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.

Merriment In Dunk-land

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.

Hospital Power

Remember that time we posted three years' worth of homages to the Ultramagnetic MCs 1989 All-Star theme? How about when they did it again for the 2009!.

Now it's time to wait no more: Here's the 2010 version. All 15.48 minutes of it.



UPDATE: Some thoughts from me on what makes a dunker.

Fall Over Parade

I find it possibly amazing that Gerald Wallace is in the All-Star Game and Josh Smith should be. We did it. We made it. Our choices have been just. Note: I forgot Durant was a first-time All-Star yesterday because, in my mind, he's been on since Texas. Say that what you will about my love with this game.

Oh wait, Josh Smith didn't get in, it stings me right down to the bone, and you can read all about my feelings and history's folly (committed upon its own head, no less), in this precious column of mine.

I ended up cutting a paragraph that might have been all figurative economics too dry for those parts, so I lay it here. Or at least its essence. Think about this: It took time for hs-ers and Euros (in the wake of KG and Dirk) to become automatic presences in the high lottery. There was still a little bit of lingering skepticism, or at least hesitance. And these were the consensus best few teens the world had to offer. Thus, in theory, in the beginning there was a de facto cap placed on what hs/Euro picks made it in. It was only the cream of the crop, those generally agreed upon as the "next KG" or "next Dirk."

However, it didn't stop there. Once these players moved all the way to the top, the floodgates were opened for the "Maybe Next KG" and "Possibly Maybe Next Dirk." This is how you got Josh Howard and David West going at the end of the first round; high school/Euro picks weren't boom-or-bust by nature, they were made to look this way by a willingness to, in effect, scrape the barrel and push the very logic that had made teams pursue them in the first place. The best ones were gambles on great potential, which had built into it some sense of security. It was much more like the risk built into drafting a college player, just with a different form of assurance. The latter ones gambled without any safety net.

This description is remarkably inexact. But what would have happened if teams had never decided to cross that line and go from the relatively safe teens to those with less and less to recommend them as solid pros? When people talk about some sort of committee that would decide when a player could jump from high school, it seems like what they're really talking about is this alternate reality where all these other prospects never snuck in the cracked door on account of equivocation.

FD Guest Lecture: Ode to Quiet Stars

A brief history of my basketball verse feud with author Sherman Alexie: First, Sherman wrote a poem for TrueHoop on his reluctance to see Iverson start in the All-Star Game. Then, I hit back with a pro-AI bucket of rhymes. Now, here's his response to my response. The Monta stuff hurts!

Let me sing for Saint Thomas Aquinas,
Who believed truth is found through faith
And reason. He would not have been afraid
Of the Adjusted Plus-Minus

Or any number that contradicts
What we see and what we think we know.
The numbers tell us Anderson Varejao
Is a quiet star, setting vicious picks

And destroying the offensive schemes
Of every team. I’d take that Brazilian
Maniac over a million
Vince Carters and Tracy McGradys.

The numbers tell us that Kobe is not
The most clutch at the end of games
(LeBron is Mr. Clutch’s real name,
Though you’d be okay with a Dirk jumpshot

Or just a simple pick-and-roll).
Some folks think that Monta Ellis
Is a star, but the numbers tell us
His team suffers when he’s got the ball.

Why do hoops fans believe what they see
When there’s no sense weaker than sight?
Why do hoops fans take such delight
In crossovers and dunks, those simple dreams,

But hardly ever reward those players
Like Joe Johnson or Shane Battier,
Who have complex and strange games---
Whose skills have layer upon layer?

I’m sick of it! I’m tired and pissed!
Well, no, I’m not mad. I’m just bored
By those fans who keep track of the score
But never realize what they’ve missed.

And why do we give these fans such power
When they choose All-Stars without reason?
Here’s the tragic truth: This season,
Iverson isn’t even better than Luke Ridnour.

I've Been Around

This game is making me shiver.

I've written some good shit at AOL in my first week. Like, things that would do just fine on this site. Don't believe me? Take a look at these responsible links.

