What It Is (Day 12)

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.

The Heart of the City

Matthew Kreisher was born and raised in the North Carolina with a love of writing, basketball and music. You can find him at The Fadeaway or follow him @makreish.

Sunday morning is my favorite time to walk along Hargett Street. There’s no traffic; most of the sound comes from brunch-goers on makeshift patios, and an unsettling quiet surrounds downtown Raleigh. Sunday neither belongs to the week nor to the weekend; past and present become one, and time slows to a crawl.

It was on one of these mornings, a few weeks back, that I walked into Father and Sons vintage shop and found myself staring at two game-day programs from the ABA’s Carolina Cougars, this state’s first foray into professional basketball. I was born and raised in Charlotte, and can attest to the fact that this state’s cult of hoops isn’t just about UNC and Duke. I recently admitted to a friend that I had owned a life-sized poster of former Hornets star Alonzo Mourning, a revelation that led to a contentious debate over whose vault of Hornets memorabilia was greater. The Cougars are forgotten traces of my state’s NBA heritage; Sunday was the perfect time to find myself thinking of how far North Carolina has come since the days of the red, white and blue ball.



In 1968 the Houston Mavericks, like most ABA franchises, were struggling to turn a profit, a problem they (like most ABA franchises) chalked up to their current market. They were sold and then relocated to North Carolina. In hopes of capitalizing on the state's fertile basketball soils, the newly-named Cougars became a regional franchise, splitting home games between Raleigh, Greensboro and Charlotte.

In theory, the regional approach made a certain amount of sense. At that point, the state was without a major metropolitan city, and the North Carolina basketball tradition was a statewide thing. But the plan backfired, as the Cougars never got enough of a local footing in any city. North Carolina has always been a hot-bed of rivalry between four schools (NCSU, Duke, Wake Forest and UNC); hoops was a matter of particularism, not the universal. With each city hosting roughly thirteen games a piece, the local pride so key to the state’s rabid hoops culture was never able to take root. The Cougars were built upon the supposition that North Carolina’s basketball history had built unity, when nearly the opposite was true.

In 1905 Wake Forest University was the first to bring basketball to the state of North Carolina, followed quickly by Trinity College (later named Duke University after Washington Duke, owner of Bull Durham Chewing Tobacco Co.). The two schools played the first collegiate basketball game south of the Mason-Dixon line on March 2, 1905. NC State and UNC followed, both forming teams in 1911. It was Carolina who, in 1945, became the first of the four teams in make it to the Final Four, led by NC State transfer Bones McKinney. In 1946 Chuck Taylor, then a traveling salesman for Converse, suggested Everett Case for the job as head coach at NC State. Case built a 12,000 seat arena and recruited nationally, caused Duke and Carolina to revamp their programs and planted the seeds of today’s Tobacco Road mega-rivalry.

The Mavericks were bought by a conglomerate of North Carolina businessmen hoping to add professional basketball to this history. They hired Bones McKinney as the franchise’s first coach in 1969; the team finished 42-42 and were swept by the Pacers in the first round of the playoffs. The team regressed in their second year; McKinney was fired halfway through the season, replaced by Jerry Steele and the Cougars finished 35-50. Steele was promptly fired at the end of the season to make way for third year coach Tom Meschery, (Russian immigrant, former NBA player, today a member of the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame). In those first few years the Cougars made a habit of hiring homegrown talent, like All-Rookie guard Gene Littles, in his first year out of High Point College, and former Duke All-American guard Bob Verga. This practice led to one of the biggest coups in ABA history as the Cougars signed former Tar Heel star Billy Cunningham away from the NBA Philadelphia 76ers while Cunningham was still under NBA contract.

The Cougars signed Cunningham during the 1969-70 season to a 4-year $455K contract starting with the 1970-71 season. The contract called for a $125K signing bonus of which $45K was paid upon signing and Cunningham, who was getting old but still very capable, was to receive the remaining $80K upon turning down his option year in Philadelphia to join the Cougars; however, the Sixers star orally agreed to play out his option year in the NBA after claiming to have never received the full bonus. There is speculation as to whether a miscommunication took place or Cunningham was hedging his bets after fully realizing the financial instability of the league; either way he attempted to return the $45K bonus and then signed a new, 5-year contract with Philadelphia. Cunningham returned to the NBA for two seasons while a series of court cases decided his fate. Ultimately an injunction handed down from the US Court of Appeals barred Cunningham from playing for any team but the Cougars until his ABA contract expired. Cunningham would not join the team until the start of the 1972 season. In 1971, Joe Caldwell, not playing in the NBA but technically under contract to the Atlanta Hawks, jumped to the Cougars without spending the obligatory year in limbo. Five years before the Oscar Robertson suit, Caldwell and the Cougars circumvented the reserve clause, in effect inventing free agency. Caldwell was later traded when he attempted to hold the organization to the terms of his deal, and ended up causing so much trouble that he was blackballed.


