white dude, with his weird little white spot and his ability to make Ralph Sampson play like dogshit. I still think about tiny Mike Evans, supplanted by tinier Mike Adams, 3-point addicts before the league figured it out⁷; I still think about Danny Schayes, so awkward with hands and feet he should have been wearing wrestling headgear over his goggles. I still think about Walter "the Greyhound" Davis, wraith of the 80s, with canonical form on his jumper and a world-historically ugly coke fiasco in his past, and how I hated him utterly when I thought he'd forced out Alex English. (My first sports hate was for a guy on my own team.) I still think about Jerome Lane, 6-6 guy drafted to solve the team's rebounding problems, who showed up to practice one day midseason and was judged by St. Coach Doug Moe "he hasn't been to bed yet".

I think about magic, and I think about loss, the hidden world and the inaccessible ones. I think about the Nuggets, the least influential cult band ever, the players defining overlooked achievement, and their rewards.

--Fat Contradiction

¹Strat-O-Matic's suggestion for adding new players was simply "find a comparable player and copy their stats over". I thought this was lame and reverse engineered the game's numbers, including figuring out their prehistoric version of "usage rate", a four-tiered system that they fucked up a lot, meaning bench players often had absurdly high rebounding numbers.

²I guess I don't count as a cult of one. I can live with this.

³That was from memory. Looks like the guards were both top 10, not 5, and Calvin Natt put up 17.7 ppg that year.

⁴This would have been a hell of a lot better if it came out the day before Carmelo attained his whatever-the-opposite-of-exile-is, I know, trust me.

⁵Thanks, Dick Motta.

⁶After dicking around with it for a while, I conclude I was at one or both of these games. I hung out after one to get Kareem to autograph my copy of Giant Steps but he never showed.
Other research demonstrates that one of my founding myths is incorrect: since 1986 or so, I have known--known as night follows day--that the 76rs were knocked out of the final playoff round of Dr. J's career because he missed a jumper against the Bucks. Turns out: not true.

⁷Deke was fucking robbed by Larry Johnson.

Schayes image courtesy of the internet.

Rick Steiner courtesy of the internet.

Fat Lever rules.

I cherry-picked his best numbers, just to see, and at 1400 points, 660 rebounds, 500 assists and 160 steals--which he did four consecutive times--Magic and Bird, once each, and Billy Cunningham (!) in the ABA, are his only company. (Because they didn't count steals 'way back in the day.) I dunno if god bows to math? but Fat Lever's peak should be bowed to by all.

Abjection At The Speed Of Sound

2011-03-07T10:33:00.000-05:00

Just listen to the music, man. It is kind of like Tony Conrad, but not, and also kind of like I thought Coltrane was when all I did was read about him. It's also reasonably pertinent to this quick bit of posting I have to take care of on these parts.

Because Twitter has gone altogether useless, and there's no such thing as having weighed in recently enough, or collective memory, or any kind of cleanser that doesn't involve a roof and flames, here are my weekend's Big Basketball Stories: Tracy McGrady and Derrick Rose. T-Mac, longtime FD favorite (for you, McGrady, I would throw Vince Carter under a thousand buses), and Derrick Rose, a player-in-process on a very good team. Oh, and once upon a time, I put forth a challenge to Rose, and now a city wants to burn me and throw me into brine because of it. At the Sloan Conference for Fighting Your Family, McGrady was unmasked by former GM Daryl Morey and coach Jeff Van Gundy as the equivalent of Sports Betting gone bad. You can read the low-down here, courtesy of Dan Devine, but I just had to jump in the mix (if I hadn't enough already, via more immediate forms of communication).

Dan ended his report from the panel with a WTF DUDEZ—as in, there seemed to be a certain amount of willful panel blindness to how great McGrady was when he was on. Zach Lowe also gave us a glimpse at just how advanced T-Mac could get when things were going his way. My problem? McGrady's career wasn't that of Stromile Swift or Tyrus Thomas; his injuries were of the more vague, debilitating variety; there was obviously a psychological aspect to his rise, fall, rise, fall, and fall fall again that defied an easy "he had it all and blew it" narrative. If McGrady was the NBA's Natural, we should not bemoan his lack of worth ethic or practice hours—lots of players are lazy-ish, and last I checked, Bill Russell was the king of hoops, and he hated to run around empty gyms—but acknowledge his career for what it was: an experience, for him and us, at once flawed and mystical. There was no reason for McGrady to have been as good as he was, as advanced, especially if he tried so little and failed to show the discipline of, say, Chuck Hayes or Shane Battier.

McGrady wasn't just bigger, stronger, faster, or more athletic. He felt and moved through the game like few before or since. You want to discard that because Gladwell told you to? In front of a bunch of writers? Fine, I guess. Just don't pretend that there's not a host of biases, or even limitations, brought in by the panelists, or that anyone (including McGrady) will ever be happy with how it all turned out. Malcolm Gladwell furnished a magic number, Jeff Van Gundy brought his own wildly particular views about how basketball, and basketball teams, should work to the table, and Morey also has an agenda—however secretive—that he brings to this kind of player assessment. Could McGrady have been better, played longer? Yes, but he paid dues in Toronto, and was effectively falling apart by the time he arrived in Houston. Was it all practice? I should stop asking so many questions before I get too many answers in return. To me, McGrady will remain a tragic figure, perhaps one of his own making. But to use him as a poster child for wasted potential is like lamenting ... fuck it, go see that Woodmans documentary. No, not the Kevin Bacon molesting kids one.

There's a way, though, to have both lived up to the hype while still falling victim to it. The holes are far less important than having gotten there at all; the ending seems all but inevitable, and not because there just wasn't enough elbow grease involved. For what it's worth, LeBron James seems far more worthy of these criticisms than McGrady. Already a far better player, to be sure, any way you want to measure it. And yet T-Mac always seemed fully comfortable in his own skin—that is, for those few seasons when everything was intact. LeBron still has way too many "if only" moments. That's the value of practice. McGrady? I don't know, would practice have exorcised his demons, cleaned up his injuries, and allowed him to get his head into the game again. Born to lose, I guess. Piece of shit, fabulous performer, both at once. If he need a book title, I will be spending all morning smashing those two phrases together in tight proximity.

***

If you would like me to compare Derrick Rose and T-Mac, do so yourself. Rose works his ass off, I will say this, and when a team forces him to show that aspect of his game—resourceful, indomitable, and fearless without sacrificing a bit of dynamism—all my previous criticisms fall away. I don't like it when the game is too easy for anyone. Otherwise, for the viewer without a particular-colored bit of cloth wrapped round his face, the game can stagnate. You may be familiar with that time I bemoaned, in order 1) the classification of Rose as a true point guard by the national media; 2) the unreasonable example he set for more limited scoring guards like [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] and some other thing that I probably didn't say but made people angry anyway. Oh, I said that I wanted Rose to turn into Dwyane Wade. Sunday's game made me happy, and sorry, I'm not jumping on the bandwagon. It was brilliant basketball, where a player was substantially challenged and thus had to fight for his comfort zone, or pull off nearly impossible feats of toughness and flight to get the two that usually comes so easy to him. Even that playmaking stuff ... Rose showed that, somewhere between trying to run an offense and dishing at the last-second, he can set the table for others without leaving them on pins and needles.

The "Fuck You Bethlehem Shoals" game against the Spurs was fun, but Chicago's win over those pussy-dicked Heat weasels was everything I had ever hoped to see from Rose. I could care less whether you think I'm back-pedaling, or should have been here all along. Players met with obstacles are either spurred to new heights or fall flat. Practice hours aside, and for now, ignoring the "loser" tag, what made McGrady great and infuriating is that he was either in that zone, or practically moribund. For Rose, it's a next gear, or a plateau, or some other cliche having to do with man-sports and engines. Given the way this season, and his career, are going, I fully expect Rose to look much different in 2011-12 than in this MVP candidate campaign. That's a wowzer, isn't it?

Really, what I want someone to do is bury me for viewing Rose through a lens of pure aesthetics. Why no attack, or at least conclusions about, his personality, motivations, etc? The Rose-as-robot trope is nothing new in Chicago, nor is it particularly interesting. It doesn't seem to have warped him like it did Kobe, in large part because Kobe was a stormy individual who decided that inhumanity was the way to go, like Buddhist retreats for pill heads. Maybe I'm just not ready to read deeper, or between the lines, with Rose. But with that, though, comes an understanding that I'm still expecting him to go higher and higher as a basketball player. Is that grouchy and mean to a city in need? I guess. But I remember Tracy McGrady. It's the very least that this young Bulls guard, and a team seemingly built for long-term success, could do for us all.

Voyage Into The Unknown

2011-03-03T02:46:00.002-05:00

It's been a long time since I paid a visit to Disciples of Clyde. Actually, last time was the day the second book came out. Ken and I had a long, serious conversation about writing, animosity, and true passion. This visit is all about ghosts, sometimes even the NBA. Eric Freeman is on board, too. You won't want to miss this one.

This is only the beginning.

You Dance and Shake The Hurt (Day 13)

2011-02-25T19:04:00.001-05:00

The latest from Yago Colas.

My students, and readers following me here, know that in 1968, when I was 3, my family moved to Madison, Wisconsin and that my memories of my first few years there are dominated by the Bucks and their meteoric rise to a title and to perennial contention. But all that changed forever in the summer of 1975. The knowledgeable among you are thinking that’s the summer that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar left Milwaukee for LA. But that’s only part of it. The other part is that I celebrated my 10th birthday with a family vacation to Portland, Oregon (where I was born) and came back with a Trailblazers pennant. So this chapter of the Undisputed Guide to the History of Pro Basketball, which links the mid to late 70s dominance of Kareem and Portland’s Bill Walton, seemed tailored especially for me.

Maybe three months before we headed west for my birthday trip, Kareem played his last game with the Milwaukee Bucks on April 6th, 1975, a home loss to the Chicago Bulls. The season had been a disappointment, especially after taking the Celtics to seven games in the NBA Finals the previous season. But Oscar had retired, Lucius Allen, the other starting guard, had already been traded, and Kareem himself had missed the first two months of the season with a broken hand. Kareem was in the last year of his contract, and though he wrote fondly of the Milwaukee fans in his 1983 autobiography Giant Steps, he was feeling isolated, alien, and alone: a 7-2 black Muslim, native of Harlem, in a small market Midwestern city. The Bucks ultimately agreed to trade him to the Lakers, where, as everyone knows, he would play the rest of his career, winning 5 more championships alongside Magic Johnson and becoming the all-time leading scorer in NBA history.

