Madvillainy

Despite the summertime hostility directed toward LeBron James, and in contradistinction to insistence otherwise, the Miami Heat have not been particularly villainous this season. Miami is disliked, probably more than any other team, but the gap between it and other elite teams is more crack than chasm. Consider Boston, which must regularly confront geographic enmity, Paul Pierce intolerance, and the burgeoning Fuck a KG movement. The Celtic haters are legion, and Boston might actually win something, so the hate means more.

To the extent that any Heat is disliked, LeBron either bears or inspires the most vitriol, however it does not feel all that cool or warranted to hate him anymore, partially because he has maintained a fairly low profile this year. James hasn't stoked the flames of fan antipathy in traditional ways. He has not feuded with beloved figures, he has not injured anyone on purpose, he has not acted like the oblivious diva that we like to say he can be during his lowest moments. (Chris Bosh is another story: fair or not, it's fun to marginalize him.) He said a few things about the union and contraction that appeared to piss off journalists more than anyone else. Were Miami a more legitimate threat to win a title this season, that looming possibility might inspire stronger feelings, but until Miami finds a Kendrick Perkins (or Boston gets hurt), the Heat will not end the year with a coronation that echoes what we saw at their introduction.

All the same, some people do cling to the narrative of a dastardly Miami, perhaps none more so than...the Heat, themselves. It's weird and somewhat dissonant. True, there have been few feel-good marketing campaigns this year featuring LeBron, Dwyane Wade, or Chris Bosh. But frankly, there has been little to say about any of them beyond the confines of traditional basketball conversations. Wade's T-Mobile ads are the most memorable contribution the Big Three have made to NBA culture so far this season, and while they satirize the tabloid news cycle and the fury that attended Heat news this summer, the ads feel played out, not poignant. For so much screaming about such a celebrated union, the anticipation appears to have exhausted most of the available oxygen.

Like most things, it's LeBron's fault. Or it might as well be. James's "What Should I Do" ad seemed to cauterize the wounds endured this summer, rather than prolonging the pain or launching a series of reprisals. It was a coda, not an introduction. Some of that effect may owe to how easily, and quickly, the ad was lampooned; critical response from media and fans robbed LeBron's defiant moment of its gravitas. Moving so swiftly to answer James, to cast his ad as either a brilliant ethering or a clueless misstep along the same ill-found path, crowded out his message and seemed to indicate general Heat fatigue. Judging the ad, regardless of direction, meant it could be processed and disposed of swiftly. People were tired, and hating requires far more energy. So Heat haters, far from vituperative and animated, quickly settled into a muted kind of loathing, and the Heat have gone about business--at times struggling but largely playing well--in the glare of celebrity, but without the elevated temperature of hatred.

Don't tell Miami, though. The Heat seem to think there's a war going on outside. Game after game, Miami is introduced to a C-Murder soundtrack:



Conspicuously missing, no matter how understandable the reasons, is the original chorus:

Fuck them other n***as cause I'm down for my n***as (What)
Fuck them other n***as cause I'm down for my n***as (What)
Fuck them other n***as, I ride for my n***as (What)
I die for my n***as/Fuck them other n***as (What)

Angry, profane, spiteful, violent, retributive, cloistered. "Down 4 My N***az" is the soundtrack to the season the Heat expected to have. Only, they aren't having it, as noted. The basketball intelligentsia made its peace with the Heat long ago. Some fans may hate the team, but enough either do not, or just do not care, to the point that James and Wade still started in the All-Star Game. Heat games on national television are broadcast with something resembling calm, the announcers seemingly happy to operate in the quiet epilogue of a story that may ultimately have been about nothing. (Or about everything--power, race, money, labor--but only in years to come.) Still, Miami soldiers on.

Night in and night out, the Heat carry this mantle of hostility out onto their home floor. For each of the three All-Stars, it conjures something different. James has been his usual, brilliant self this season. Without mind-boggling numbers which the most optimistic James fan, or the most excited champion of spite (like me!), may have expected, he has made the Heat his own. Not only does he control the ball when it matters, but Wade has played a role as LeBron's second-in-command. James's steady demeanor, toned down from the exuberance he displayed in Cleveland, bespeaks a man toiling under the weight of expectation, some of it self-imposed. But not merely chastened or quiet, LeBron also has played with an air of dignity that contradicts The Decision and probably would not seem as strong were the Cavaliers not historically terrible. As though Miami's ascension and his game's devastating impact were inadequate, the sorry plight of a Cleveland team sinking swiftly has created a new and dazzling manner by which we can calibrate LeBron's preeminence. For his part, James has spoken kindly of Cleveland and otherwise focused on the task at hand, clawing back some of the respect he surrendered in July. The C-Murder track just isn't right for James under this light; he has been serious and spoken through example, but not insolent.