-Exporting the Positional Revolution to the masses, for OKC/ATL and then as the saving grace of All-Star Weekend.

-Why the NBA's "observance" of MLK Day bugs me.

-And, reunited with Ziller, the comic gem "Why DeJuan Blair Went So Late" and a graph-heavy, theory-laden extravaganza on the subject of individuality, morality, and free will.

If you liked any of that, here's the feed for my posts.

Yours,

Shoals

I Still All Love You!

Man, this 1979 ASG clip is amazing. Everyone is fucking huge, long, and from a different body era than the 1980's, 1990's, or today. And then halfway through, there's a commercial for that movie where Clint Eastwood befriends a monkey. Sometimes you wish you could live forever!!!!!!

So maybe you heard, today was the first day of The Baseline, the NBA blog I'm doing for Sporting News along with Sean Deveney and Chris Littmann. If this is news to you, I'm sorry it took so long to announce it here. Today was busy and kind of hectic. No, this doesn't mean the end of FreeDarko. I'll be around, though maybe not as frequently as before. And I still would like to keep getting all these excellent guest posts. Before the bemoaning begins, try reading the thing first. You'll find:

-Minutemen reference in title followed by some low-level Wittgenstein

-Debate over the meaning of "scorer" that had one commenter cursing postmodernism

-Our manifesto, which includes one of the best Moses Malone photos I've ever seen

So we will all have it both ways and life will improve on all fronts. Here are a few odds and ends:

-Haven't had time to read this exchange all the way through, but I think these guys are saying that Antoine Walker is the Achilles Heel of all of Malcolm Gladwell's recent writing.

-From Zac Crain's Twitter, a really awesome anti-Andersen sign.

-My main man Wingo is unfortunately without television right now, and is watching some of these games on some computer feed. There's a chat room that runs beside it, and he sent me this moving sequence:

10:37bmoreray:Birdman has the runz
10:37crza:lol@ birdflu - very good
10:37xavierhimself:lol.. NEED SOME SMACK COACH
10:37captainsyracuse:he's got swine flu
10:37hrshakoury:birdman is doing lines in the locker room
10:37offshoreorca:i'm getting a little tired of the birdman drugs joke. he came back, that's tough stuff
10:37snoba77218:birdmans gona play great at the half, got ape *** on JJ Barea, and run off naked before the end of this game
10:37kobejaun420club:maybe str. lining speed
10:38aridresi:birdman brought swine flu back from mexico
10:38elephantplatapusdinosaur:yeah Birdman went through a lot
10:38tonefresh25:birdman is goona take a sh*t on dallas fans
10:38gazbin:anybody like nick drakes stuff?

apparantly nobody did, and gazbin was not heard from again...

Let that be a lesson to all of you.

Mindless Displeasures

First, read Shoals and Joey on AI’s life-altering haircut. Then, relive the parts of Saturday night’s festivities you forgot to complain about with Ty Keenan and Carter Blanchard.

Shooting Stars

Carter Blanchard: Do you think teams like the Bobcats or Grizzlies are upset that they don’t ever get to do Shooting Stars?
Ty Keenan: Shooting Stars exists to respect tradition. Greg Anthony would be great on the Grizzlies team.

CB: Is it more embarrassing for Dan Majerle or Lisa Leslie to be in the Celebrity Game?
TK: Leslie, because she still plays. Majerle is basically a celebrity now anyway. He could be on Confessions of a Teen Idol.

CB: The Spurs are pretty good. Do they practice this?
TK: It might be like the South Park episode where the good baseball teams do badly on purpose so they don’t have to keep playing.

CB: It’s a shame the Suns lost that after making the first five baskets. Majerle's halfcourt shots are impressive just because he swishes them.
TK: I also like that Leandrinho shot real halfcourt set shots. They are definitely the most FD Shooting Stars team.
CB: Great interview by Cheryl with Detroit. This win is grouped with MVPs, championships, and gold medals.
TK: Will Cheryl shave her rows now that Iverson did his?