As for the Bucks, they sucked for the next two seasons before Don Nelson began to turn them around in the 1977-78 season. I still liked them and wanted them to do well, but I had moved on, adopting the Portland Trailblazers as my new home team on the grounds that I had been born there and that I had visited there in 1975. I even had that Trailblazers pennant up in my bedroom, right next to the Bucks pennant. Now, the 75-76 Blazers weren’t anything to write home about either, finishing 37-45 and missing the playoffs. But even so they held my attention because, among other things, they had Bill Walton, in his second year out of UCLA. As I’ve written elsewhere, as far as college hoops went I was a Bruin. And indeed, the very next season Walton led the Blazers to the NBA championship and vindicated my decision to adopt them as my home team.

In his chapter on this period of my life – I mean, on these two centers and the period of NBA history they dominated – Shoals first establishes some of the contrasts, in fact and perception, around which we might organize our understanding of their careers. There are, first of all, the very arcs of their careers. While Kareem played over 1500 games in 20 seasons, Walton played less than 500 games over 10 seasons. Kareem won six titles and six MVP awards, and played in 19 All-Star games. Walton won two titles, one MVP award, and played in two All-Star games.

But if that were all there was to it, then it would seem Walton – exceptionally skilled though he was -- hardly merits a co-starring role in the story of this period of league history. But that’s not all there is to it. Though to fully and honestly understand why Walton continues to be considered among the all time great centers of league history and as one of the dominant players of the 70s we have to follow Shoals out of the arena and into American society at large.

There we find that each player embodied different facets of 1970s America. Kareem, as is widely known, converted to Islam and changed his name from Lew Alcindor in May 1971, the day after the Bucks won their first and only NBA championship. That was right around the time that Walton would enroll at UCLA and embark not only on a legendary college career, but also break the athletic mold by experimenting with a variety of extra-curricular activities from political protests to vegetarianism. Kareem, already perceived as stoic if not aloof, came with his conversion to emblematize angry blackness that would not be appeased or assimilated. Walton, meanwhile, would be seen as the eccentric, outgoing campus radical.

But in an NBA era in which the increases in black players, salaries, and reports of drug use would combine to turn off a white audience that would rationalize its disinterest as a sorrowful lament for the decline of the team game, the rise of egotism and flamboyance, there was more: Walton would be stationed as the standard bearer for the traditional game played the right (read: white) way. This perception would culminate, and Walton’s historical reputation be set in stone, when his disproportionately white Trailblazers team, playing an effective passing game, defeated what Shoals calls the “badder than thou” 76ers of Julius Erving, Darryl Dawkins, and World B. Free in the 1978 finals.

I was oblivious to these dynamics at the time, though in another way I was living them and, in yet another way, I was undoing or at least complicating them. As I’ve written before, one of the more striking aspects of my memories of the Bucks is how sparsely attended their games in Madison were. In Packer country, none of my (all white) Catholic school friends really cared much about the Bucks, let alone about basketball. So I gravitated to the only kid who did, who also happened to be the only black kid in my neighborhood, Robb. Robb had moved into the neighborhood in 1976 and went to public school. He was a Dr. J fanatic.

I will be the Blazers and Robb will be the Sixers. Best of 7. Blazers home games will be played in my driveway. Sixers home games will be played up on the court up The Park, which borders Robb’s back yard. His terrifying German Shepard, Ginger, chained to her dog house in the back yard, will cheer Robb on and intimidate me, especially when Robb, laughing, will say, “Kill Ginger Kill.” We will have boom boxes blaring music during our games and, for night games in my driveway, we will hook up shop lights to the garage door. We will introduce the starting line-ups: “at forward, from the University of Massachusetts, NUMBer SIX, JOOOOLLLLIUSSSS ERRRRRRVINGGGGGGGGGG.”

Robb had the edge in one respect for sure: it was much easier to imitate the Sixers than the Blazers. He could pull up for long jumpers and be World B. Free, he could back me in for a power lay up as Darryl Dawkins or a little Caldwell Jones jump hook, or, of course, he could swoop in for demoralizing driving Dr. J. layup – the crowd in “The Spectrum” going nuts (or the crowd in Memorial Coliseum hushed by the display of athleticism and blackness).

Meanwhile, what was I going to do: be Bill Walton throwing an outlet pass? Be Dave Twardzik hitting Bob Gross for a backdoor bounce pass? Maurice Lucas ripping down a board? Of course, I did all these things, but it wasn’t quite the same and I still recall the confusion I often felt as I attempted to translate what I was doing in my one-on-one game with Robb into the language of a Blazers broadcast.

I don’t remember how those series turned out. I remember we kept stats, “arbitrarily” assigning a certain number of points, rebounds, and assists to each of our “players.” Robb was about a year and a half older than me and though his time was split between hoops and football (and mine was not), I think he probably still won more of those games than he lost (that would change over the course of high school). I know that our games were fiercely competitive and serious, frequently leading to arguments, but these always seemed to resolve themselves over post-game meals. At the Spectrum, we would enjoy postgame homemade sweet potato pie and iced tea. At the Coliseum it was more likely to be fresh baked chocolate chip cookies and milk,

I came to consider Robb my closest friend, even though we went to different middle schools, high schools, and colleges. He introduced me to Earth, Wind and Fire, and later to Luther Vandross. We went to see Purple Rain together, several times (but also, before that, Rocky, also several times, and Conan the Barbarian too, because of Wilt’s cameo – just one time). We even “recorded” a song together, covering EW&F’s “After the Love is Gone” under the pseudonyms McAlister and Whitehead, for which we carefully drew the LP art.

To this day, Robb erroneously believes it was McFadden, not McAlister. We don’t get in touch regularly, but every time we do it is as if no time had passed. We smoothly integrate the victories and defeats of our respective passing lives into our friendship, a friendship we built when we were competing for the NBA title back in the 1970s and stumbling with awkward gait through family discord into adolescence.

But I realized reading Shoals that Robb and I were also playing with social and ideological, especially racial, dynamite. It’s as though the grownups left us these fucked-up toys and we still did something cool with them. After all, we saw and loved both Rocky and Purple Rain (maybe we loved Purple Rain a little more). Robb may have been the Sixers and I may have been the Blazers, he the hard-to-contain slasher, I the dead-eye shooter, he black and I white. But somehow, for better or worse (for better and worse), we never seemed to understand that these affinities had racial significance. Or maybe, at some deep level we did, but we didn’t care. I certainly don’t remember us talking much about race until we were older, maybe late in high school. Maybe I’ve repressed it and Robb remembers this differently. Maybe it just wasn’t as important as trying to find a way to feel less alone and more at home.

Or (and) maybe we were both tapping into something that Shoals points out toward the end of his chapter, something that undoes the dichotomous opposition between Kareem and Walton, Blazers and Sixers, and all the broader moral and racial meanings mapped onto those figures; something that the two of them shared, not only as players but as figures on different edges of the American mainstream at the time. “Each,” Shoals argues, “embodied a different kind of purism. In the stately Kareem and the playful Walton, there was a wholly original perspective on how to approach the game, philosophically speaking. . . . Each lived by his own version of the philosophy expressed in this statement by Kareem: “Don’t ever forget that you play basketball with your soul as well as your body.”

I’m not sure that the philosophy was a new one, but I think that the articulation of it and in those terms specifically was a new one and very much of its time. I suspect, for example, that Bill Russell also played basketball with his soul as well as his body, but I don’t think Bill’s time (nor perhaps his temperament) were ready to say so, let alone to stand for that. But Kareem and Bill both did stand for that, as did by the way, in my opinion, Dr J and the Sixers of that era. Those Sixers after all more than any other team at the time embodied the ABA genome that was just then impacting the NBA, a genome, as I wrote last week, that could be summed up with the phrase psychedelia, or “soul, manifesting.” It’s a nifty way to sum up, perhaps, what is shared by every wonderful player, event, or moment in the game’s history: they are played with soul as well as with body. I think Kareem and Walton hold the distinction of being the first notable players of the modern NBA to fully live the consequences of that commitment, on and off the court.

Given the durability of our friendship, and the other interests that we shared and introduced each other too, given the intensity with which we constructed an imaginary space in which we could, with soul and body, embody these heroes of ours, I suspect that Robb and I were more than anything loving and trying to live Kareem’s maxim in our games and in that way to elude the painfully alienating dichotomies that marked the time, and the game at the time, and that we were perhaps just beginning to fathom, each in our own way.

A French philosopher I much admire, Gilles Deleuze, once wrote in favor of what he called “intensive reading,” which he described in the following terms: “the only question [of a book] is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through you try a different book. . . . A book is a little cog in much more complicated external machinery. Writing is one flow among others, with no special place in relation to the others, that comes into relations of current, countercurrent, and eddy with other flows. . . This intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything…is reading with love.”

Let me now just type that passage again with some simple substitutions: “the only question [of the game] is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through you try a different game. . . . A game is a little cog in much more complicated external machinery. Hooping is one flow among others, with no special place in relation to the others, that comes into relations of current, countercurrent, and eddy with other flows. . . This intensive way of playing and watching, in contact with what’s outside the game, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each player and fan in the midst of events that have nothing to do with the game, as tearing the game into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything…is playing (or watching) with love.”

The cases of Walton and Kareem’s respective careers and personas, Shoals writing on those cases, and my own memories of the time offer, I think, another important instance of how the game is more than a game, or, in other words, of what it means to play, watch, and think about the game with love. In this particular case, the instance is inflected specifically by the tones of the era in question. And the cases are instructive of that time, in which during the decline of American civilization some people were still talking about soul, desperately trying to find their way to something like an integrated existence in a rapidly transforming (not to say disintegrating) culture that was America around the time of its bicentennial, in the wake of Vietnam, and Watergate, and in the thick of the energy crisis.

In this, we can see also the conditions under which the game allows itself to be experienced and understood as more than just the game, more than just the moves on the court, more than just the technical innovations. Kareem and Walton offer examples of throwing oneself so fully into the game that you come out the other side and see the game as a swatch in a much vaster fabric through which our very selves are threaded.

We were just playing, sure, Robb and I, just like Walton and Kareem and the Doctor were just playing, but we were also, like them, taking the promising and unpromising threads of our time and place, private and public, and weaving ourselves, body and soul, from them, And in turn, we were – we are -- weaving those unfinishable selves into the fabric of the world.

[postscript for readers with writerly interests: I didn’t actually have a class this week. I cancelled it to stay in St. Louis to care for my fiancée, Claire, who was sick. I expected that to have no impact at all on my post this week (odd as I realize that may sound). But it did. Normally, I leave class and take a few minutes to jot down a few key notions – some from the book, some from the clips, some from the students, and some of my own. Then later, when I have some time, I write out the blog, which usually comes out in the first draft more or less as you have been reading it. This time, of course, I didn’t have those notes. But I didn’t think that would matter at all. I wrote and wrote. What I wrote was a lovely, extensive recollection of my life between 1975 and 1977. But, as Claire, who I believe is a more talented writer and professor than I, gently pointed out when she read it, it didn’t have much to say about what was important, in terms of the Cultures of Basketball, about Kareem and Walton and the game at that time. We went back and forth once more: me drafting and she reading, before, lo and behold, I found myself jotting down a few notions: some from the book, some from the clips, some from the students, and some of my own. And these became the basis for the post you’ve just read.