In 1972-73, recently-retired ABA guard Larry Brown -- a UNC alum -- took Meschery’s place. It was Brown’s first-ever coaching job of any kind. The combination of Brown and Cunningham sparked the Cougars, who went 57-27 and became the first ABA team to shoot over 50% from the field. Cunningham earned MVP honors and Caldwell, no longer expected to carry the entire franchise on his back, flourished. The Cougars went on to win their only playoff series, sweeping the New York Nets, before losing in the second round to the Kentucky Colonels. Unfortunately, this success was short lived. Cunningham was plagued by kidney problems throughout the Cougars’ fourth year and they were eliminated again in the first round of the playoffs. The franchise was sold for $1.5 million to two New York brothers, Ozzie and Daniel Silna, and their lawyer Don Schupak, who moved the team to St. Louis.

The Cougars may have been doomed, but they stood for something bigger. The ABA was rife with experimentation -- even if most of was in the service of financial desperation. The NBA had not challenged its own conventional wisdom since the introduction of the shot clock in 1954; it was conventional wisdom that said players were bound to an NBA team for life unless the team said otherwise. It was this spirit of departing from the norm that allowed the Cougars to experiment, and ultimately fail. That is Raleigh’s legacy of professional basketball. In retrospect, that they failed to establish a regional franchise is less important than the fact that they tried at all.

I was born and raised in Charlotte, but now call Raleigh home. When I was growing up, Charlotte was a small banking city, whose goal of becoming a nationally recognized banking city unified a community. In 1989 the NBA rewarded the Queen City with the Charlotte Hornets. By the mid-nineties, Charlotte was somewhere between a small Southern past and a future of financial growth, an identity that took hold just as the Hornets took off. New NBA teams succeed when they’re integrated into the culture of the city, and capitalize on civic pride. This was why the Hornets succeeded at first -- that and Charlotte’s determination, as a mid-level city fighting for national recognition, to make sure they succeeded. Then George Shinn happened, and by the time the Hornets moved to New Orleans in 2002, the community was unified behind its dislike for one of the NBA’s worst owners (and worst people).

When the Bobcats started life in 2004, Charlotte was the worst kind of city for an NBA franchise. Today, the state is a very different place. The struggle for recognition that once galvanized the people of Charlotte ended in 1998 when the Bank of America merger turned it overnight into the nation’s second-largest banking city. With the struggle for recognition over, the civic pride that manifested during the city’s period of growth quickly eroded. Charlotte is now defined by the corporations that now call the city home. The NBA's second attempt to tap the basketball gold mine that is North Carolina now perennially ranks toward the bottom of the league in attendance levels. With the CBA negotiations going nowhere, David Stern has begun talking contraction; many point to Charlotte as the most logical team to cut.

However, Charlotte wasn’t the only growing North Carolina city. Raleigh has quickly risen to second largest metropolitan population in the state and along with Durham and Chapel Hill forms the Triangle part of the Research Triangle Park. In 1973, Cougars owner Tedd Munchak wanted Raleigh cut from the regional plan because attendance numbers lagged dramatically behind both Charlotte and Greensboro, where the Cougars were once attacked by bugs left over from the previous day’s cattle show. Raleigh now grows at a rate of 22% a year. The Research Triangle Park (RTP), located between Raleigh and Durham, has become a destination for technology firms. Since RTP was located on what was once farmland, away from the heart of Raleigh, there was no need to bend to corporate will in the way Charlotte did. Instead, Raleigh responded by renovating historical buildings in attempt to preserve the past. Small businesses began forming where once there were only government jobs and local culture was allowed to flourish and evolve. The New York Times recently described Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill as North Carolina's "Axis of Cool."

What makes the area unique is the strong sense of culture and community within each city. Chapel Hill is Chapel Hill, and Durham built a culinary empire around local, individually owned restaurants like Magnolia, Nana’s Steakhouse and Vin Rouge. Not coincidentally, that’s also the UNC and Duke binary. Raleigh, though, has found its own way, one whose strong local culture and love of basketball could make it a Southern version of Portland.

A few years ago, Ivan Howard of The Rosebuds invited me to a regular pick-up game at some outdoor courts tucked away behind Peace College. I play there regularly, along with Victor Lytvinenko, founder of high-end denim brand Raleigh Denim; writers like Grayson Currin, music editor of The Independent, co-creator of Hopscotch Music Fest; and musicians like Howard, Megafaun’s Brad Cook, and Steve Popson, bassist of FD favorite Polvo, who after his time in Chapel Hill moved back to Raleigh to open King’s Barcade. I’m close to convincing him to buy NBA Jam ‘93 for King’s. It’s people like these -- hoops fanatics who also now make Raleigh such a vital city to live in -- who remind me of the legacy of the Cougars.