Skills competition

TK: Did they pick four scoring point guards on purpose? Harris is probably the closest thing to a pure point guard in this group.
CB: I’m just shocked that Mo was in this and he was bitching about not being in the game. This is as prestigious, if not more so.

CB: Do you think someday kids today will look back on the TNT theme with the same nostalgia we attach to Tesh?
TK: There are too many networks with basketball these days. Plus it's hard to compete with the Pussycat Dolls.

TK: Didn’t Wade have a turnover in this last year? That’s probably when he decided to turn it on.
CB: I actually think Jason Kidd’s performance in this last year was a significant moment.
TK: Devin Harris is really dealing with those demons even though the Nets don’t have great history in this event. But Mark Cuban would still take Kidd's performance.

CB: Reggie needs to stop acting like this event that has historical significance. Although he really is perfect for pretending this matters.
TK: I’m just not sure why he keeps saying everyone is too nonchalant.
CB: What is he expecting them to do, scream?

CB: Rose is not excited that he won. He just sighed like his dad was trying to take prom pictures.

CB: Why does the Rookie Game feature incessant screams?
TK: They give seats to kids with terrible diseases.
CB: People could be getting slaughtered.
TK: Did they yell during the Celebrity Game?
CB: No.



Three-Point Shootout

CB: The three-point competition is more pressure than taking game-winners, according to Reggie.
TK: Kapono will win because this is all he does. I’m not sure he knows this is different from a real game.
CB: Do you think he insists on practicing this during the season? They try to run plays and he says “No, I need to work on my moneyball!”

TK: Kenny just called Roger Mason ashy.

Carter’s internet dies for a while

TK: Cook and Lewis tied! More boring shooting!
TK: With two Florida teams in blue and red jerseys, this is like the recount.
TK: There is nothing more depressing than talking to yourself about the Three-Point Shootout on Valentine’s Day.

TK: Reggie definitely makes all-star scrapbooks. The dunk contest is one page in each, but the three-point competition takes up fifteen.

Dunk contest begins

CB: "To me, it’s gonna be all about his props" is proof positive that Reggie should be fired.
TK: Reggie asks for Carrot Top's autograph at every celebrity game.



TK: Cedric Ceballos being a judge gives us a peek at how the NBA would deal with PEDs.

CB: That first dunk by JR was awesome. Has anyone ever done a double-bounce before on the toss?
TK: No, yet he got pretty bad scores. I fear what’s to come.

TK: What’s with Rudy’s jersey? Is that a LaRue Martin reference?
CB: Are people booing Rudy? That dunk was awesome. How is that just a 42?
TK: Oh, Fernando Martin. I still like it as a LaRue reference. And these judges are xenophobic.

CB: Nate gets way too much credit for being short. He did the same thing as JR with one fewer bounce and not on the first try, but he got better scores.
TK: Kenny says it’s for extension. Apparently the dunk contest is now gymnastics.
CB: I hate short people.

TK: Why is Pau helping Rudy? Sergio Rodriguez must be crying right now.
CB: This dunk is taking way too many tries.
TK: They are arrogant like the Spanish Armada.
CB: Why wouldn’t he do the foot thing?

CB: I know people who did Nate’s boost dunk in middle school.
TK: He's totally pandering. Maybe Dwight will dunk off a ladder to show that he's tall.

CB: Isn’t it against the rules for Dwight to dunk on a non-regulation rim?
TK: That is not 12 feet.
CB: Why are they acting like it isn’t common knowledge that he can dunk 12 feet? And why are they letting him use so many props? I’m so angry.

TK: Nate is wearing green because he’s doing something involving a leprechaun. Oh wait, it’s for kryptonite.
CB: I’m just angry. I can’t enjoy this.
TK: Nate is the guy from Superman IV.



CB: Reggie thinks the free-throw dunk from a 6'11'' guy won’t look good.
TK: Wasn’t that just the Superman dunk last year?

CB: I’m done with Nate Robinson. JR had the best dunk.
TK: Cheryl asked him what his strategy was. That’s easy: “I am short.”