That really might only be of interest to me. But it strikes me as offering yet another instance of what I think Deleuze is promoting in the passage I quoted above. I had mistakenly thought that the class and the students weren’t important to my own thinking; that, in a sense, I didn’t need anything but myself and my memories to communicate about the history of the game. And it’s not that that was useless. But it was, in a sense, closed. What Claire did, which is perhaps what my students in their own way do in class, is open the game, open my game, my experience of the game, and my thinking and writing about the game out to that wider world. Talking about this with Claire, she reminded me of an adage along the lines that you must study the Torah in pairs so that God can come in between. It might be sloppy analogical thinking on my part, but that strikes me as another way of recommending reading with love. Or sometimes, to put it in other words, the best way to tear the book, or the game, into pieces is to share it with someone else.]

SAN FRANCISCO TONIGHT!!!

2011-02-24T13:34:00.000-05:00

7PM, Rockit Room. Eric Freeman, Eli Horowitz from McSweeney's, and myself. FREE ZILLER.

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I plan to be fully on, like in this video, where I'm acting like I just swallowed a school bus full of coke. But feel free to bring me pills if you want. Also I am trying to figure out if I broke a law by posting/typing this. I have to call my insurance company now. See you tonight!

Madvillainy

2011-02-22T11:40:00.001-05:00

Despite the summertime hostility directed toward LeBron James, and in contradistinction to insistence otherwise, the Miami Heat have not been particularly villainous this season. Miami is disliked, probably more than any other team, but the gap between it and other elite teams is more crack than chasm. Consider Boston, which must regularly confront geographic enmity, Paul Pierce intolerance, and the burgeoning Fuck a KG movement. The Celtic haters are legion, and Boston might actually win something, so the hate means more.

To the extent that any Heat is disliked, LeBron either bears or inspires the most vitriol, however it does not feel all that cool or warranted to hate him anymore, partially because he has maintained a fairly low profile this year. James hasn't stoked the flames of fan antipathy in traditional ways. He has not feuded with beloved figures, he has not injured anyone on purpose, he has not acted like the oblivious diva that we like to say he can be during his lowest moments. (Chris Bosh is another story: fair or not, it's fun to marginalize him.) He said a few things about the union and contraction that appeared to piss off journalists more than anyone else. Were Miami a more legitimate threat to win a title this season, that looming possibility might inspire stronger feelings, but until Miami finds a Kendrick Perkins (or Boston gets hurt), the Heat will not end the year with a coronation that echoes what we saw at their introduction.

All the same, some people do cling to the narrative of a dastardly Miami, perhaps none more so than...the Heat, themselves. It's weird and somewhat dissonant. True, there have been few feel-good marketing campaigns this year featuring LeBron, Dwyane Wade, or Chris Bosh. But frankly, there has been little to say about any of them beyond the confines of traditional basketball conversations. Wade's T-Mobile ads are the most memorable contribution the Big Three have made to NBA culture so far this season, and while they satirize the tabloid news cycle and the fury that attended Heat news this summer, the ads feel played out, not poignant. For so much screaming about such a celebrated union, the anticipation appears to have exhausted most of the available oxygen.

Like most things, it's LeBron's fault. Or it might as well be. James's "What Should I Do" ad seemed to cauterize the wounds endured this summer, rather than prolonging the pain or launching a series of reprisals. It was a coda, not an introduction. Some of that effect may owe to how easily, and quickly, the ad was lampooned; critical response from media and fans robbed LeBron's defiant moment of its gravitas. Moving so swiftly to answer James, to cast his ad as either a brilliant ethering or a clueless misstep along the same ill-found path, crowded out his message and seemed to indicate general Heat fatigue. Judging the ad, regardless of direction, meant it could be processed and disposed of swiftly. People were tired, and hating requires far more energy. So Heat haters, far from vituperative and animated, quickly settled into a muted kind of loathing, and the Heat have gone about business--at times struggling but largely playing well--in the glare of celebrity, but without the elevated temperature of hatred.

Don't tell Miami, though. The Heat seem to think there's a war going on outside. Game after game, Miami is introduced to a C-Murder soundtrack:

Conspicuously missing, no matter how understandable the reasons, is the original chorus:

Fuck them other n***as cause I'm down for my n***as (What)
Fuck them other n***as cause I'm down for my n***as (What)
Fuck them other n***as, I ride for my n***as (What)
I die for my n***as/Fuck them other n***as (What)

Angry, profane, spiteful, violent, retributive, cloistered. "Down 4 My N***az" is the soundtrack to the season the Heat expected to have. Only, they aren't having it, as noted. The basketball intelligentsia made its peace with the Heat long ago. Some fans may hate the team, but enough either do not, or just do not care, to the point that James and Wade still started in the All-Star Game. Heat games on national television are broadcast with something resembling calm, the announcers seemingly happy to operate in the quiet epilogue of a story that may ultimately have been about nothing. (Or about everything--power, race, money, labor--but only in years to come.) Still, Miami soldiers on.

Night in and night out, the Heat carry this mantle of hostility out onto their home floor. For each of the three All-Stars, it conjures something different. James has been his usual, brilliant self this season. Without mind-boggling numbers which the most optimistic James fan, or the most excited champion of spite (like me!), may have expected, he has made the Heat his own. Not only does he control the ball when it matters, but Wade has played a role as LeBron's second-in-command. James's steady demeanor, toned down from the exuberance he displayed in Cleveland, bespeaks a man toiling under the weight of expectation, some of it self-imposed. But not merely chastened or quiet, LeBron also has played with an air of dignity that contradicts The Decision and probably would not seem as strong were the Cavaliers not historically terrible. As though Miami's ascension and his game's devastating impact were inadequate, the sorry plight of a Cleveland team sinking swiftly has created a new and dazzling manner by which we can calibrate LeBron's preeminence. For his part, James has spoken kindly of Cleveland and otherwise focused on the task at hand, clawing back some of the respect he surrendered in July. The C-Murder track just isn't right for James under this light; he has been serious and spoken through example, but not insolent.

For Wade, meanwhile, the lasting impression is far more somber. Generally effective but intermittently out of sorts, Dwyane has occupied the role many forecasted for James. He has been supplanted as Miami's leading player. For years, his explosive style carried with it a noble air of martyrdom. He threw himself, often quite literally, into everything, from passing lanes to collapsing big men, and his regular ability to either win or go down furiously was heroic. Dwyane Wade was a wonderful loser when he had to be, and he made long odds a part of his appeal. He has never been a great winner, though, as his referee-aided championship surely reminds even some of his fans. Now, with his athletic exploits less mythic and his place on a winning team somewhat diminished, striding out as the Heat do each home game feels insincere. The bravado and assurance of the track no longer mesh with a player who seems like a lesser version of what he once was. Perception has hurt Wade more than any Heat, and his relative reticence has only reinforced the secondary lane in which he travels. He's like Magic--the bad rapper, not the bad television personality--on this track.

For no one, though, is the illusion of a season spent fighting more disconcerting than Bosh. It doesn't even bear explanation, really. After a summer during which he was happy to subordinate his will and persona to that of the teammates he hoped to gain, the specter of this lanky studio gangster with the disorienting facial hair (he's black, it's Asian) coming at an opponent fueled by C-Murder's bile is laughable. Sorry to be so literal, but C-Murder is in prison. Chris Bosh usually seems like he only eats when LeBron allows it, and as though he would punch with the underside of his fist. Though, this does make Bosh the perfect Heat for today's analysis. The Heat are not who they thought they would have to be, and Bosh lives it.

What It Is (Day 12)

2011-02-21T11:30:00.002-05:00

Yago Colas posts again about his Cultures of Basketball course, but also, what the ABA means to us today. Especially in the afterglow of All-Star Weekend. Here's Day 11, on kids and the seventies Knicks, if you missed it.

I didn’t plan it this way when I designed the syllabus, but it seems especially appropriate to be teaching, thinking, and writing about the old ABA during the media-amped spawn of pure skill and utter silliness that is NBA All-Star Weekend. We wrestled no bears, but it was as though the giddy 70s hallucination that the ABA can appear to have been infected my students (and me) so that we had a wacky day worthy of the most surreal of that defunct’s league’s half-time shows.

I undoubtedly set the tone for this, in part, by beginning class with my personal anecdote about watching the Michigan game the night before at Applebee’s next to a couple of puffy, red-faced, slick-haired vulgarians who were ragging endlessly on each and every one of the players that I have in class. I was surprised to find myself offended. The students (players more than anyone) insisted on hearing the criticisms in all their blockheaded, paunchy glory. And with that I seem to have informalized the classroom beyond the point of no return.

From there, after a brief and meaningless introduction, I rolled a 3-minute clip of Julius Erving tearing up the ABA. As Dr J exhibited his assortment of pull-up threes, twisting finger rolls, and, of course, elegant swooping slams to a funky instrumental backbeat, the students got rowdy and loud.

Beating on their little desks, they screamed for more clips: "Where’s the drifting-out-from-behind-the backboard scoop?!!" "That was the NBA," I tell them, oldly, "against the Lakers." “We wanna see that!” “Julius in the NBA!” Inside I’m resisting – this isn’t about Julius per se, but about the ABA – but I’m weak. I don’t want to lose them, I don’t want to police them, and most of all, as I’ve said before, I could watch these clips all day. I want to see the Doctor too. “You really wanna see that?” I ask, suggestively, blithely unaware of the doom about to descend. “Yayyyyyyy!!” they shouted, birthday hats akimbo, noisemakers blaring, faces smeared with cake. “Okay!” I say brightly.

With my computer’s desktop projected enormously on the screen in the front of the room, I quickly Google “Dr J in the NBA”, self-conscious about how slow I am in this medium compared to these kids who were all born and raised in the Matrix (even slower than usual since I can’t type normally because of the splint immobilizing my right hand). But I manage to get to a long list of video links. Now I can’t decide. We see one called “NBA Julius Erving Mix”, with a subtitle in Spanish: “dunk de Julius Erving.” That looks like fun. I click and then watch with horror as the first static image appears on my screen (and therefore, I know, 1 billion times larger on the screen over my left shoulder, and probably on a monitor in the Dean’s office): a woman wearing a cut off tank-top with the words “Got dick?” emblazoned across the front. Yeah. Of all the stupid things I’ve done, of all the humiliations I’ve suffered in the classroom since I taught my first class as a graduate student at Duke University in 1988, nothing like this has ever happened. Now we are indeed in a time machine hurtling toward the ABA.