The Bobcats will continue to have my support, but every time I watch them play in front of an empty stadium, I feel like I’m watching a wasted opportunity -- for the NBA and for my state. My whole life I have been proud to call North Carolina home. The glory years of the Hornets left a stamp on my childhood -- I experienced Larry Johnson’s rookie year, witnessed Jordan in the ’98 playoffs, and fought back tears after hearing the news of Bobby Phill’s crash -- and created a lifelong NBA fan. It was hard to embrace the Bobcats at first, mainly because of the once-strong ties to the Hornets, but ultimately I couldn’t resist. Yet they play in a city that barely cares, and part of me wonders what could have been had NBA officials ignored the conventional wisdom that has become Charlotte’s mother tongue.

Thirty years ago, Raleigh was home to an ABA franchise that challenged the norm, however disastrously. With labor negotiations stuck in the mud and the possibility of a lockout on the horizon, it appears both sides have lost. The spirit of the ABA and the changes it provided are needed now more than ever. The Bobcats are indicative of all that’s gone wrong with the NBA; we may never know how different things would be if, instead, they had followed in the footsteps of the Cougars.



(You can view both programs in their entirety here)

Too Good for Twitter

A lot of rad, fragmentary ABA footage, with Polish (I think) over it. This stuff never gets old, and I never feel silly for liking it so much.

NOTE: My brother in DoC Ken has pointed out that this is the doc Long Shots, which I've posted here (all four parts!) in the past. However, I like the Polish version better. Face it, old footage is better with no sound or music. The past is silent and scary.

Pair of Twos

Behold, my reaction to Barkley in jail. You should compare and contrast it with Dr. LIC's earlier take on an earlier stage of the situation.

Beyond that, here's some serious DITYT shit:





Hiss on YouTube clips is the new surface noise on samples.

EDIAL, 9.22.08

The tourney ends, and thus, we remember another tradition.

-Ready for Obama Jewish Semiotics #44757345? Turns out Michelle has a rabbi in the family, a cousin who trained in a sect, but was then vetted and accepted by the white Jew establishment. Here's the full story about RABBI CAPERS C. FUNNYE, JR. I'd been preparing a taxonomy of Black Jews, including some sort of authenticity index, but didn't feel like getting in a fight over the Lemba. So suffice it to say that, even if the Ethiopia thing is not quite literal, this guy's not hanging in Times Square or part of a certain hilarious Miami cult.



-More Barry: In a Times piece on Obama, the teacher, the following passage explains, well, everything about everyone:

Obama’s rootedness in the real world shaped every aspect of his teaching. He laced his lectures with basketball analogies. When a student observed the death of Jam Master Jay of the hip-hop group Run-DMC by wearing the group’s trademark tracksuit to the racism seminar, Obama acknowledged the gesture with a nod and a smile. (“I can assure you, that would not have been a common response among the faculty at the University of Chicago,” Joshua Pemstein told me.

-Ladies and gentlemen, Joshua Pemstein today

-Although the first sentence of this New York Times article about football players wearing wristbands around their biceps actually mentions basketball, the author fails to mention the man who most likely started this trend--NBA strongman Ben Wallace. Ironically, Stern cited the NFL as a model when he outlawed wearing wristbands on the biceps a couple years ago.



Possibly the first footage of Dr. J as a pro (at all?), from one of those fabled NBA/ABA exhibitions, no less. Erving enters off the bench and while he's not exactly dominant, there's that sense that he—and a lot of the ABA players, in fact—have seen things that the likes of Oscar and Wilt just haven't. Not saying they're better, even though they go on a run in this clip. But this isn't sloppy street vs. button-down expertise, it's the great unknown pushing up on the powers that be.

More America

Yes, I'm watching the convention, but if you get bored, here's HBO's ABA doc in three parts. Also, I have to think about whether "post-rational" or "post-politics" is a more lasting contribution to the cable news canon.

A Cleansing Agent

Okay motherfuckers, you want integrity? Here's a low quality video of a commercial where Artis Gilmore takes on a team of tow-haired pre-teens, crushes them, and is subsequently humbled by some sort of giant metal box. Shades of the Pats and the soda machine (awesome!) and the commercial where Kobe blocked the chubby ten year-old (pasta!). In the interest of not endorsing the establishment or evoking anymore of the Beast than I already have, I have not included links for those over-exposed ads I mention.

And yeah, the quality is shit. But the Dead Sea Scrolls came to us in shambles, and they sparked an entire decade's worth of History Channel programming. So you choose what side you want to be on.