For Wade, meanwhile, the lasting impression is far more somber. Generally effective but intermittently out of sorts, Dwyane has occupied the role many forecasted for James. He has been supplanted as Miami's leading player. For years, his explosive style carried with it a noble air of martyrdom. He threw himself, often quite literally, into everything, from passing lanes to collapsing big men, and his regular ability to either win or go down furiously was heroic. Dwyane Wade was a wonderful loser when he had to be, and he made long odds a part of his appeal. He has never been a great winner, though, as his referee-aided championship surely reminds even some of his fans. Now, with his athletic exploits less mythic and his place on a winning team somewhat diminished, striding out as the Heat do each home game feels insincere. The bravado and assurance of the track no longer mesh with a player who seems like a lesser version of what he once was. Perception has hurt Wade more than any Heat, and his relative reticence has only reinforced the secondary lane in which he travels. He's like Magic--the bad rapper, not the bad television personality--on this track.

For no one, though, is the illusion of a season spent fighting more disconcerting than Bosh. It doesn't even bear explanation, really. After a summer during which he was happy to subordinate his will and persona to that of the teammates he hoped to gain, the specter of this lanky studio gangster with the disorienting facial hair (he's black, it's Asian) coming at an opponent fueled by C-Murder's bile is laughable. Sorry to be so literal, but C-Murder is in prison. Chris Bosh usually seems like he only eats when LeBron allows it, and as though he would punch with the underside of his fist. Though, this does make Bosh the perfect Heat for today's analysis. The Heat are not who they thought they would have to be, and Bosh lives it.

We Can't Be Stopped

I meant to write this yesterday, but got overwhelmed by exactly the monster I had hoped to combat. Yesterday was truly awful. Miserable, boring, sad, ugly, voyeuristic, base, and nearly resistant to any kind of fine distinction. I know that not all of Cleveland felt that way, and yes, LeBron James did that city some wrong. But the story wasn't that nuance, at least until after the game, when some fans at the game admitted they just needed that catharsis, and James showed some vulnerability on the subject of this summer. Confidently, of course, and with one gaffe that everyone jumped on. Still, he was there, acknowledging that the night did matter to him. We watched, though, hoping for the worst, or at least something that would justify this night's marquee billing. I was back and forth between TNT and Michael Vick, and granted, I kind of had to tune in. And yet that wasn't an event: it was a set of conditions that we hoped would yield one. Nearly all the possibilities were bad. It was not what I love about the NBA, or any sports. Reggie Miller was in his element, though. Good for him.

Afterward, though, we got some vintage Monta Ellis -- albeit in a loss -- and a reminder that the Steve Nash is always worth watching. I even briefly appreciated Jason Richardson. On Wednesday, Blake Griffin had one of his most profound (and shocking) games to date, pure joy that, in the Twitter I inhabit, led to nearly as much chatter as Heat-Cavs. Eric Gordon, who has quietly grown into a scoring dynamo, with more power than you think, was in the building, and Baron Davis looked like the old Baron again. Shit, even during the Heat game, LeBron's third was a reminder not of what Cleveland's missing, but the real reason he matters to us in the NBA community. No one can put together that kind of quarter, one where the court shrinks, the basket lowers, and defenders are little more than apparitions, or cones in a ball-handling drill. What's past degree of difficulty? Playing like the game could use a few more impediments.

It's ironic that James is still the league's standard-bearer for ecstatic basketball (though Griffin is getting close), since last night, and the Heat in general, have overshadowed a season that's brought more FD Good News than any in recent memory. The Class of 2003 was supposed to take over the league, and instead, the principals have confused that narrative and, at best, put their ascent in dry-dock. Carmelo Anthony, too. Amar'e in New York isn't exactly a league-changing endeavor, and Gilbert Arenas, another slightly older fellow traveler, is trying to work his way back to being worthless -- not just pitiable. These were the figures that launched FreeDarko and all of them are suffering. Except the league as we see it is healthier than ever.