The students are like teenagers – well, most of them are teenagers – at their first keg party. Howling, laughing, shouting clever comments to the person sitting two inches away from them, hysterical with embarrassment and excitement at having blasted through a taboo. Jumping over a car seems like nothing when you've just seen that in your college class. My crippled fingers stab at the keyboard trying to make it go away, my clumsiness magnified exponentially as I try to restore a semblance of calm to what has become a roomful of very large, coked-up 6th graders. I find a new clip and, as always, the graceful moving images of baller excellence gradually bring them back to their senses, or, at least, make them quiet down a bit. But, as the last image fades, along with the last bellowed note of Whitney’s “Greatest Love of All,” I sense the loopy energy bubble back up to a boil.

I try to channel it: “what do you see in the clips of Erving? “ Some of the answers: “grace, dunks, the range on his finger-roll, his athleticism.” Great, I tell them. And then I remind them that much of what we saw in the Dr J clips was occurring at the same time as what we had seen two days before in clips of the Knicks. But it looks like a different game, like a different era, like our era. And, in fact, it’s true, they see it too, today’s NBA game – driving athletic layups, rim rattling dunks, three-pointers – owes much more to Erving and the ABA than it does to Red Holzman and the Knicks. Unfortunately, scintillating and promising though that postulation may be, they’ve lost interest and begin to bombard me with irrelevant questions about Dr J’s career. That happens a lot: class disintegrating into a streetball version of Jeopardy.

I countered by putting a concrete focal object in front of them. "Take out your books," I droned, "and open to this picture, on p. 86." At least they are obedient, even if glumly so. We look at Jacob Weinstein’s trippy ABA artwork, a two-page visual explosion, in magenta, yellow, and the palest of pale blues, of elevating players, towering stylized afros, skyrocketing shapes and stripes, squiggles and loops, and bears and dancing girls. It’s really a brilliant piece of work, like mainlining Terry Pluto’s Loose Balls (the canonical documentary account of ABA zaniness). “Let’s look at this,” I say, “like a work of art, what jumps out at you?”

First answer: “the 70s.” I press for a little elaboration. They do pretty well, pointing to the color palette and the explosive lines and forms just barely ordered. They smartly contrast this with the art work we’ve already examined in the class: the neat lines and subdued colors of the Celtics trophy machine, the slightly more individualized and fantastic but still by no means chaotic image of the Knicks plying their trade against a skyline of newspaper headlines and box scores. What do the 70s mean to you? I ask.

One kid’s answer: “I don’t exist.” By which, it turns out, he meant neither to roll out a slip-n-slide of Cartesian doubt, nor to transport us into a paradoxical first-person consciousness prior to his conception, but rather just to state the obvious: it’s before his time and so doesn’t mean much. It’s the flipside of the Trivial Pursuit version of historical interest: none. I choke back the rising gorge of self-righteous indignation so as to glide past that worrisome – and all too common -- ignorance and lack of curiosity about any frame of reference outside the first person singular in the present tense. Fortunately, someone else says, “It’s the 70s, it just looks like, like, anything could happen. You tell me something crazy happened in the 70s and I’d believe it, because anything could happen in the 70s.” A couple of students echo that, as though the first one hadn’t even spoken, like academics in a committee meeting.

Bingo. I can work with that. "The 70s," I say, "I’m hearing means possibility to you, an expanded field of possibilities." I hear a sound. Everybody laughs. I look confused. I hear the sound again. Not sure if it is a fart or a snore. Everyone laughs again. "Please," I think I begged, "can y’all stay with me here." A hand goes up: "Who is the guy holding the McDonald’s bag in the fur coat?" I look more closely at the illustration. I can’t remember and I’m so irritated by their unrepressed fascination with the marginal detail. Then I come up with it: Marvin Barnes. I tell them the story about Barnes refusing to board a St Louis bound plane in Louisville because it would arrive “before” it departed: “I’m not getting on no time machine,” said the player some felt could’ve been the greatest ever. No hand, but a voice calls out, "Who is the guy with the gun in the Condors uniform?" I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t fucking know. Their fucking attention spans are like the 2005-6 Phoenix offense: 7 seconds or less. I say none of this. Instead I laugh: "you can look it up if you want, y’all are so much faster on your devices than I am." (it was John Brisker, for the record).

I try again: "Possibility…" I say, richly trailing off, trying to make the word sound like an open door rather than a lead balloon. I really want to bring home the point that this marginalized insanity of the ABA, the league that apparently folded, had actually migrated into the NBA and taken over, viz. All-Star Weekend. But I also want them to get not only that historical point about the game, but to glimpse that there’s a way of thinking about possibility and growth, about marginality and centrality here. I fantasize about them going out in the world and scrambling social hierarchies because of Cultures of Basketball class.

"Wendell Berry," I tell them, "is an American poet and essayist, who is also a farmer in Kentucky." (Snickers). "He’s interested in questions of land use, farming, productivity, and ecology," I say. Back in the late 70s, just after the ABA folded, he took a trip to Peru to study the farming practices of Andean peasants there. I remember almost nothing of this essay except the following (which I may in fact be misremembering): Berry was struck by the fact that the Peruvian farmers would leave a wild margin all around their cultivated plots. Accustomed to the US practice of tilling and planting every possible square inch of arable land, Berry was puzzled. The farmers explained that the margin was sort of like a research laboratory. If some sort of pest, for example, destroyed their crop one year, they could look to the margins and see what had survived and in that way begin to develop hybrids that would resist that blight the next time.

Now it all started coming together for me. I began to see the students’ wildness today as an expression of, as a way of responding to, by reflecting, the wildness of the ABA. “What the hell was the ABA?” asks the subtitle of Bethlehem Shoals’s chapter (entitled Notes from the Underground) on the league in FreeDarko’s history of the pro game. Indeed, what the hell was that? The question we ask after something absurd occurs. Or, even more pertinently, after we come to our senses having participated in something absurd and inexplicable, or maybe even embarrassing. The question we ask having seen a UFO shoot across the evening sky, a quick trailing flash in our peripheral vision. It’s the question that might be asked of anything that grows in the unpoliced, uncultivated, untended margins of our attention. What the hell was that?

Indeed, that’s why I’ve allowed myself (why I always allow myself), against my judgment, to ramble about the seemingly unproductive, distracted and distracting occurrences and comments in class. The students seemed to me to be pestering for the identities of players on the margins of the picture, but they were really asking what the hell was that on the periphery of their egocentric, adolescent vision? What was that in a cowboy hat and six shooter? In a fur coat clutching a McDonald’s bag? Was Will Ferrell true? What was that world before I was born? (Indeed, the viral metaphor helps me understand how I kept getting carried away on the tide of their appetite for the decontextualized marginal detail; they were bitten by the ABA and I was bitten by them). What the hell was that?

And the answer, just like when someone hauls out the baby pictures (or better yet, the ultrasound images), is: it’s you, silly! Your game, your day and age. Saturday night Claire and I watched – riveted, bored, and embarrassed all at once -- a high-heeled, dolled up Heather Cox (I know its obvious, but really, why is a woman wearing heels to a basketball game?) escort Clippers guard Eric Gordon to a green screen, where he bashfully donned a Spartan helmet, grabbed a fake sword, and stood awkwardly before Jon Barry, ESPN commentator, who himself was also holding a sword and wearing a gladiator mask. They proceeded to mumble a few lines from the movie “Gladiator” and half-heartedly to knock their swords together like two embarrassed six year olds who are friends only because their parents are. “Thanks for the giggles, Eric” said Heather. He wandered off probably wondering “What the hell was that?” That was just before Justin Bieber nailed a three pointer in the celebrity game; which was just before he claimed his MVP trophy shouting props to “my boy Magic Johnson.” Did Justin Bieber really say “my boy Magic Johnson”? Did Magic really not only let him, but slap palms with him as he did? What the hell was that? The ABA –oops, the NBA – Its FANtastic! Have we really come so far from wrestling bears and playboy bunnies?

It’s true, the ABA may primarily be a mine of retro cache for a few urban hipsters, or a nostalgia trip for some middle-aged ballers like myself, but in some very real ways the ABA didn’t fold at all, it just implanted itself parasitically into the NBA and mutated (Shoals himself offers the viral metaphor in passing, and refers to the league as a “workshop or laboratory”). Add it’s not just the shamelessly, insatiable appetite for attention in the global media marketplace or the brazen techniques for securing it that the farmers of the NBA found and hybridized in the margins that were the ABA. It’s also, as I pointed out to the students, the game itself, the product on the floor.

If LeBron idolized Michael Jordan, well, it’s well-known that Michael idolized North Carolina State, then ABA, high-flyer David Thompson. Thompson may have burned out, but Dr. J didn’t, becoming instead a dominant gene in the host body of his new league. Where clips of the 70s Knicks offer an endless series of sober layups and mid-range jumpers (their regularity only emphasized by the oddity of an Earl Monroe scoop shot), the typical NBA game today presents itself as a series of 3 pointers, twisting layups in traffic, and mighty jams: in short, as a Dr J ABA highlight reel. And never is that more evident than during All-Star weekend, when the game turns itself inside out: parading as spectacular exhibition what in fact it is all the time.

There is a beautiful coda I would like to add, though it didn’t occur to me in class, lest I sound too disdainful. I’m only a little disdainful. After all, I’m of original ABA vintage and my authentic ABA game ball (autographed by the 1975 Spurs) sits proudly on our mantle. It’s in my DNA. But if I nonetheless seem less than caught up in the spectacle let me offer this by way of gratitude to the progenitors of Amazing.

The students, in responding to the artwork, mentioned the word “psychedelic.” In the feverish haze of my own ABA acid trip, I neglected to tell them that etymologically, “psychedelic” means “soul manifesting.” But it strikes me now that the phrase is a perfect response to the question: what the hell was the ABA? It was soul, manifesting. And while it may well have been an economically futile, exploitative, drug driven ride for a few martini-soaked businessmen, it also implanted some much needed soul (and style) into the genetic material of the mother ship that would first absorb and then be possessed by it.

"I Would've Jumped Over a Giraffe"

2011-02-21T10:04:00.001-05:00

Here's some vintage Bron-acting-human that also suggests he saw the latest FreeDarko print. You know, the one where Blake Griffin himself jumps over a giraffe instead of that piddly car.

LeBron: "I wouldn't have jumped over a car. I would've jumped over a giraffe!"

BUY OUR BLAKE PRINT HERE.

Plus, additional happiness: Ziller and I reunite to grade the Skills Challenge like a Dunk Contest. It had to be done.

Merriment In Dunk-land

2011-02-20T02:03:00.001-05:00

Congrats to Blake Griffin! He did what we thought he would! Check out our print of the newly-crowned Dunk Contest champ, and read some quick thoughts I exchanged with Eric Freeman.