TK: That was identity politics at its worst.

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!

Vain Gray Ovens

Real quick, and maybe better designed for the Twitter: When they first announced HORSE, I was deathly afraid this was going to turn into some racial bullshit. I mean, what gave that away harder than the "no dunks" rule, buried deep in the press release? The reason I objected to everyone's jittery Kevin Love nomination is that, like it or not, trick shots are the result of practice. That's (EDIT:) self-fulfilling gym rat shit, and it's almost unreasonable to expect anyone else in the field to pull off your ace in the hole.

Now, to draw an analogy I absolutely hate myself for, it's classical music from a score. Putting Durant, Mayo and Johnson in there, is—arghhh—improvisational. Instead of all aspiring to a set-piece one dude knows like his own hand, you'll have weird combinations of elements emerging on the spot. Okay, so maybe these three will do some preparation, but not like how the Other Horse would go down, or how they would do for the Dunk Contest (P.S. the "white" HORSE with, say, Love, Miller and Dunleavy would be the white Dunk Contest). Am I falling victim to stereotypes here myself? Maybe. Durant could very well decide he has to win this one. But given the kind of players, and personalities, these three are, you know they're not going to come with anything corny, or a shot that it's clear they've spent their whole life working on. I'm thinking lots of high-bounced, backboard use, and range. Like the Dunk Contest of consummate scorers. Now that's got a solid ring to it.

Keep those contest entries coming!

Sorry for the sloppiness in the beginning that makes it sound like I don't believe in African-American gym rats. I hope you all got my drift.

There's No Ritual in Fun!

If you've been reading this site for a minute, or haven't but found yourself inexplicably drawn to it, you're probably familiar with this timeless clip:



Stage set. When I was on the road, I met this guy in New York who swore that he and his friend had kept this torch alive, recording their own awkward, lo-fi, partly freestyled, and did I mention, very white, homages to these perfect nine minutes of Ultramag weird/NBA classic synergy. He got in touch with me over the weekend and blessed me with mp3's of their efforts, as well as assurances that the 2009 edition is on its way. So without further anticipation, here's Doug S. and friend down through the years:

All-Star 2006
All-Star 2007
All-Star 2008

While you won't exactly hear the recent history of rap played out in these tracks, there is definite evolution as they, I don't know, figure out how to use a computer and control their voices. Even if you don't get all the way through all of them—and you should—at least respect the monk-ish devotion and triumph over god-given limitations. Not to proselytize, but this just might be the FD version of the inspired fan jingle.

P.S. New post later today or early tomorrow. Also, the FD Twitter is so on and poppin' that it warrants getting an account.

HOLY GRAIL ALERT



Video of the 1976 Spirits of St. Louis team, one of those ones that got away from my lifetime.

Henry Chinaski is not Spider-Man

The NBA All-Star Weekend is, as much as anything else, a sort of Topsy-Turvy celebration, where traditional roles are set aside and the hierarchy of the league is put in reverse for one glorious weekend. In the three-point contest, specialists dominate MVPs in a supposedly objective contest. (I don't really acknowledge the presence of the other two All-Star Saturday events, but if you wanted to stick with the theory, the skills contest is a measure of the individual abilities of those whose best attribute is making their teammates better, and the Shooting Stars Competition is basketball as a boring and miserable exercise.) The dunk contest has come to celebrate something wholly different from what it claims to be, celebrating style and creativity rather than showcasing the pure awe that MJ, Dominique, and Vince were able to instill during their reigns over the contest. Consider the post-Carter dunk contest champions: Jason Richardson now leads the league in threes made. Fred Jones, Desmond Mason and Gerald Green are in various stages of irrelevance. 0% of Nate Robinson's shots in games are dunks. (I'll get to Josh Smith later.)