Every night on the highlights, you see Russell Westbrook doing something or other outrageous (Durant's around, too). Rajon Rondo has responded to this summer's sour USA Basketball experience by ascending into the point guard ether. Chris Paul is back, and he and Deron Williams have resumed battling each other until the end of time like something or other from Norse mythology. Michael Beasley has recovered the game that made him such a beast at Kansas State, and along with Kevin Love, has made the Timberwolves the league's most thrilling exercise in futility. Gordon and Ellis are among the league leaders in scoring; Monta's Warriors are not only intriguing, but also downright functional. I long ago stopped talking bad about Steph Curry, and now I'm about to do the same for David Lee. Dorell Wright is a revelation! John Wall is averaging 18 points, 9 assists, and nearly 3 steals, and we're still waiting for him to really announce himself. The Spurs are very nearly Manu's team, which is both unlikely and intoxicating. Lamar Odom is having his best season since Miami. Have you watched Jrue Holiday? It's hard, given that team, but worth it when he shows what he's capable of. No one remembers Tim Donaghy or looks at results as a function of sportsbook betting.

There are problems in the world today. The Kings have gone purely dysfunctional, with Tyreke Evans and DeMarcus Cousins at the heart of it. Blatche is fat. Brandon Jennings stopped taking that next step we had expected. Anthony Randolph is sphinx-like as ever, even to Mike D'Antoni. And obviously, the Heat were supposed to transform basketball theory and aesthetics. For the most part, though, I am in hog fucking heaven. Why do we need to turn our eyes toward LeBron in Cleveland when, more than ever, it's a fine, fine time to simply bet on the NBA writ large. I'm bad at giving thanks and making toasts, but apparently that's only because they put me on the spot. I am so happy right now.

You're Promised the Honker

The following is not intended as a defense of Jay Caspian Kang's post on Kevin Garnett. Mr. Kang is a quite able-bodied young man and can speak for himself, in these parts or elsewhere if he should so choose, whenever he so pleases. Nor is it any sort of attack on the man they call Rough Justice, who has contributed to FD in the past and is, at There Are No Fours, a writer you should digest on a regular basis.

That said, I would like to take some of this quality 6AM airplane time to address RJ’s post from yesterday, where he lashed out at Jay’s Kevin Garnett post and raised some broader critiques of the FreeDarko way of life. Let it first be said that my feelings on Garnett-Villanueva are uncharacteristically murky. In a purely ethnographic manner, I dismissed CV’s tweet-borne outrage as “just not the way things are done.”

I wasn’t only the writer to say, in not so many words, “come on Charlie V., WE PLAYIN’ BASKETBALL!” Rather than take a moral position, I was content to relativize, or romanticize, or whatever, and say that sports are awesome and athletes, subject to more special rules than the rest of us, even when it comes to the expectation of half-decent conduct. I heard from readers who wondered why the near-rampant homophobia of sports wasn’t somehow entering this discussion; in talking with Jay, I started to think that here, Garnett was the exception that proved the rule.

There’s a lot that can be empirically, and affirmatively, chalked up to the culture of the sport. When is trangression transgressed? When, as in this case, the speech-act is both resoundingly dull and just plan mean (as in petty). The common currency, or rules of engagement, is all about drive, rancor and wit. Going too far and not going far enough are strangely intertwined.

As for Garnett himself, to call his intensity performative is by no means to discount it. If KG is one-hundred percent authentic – which, mind you, is different from sincere – out on the court, he would be almost alone in sports. Part of playing the game is playing the game, playing mind games, and any other such cliché you can call up to register the duality that is the competitive self. If you hate that sentence, just say “nature and nurture” three times fast. Garnett, like pretty much any other person looking to topple others in his field, is closed loop with no beginning or end. He wouldn’t be driven to so fastidiously project the character he does if he weren’t, on some level, really that hell-bent on succeeding. Yet as the Recluse suggests, KG’s allowing himself to be so swayed by lawless emotion is easily attribute to Jordan-era basketball socialization. From there, though, we’re right back at “but it takes the right kind to so totally embrace, and even further amplify, the lessons of MJ’s persona”.



