PCA: From the Archives

Upon hearing about my encounter with Julius Erving in Vegas a few weeks back, my girlfriend's dad pulled out some old photos he shot of Dr J at a Virginia Squires vs New York Nets game back when he was about 15. (click on all images for a larger view)

Apparently the Squires were terrible and the ineptitude of the front office drove the fans away to the point that more people in 1976 were probably watching high school girls play 6-on-6 basketball in Iowa than were attending games at Hampton Coliseum. (I found this site strangely compelling, especially for the aggressive threats of litigation for stealing his pictures. And for the girls in Klan hats with the peach baskets.)


Anyway, this left ample room for a kid with a camera to wander around the arena and snap blurry photos, unknowingly paving the way for me to take blurry pictures years later. I didn't have time to scan the pics (that he'd packed around through 30 years and 17 moves), so I just took pictures of them on the tailgate of my truck.



(Perhaps to celebrate my recent encounter with Erving, NBA TV Broadband is airing a featurette of the Doctor.)



Speaking of rubbing shoulders with NBA types, I recently found myself unexpectedly attending a $10,000-a-plate benefit dinner (not on my dime) for the Hogle Zoo in SLC. I ended up sitting with Frank Layden and his wife, sharing exotic Thai curry while animal handlers showed off chinchillas and snakes with vestigial legs.



Layden was amazingly nice and seemed genuinely interested in what my friend Kristen and I do when we aren't attending zoo benefits. I'd overheard Layden at the Rocky Mountain Revue listening to some unathletic kid talk his ear off for 45 minutes about how to be a better basketball player. So meeting Frank Layden at the zoo, chatting with Eddie Jordan at the summer league, meeting the Team USA players, and thinking of how nice the Doctor was in Vegas even though he was in the middle of a conversation with friends and had every reason to be disinterested, left me very impressed with how incredibly adept these NBA players, former players, coaches, executives are at chatting up and making pleasant conversation with people they'll never see again in their lives.

These conversations, along with the way TO and Bonds have been depicted in the media (accurately or otherwise) left me feeling misled by mainstream sportswriters who claim that most NBA players and executives are insufferable misanthropes. I don't want to play the race card here, but for some reason I think a lot of the sportswriters I grew up reading came from the Paul Shirley school of sports thought: That these athletes and agents and coaches and executives are impossible to be around, and a thinking man would do well to stay away.

Certainly some of the people I've met over the last few months are notorious ambassadors of the game of basketball, (Julius Erving, Frank Layden, etc.) so I shouldn't be surprised that it would be a pleasure to chat with them. But still, why do NBA writers paint those involved in the league as incorrigible and unapproachable?

Watching Bill Simmons on the Colbert Report a few weeks ago was eye opening for a variety of reasons regarding the fan/writer vs player/coach/exec dynamic. In response to Colbert saying "you have the common man approach to sports writing, what does that mean?", Simmons mentioned that he stays out of locker rooms because "you don't want to meet Barry Bonds and kind of like him and then have him be a jerk to you and have him tell you to get away from his locker." I thought that was very strange, because why would you want to avoid real human interaction with someone you cover/watch?

But perhaps his comments are in line with my nascent perspective of the athletes and executives I've met: If you can meet these guys in a casual setting and treat them with respect, they come off like world class people. If you're in their jock right after a tough loss asking them why they missed two free throws, they're more likely to use profanity.

These sportswriters chose their line of work of their own free will, and perhaps because of the somewhat adversarial nature of their position, taking the jaded "who cares about these petulant millionaires anyway?" point of view might be their way of maintaining a sense of dignity. Still though, I feel cheated by the broad brush strokes of the writers who paint the whole league as a group of overpaid narcissists who aren't worth getting to know.