Bethlehem Shoals: I've convened this meeting under the cover of darkness because that dunk contest left me all emotionally bedraggled. Like it was far deeper than the usual "yay" or "nay". How are you holding up?

Eric Freeman: I am pretty zen about it. Griffin won, as expected, but I always assumed that he wouldn't have my favorite dunks and would carry through on name recognition. Did you know that Nate Robinson said a few weeks ago that the dunk contest is rigged? Once Griffin acquitted himself decently you knew it was over.

BS: Didn't Nate win it like 70 times himself? Here's the thing: there was very little narrative arc to it. It was more like a tableau, or an allegory with four primeval feelings each submitting their claim for your attention. That might be what was so disorienting -- and powerful -- about it. To me, at least. It was more like four different perspectives on the same event, each with its own teleology. And yet it contained all four.

EF: That sounds right to me. Even Griffin's ascent seemed preordained rather than executed within the moment. But how many dunk contests really have narrative strength in the moment? Vince in 2000, I suppose, and maybe the Nique/MJ battles. Those are rare events -- I'm perfectly happy with the contest if we see some good dunks and everyone has a good time. There were no real stinkers this year, so I'm happy.

BS: We were also spared the usual tension of dunk contest, a kind of narrative anxiety where dunkers (and the audience) fret over how they will sequence their dunks for maximum effect with the judges. That's usually what passes for the inter-activity of narrative, and again, that's more a technicality. Today was like a release from that, since every dunk was good. And we learned that, as you said, the two dunkers dunking it out with dunk-fire in their dunky eyes is, at best a rare occurrence. Otherwise, you're competing against the scoreboard, and the forces that shape it, which themselves are determined n real time. Maybe each dunk as a vignette, whose score ends up being fairly meaningless (see Ibaka), is the only way to watch it. It's only as strong as the different stories it tells, not some sort of overall coherence or unity.

EF: I certainly prefer this sort of contest to the forced narrative of the Nate Robinson/Dwight Howard competition, where seeing two "great" dunkers of different heights supposedly made it interesting. Just pick four guys with impressive abilities and a willingness to go crazy (see: JaVale) and hope for the best. It's almost a shame Griffin had to be in his team's city and the fans got to vote -- otherwise we might've had a really exciting upset. Would losing a dunk contest really make anyone think less of him as a dunker?

BS: Especially when this year, there was no sense of trying to save themselves for marriage. They came out and did their thing. It sort of underlines the silliness of judging a contest when, as with today, the dunkers are all almost coming from different planets. Yeah, Zen as hell. A showcase where some dunked more than others, but everyone made their point. That might be the enormity of it ... I don't really feel like DeRozan or Ibaka were somehow kept from making an impression on us, and helping BRING THE DUNK CONTEST BACK. There's no reconciling the four of them, and it probably doesn't matter. I find it kind of ridiculous that we judged that at all. Couldn't it just be like a Christmas display in the middle of a shopping mall? God, there I go again, threatening the integrity of the competitive spirit again. Will I never learn?

EF: Apparently not. It seems like what you're saying is that there should also be some kind of battle for third place so everyone gets to dunk as much as everyone else. Then, no matter who wins the official trophy, we'll have seen what each contestant has to offer. And then we'll know the real champion. In our hearts, where it counts.

FD Bigger Than Life

2011-02-18T15:31:00.002-05:00

For All-Star Weekend in Los Angeles, the folks at UNDEFEATED commissioned our very own Jacob Weinstein to do an artistic interpretation of the Blake Griffin Experience. Look for it above the Undefeated store on La Brea if you're in LA. If not, cop the print, in one of three colorways, at the newly re-opened FreeDarko Imperial Outlet. Buy some other stuff, too!

A few links:

-If you haven't already, take a look at GQ's Guide to the New NBA Golden Age. Yours truly files a feature on the Thunder, the result of a ten-day stay in OKC; there are also contributions from Eric Freeman, Billups, and oh yeah, more Jacob art. That Thunder illo should be available for sale down the line.

-Maybe you heard, I wrote a little something about why I don't enjoy watching Derrick Rose. Yes, I saw last night's game, and yes, a lot of it was awesome to me. So we're making progress. Really, it's comes down to whether we have to jock every good basketball player just because they're good, or whether we're allowed to have preferences and ... taste!

-Check out Yago Colas's piece from yesterday on teaching the seventies Knicks to the kids.

-Eric and I with some mind-altering predictions regarding this weekend.

Dunk You Very Much

2011-02-17T12:08:00.002-05:00

If you aren't reading Yago Colas's posts about his Cultures of Basketball course, well, you're an idiot, because they just might be the most FD thing going right now. Sorry if I've used that line before. Sure, there's stuff about school in there, but even if you have no interest in academia or pedagogy, there's still a good 2,000 words on basketball and culture and memory. Here's Day 11; you can read the rest here.

I guess it's self-serving to keep in the parts that discuss the FD book, but oh well. That's context.

This must be a very precious memory. I’ve even written about it before, in passing, in the first substantial post on my blog, before I even knew there would be a Cultures of Basketball course. I am small, 6 or 7, maybe 8. And for today, I decide, I will be Walt Frazier in my driveway. I will dribble around aimlessly at first, warming up my imagination. And then: Time is running out (time was always running out). The Knicks are down by one (my team was always down by one). Frazier steals the ball from West and glides – yes, glides -- down the court (somehow fast and slow at the same time) but the Lakers are already back so he passes to Bradley on the wing. Bradley fakes a jumper and dribbles two steps toward the baseline, then facing a helping defender he flips it back to Clyde at the elbow, who rises, rises gracefully, cocking the ball back and releasing it like a gentle spring at the top of his jump.

My imagination loses sight of everything except the ball, its rotation and the perfect geometry of its arc to the basket. It’s good! It’s good! Frazier wins the game! Then I have an idea. This could be better. I get out my tempra paints and transform an old t shirt into a Clyde Frazier Knicks jersey. I look in the mirror. Better. But it could be better still. I get the paintbrush and carefully paint myself a moustache and sideburns, or maybe it was a full beard. I don’t remember. Now I am Clyde.

I loved the Milwaukee Bucks as a kid. They were born as a franchise the same year my family moved to Madison, in time for the 1968-69 season. The Celtics won their last title that year, Russell retired (I still have the issue of SI in which he announced it), and the field was open. The Bucks sucked that first year and I don’t really remember anything about them, But then they got Lew Alcindor from UCLA. And through the 1973-74 season they would amass the best regular season won loss record of any NBA team, win the title in 1971, lose in the Western Conference Finals to eventual champion Lakers in ‘72, lost in the WC semis to Golden State in ‘73, and lose in the finals to Boston in 74. I watched them in person when they’d play games in Madison (rarely), watched them on TV (a little less rarely), and listened to them on the radio (all the time).

The other perennial contenders of that time were the Lakers (champs in 72), Bullets and, of course, the Knicks, who won the 1970 and 1973 titles. These were my formative basketball years, the experiences and memories of teams, games, and players (Robertson and Jabbar, Wilt and West, Hayes and Unseld, and then, Reed, Monroe, Barnett, Bradley, DeBusschere, and, of course, Frazier) that to this day outsize all others in my mind; that make me bristle irrationally at any suggestion that any other NBA era was better, and that make it hard to even understand what teaching the period should look like, let alone to formulate a coherent lesson plan.

So I approached Tuesdays class, for which we had read the FreeDarko chapter called “The Get Along Gang: Why Everybody loves the New York Knicks”, with a mixture of intense childlike excitement, middle-aged nostalgia, and pedagogical cluelessness and panic. I have always loved reading, and there are certain writers that I have loved especially. But they are not confusingly intertwined with the core of my being like 1970s hoops. I feel that I’ve mostly managed to integrate my passion into my teaching without becoming wholly incoherent. So much for that.

Even now, as I’m writing, I’m having a hard time weaving a story or a focused argument out of the tangled skein of memories and feelings that the period evokes for me. All the more so, since as I told the students at the outset of class, that decade of NBA history is often dismissed as a kind of low-ebb middle-ages sandwiched between the Celtics dynasty and legendary era of the 1960s and the resurgent media friendly era of Magic Bird and Jordan. The 70s offered no single dominant franchise. But that’s not all, the ABA helped drive salaries up and the league became mostly black for the first time in its history.

Meanwhile, widely reported drug use among the players gave a mostly white audience an excuse to cluck in moralizing disdain and to turn the channel rather than watch rich young black men ball. All of this, of course, in the context of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Energy Crisis. Oh, and disco. So what do you when your fondest and most powerful memories of the game are of what most – not all – NBA chroniclers would prefer to forget, if not write-off as an embarrassing exhibition of what is not-Amazing? What do you do when the story of your formative years is of dissolution and wasted promise?

1.Evasive action II: Nickname poll (What is your favorite all time hoops nickname?). Results: Iceman and Mailman tied with two votes each (Skip-to-my-Lou also got two votes but I invalidated them in unaccountable contradiction of the political philosophy I advocated on Day 10). My own choice: Black Jesus.

2.Time killer: Three video clips: one of Earl Monroe (see 1 above), one on the 1970 Knicks title team and one on the 1973 Knicks title team.

3.Passing the Buck open-ended question for the class: What made the biggest impression on you as you read the chapter on the Knicks or as you watched the video clips?

Hmmm. Lots of silences in today’s class. I clearly came neither ready to play nor ready to really expose myself and try to make my inability to be coherent into a teaching opportunity. Which doesn’t mean that they didn’t try to step-up and fill the void. I’d say they did. You know, sometimes it’s the students who have somehow to find a way on the spur of the moment to pull together and make a particular class work, a job that I could at least have made easier by confessing that I needed them to do it. But even without that they came up with several interesting observations. Among them, the one that most stuck in my mind is that the Knicks rarely dunked in any of the clips we watched. Why, a student wondered?

I don’t mean to be coy or over-complicating in what follows. I know that the prevalence of the dunk today really had its origins historically in the 1976 ABA inaugural dunk context, in the merger that brought acrobatic dunkers like Julius Erving and David Thompson into the NBA fold and of course especially to the confluence of Michael Jordan and ESPN, with its nightly parade of dunk highlights in the 1980s, not to mention the overall superior athleticism of NBA players today. So that it might seem that the responsible thing would have been to politely explain that the question was anachronistic, like asking why the pioneers on the Oregon Trail didn’t just take a plane. But not quite, because it’s not as though nobody dunked in the NBA back then (and, indeed, the NCAA had not long before banned dunking, imagining the threat that anticipated Lew Alcindor dunks posed to the game), and the Knicks defense certainly generated plenty of breakaway opportunities for crowd rousing jams. So it was a valid question.