I can quite artificially pick and choose what Garnett traits to admire, or at least enjoy -- cussing at no one in particular, banging his head on the padded goalpost, needlessly blocking shots after the whistle, barking like a dog, and slapping the floor on defense for no other reason than to fire himself up further. That John Thompson interview, the “loading up the clip” sound bite, and that dolorous adidas commercial with the stand-up comedy section, these are all pure gold to me. Yet that’s a false dichotomy. These are part and parcel with the bullying, dirty play, and complete and total loss of perspective while on the court that increasingly, have become the hallmark of Garnett’s on-court demeanor. Part of it is the move from Minny to Boston, which got Garnett out from under that all-consuming cloud of pathos and made him less eternally sympathetic and – since he was suddenly playing on a real team – eccentric. Going from feel-good super-team to brooding contenders further concretized Garnett. You just couldn’t look at him any more as a powerful, twisted curiosity. He was out on center stage, and then after 2008, a professional who didn’t care to leave room for our indulgences. Getting older didn’t help, either.

That’s to say, I neither quite agree with Jay, nor with the part of me that could once be brought to tears by a 2002 shot of Garnett guarding Webber. Before, Garnett was an extreme version of competition with no object. Once he got a taste of its applications – the only role that would ever make sense for him, long-term – he changed, but our perception changed, too. The KG of Minnesota was a parable, a folk hero, a creative act that drew in athlete and fan alike to create mythology. He was perfect for the purposes of this website, but I can’t pretend he wasn’t kind of a dick all along, or that the way he looks in this second act somehow stands apart from the earlier KG. What I’m learning now is that I’m stuck with both, and that they’re actually one and the same.

Much of Rough Justice’s post was directed at Jay; I may have indirectly addressed them, but the point here isn’t to rush to the aid of the last thing published on this site. What really interests me is RJ’s assertion that liberated fandom and team faithfulness are not mutually exclusive. To this I say, duh. To be perfectly honest about it, the “manifesto” in our first book did the concept of liberated fandom a great disservice. I was only barely responsible for it; it was put together by forces beyond my control, and I was too busy to complain that it tacked way too extreme for my part. Plus, I heard it would help sell books.

On this blog, I have never suggested that liberated fandom meant players over teams, or that pure aesthetics are all that is to be gleaned from basketball. What excites me about basketball is that, at its best, a team is not only the sum of individuals – it has nearly the same amount of personality. Furthermore, winning is always a question of aesthetics, and aesthetics employed primarily in the service of winning. It’s the interplay between these two poles that, to me, exemplifies the NBA. And while I’ve always scoffed at being chained to a single team, especially when players shift around so much, I’ve always taken it as license to have a rooting interesting in a bunch, with one or two sometimes elevating themselves above all others. Granted, oftentimes my more casual interest in a team is a function of a player or two, but for what it’s worth, I’ve always been known to turn my back on individual players. In short, liberated fandom is more like free love than a weird fetish, or unlimited free porn downloads.



That’s all I have to say on the subject for now. There is precious little rock in my iTunes. I have some thoughts on legacy that I’ve been meaning to get up for a while now, so let’s so how bored I get on this next flight. The television isn’t working on here but I wasn’t expecting it in the first place.

THE PASSION OF KEVIN GARNETT

Jay Caspian Kang has a tumblr where he mostly posts videos of bad rap acts from the late nineties. Follow him on twitter at maxpower51.

Two nights ago, I walked around the Mission and watched as thousands of elated Giants fans flooded out of the bars and into the streets to celebrate. As I walked deeper down 24th Street towards the frontlines of gentrification, where handcrafted coffee houses with vaguely German names have staked out their own turf in the never-ending battle between the Nortenos and the Surenos, the scene didn’t change much. Everyone was elated, yelling. Even the nerdy brand of San Francisco hipster, the ones who can’t figure out how to dress interestingly, were out cheering on their stoops. The honking of horns, the unabashed revelry, the energy of the city was unlike anything I’d ever seen before. And although I have no allegiance to the Giants or even to the Bay Area, I found myself thinking of all the Roger Angell and Philip Roth quotes I had long since cast off as being sentimental, ridiculous. Baseball was stitching together a civic consciousness, a shared ecstasy. What that was worth was open for debate, but it certainly had an undeniable power to bring people together into something approximating a joyful moment.