This year, of course, was the exception. Dwight Howard is the most functional dunker of my lifetime, and while I was 7 years old when proto-Shaq left the Magic, I can't really imagine making more impact by dunking the ball than Howard is now-he's a legitimate top-10 player in the league and a full third of his shots are dunks, and even when he doesn't dunk he changes the defense, as they must keep someone between him and the basket at all possible times in fear of the alley-oop. When he plays, the court pulsates with the power of dunk. And yet his dunk contest was marked by triumphs of style rather than substance, with his signature dunk being a show of smoke and mirrors while THE BIRTHDAY CAKE was, like Howard's tragically futile sticker dunk, a demonstration of substance-as-style, and the contest ended with Green doing a ridiculously difficult dunk that didn't photograph well (seriously, try jumping off a hardwood floor in socks), while Howard did a two-handed windmill using a toy hoop.

When a guy who just got waived rides for degree of difficulty while an MVP candidate goes for style points, it just tells you that All-Star weekend is a distorted time. (Disclaimer: In no way did that paragraph mean to deprecate Howard's deservingness, mainly due to the Inverted Windmill and the Ambitastic Tappy-Oop, it's just saying that Howard based his claim on style while Green dealt more in degree of difficulty, which is odd considering their relative ability.)

Of course, the game itself is the greatest example of All-Star Weekend's spirit of casting aside the shackles of team roles, as players, especially for the first three quarters, govern their games by what they feel they should be instead of what they are told to be. Watching the All-Star game often reminds me of the story in The Blind Side where Michael Oher, the 6-7, 280-pound future offensive tackle, showed up to play basketball for his tiny high school not with the game of a banger who lived in the paint, but as a shooting guard who preferred to gracefully handle the ball and rip threes off the dribble, because he'd learned the game by practicing alone on the street and had never even seen himself in the mirror.

In other words, he played like a guard because nobody had ever told him that he was a big man. This is reflected by The All-Star Game's freeing nature; we get to see Dwight Howard only taking dunks, Rasheed Wallace popping left-handed threes, Yao launching threes himself, Jason Kidd getting 10 assists but only shooting twice, AI dishing out 6 assists and only shooting 7 times, 'Melo shamelessly gunning, VC treating basketball as aesthetic exhibition as opposed to athletic competition, and the like.

But look at the MVP of the contest. He went for 27/8/9 on 12-22 from the floor and 2-7 from deep. His season averages are 31/8/7 on 22 shots and 5 threes. In other words, for LeBron, the All-Star Game, when players can do as they feel, was exactly like any other game. Even his signature play, the game-sealing dunk, was a slashing dunk through traffic instead of a VC/T-Mac show, the kind of highlight he generally provides within the context of a game.

It's not even that LeBron is the least inhibited superstar we've seen since, like, ever: it's that it makes sense. At the highest level of basketball LeBron played before the big show, he took the tip, brought the ball up, hit the boards, slung dimes, just generally did the whole thing up, and now he's more or less doing what he feels in the pros. Some will tell you that some Coach K in LeBron would have done him right; footwork down low, form in the mid-range game, etc. This is untrue. Sure, he might have some fundamentals, but would they have come at the cost of the freedom that makes him as he is? That's a rhetorical question.

Several folk have noted that the best players in the league are from the high school cloth; according to Race For the MVP, the best player in the L has been McGrady, Howard, LBJ, Kobe, or KG for all but one week, and Amare remains the unsung MVP candidate. What stands out about these players is not just how good they are but how unique they are, with the possible exception of Kobe, who didn't go to college but did intern at the Zen Academy.

LeBron is a dominant big man who plays de facto point guard on the perimeter. Howard eschews traditional big-man offense and instead just finds creative ways to use the power of dunk. KG has struck the elusive balance between "little-big" and "big-big" skills. Amare makes his office not on the blocks but by catching passes at he top of the circle and thundering downward. T-Mac works the point forward. (Even before the class of '95, the guys blazing the trails were from the closest thing to high school ball, the land of the small college, which gave us Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman in their unconventional glory.)