And, anyway, when you are teaching or thinking about things, sometimes, I have found, it can turn out to be useful to recall and then set aside the obvious path and just pursue the question along whatever paths it takes you. You might not get to a better answer to the original question (we didn’t) but you might discover some interesting other thoughts along these not obviously promising side roads. Plus, like I say, I didn’t really have the presence of mind to come up with something on my own so I wasn’t about to piss away a student contribution. What emerged from the discussion were three points that weren’t necessarily, and perhaps shouldn’t be, related, but part of the fun of this writing is making dubious connections and offering speculative interpretations that are only tenuously tethered to the facts.

The first two possibilities were offered by students: 1) the Knicks didn’t dunk because it was at odds with the unselfish style of play to which they all obviously subscribed. The dunk might have felt like an attempt to drawn attention to oneself as an individual player. And 2) the Knicks didn’t dunk because they preferred the understated cool and fluidity of the lay up over the staccato violence of the throwdown. So, I observed, we have a moral interpretation and an aesthetic interpretation of the no-dunk Knicks. Before going on I just want to pause to point out how pleased I was with my students for thinking “beyond a boundary” and recognizing how much more there can be to understand in what appears to be a simple technical choice between two equally effective options on the court: do I lay it in or do I throw it down?

The third idea wasn’t so much an explanation of why they didn’t dunk as an account of the hidden racial politics dogging the dunk, which I offered off the cuff in response to a student question about the legal history of the shot. The dunk was never illegal in NBA competition, but was banned by the NCAA, as I mentioned above, beginning with the 1967-68 season until 1976, But the point I also made about the dunk in that context is that the first dominant dunker, Wilt Chamberlain, as has been amply noted elsewhere, terrified basketball purists who feared he would destroy the game (see John McPhee’s elegant paean to Bill Bradley, which is structured in part around the sophistication of Bradley’s style drawing McPhee back to the game in the mid 1960s after its pleasures had been spoiled for him by dunking giants).

It’s difficult, and probably unwise to separate the fears of Chamberlain in that era (and of Alcindor in the next) from white fears of a black uprising in the game, which in turn are difficult to separate from white fears of a black uprising in society. In short perhaps overly simplistic but still illuminating terms, the dunk was unconsciously (though also no doubt in some quarters consciously and explicitly) racialized as a brutish black play at odds with the more sophisticated white traditions of the game.

So, for now, just keep these speculative notions in the back of your mind: the Knicks preference for the lay in over the dunk could be read as having moral, aesthetic, and political layers of meaning. Meanwhile, our reading for the day, as I say, was Bethelehem Shoals’ investigation into “why everybody loves the New York Knicks.” His argument, already succinctly expressed in the title of the chapter: “the get along gang”, is two fold. In the first instance, the Knicks embodied a style of play (aggressive team defense and unselfish offense with quick passing and lots of movement away from the ball) that “was a direct descendant of the ball that had been played in New York colleges during the first half of the century. It harked back to the city’s past and resonated with generations of fans from the New York diaspora (and not just Jews).”

Second, the Knicks employed the style successfully with a roster of players who represented exactly the particular racial, ethnic, geographical, and socio-economic groups that were most definitely not getting along in American society at the time, In Shoals’ words: “everyone loves the one about the pimp [Frazier], the nerd [Bradley – also a Midwestern banker’s son], the black Southern Gentlemen [Willis Reed], the white workingman [Dave DeBusschere], the hippie [Phil Jackson], and the street urchin they picked up along the way [Earl Monroe]. The Knicks were America’s Team for a country trying to make sense of itself –and wondering what coexistence might look like.”

In addition, I think that Shoals, in his comparison of Red Auerbach (architect and coach of the 60s Celtics dynasty) and Red Holzman (laconic coach of the Knicks), is also suggesting that the Knicks offered a different kind of response to the essential hoops tension between the individual and the team. Where the Celtics became interchangeable parts in a durably and predictably (if also magically) effective winning machine, the Knicks players were all personalities, celebrities even, off the court who found a way to mesh perfectly on the court – despite, or perhaps because, of the considerably greater spotlight that the new era and their New York home shined on them.

I have zero objection to this view of what made (and makes to this day) the Knicks of that era so appealing. Indeed in class we talked about this (oddly arriving at it ourselves without reference to the book – a sign of my poor psychological preparation for the day) and it led to an interesting, if abbreviated, discussion of the kind of roles that teams can play for their cities and for the society at large. We talked about and cited the numerous examples of teams galvanizing and inspiring a city that is struggling (as with the Pistons and Detroit, both in the late -80s and in the more recent edition). But we also wondered together whether there was a flipside to the way teams can inspire and excite struggling cities (and societies). Whether there is a palliative effect at work whereby the success of a team and the feel-good atmosphere it can inspire can serve to dissipate anger at conditions and injustices that persist after all the ticker-tape has been swept up.

In other words, we tried to think about the ways in which a team’s success can lead us either to stop thinking that our society has problems that need our attention and effort or to stop working for those problems because after all, unlike a title run, there really isn’t a clear cut sign of final triumph in the struggles against, say, poverty or racism.

I want to emphasize that I’m not proposing an either or here, nor am I trying to tell anyone (including my students) what they ought to think about this issue, or about any particular instance of these dynamics in general. I’m just trying to encourage critical, well-rounded thought on the question and, in class, anyway to try to introduce students to a long standing debate in the humanities over the role of art in society (a debate of which I take, for the present purposes, the sports and society question to be a kind of related offshoot). I like and wished I had pointed out to the students that its possible to feel and think both ways at the same time, as Shoals does when he writes, “if the Knicks offered hope for the country, they did so while acknowledging that things would never be the same again. For America, these teams were not an attempt to deny the trauma of the sixties but a reality that offered a way forward. They continue to resonate because, in the end, the Knicks are about the possibility of shared values even after the whole world seems to have broken wide open.”

I find that to be extremely stirring, well-thought-through stuff. It even helps me to understand why, even as they eclipsed my beloved the Bucks in agonizing fashion in the early 70s, I was dressing up as Clyde and loving the Knicks. Now that I think about it, I realize that as a kid I was looking pretty desperately for a get along gang in my own family, which suffered its share of tension and strife at the time. I’m not saying I thought this consciously of course. Consciously I just knew Clyde was fucking cool and I was going to be him when I grew up (which as it turns out is exactly what happened as you can tell from my account of the first day of class), I’m just saying that unconsciously I had picked up on the get along discourse of the Knicks and had internalized it as a kind of fantasy I wanted to live in, even if I was too young to really realize that my whole country – and not just my family -- might have been in need of that too.

So I’m down with all of this. But I’m still left wondering how to solve the case of the missing dunks, and I’m still not content to go with the easy and true historical answer (that the dunk was just not yet a big part of anybody’s game in the NBA at that time). I want to try to put this all together. It’s actually pretty easy with the moral and aesthetic qualities we in class attributed to the non-dunk. That is: if the Knicks’ non-dunk is an affirmation of unselfish humility and of understated fluidity then it’s not hard to see how that supports the kinds of values the Knicks would be supplying their city and the nation as a whole.

I’ll admit all of this may just be the sign of an oft remarked upon general shift in basketball culture. I’d never noticed the lack of dunks on the Knicks. But it was one of the first things my students – and a “Jordan baby” from the Chicago area no less -- noted. And believe me, I was and am as seduced as anyone by those Knicks teams. Above all, they created open look after open look whether on a fast break off a steal or in their unstructured intelligent and cool offensive flow – everything looks so easy. Who needs a dunk? Who even misses them when you are watching that?

But when I think about the racial politics of the dunk I’m left a bit confused and uncomfortable. Let me explain. The City Game, published by journalist Pete Axthelm in 1970s, is a moving, elegantly written account of the 1970 Knicks championship season that shows why the Knicks were so popular in New York by telling their story alongside those of countless city playground stars who played the very same kind of ball the Knicks played. But as Axthelm acknowledges, as galvanizing as those Knicks were, they did not cure the ills of the city or of society, and many of those same enthusiastic playground ballers wound up strung out on drugs, trapped in poverty, imprisoned or dead. What feelings does that give rise to? And what is the appropriate expression of those feelings? Where I want to ask, in the Knicks playbook, is the basketball play that expresses the sadness and rage occasioned by that social violence, that colossal waste of human creativity and talent?

It is as though, in light of all this, in addition to everything else I have also felt and thought about the Knicks, that I feel and think about the Knicks, I am also provoked – in spite of myself -- to view them as a kind of populist compromise. I mean, the sort of populist compromise that appears to offer room for everyone and everything at the social banquet table, but that has actually done so at the expense of leaving some standing outside the door. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s inevitable. Yet it doesn’t feel okay to me now, even as I still feel lured by the stirring style of play and success of those Knicks teams, even without the dunks.

If the dunk has historically been seen as the flamboyant, sometimes violent expression of individual power (if not anger, or gleeful anger), not to mention racialized as such, then I can’t help but think that there was no room for those things in the new reality the Knicks promised us. All of which would be just fine if it were also the case that the conditions that give rise to the feelings that get expressed in a dunk had disappeared from society.

But if they didn’t (and we know they didn’t and maybe that is the not so secret story of the lost decade in which I was formed, basketballically and otherwise), then what do we do with our desire – what do I do with my desire and I mean this as a real, not rhetorical question -- to forego the extra pass, eschew the easy lay up, and throw down a "Chocolate-Thunder-Flying, Robinzine-Crying, Teeth-Shaking, Glass-Breaking, Rump-Roasting, Bun-Toasting, Wham-Bam, Glass-Breaker-I-Am-Jam"?

Maybe I’m overstating things. I usually do. Maybe all I’m saying is that the missing jams look to me, now in retrospect, like an index of where we fell short in putting it all together. Where we are still falling short.

Don't Wait For Me

2011-02-15T13:20:00.000-05:00

It's on FanHouse, yes, but Eric and I really kept saying "fuck, these made-up insulting NBA Valentines really belong on FD". Unfortunately, I had to stop short of having Dolan called Walsh a "fucking cripple" because it was on AOL.

Believe our recommendation.

Semi-Pros and Cons

2011-02-09T10:21:00.002-05:00

Last summer, I took part in the D-League's fantasy Hall of Fame experience thing. Here's what happened. I kept in touch with Wayne Washington, one of the guys I met there. Wayne's in a situation that this blog—or any, for that matter—rarely consider: trying to break into professional basketball, without the benefit of McDonald's hype or D1 exposure. Wayne kept a running journal this winter; here are some excerpts. Also, check out this recent interview he did with Bounce.

12/14/10
"Let me see your hands"

There's nothing like having the gym all to yourself. Tonight I decided to do some ball-handling drills and really tighten up some things: same time dribble, alternating dribble, in and out, front to back. This really builds up the muscles in your forearms and fingers. As I'm doing this an older gentlemen and high-school aged kid start shooting around. I pay them no mind really.