A lifelong Red Sox fan, I watched Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS in a piano bar in midtown Manhattan. The bar itself had no mounted screens, but someone had wedged a small TV in one of the bar’s shelves. Me and the bartender were the only people who were watching. My new art school friends were watching the performance artist Soy Bomb sing the National Anthem of a fake country, in some language he had made up. When Johnny Damon’s grand slam cleared the short porch, I yelped, took out my phone and started furiously texting my friends back in Boston. My art school friends gave me a look usually reserved for cute Special Olympians and dogs who try to walk on their hind legs. I remember feeling a tingle at the back of my skull, a charge flood into my fingertips—the usual bodied indications that something was changing. Just three months prior, I had graduated from a college where the major social activity was crowding into the campus pub to watch the Red Sox. Now, I was sitting in a piano bar with friends-of-friends of a performance artist best known for jumping up on stage with Bob Dylan during some Grammy performance. I wondered how long it would be before I would stop seeking out the small TV in the corner of the bar. When would being friends-of-friends of Soy Bomb become my life? A year? Three months?

As it turned out, the tingly feeling was just the effects of the awful garlic-infused vodka I had been drinking. I kept watching sports, but as my priorities changed, I found myself caring less and less about whether or not my team won or lost.

By the time the Sox won again in 2007, I had started reading FreeDarko, which provided me with a name for my particular sports affliction. Liberated Fandom made sense, not only because my beloved childhood losers had been usurped by a bunch of rowdy Cowboy Up dickbags, but also because it allowed for a different engagement with sports, one that seemed to fit better with my particular circuitry. I’m sure that most of the people reading this are doing so because they, at some point, felt a similar detachment from caring whether a team won or lost, but could not quite pry themselves away from the intricacies, and, at times, the beauty of the spectacle on the court.



Within this aesthetic realm, where players exist as performers, who, while never completely excerpted from the calculus of winning and losing, share a relationship to the game similar to that of an opera diva and the libretto, the prima donnas are the Pedro Martinezes, the Allen Iversons, the Griffey Juniors. Those athletes, through their individual brilliance and magnetic personality, transcend the manufactured drama of millionaires pretending to collectively care about beating other millionaires in a fully corporatized game. The anti-heroes are always those millionaires who would have you believe that there is nothing more vital to humanity than whether or not they win or lose a playoff series.

Yes, as fans, we demand the players care about winning, losing and loyalty, but there also exists an unspoken line where the athlete should not cross. Namely, they should never, ever, never-ever-ever remind us that the scope of their lives is larger than our own. The history of fans violently turning against an athlete is just a list of athletes who felt entitled to publically disregard a communal rule. Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire cheated and we got mad because most of us don’t (or can’t) cheat at our jobs. The answer to LeBron’s Nike question is this: we wanted you to swap employers with quiet dignity, because when we switch jobs, nobody really cares. And since we like to think of ourselves as people who work hard at our jobs, we also demand the athlete care, but when he steps off the field of play, we expect him to be the sort of guy, who, to quote some disastrous election logic from a few years back, we can have a beer with.



(go to 4:07)

In the dungeon of tunnel-visioned stars, only Barry Bonds has carried the excesses of caring-too-much as poorly and awkwardly as Kevin Garnett. Jordan was protected by doting reporters and the persistence and impenetrability of the mask he wore whenever he was in front of a camera. Kobe is saved by his visible intelligence, his occasional moments of thoughtfulness. Garnett has never possessed any of these graces, or, at the very least, the institutional guidance to occasionally edit out his excesses. What’s worse, there’s always been something a bit off about Garnett’s famed intensity—he doesn’t quite burn in the same way that Chris Paul burns, he doesn’t have Isaiah’s grim determination, he doesn’t have Rodman’s “fuck it, we’re winning” mentality.

With Garnett, there’s always a sense of insecure theater, of a man who hasn’t quite convinced himself of the virtues and authenticity of his passions. We all know people like this in our daily lives—the sneering indie snob, the violently overprotective mother, the religious blowhard. When Garnett started crying in front of John Thompson in that famed TNT interview, I remember feeling bad for him, not because he was sick of losing, but rather, because he, in true Jimmy Swaggart style, felt the need to imbue such wild theatrics into his caring. When he made the comment about going to war and bringing teks and grenades, I remember thinking, “He just doesn’t get it.” Nothing that’s happened in the interim, from the weirdness of his championship ranting to last night’s confrontation with Charlie Villanueva and today’s bizarre attempt at an explanation, has budged that perception.