Even the non-all star HS guys work in powerful and mysterious ways; Josh Smith might be one of the best defensive players in the league as a shot-blocking shooting guard. The Warriors, the league's most unconventionally fantastic team, employ only two rotation players who have ever set foot in college, and one of them is demi-god Baron Davis, who played to his own beat even at the Church of Wooden. (Unrelated note on the Warriors, prompted by the Mavericks losing Nowitzki and still yet to beat a winning team after their panic trade: not only are the Warriors capable of beating anyone, at any time, essentially based on the health of their spirit animals, they are perfectly capable of claiming a team's soul as part of the transaction.)

Last time I talked about college basketball, I advocated for the value of a good role player coming out of college, as many of the guys laden with "upside" and expectations end up falling short, while guys who know how to do their jobs are overlooked and cause chagrin among all when they continue to do their jobs well in the NBA. Upon further review, I've pretty much decided that college basketball's system of assigning roles is purely and simply evil no matter what. Players like J. Smith would be shackled to the confinements of being a traditional shooting guard, robbing us of his high-flying exploits at power forward. Monta Ellis would be told to run the point. Amare and Dwight would have been told to quit their flights of fancy and stick their butts on the blocks. THIS WAS DAVID LEE. Josh Smith is not effective despite his rawness: He is effective because he is allowed to be raw.

Even those given absolute freedom in college end up shackled by their role as savior: Instead of being allowed the key to unlocking his talents at his own place and find his game, Durant was thrown into the role of savior and is now being forced to suffer by a team whose only move to develop him in any sort of positive way was to trade for Donyell Marshall, who shall serve as a vivid and horrifying reminder to Durant of what he could someday become. Hell, look at AI; every time he's had talent around him, in the Olympics or the All-Star game, and to a lesser degree with Denver, he practically aches to show the world he is not a ball-hog at his core, but has been shoehorned into being one by the likes of Kevin Ollie. (If you want my take on B-Easy; I fear for him as well. A fast power forward who can take big guys off the dribble from the free throw line and become a bigger David West, a faster Carlos Boozer, or Super-Bonzi? Good Policy. A guy who's slow for an elite NBA perimeter player and favors fadeaways from 21 feet and turns the ball over twice as much as he gets assists given 20 shots a game and told to make it work? Bad Policy.)

For all the noise about HS guys being thrust into the limelight too quickly, coming into the NBA incomplete and mercurial will always be better than having to shoulder the burden of perceived completion; by being allowed to find the music of their own games, the HS guys eventually found an off-beat form of truth as yet unrivaled by any other category of player. Even LeBron, who came in wearing savior white, was allowed to find his way in Cleveland, who experimented with him at the point but eventually stuck him on the wing, took Ricky Davis and D-Miles out back and shot them, and allowed him to run things as he always had and shall continue to do.

The age limit is an affront to what makes basketball great; basketball-as-jazz is something we refer to as little as possible here, but the age limit puts Coltrane in a symphony. But it's not going away, and it might even get raised soon, so we should make the most of our chance to appreciate the rare and off-center diamond that is the High School player while we still can, who base their games on what they are rather than what they were told to be, and find greatness where they could not be shown to look. And if the age limit applied to sports bloggers, you'd be reading this in The Daily Trojan. The age limit sucks.

Foot on the Lever

Excuse the rant-y quality of what follows, if that sort of thing bothers you.

Avery Lemacorn already gave us some comprehensive analysis of the Hornets/NOLA dynamic. But with All-Star Weekend here at last, I feel moved to weigh in with some words about the locale. It's no secret that Katrina was a racialized tragedy, and the NBA—the league most often tarred with negative racial associations—threw its weight behind the rebuilding effort like no other major sport. Certainly, a lot of the weekend's festivities will nod toward the disaster, with players going out of their way to fit some goodwill appearances into their schedules.

I wonder, though, if the weekend writ large will feel any different. Wilbon famously referred to ASW as "the Black Thanksgiving," which if nothing else invests it with some kind of socio-cultural weight. Now, in New Orleans, you've got athletes who jumped at the chance to donate their time and money two years ago, including plenty who participated in Kenny Smith's ad hoc charity game in Houston (the Black All-Star Game?). What's perplexing me is that this just doesn't feel like a moment. Why isn't it all coming together in some sort of powerful statement about the power of sport, the degree to which the NBA reads black, and the cultural significance of its best-known figures?