I continue to work on my handle, doing crossover moves in place. I look over now; the old man is trying to teach this kid the ins and outs of a pick and 'roll. To borrow a line from Barkley, Stockton and Malone are turning over in their graves.

When I’m done, I start walking toward the water fountain. The older guy stops me, asking if I can set the pick for them as part of his lesson. Then, as he's teaching the kid, he starts giving me advice. I try not to seem cocky—I do know how to run and defend a simple pick and roll—so I show respect and nod in agreement with him. From the looks of it, he's a big-time Kentucky Wildcats fan, decked out in blue UK shooting shirt and shorts.

Out of nowhere, he asks what position I play; point guard, I answer. He nods, goes back to the pick and roll instruction, and then asks me where I play. I explain that I just finished my college career, and am playing with a local pro team. He pauses, looking me up and down, as if he were searching for this so-called ball player I claim to be. Then he blurts out "let me see your hands!", while reaching out to show me his. "They don't look too big", he says. He questions my height, "Are you over six feet?", and before I can answer, blurts out. "Can you dunk?" I take two steps and flush one. The high school kid is impressed but the old man stood there, still sizing me up.

He breaks the awkward silence to ask me my name. Funny, I got asked to show my hands before he bothered to get my name. When I tell him, his eyes light up: "Wayne Washington … that’s a good name!” I guess I should thank my Dad for that one.

Out of nowhere, he asks if I've heard of Tubby Smith. In my head, I’m starting to get annoyed, but I stay polite, smile, and answer, “of course". “Well, that’s my brother", he responds, followed by stories of childhood battles on the playground. While this is going on, he challenges me to a best out of ten free throw contest. He complains that a lot of young players shoot with there elbow out; he’s been telling Tayshaun this for years.

Some more guys show up, and we play some four on four. Mr. Smith embarrasses these kids—30 years younger than him—with some up and under moves and well-timed pump fakes. I was playing to impress Mr. Smith, and my team wins both games.

Afterwards, I catch up with him in the locker room to talk more about my situation, and how I’m trying to move up in the world of basketball. He gives me his card, and tells me he'll see what he can to help me, since this sport is often about who you know.

As he walks out the door, I say to myself, "Hey Tubby, send your brother some Minnesota gear already".

12/28/10
Don't Get Hurt

I’ve been playing with the Washington Greenhawks of ABCL. The team took some time off for the holidays. You can work out and do drills but the urge to play is always there.

When I play pick-up these days, my number one rule is "Don’t get hurt." I can't afford to miss any practice or game time … literally.

For me now, it’s totally different to play with normal people. Yes, I said “normal people.”

nor-mal per-son- n. One who has never played basketball at a high level and only understands the simple concepts of the game. See “weekend warrior”.

The cons of playing with normals folks far outweigh the pros. Really, the only pros are getting a decent run and working on some new things. Then there’s the cons. I could get hurt and cost myself money and opportunity, just to play in a pointless pick-up game. That's why I rarely go all out full-speed—these guys have nothing to lose and will throw their body around. Imagine going up for a dunk and 5'6 chubby guy who can't even touch the net coming across the lane to challenge you. He has no shot at contesting the dunk and all 200 pounds of him is going to knock your legs from under you. Then you're free falling and trying to figure out how to land now so you can live to play another day. So I’ll rely on three-pointers and pull-ups, and only drive when I really need a bucket. Too many Bruce Bowen and Bill Laimbeer type of guys out there.

Getting back to practice should be fun this week. We have a big game next weekend in Woodbridge, VA. It’s an away game, but the opposing team actually plays in a gym closer to my house. I only have to drive fifteen minutes to get there, instead of the usual one-hour drive, and my family will be there. So it’s sort of a home game for me, at least.

12/30/10
"How much you get paid?"

With this being my first experience with semi-pro basketball, there’s a lot for me to learn about the culture. Most people can only relate to a high school/college atmosphere or the NBA they see on television. This world is a little different.

First off, the talent level on our team is pretty high. I know there are other semi-pro teams out there that have "roster fillers" on their bench. Not the Greenhawks. The big names are Baby Shaq from the AND1 mixtape tour and NCAA champion and former Terp Byron Mouton. But we have talent across the board. Most guys have made money playing ball before, whether it was overseas, other leagues, or even streetball.

People use the phrase "It's a business” all the time, but you never think about what it really means. I don't play for a team; I play for an organization, and it's built from the top down. Team owners have the power because they put up the money. This isn't like high school or college, where the coach is the head honcho. Our coach handles all the on-court affairs, but he still has to answer to someone. Coach Falando is a players coach who knows where we're coming from. Our GM Adam is the bridge between the team and the owner. Coach might tell us one thing but the next day, things have changed because of a new message from up top that reaches us through Adam. It really is a business, not a game.

When people find out I play, they ask me one question."How much do you get paid?" In the words of the Fresh Prince "Mind ya business just mind ya business." (You gotta do the neck thing, too). Why don't people understand it's a rude question to ask? In no other profession would someone feel like this was acceptable. I usually respond that "it's not millions". It's not enough to live off without another source of income, but it is money in exchange for basketball. There’s a lot of guys who play in this kind of league for free, so I really can’t complain.

We’re always thinking about roles on a basketball team, but when it’s your job, it’s about responsibilities, and accepting where you stand. This is where being a professional comes into play. Right now I'm a back-up. I understand my role. Am I satisfied? Hell no! But I don't let it affect my performance. Also, I don't let my pride keep me from admitting the guys who play in front of me are very talented in there own right. A lot of guys have too much pride to accept their reality and it hurts them in the long run.

Practice is for building team chemistry and preparing for games. Players have to improve conditioning and skills on their own time for the most part. We only have the time to practice three times a week, and hopefully, everybody can make these. Since I have time, I've been working out in the mornings. The extra shooting, ball-handling drills, and conditioning pays off.

The reason for playing on this level is to show the world what you got. It’s all about getting good game tapes to market yourself and getting exposure. On the 1st day of training camp they told us "you ain't gonna get rich off the Greenhawks". Looking at my gas tank and bank account, they definitely didn't lie.

1/1/2011
New Year, New Game

I played in the Potomac High School gym back in high school. It's kind of depressing to have made it to a pro level and then find yourself at a local high school, getting changed in a classroom. But putting on the uniform always brings a sense of pride and accomplishment, and being part of a team is a great feeling no matter how old you are. Just knowing that people are going to pay money to see you perform is amazing.

Potomac has the jerseys of the 1000 point scorers painted on the wall. I know most of these names and quickly reflect on each of their careers and where they might be playing tonight. Some great talent on that wall.

While we warm up so does the Bomb Squad. Ah yes, the Bomb Squad! The appropriately named dance team for the Beltway Bombers. They’re working on their routine while some up-tempo dance song is blasting. Let’s just say nobody was 100% focused on the game at this point. After we spend half the national anthem trying to locate the flag, it’s gametime. When the PA person begins our introductions, she blatantly reads the names really quickly and in a monotone that sounds like Boomhauer from King of the Hill. The verbal slap in the face gets us fired up.

As the game starts off I swear there was about 12 travel calls in the first 5 mins. It could've been the players’ happy feet, a dusty floor, or maybe a ref’s quick whistle. I've never seen anything like it before. Sitting on the bench we had a great view of the Bomb Squad. They were lined up across the baseline under the basket closest to us. I don't know if that was intentional but its good strategy because just about everybody had a double take moment followed by a "damn" or something.

The game is pretty even after the first half. They went ahead, then we caught up and grabbed some momentum. Our instructions at halftime were no different than before: Play harder than the other team.

The second half was similar. We did a good job boxing out and limiting their opportunities. Mid-way through the third quarter, I'm wondering when I'm going to get in. The fourth quarter rolls around and we’ve taken some control of the game. Baby Shaq did some damage on the block and got some tough buckets for us. We held on to the lead and pulled out the first win of the season.

The final buzzer went off and as I’m was walking off the court, I see my family coming down from the stands. All I could do was shrug my shoulders and say "I don't know". I was genuinely happy that we won, but I wish I’d been given the chance to get out there. I just have to wait my turn. It’s a long season and if the Greenhawks didn't think I could play I wouldn't be there.

1/8/2011
"Can you sign my hand?"

Today we played the Beltway Bombers again, this time at home. We play our home games at Coolidge High School, and it’s by far the largest gym in our league. That's not necessarily a good thing because you need people to fill it. I was concerned we wouldn't have a good turnout, but people slowly trickled in after tip off. For some reason the gym was cold as hell, so I had to keep my hands in a towel just to attempt to stay warm.

The visiting Bombers only had 8 players dressed for the game while we were at full strength. We got off to a good start and took control of the game. Once again the refs were borderline terrible but that's pretty much expected.

Not starting will have you playing the waiting game. That means every time the coach gets up or looks down in your direction you hope your number is called. Tonight my opportunity came in the second quarter. Coach told me to check in with 4:00 remaining in the half.

Coming into a game off the bench is always difficult. One part of you wants to make a play but I've always been told to be patient and work your way into the game. Sadly, sometimes you don't enough time on the court to do that. In my four minutes of play, I had one assist and went 0-2 from the field. I had two good looks from the college three but I was off the mark. We didn't get any defensive stops while I was out there, so I didn't get a chance to push the ball in transition.

I've always found it weird that PA announcers don't get corrected when they mispronounce names. The whole game Byron Mouton was called Bye-Ron and I was thinking if it's bothering me then Bye-Ron must have a problem. Late in the fourth we got lazy, and the Bombers cut the lead to three. We missed some FT's and they hit a big three to tie up the game. We went into OT and put them away quickly.

Since this was our first home game, we were told to stay on the court after the game and sign autographs. For some reason I felt like it was some kind of joke on me. Who really wants my autograph? While I was hanging around talking to our assistant coach, a group of kids did come up to me and I signed two t-shirts and a hand.

Yes, a hand.

I Saw My Ghost Dragged By Carpet

2011-02-01T16:58:00.002-05:00

Here's a piece I did for The Good Men Project about what I like to call "sports criticism". That would be the intersection of sports and criticism. I wrote it a while ago but couldn't get it published until now. You can tell that from how heavily it leans on a long-ago Simmons column. Enjo!

UPDATE: This video is new to me. Thanks, Extra Large!