Anyone who has played pickup basketball has come across the guy who compulsively and needlessly bullies other players. These guys always force you into that ugly headspace, wherein you must calculate what is more debasing: to endure their abuse or to fight back. On Tuesday night, Charlie Villaneuva made a bad compromise by tattling via twitter, when the more appropriate response might have been to punch Garnett in the mouth and let the public decide whether or not it was justified. Strangely, it was Villanueva’s twitter activity, and not Garnett’s trash-talking, that violated an unspoken code: the one that dictates athletes take care of their own business without turning to the public opinion. And while I’m not so naïve as to say that Garnett’s comments marked some unbreached depth of trash-talking, I don’t find it instructive or even interesting, really, to argue whether or not this is in or out of character for him, specifically, or for NBA players, at large.

I’m certain there are tons of assholes who say asshole-ish things on the court. But a history of boorish behavior shouldn’t excuse what Garnett said and it certainly should not change the prevailing opinion on the sort of guy he has become. We all know he is the irrational, manic bully on the court, the one who you just wish would get a girlfriend or find a job he enjoys, the same guy who ruins it for everyone else. And we know that sometimes the bully’s intensity, even if its fraudulent at its core, can rub off on his teammates. What sometimes results is five guys who cry at every foul call, who puff out their chests and talk shit, who throw elbows and who say things that turn an otherwise friendly, enjoyable game into a slap-battle of dicks. There is no question that Garnett’s “edge” has helped the Celtics win games, but it’s also created a litany of ugly moments in which Garnett physically attacks and threatens much smaller men. Any rational fan, really, anyone who doesn’t salivate at the thought of jumping strangers, should feel their stomach turn whenever they watch one of these encounters. And, I’d argue, if what Charlie Villanueva said is true, and there’s no reason to doubt his word, especially when compared to Garnett’s preposterous explanation, anyone with any decency or compassion should cringe when they hear about a grown man evoking the words “cancer patient” while ridiculing another grown man about a rare genetic condition that causes him to have no body hair.

Let’s remember: the bully ruins every pick-up game. The moment Garnett was traded to the Celtics, he ruined yet another one of my childhood teams. I haven’t rooted for the Celtics since and I’ve enjoyed the NBA more.



It was a strange swing—from witnessing the elation of a city over the Giants to the ugly reminder that there is a way to care too much about sports and championships. Garnett has always been my benchmark for twisted intensity, for what happens when an athlete takes the dogma of winning-at-all-costs and turns it into something ugly and indefensible. Sports, after all, are not war, and although we burden the stage with military props and metaphors, I don’t think the model we envision for our athletes is wrong. The best should play with passionate intensity, but there is a sportsmanlike way to perform any task, especially one as fundamentally meaningless as trying to put a ball through a hoop more times than your opponent. Yes, Garnett has done this before and he will do it again and the next Garnett will do the same, but that doesn’t mean we have to continue to confuse cruelty with competitiveness and a genuinely pathetic lack of perspective with intensity. Why can’t we just call an asshole an asshole every time he acts like an asshole? What the fuck do we owe Kevin Garnett?

I Never Knew You That Way

I know these are everywhere, but I had to put them here. Some of you will be happy to hear that Billups first pointed them out to me.

Luke Harangody, Boston and the Gathering Whiteness

Jack Hamilton concedes that if you’re a Celtics fan who’s reading this blog, you’re probably not a racist, but still secretly believes he’s even less racist than you. He writes elsewhere about music and other wonderful things. You can find him @jack_hamilton

The news that Shaquille O’Neal is now a Boston Celtic has been greeted with a desultory enthusiasm, as New England collectively smiles and lightly shrugs its shoulders. The Celtics have a long and speckled history of late-career renewal projects, from the memorable and successful (Wayne Embry, Bill Walton) to the forgettable and frankly depressing (Pete Maravich, Dominique Wilkins). Clearly Shaq brings along his own unique baggage to his sixth NBA team, but hey, the beat writers’ jobs just got a little easier, he swallowed his pride and signed for the veterans’ minimum, he’ll fill in credibly for Kendrick Perkins on the offensive end (we won’t talk about the other end), and with Kevin Garnett and the newly-signed Jermaine O’Neal, Danny Ainge has just successfully assembled the greatest collection of big men in the history of 2002.

So there’s that. The potential downsides are even duller and more predictable: Shaq wrangled an overly magnanimous two-year commitment from the team; his track record of toeing the company line when playing time and such don’t go to his liking is spotty, a worrisome issue if Perkins manages a recovery sooner rather than later; and, lastly, let’s face it, as Robbie Robertson said in The Last Waltz, it’s not like it used to be.