Maybe it's just too late. At a time when the league might very well move a team to Oklahoma City, maybe having All-Star Weekend in NOLA isn't such a big deal. The downtown is largely intact or, on the surface, redone. The surrounding areas of total devastation are pretty well-hidden, and are looking more and more like permanent features of the city's landscape. There's enough of an infrastructure to keep things under control—hell, there's probably still Blackwater creeping around in the alleys for when shit gets really ugly.



It's a nice gesture that the game's there, albeit possibly condescending to the city and to whatever the NBA could mean. And let's not forget that, in the wake of Katrina, the city's demographic slant just ain't what it used to be. It's always decent to honor the ghosts of the dead, but those of the evicted and displaced? With a corporate salute? Again, that just doesn't add up to me.

And that's just it. This isn't an aggressive gesture on the part of the players, or the league, to take the side or show unwavering support for the city's victims. It's the blackest sport there is, brought into a city that's knee-deep in whitewash and dreams of gentrification. Had the All-Star Game come there sooner, it could've been a beacon of hope. Had it been seen as intervening to call folks home, to say that "this is our city," then I'd see some political relevance in it. Instead, it almost feels like a smokescreen.

While the charity that immediately followed Katrina felt like a movement, whatever players do now—and I'm not trying to downplay their sincerity, I'm just saying—is decidedly lacking in that tremulous overtone. If anything, it kind of makes it seem like settling is the best they can hope for. Bring in the All-Star Game, get some help for some families who made their way back. That means New Orleans is still black, right?



Addendum: You've probably all read ESPN's multi-articled treatment of the NBA's image problem by now. I personally don't see anything wrong with my claiming that the league can mean something to African-Americans, including disenfranchised ones, while agreeing with the mag that the Association isn't comprised only of ghetto success stories. Obviously there are distinctions of region and class within any ethnic group; it's the responsibility of those outside of it to acknowledge these, and not think with too broad a brush. However, that doesn't preclude the NBA and its players being a positive force for African-Americans writ large. In fact, it's when stereotypes break down that a group can have some sort of solidarity that doesn't run the risk of hurting it.

Mr. Liver's Sunday Memo

One thing I've learned while working on this book: I like memories. I prefer players as I remember them from day-to-day than the fussy business of paying attention. So sue me.

I also cannot overstate the importance of the purely outrageous in my view of basketball. Writing about Josh Smith and Gerald Wallace over the weekend was like a spiritual experience, exactly because I took off the shackles and restored them to their rightful place beyond the sun. I'm sorry, I can't fake it—my skin shrivels when I hear NPR commentators dip their feet in the "poetry of this Super Bowl match-up" waters, but I'm always going to tend toward basketball as transcendent spectacle.

That's why I'm totally stoked about this year's Dunk Contest, which is beginning to take on surreal features. Green, Howard, and Gay are currently debating, McLaughlin Group-style, over just how high the hoops will be raised. Are you stealing my silver? This is outright mutiny, taking all the pageantry of the post-Vince artifice and pretending it's just not there. The judges, the system, fucked up by wronging Dwight. Time to take matters into their own hands, and do so with grand, public, possibly insane bragging that the NBA is powerless to guard against.



Gerald Green is like the NBA's verison of a suicide bomber right about now. I still don't get how his scoring and flash can't help some long-suffering franchise, but whatever, he's fast slipping away. So he stakes it all on the impossible, and just dares the league to calm him down, or his foes to back down first. I was bummed about trading Rudy Gay in my fantasy league, until I found out that John Salmons has been spending time with his wife's tricky pregnancy, which is TOTALLY KINGS, going all the way back to Webber. Plus I now have every single Atlanta Hawk on my team.

