Abjection At The Speed Of Sound

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.

Clay Left Smoldering

New Shoals Unlimited on the linguistic lunacy that is the Most Improved Player award. Also, notice the new Amazon widget to the right: Same "you buy stuff by clicking through here, we benefit" idea, but new approach. We're going to be recommending books, music, movie, whatever we feel is worthy of FD's prized endorsement. If you click through there, feel free to buy whatever you want. But the point is to manipulate you.

Apologies if I've touched on this before, but when you have the same screamed phone conversation with multiple FreeDarko members, it warrants a post. It's agreed around headquarters that, simply put, Gerald Wallace is now scary. Not edgy, exhilarating, or overwhelmingly intense. When you watch him play now, fright nips at each and every fiber of your bones.

Part of it is his appearance. I will never cease to hammer home this "Gerald Wallace is the Predator" meme, because this is what a pop culture/sports analogy should be. Wallace is now a little older, thicker, and yet at the same time broken down and flecked with scars on his arms and shoulders. Gone is the sleek, statuesque specimen who was equally at home walking on air or slamming into the earth. Now, Gerald Wallace looks like the sum of all his heights and collisions—lofty, worn, tough, and always in a quiet frenzy. His dreads creep down the side of his head, where they occasionally come into contact with the plastic mouth guard that's always hanging out in the air.

This kind of adornment seems so out of character that we're taken aback by them. It's mysterious, like a vaguely sinister echo of his warped basketball philosophy and the moments that shaped it. We barely notice tattoos anymore—J.R. Smith and Larry Hughes are practically covered from waist to chin, but it's all in good fun. Wallace, though, exists at the intersection of style and grim reminders. Other useful pop culture references: Star Wars bounty hunters, those elegant tackle boxes with death sitting casually on their brains; every Vietnam movie where heroes get subsumed; eye-liner on radicals in the desert, and the chintzy portraits that follow directly from it.



No shock that this new vibe has manifested itself in—or stems directly from—Wallace's game these days. Gone are the eye-popping box scores of yore, the competition with Smith and Kirilenko to see who could most delight our mightily peripheral group of enthusiasts. Wallace scores less, attacks more sparingly, isn't as frequently streaking ahead on the break or leaping up for the put-back—even as he's continued to get more fluid and guard-like with each passing year. Part of this might be Larry Brown, which is fine, because it works. But it's most certainly not a reluctance to put himself or others at risk (though, it should be noted, usually only doing damage to his own person). Wallace is a lurching, semi-breathing basketball death wish.

Remember when Wade or Iverson embraced contact around to the basket to such an extent that it became an end in itself, and got kind of stupid? Wallace seems to have taken this same attitude toward open-ended, violent motion. And movement, if a difference exists there. He doesn't make plays as often, or sow the seeds of chaos (as said in our book.) Now, he's just kind of there to hit the floor like it was a dunk, go for blocks and steals like an agile wrecking ball, terrorize the court in a way that somehow evinces both more and less discipline. This isn't the hustle player reborn, but the blood and guts of what athleticism means at its best in the league. And it isn't necessarily pretty or inspiring, unless you think Icarus is really fucking cool coming and going.

That's because, while Wallace is by no means a dirty or petty player, the toll he's exacted upon himself is, for a basketball player, almost unprecedented. Four concussions to date, and an insistence on rushing back from a collapsed lung. The lung's actually become a running joke; most guys allude to their limitations with "I felt that in my leg," but for Wallace, the game catches up with him in his ribs and breathing apparatus. Forget the high-flown accounts of potential lost and imagined; in his combination of blazing ability, blatant disregard for his body, refusal to change one bit, and downright earnestness about the whole thing, Wallace is the second coming of Pistol Pete Reiser. As Big Baby Belafonte says, you can't watch him without worrying he's going to collapse or implode at any moment, even as he exudes strength.



I wish I could say that in Wallace, we see a simultaneous acknowledgment of mortality and embracing of life. Instead, he just makes my skin crawl.

Clutter About Light

BREAKING: First huge trade. I like to think this means Miami gets a center, straightens out their frontcourt for Beasley's sake—though Ziller points out that Brad Miller could've done the same thing for cheaper—and the Raptors now get their run on. It also depends on how much you believe Marion and JO are "done" or, for the purposes of this site, irrelevent. It would be funny if this lead to the real creation of "Suns North", with Marion once again the lynchpin of it all. Would say more, but I'm off to see Joan Rivers.

I have a celebrity birthday to tend to this weekend, on top of Valentine's Day, so I'll be low-key until my Sunday TSB column sums it all up. There might be a live-blog but at some point, but for all intents and purposes you can consider this an All-Star Weekend open thread.

To get you in the mood:

-Read me at The Sporting Blog, where I've been writing a decent amount about this weekend.

-Those zany Jupiters now have their own site, and a 2009 version of their annual All-Star role call.

-Me, among much bigger names, on a virtual ESPN mag panel on the Dunk Contest. My answers were edited, and this was all before J.R. Smith was in, but it's nice to see my name up in lights like that.

Unrelated:

I spent the first part of the week in Portland, including a Powell's experience was overwhelming in every way imaginable. Also, big ups to the Comcast post-game television show. I read this novel once in college about a Nazi doctor who fucked with people's vocal chords to the point where their ability to speak (and thus think and exist) was reduced to something primordial, and with it, he felt like he was getting at human nature itself. That's what "Talkin' Ball" is like when the comedian is on.

The game I took in on Wednesday, which I wrote up here, really illustrated something myself and Ziller have been talking about. Greg Oden had 10 rebounds, almost all of them memorable. Jared Bayless chipped in a career-high 8 assists, and I only recall one or two of them. This brought me back to a conversation Tom and I had, where I pointed out how easily, maybe even unimpressively, LeBron had racked up his assists in his MSG showcase (like that it's not even a Knicks game?). His contention was that very few assists stick with you; I took it further, and now firmly believe that consistent production in either assists or rebounds is almost always ambient in nature, occurring seamlessly within the flow of the game. These plays only stand out if they are either flawed, or risky and thus imperfect in the formal sense, or dramatic, which usually comes with one or both of these other two characteristics.

When Oden's active, his springiness and size are truly awe-inspiring, but they're made all the more evident by how often he bobbles a rebound, or has to go up twice to reel it in. On the other hand, Russell Westbrook—who takes my "blocks like he's dunking" axiom and applies it to rebounding—was a monster on the glass, but almost always lept in out of nowhere, or over multiple Blazers. Obviously this "noteworthiness" is better than the other not only because it works, but because it's intentional, rather than accidental. In Bayless, you have assists showing up in the most "ambient" way possible. Tom pointed out that Chris Paul has plenty of these, two, and that his highlights often result from exploiting opportunities others can't see. This is familiar FD territory, I know, so I'll shut up after this: Contrast that with Nash, whose pre-Shaq assists always stick with you. That's because almost all of them are risks, based on assertiveness rather than patience, and often take unfamiliar paths.

Anyway, happy weekend, and keep us in your thoughts!