Catch A Cab By The City

2011-01-31T10:12:00.000-05:00

Yago's latest post from his Cultures of Basketball course is up, where he subjects the students to my "Mikan and Modernity" essay. That's the chapter I was both most shaky on and, idea-wise, the most proud of. Yago homed in on my view of Mikan as the first true individual in the game, and in doing so, drew out the definition of "modern" that begins around Descartes. That view of individuality—that it is about style, the "how" as much as the "what"—informs most of the way I see the game, and would become indispensable to the game when African American players invaded in the mid-fifties. He told me over email that to him, the irony of uber-nerd loosing the concept of style upon professional basketball is almost too good to be true. It's worth noting, though, that the Globetrotters and Rens had been around before Mikan, which certainly suggest that Mikan was more an unlikely conduit, or a strange point of entry, rather than the originator.

When I was writing it, though, I was focused primarily on not how the individuality's relationship to time and space, but the notion that in the NBA, a unique relationship to time and space was the essence of individuality. Mikan wasn't an individual who proved this through a unique relationship to time and space; he was an individual precisely because of this. It's far easier to apply this logic to Mikan, or even Pettit, than Russell or Baylor in the years that followed. I will now blame it all on my framework, which I blame on a desperate need to either make use of what I learned in grad school, or justify all the pop-science-cultural-history reading I do for fun. I was thinking of the way that, after the Industrial Revolution had once and for all put a large part of the populace on the clock (literally and figuratively), new developments like the railroads, the telegraph, and widespread electricity destabilized this concept, as well as that of space.

How, in history, does this lead to individuality? I'm not quite sure, other than the fact that suddenly, daylight and travel were nearly as plastic as you wanted them to be; the transmission of information could take weeks or seconds, depending on your inclination. I will need someone far smarter than me to explain how that's a useful expansion of the metaphysical "I", rather than a distraction from it. I am certainly not ready to say that our sense of time's existential weight is what gives rise to George Mikan. We'll save Heidegger for positionality, where Being and Time is the internal, and later Martin is the external individual. Derrida or Ornette Coleman give us the organizing principles (such as they are).

To close this on a thoroughly self-deprecating note: Whether the historical analog is the early 17th century, or the late 19th, you have, in a sense, history being compared to history. It makes considerably more sense to explain how these developments in basketball parallel those of the larger cultural context of the time, as I did with Wilt and the Cold War. Too bad they don't. Actually, it reminds me of what Jacob said was the difficulty of making wacky comparisons in this book's illustrations: to paraphrase, all sports history is mythology. It's one thing to compare a current star to Shakespeare, or the Wright Brothers. However, someone like Wilt or Cousy is already in some sense a mythological figure. It's an awkward juxtaposition, so you either have to make it especially timely (a form of literalism) or retreat into symbolism. I have no idea why Naismith as Moses (or all the other things I compared him to) works.

Positive Uncertainty

2011-01-28T14:27:00.001-05:00

Bio: Rough Justice guarantees he would pass a doping control urine test, but only because they haven't invented a drug that could give him Andrei Kirilenko's hairdo yet. Check out his other work over at his blog There Are No Fours.

Doping suffuses professional sports. Ask almost any fan, athlete or talking head how they feel about performance-enhancing drugs and you’ll get an earful of righteous judgment, but drugs are part of the sports landscape for good because they work and because the money at stake overwhelms the various reasons why players might abstain.

Dopers aren’t acting out a set of beliefs contrary to the masses; they’re acting out their desire to win the fame and money that success will bring, or simply trying to win. The margins between pro and failure, between starter and backup are often slim enough that the extra boost chemistry can provide will bridge the gap for someone who can’t quite make it. Authorities can try to stop use with penalties, but testing doesn’t eradicate illicit PED use; it creates an arms race between the chemists creating new, subtler drugs and the chemists inventing new tests to sniff out those new drugs.

The NBA has so far avoided a large dustup about drug use, with a few isolated incidents that were explained away easily enough, but in light of OJ Mayo’s suspension it’s worth taking a look at what PED use in the NBA might look like.

There is no sport immune to chemistry, but individual sports are affected differently and to different degrees by doping. At the far end of the spectrum, any sort of racing is completely vulnerable to drugs. Cycling is the sport with the biggest drug problem precisely because a bike racer engaging in oxygen-vector doping will beat a similarly talented non-doper every single time. The NFL, where speed and strength are the main currencies for position not named quarterback, showcases defensive ends faster than the defensive backs your father watched, but skill position players need to be able to read defenses and run routes as much as they need to have a good time in the 40 yard dash. Still, in a sport where brute strength is a key asset for 80% of the players on the field, steroid use will always be a huge advantage.

The breaks built into the game also provide enough rest that the stamina problems bulking up might cause don’t undermine effectiveness. Shawne Merriman’s suspension and subsequent accolades and blowback strongly suggest the sport isn’t clean, but also that the NFL views this primarily as a PR problem. No one needs the baseball doping conversation to be rehashed. Basketball, hockey and soccer have remained largely incident-free; that doesn’t mean that they aren’t being affected by PEDs, but their structure and play limit the effect drugs can have more than other sports.

Simply put, the precision of the NBA game means that doping isn't a direct path to success. Being bigger and stronger helps, but good players marry that to the finesse to finish plays or the jumpshot they've honed since childhood. If physical ability alone determined success on the court, Gerald Green would be thinking up the next cupcake dunk, not plying his trade in Russia.

The NBA is a second-order sport for PEDs, one where doping can aid ability but not generate it. As a fan of both baseball and professional cycling, I’m cynical enough about the issue to assume that some non-zero percent of NBA players are doping. Older guys trying to eke out a last season or two, injury-prone players trying to get/stay healthy, skilled but underathletic players trying to make it, second-tier guys trying to break through into stardom, there are plenty of reasons why a professional basketball player would turn to chemical assistance.

But the best players aren’t the biggest or fastest, they’re the guys who are best at getting the ball in the hoop and stopping their man from doing the same. Physical shortcomings matter, but skills that are forged by time in the gym do too, and there’s no chemical shortcut to Ray Allen’s jumpshot or Kobe Bryant’s footwork. LeBron is the best player in the NBA not just because he’s 6’8”, jacked and quick, but also because he can shoot, pass, defend and position himself at an elite level. There are only a handful of players who can succeed in professional basketball without possessing an NBA body, but there are also countless players who couldn’t succeed despite having that body.

At the end of his response to O.J. Mayo’s suspension, Henry Abbott said “Players are bigger, stronger and faster than ever. Many of the world's finest enhancers are impossible to test for…Is it really smart to stick with the theory that performance enhancing drugs are just not a problem in the NBA?” It’s true players are bigger and faster than ever, but that’s not any evidence of drug use specifically. It ignores the fact that NBA players strength train and condition in a way that was unheard of a few decades ago, and the current generation is the first to have such methods available throughout their youth careers. NBA players used to smoke!

Players are taller than ever before, but the NBA draws players from a larger genetic pool, both because the sport is global and because the US population has continued its steady climb. Medical advancements mean MRIs and new surgeries can let players continue playing after what would have been career-ending ten years ago. PEDs may well have a part in the physical talents on NBA rosters, but it’s not like the physiological changes we’ve seen can’t be explained without them.

The NBA has a testing policy for a reason. It’s not there purely as a PR ploy; if there were no reason for basketball players to use PEDs there would also be no need for testing. But if you paid much attention to how baseball players explained their steroid use you learned that most users got started by following the “here, try this” plan offered by a teammate. Professional athletes operate in a bubble and don’t by and large have sophisticated knowledge about biochemistry, so they would have to rely on others to introduce them to drugs.

I don’t doubt that some players have followed this route, but unless players are doing a fantastic job of conspiring to keep a league-wide habit secret, the users are likely individuals injecting or ingesting at home, clinging to the edge they’re giving themselves over their compatriots. Morality isn’t the only impediment to PED use; acquisition isn’t necessarily an easy task. I’m sure there are players in the NBA who would take a drug if it were put in front of them but don’t have the first clue where they would go to get it.

Not only that, but there’s no one drug that would benefit every player in the league. Part of the reason for steroid ubiquity in baseball and football and EPO ubiquity in cycling is that those PEDs help every athlete. Baseball and football are all fast-twitch actions that are over within ten seconds. Steroids make everyone faster and stronger. Everyone can benefit from hitting a ball farther, throwing it harder or running faster.

Similarly, every cyclist will be better at his job if his circulatory system does a better job of delivering oxygen to his muscles. But the different roles and skills of a basketball team make it unlikely that any drug, other than HGH, would benefit everyone. An shooter who makes his living running his defender all game and curling around screens would gain from taking a drug that aided his stamina. A post player would do well to bulk up so he could push people around. A slasher could exploit a few more inches of vertical leap. But if different players on a team would benefit from different drugs, they’d all have to find them via their own routes unless a drug culture was truly pervasive or a team was actively helping its players dope.

Players might take the risk of exposure inherent in sharing drugs with a teammate for team gain, but given the variety of body types and skill sets you find in any given locker room, NBA doping would have to be more diffuse than the doping is in any of the sports that have established problems.

O.J. Mayo claims the DHEA in his system is from a supplement he vetted poorly. That’s an eminently plausible claim. As far as I can tell, DHEA isn’t a masking agent or precursor for anything else, and it’s currently legal to sell it over the counter. It’s possible he was using it as a steroid, but unless he had very high levels of it in his system, it’s much more likely he did a terrible job reading labels at GNC. It’s possible he’s a cheater, but it’s more likely he’s a knucklehead. This isn’t Mark McGwire with Androstenedione in his locker.

If I had to guess, I would say NBA doping is a low-level phenomenon. I would be shocked if use were higher than one out of every ten players precisely because the returns for doping are more limited in the sport than in others. I would be even more shocked if no one in the NBA were using PEDs. But in today’s media environment, where baseball dopers have been excoriated in the press for their “crimes”, a basketball player who is regularly drug tested would have to be careful about what he was doing and to whom he mentioned it. The tacit approval that aided steroids in baseball does not and has never existed in the NBA.

A player who was doping would use HGH, EPO or some other drug that is undetectable in a urine sample. If OJ Mayo were a serious doper, you can be sure he wouldn’t risk exposure by having something as easily detectable as DHEA in his system. If we’re going to have a serious conversation about performance-enhancing drugs in the NBA, I’m all for it. But OJ Mayo almost certainly has nothing to do with it.

FreeDarko Welcomes Your City: Seattle and San Fran

2011-01-27T12:54:00.001-05:00

FreeDarko is hitting the road again, in support of the book that keeps on giving.

2/8: SEATTLE
I'll be at the University Bookstore, starting at 7PM, to talk about the book with Sportspress Northwest columnist Seth Kolloen. Trust me, you don't want to get just me and the electronic noise machine like Portland did.

2/24: SAN FRANCISCO
Get ready for fear, also at 7PM ... Green Apple Books is hosting a night of FD and beer. Join Tom Ziller, Eric Freeman, and myself for a panel, moderated by our old friend Eli Horowitz of McSweeney's. I don't drink but plan to eat lots of apples. Also, I have never actually met Tom before.