What really rips this all to shreds is if Howard gets some small-man mobility and flexibility going. Say he duplicates J.R. Smith's around-the-back dunk from 2005—most criminally-unheralded entry in the ritual's whole history. That would indeed, as the gophers state, change the game.

Things that would make the Super Bowl: If Google bought Tom Brady and Plaxico Burress accidentally sat on his mixtape collection. Other than that, I'll be busy making the perfect salad.

Damn people don't respect the Dunk Contest enough. There is most definitely a trickle-down effect from what happens out there to a players' on-court juice. Another reason why J.R. got robbed.

What I Saw Before Fainting

(HOLY FUCK Gasol part at the bottom)

So I tuned into Pistons/Lakers last night for one reason alone: To watch Amir Johnson, who finally has his spot in the rotation. He lived up to it, looking like he belonged and regularly wowing myself and others. Dude is basically everything every tall lottery pick of the last five years wishes he could be, and all that Bynum's got over him is a few inches and a (Kobe-inspired?) will to self-discipline. I also have to give it up for Rodney Stuckey, who played the way his last name sounds. I'm beginning to think that "combo guard" isn't an inherently flawed concept, just that it's an art in the same way pure PG is. It's not like all "undersized SG's" automatically become combo guards—they can only aspire to that. Stuckey could do it.

If Johnson displaced McDyess, and Stuckey somehow got 25 minutes a game, I'd watch Detroit regularly. You can put that on your graves.

But the real reason I've come back to this wasteland of image-less ruin is the Rip Hamilton/Kobe relationship. During halftime, the Pistons network ran some light-hearted clips of Rip advocating for himself as a Three-Point Shootout candidate. He looked cheery, and said, more or less, "people think I can's shoot threes, but I can. Check the numbers, not the lies snakes tell." Then Kobe, in full fur coat regalia, had on his serious face as he commended Rip on developing past the three-point line (something that once bugged the hell out of Shoals). And then the sillies: "he belongs in there, but I'll take him down."



The Rip/Kobe relationship is endlessly fascinating to yours truly. You know how, whenever you get around your parents, you act like you're sixteen? It seems like these two All-Stars instantly revert back to their days of regional HS battles. You can see it on the court, definitely, where Rip's defense borders on zealous, his offense has an edge to it, and that reptilian glaze is decidedly absent. And Kobe, he almost loosens up in a way that's somewhere between foolhardy cockiness and backyard ease.

It's weird, the whole NBA Brotherhood thing dictates that players' interactions bank on shared pasts. With Kobe and Rip, though, that past is one of rivalry—one that, however low-stakes and goofy it seems now, still awakens in them something awfully vital. Paradox: In all their youthful fronting, you get a whole new kind of vulnerability from the two. They really opened up, didn't they?

UPDATE: Now, it's been well-proven that I don't know shit about basketball. And that anything exiling Javaris Crittendon makes me sad (unless, of course, it's the beginning of a completely amazing and non-sensical Crittendon/Conley backcourt, with Lowry at the three). But this has to be the definition of mid-season monster. Who gives a fuck if Gasol's back is kind of bad? He's a legit All-Star 4, who can do a bunch of shit, and gets paired with that Bynum guy. And Kobe. And Odom, now free to be three (you like that?) That shit is SCARY, and delirious in the way that the best style melanges always are.

Lakers clearly don't care about long-term anymore, since their concern is winning with Kobe—hence those draft picks avalanching away from their person. I'd say that this gives them as good a chance as they'd ever find. And, at the risk of blasphemy, this makes me happier than Kidd would've. This is skilled size—times two—to go with Bryant. They were winning with just Kobe/Bynum, and now you've thrown another Bynum-like presence into the mix. And allowed Odom to be as fluid as he wants to be. Man. I am stoked and I don't even live in California! Might is rising. Boston has an enemy.

If you had ever told me that one day, there might exist a Gasol/Odom/Grown Bynum frontline, I would've thrown up on the ceiling and then cleaned it off with my own tears.

[INSERT IMAGE HERE OF ME SPENDING ALL MY MONEY ON PLANKTON AND GUNS]