Freedrafto, Pt. 23057: A Style Guide
Freedarko has alternately identified itself as devoted to the NBA as League of Style and as League of Stars. Maybe we should just say League of Stylish Stars. Because that's what we want. But, what we enjoy even more than stylish stars themselves is watching players and their styles evolve, and perhaps nothing is more Freedarko (hey, it's been a while since we used FD as an adjective, we're bringing it back!) than a young buck with the potential who never quite makes it. It's the fragility of the human condition. With that in mind, we give you the dirty half dozen of players in this year's draft who look at this formative stage in their careers to be the most Freedarko.
Tyrus Thomas - young, athletic, raw.....FD to the bone gristle
Adam Morrison - possibly a surprise to some of you, but dude had a Karl Marx poster in his dorm room, so you know we're down with that
Randy Foye - although Shoals debunked the MONDW, this cat is the closest one
Ronnie Brewer - Lebron minus the strength and the shooting
Guillermo Diaz - this boricua brother is the most exciting player in the draft
Joel Freeland - if Chad Ford is describing some random English dude as the next David Lee, he's FD
posted by Brown Recluse, Esq. @ 6/28/2006 09:20:00 AM
21 comments
21 Comments:
I was wondering when Freedarko would post the red suit photo.
btw Morrison was clearly the most articulate and incisive guy in the ESPN chat last night. The other guys especially Tyrus just gave "Both teams played hard" type of answers.
Renaldo Balkman - very Freedarko.
MONGA?
To quote the aforementioned chat...
Adam Morrison: It doesn't matter. Portland would be a great city to play in. But any city's a great city.
So true, Adam. If the NBA doesn't work out for you, I see a great career in urban planning. That would be so Freedarko.
In fact, what kind of architecture style would be most Freedarko?
I see FreeDarko as Art Deco. Say, Miami circa 1955. Vaguely Euro, retro and modern all at the same time.
Morrison once wrote "religion is the opium of the masses" on Gonzaga's locker room dry-erase board to protest a mandatory pre-game prayer service. That doesn't peg him as FD as much it screams "guy who wears Che t-shirts three times a week." I just hope to God he doesn't pull an Etan and start writing spoken word.
I think the Suprematists/Futurists might be the proto-FD architects. Which would make Zaha Hadid the Gilbert Arenas of FD architecture.
http://www.guggenheim.org/hadid/index.html
honorable mention goes to thabo sefolosha. a black wing player from switzerland? sounds pretty FD to me.
also, etan thomas is totally freedarko.
wv: sziog = szerbiak is an OG
Plus Ronnie Brewer has a jump shot that's so screwy, it makes Marion's look like Jimmy Chitwood's.
Actually, it's not that messed up, but what is FreeDarko if not hyperbole.
i'm with rudy. rudy to the bobcats.
Oh, Etan Thomas. I'll never be able to un-read what Scoop said about the dude. I live in a city where Mumia Abu-Jamal gets compared to Nelson Mandela, so being used to ridiculous cultural relativism was the only way my head didn't explode trying to read one paragraph.
Tim Duncan = Frank Lloyd Wright
Simple, brilliant, and most definitely not Freedarko.
Gilbert Arenas = Antonio Gaudi
mysterious & baroque, yet functional
Darko Milicic = Paolo Soleri
Big plans, mostly underutilized
Tim Duncan DOES NOT equal Frank Lloyd Wright.
Duncan's hyperbolic use of function over form, substance lacking style, is highly representative of Bertrand Goldberg (aka Corn-Cob Towers dude, aka Wilco cover art). If anything, this obsessive modern focus on efficiency (statistical and repetitive) begins to mimic nature's most natural patterns, and it is only in this neglect of style that style is reborn.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Goldberg
i like brewer because he's from arkansas.
regarding Etan Thomas's poetry:
I heard some of it on the the C-Span books channel thingie, when he was reciting it at a bookstore. He sounded pretty good. It may be hard to read, but it was fairly interesting to listen to. There's better verse out there, and nobody's claiming Etan Thomas is anything more than an amateur who has recognition only through his athlete status, but still, don't be so quick to judge.
Can somebody explain the "Just picked up a basketball three years ago" thing to me? I don't understand it on a couple of levels.
a)Me and the neighborhood kids played every sport imaginable growing up. Soccer, football, baseball, basketball, golf, frisbee, archery, team handball, hockey, dodgeball, non-team handball, tennis... you name it, we played it. Which is not to say that I have ever played any of those sports except basketball and baseball seriously. If I joined a high school football team today and started training with them, I would consider myself to have 'just picked up for a football for the first time' in a serious way. So is that what is meant when they say a guy like Freeland just picked up a basketball three years ago? Or did he really never play basketball growing up at all?
b)Obviously FD is all about potential, but doesn't FD value the myth of MJ as perpetuated in the beginning of Space Jam, with the 6 year old kid shooting hoop after hoop until they start falling? We've all been steeped in basketball lore since childbirth, and I don't understand why a free pass is given in the name of 'potential' to a player who's a great athlete but because he just picked up the game as a teenager, doesn't have the appreciation of what it means to be an NBA baller.
two words for you:
growth. spurt.
I'm 90% certain that during the tourney when I nominated TyTho for FD-ness I was dissed and dismissed with something along the lines of "Ty Thomas is too SLAM! to be FreeDarko."
aaron - he's english. they only play football (soccer) growing up. Maybe also some rugby. If they do play basketball, it's at gym class in school. Basketball has almost zero popularity in the UK - aside from a few urban black communities. There are some fanatics, but you can find people in the US who are rugby fanatics.
No, but my point is that I played some form of rugby in a neighborhood backyard growing up. I think we also tried cricket once.
All I'm asking is whether Joel Freeland had played basketball in gym, or whether 'picked up the ball for the first time three years ago' is completely literal.
And I'm also asking why such a thing is glamorized.
Speaking of English basketball, this is good. I think this is the opposite of "Freedarko", though.
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