As a native Bostonian who’s spent a reckless amount of his conscious life pondering the various conditions of Celtic-ness, I confess to finding it hard to care. I like O’Neal well enough and in his prime he was one of the more memorable and compelling athletes of my lifetime, but he’s now the dumbest kind of interesting, the basketball equivalent of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book that you’ve already read cover-to-cover. His tenure in Boston will be of minimal cultural significance, and that will be just fine, and in many ways his signing provides a nice flourish to the narrative of Danny Ainge’s quixotic, “I want to grow old with you” offseason, the one that has the Celtics committing to a Wild Bunch-style final stand against the marauding usurpers in Orlando, Chicago, and of course South Beach. Shaq’s primary utility over the coming days, weeks and months will be cram this story into the molding of archetype. But I don’t think it’s the whole story, or even the story of the Celtics’ offseason. To claim it as such would be to willfully ignore the events of June 24, 2010, namely the dawning of the Luke Harangody Era and the new new whiteness in Boston basketball.

When it was announced that the Celtics would be using the 52nd pick in the 2010 NBA Draft to select Notre Dame’s Luke Harangody, the jokes, as they say, wrote themselves. Boston’s love affair with the white athlete is copiously documented and has a tendency of revealing itself in ways humiliating for those of us mistrustful of 19th-century ideas of innate racial character. Rarely has this been more perfectly exemplified than through the figure of Brian Scalabrine, whose position on the roster Harangody may soon usurp in a capital B, capital D “Business Decision” freighted with symbolic significance.

The Scalabrine Era in Boston was long-lasting, fascinating and mostly disgusting, a potent and unseemly cocktail of ethnic solidarity, backlash resentment and culturally retarded imaginings of white skin and its relation to the perennially popular bullshit “intangibles”: heart, hustle, grit, toughness, character. Most of this wasn’t really Brian Scalabrine’s own fault: he’d been the beneficiary of one of the worst contracts of the Danny Ainge era, cashing in on an overrated and overexposed run with the Kidd-era Nets and the influence of the Brain Doctor run amok in Beantown. Nor was it his fault that both prior to and during the Garnett years he was the most visible white player in a period during which Boston basketball became first unprecedentedly black and then unprecedentedly black and successful, a crucial shift from the times when widespread fan carping about the selfishness, laziness or “immaturity” of Antoine Walker or Ricky Davis or Paul Pierce (yes, even Pierce) could be comfortably couched by the team’s actual mediocrity.



But how those “Scal-a-brin-e” chants at the Garden and countless barstool encomia to the redhead’s gritty determination still stick in the craw. I remember attending a Celtics game several years ago with an out-of-town friend who is not a basketball fan. The Celtics were blowing out their opponent and at some point in the fourth quarter Doc Rivers called Scalabrine off the bench and the place went ballistic, cheering like crazy every time he got the ball, sometimes booing when he didn’t. “Why are they doing that?” my friend asked. I shrugged it off but the answer floated between us, obvious and awkwardly unsaid: because he looks like them.

It sounds innocuous but it’s not, and most racisms aren’t much more complicated than deciding you like people who look like you more than you like people who don’t. In sports, and especially in Boston, this plays out in a perverse and deeply fucked-up narcissism, as white people in a predominantly white city talk themselves into believing that Larry Bird or Tom Brady or Curt Schilling are somehow reflections of them, which in turn makes it oh-so-easy to elide something as superficial and tangible as skin color to something as vague and subjective as “integrity” or “character.”

Of course, the crucial difference between Larry Bird and Brian Scalabrine is that Larry Bird was extraordinarily good at basketball, whereas Brian Scalabrine is one of the worst players in the NBA. Curiously this meant that the platitudes of work ethic and gritty determination were redoubled, and the imagining of Brian Scalabrine as lovably oppressed underdog took shape. At its core was some truth: Scalabrine did work hard, and more importantly, he appeared to work hard. Of course, the reason that he appeared to work so hard was that the game of basketball was quite difficult for him, and the reason it was quite difficult was because he sucked at it.

This wasn’t a leap many fans were willing to make, and it’s here that the underlying racism of the cult of Scalabrine was most nakedly revealed. If you watch any amount of Celtics basketball and come away with the impression that Brian Scalabrine works harder than Kevin Garnett—and rest assured, there are people who believe this—there are far deeper pathologies at work than simple stupidity (although that’s assuredly at work as well).



It’s important here to bear in mind that, aside from possibly sex, sports is the earliest sphere of American culture where a myth of innate white disadvantage began to take hold. This is revealed in recognizable if incoherent form as early as Jack Johnson, but I’d venture that by the 1970s (and probably earlier) the idea that black men were inherently blessed with more athletic gifts than white men had become more or less common currency. Of course, many white sports fans and commentators continue to cling fast to the notion that white athletes are more “cerebral,” but the fact is that the various narratives of white disadvantage that now circulate through the American right were initially rehearsed in sports. And many fans who prattle on about how “hard” Brian Scalabrine plays don’t like to have it pointed out that this is because he sucks at basketball; they prefer to believe, either deep down or disturbingly close to the surface, that Scalabrine works harder than his darker-skinned teammates because these teammates have an innate and effortless advantage.

In a sense Scalabrine was something of a bridge figure—he’d started his tenure in Boston when the team was nearly unwatchably bad, and he managed to stick around through the Garnett/Allen acquisitions and the revitalization of Celtics basketball. The fact that he did this as the token white guy isn’t insignificant, because being the token white guy on a bad team where you’re expected to contribute is qualitatively different than being the token white guy on a great team where you’re expected to stay on the bench at all costs: one is tragedy, the other farce, or something.

The lack of basketball expectations meant that Scalabrine essentially came to function only symbolically, as a sort of imaginary space where white fans could try to make sense of what it meant to emotionally invest themselves in an unmistakably black team that was also very, every good. There started to be a sort of faux-irony attached the chants that didn’t exactly help things, because let’s face it, Boston hasn’t exactly earned the right to be ironic about that shit.



Now Scalabrine is gone, or at least appears to be soon, and it would seem that his symbolic void will be filled by Luke Harangody, a scrappy white boy seemingly from central casting: burly, undersized, questionable athleticism, even the Notre Dame pedigree, trading one questionable Irish mascot for another. The catch is that Harangody might actually be—gasp—good; when the pick was announced I braced myself for snarky texts from Boston-hating friends (and oh, how they came) but as a fan I found myself excited. It was a great pick, reminiscent of the Leon Powe heist of a few years ago: Harangody had played four highly productive seasons in a power conference, generally a decent (and painfully obvious) barometer for a productive NBA career. All physical limitations aside, he knows how to play basketball, and while there’s an outside chance that a first-round project like Daniel Orton will end up a star, if I had to choose which one had the better chance at a solid eight to ten years in the league I’d go with Harangody, and you probably would as well.

So now we’re looking at a situation where Boston might have landed its first genuinely effective white player since—who? Dino Radja? Even the Croatian chain-smoker never really achieved full-on lunchpail status with the Boston palefaces. After years of pulling embarrassingly overenthusiastically for Brian Scalabrine because he was white and sucked, along comes Harangody, who’s white and who might not suck (emphasis on “might”): this could fuck up the whole storyline.

If Scalabrine was the face of a new post-Bird whiteness in Boston, where racial solidarity had to be reconciled with gross incompetence through stories fans told themselves to naturalize this incompetence, Harangody could be the new new whiteness, complicating the myth of difficulty by actually being good at basketball. What happens if Luke Harangody is Big Baby Davis, a not-great but exceedingly serviceable NBA player who fills a role on the basketball court instead of simply in a deeply symbolic racial imaginary? What happens when he’s corralling offensive rebounds and feeding Ray Allen on the perimeter rather than sharing garbage-time with the likes of Bill Walker and J.R. Giddens? What happens if Brian Scalabrine and Luke Harangody share nothing more similar than a highly chant-able, four-syllable last name?

The jury is out and I desperately want to be surprised, but I already wish I hadn’t drawn attention to that last part.

Two the Gull Way

Sometimes, you get an email so pure in its intentions, so rippling with information and connections, that you can basically steal it and make a post from it. So thank you, longtime reader Ian Ross, for bringing the following facts to my attention.

-Apologies if I'm late on this -- I kind of got sick of reading every single thing every single person in every single city touched wrote about LeBron -- but David Hyde column from the Sun-Sentinel, dated 7/11, has some real stunners in it. At least for someone who recently finished working on a book about NBA history. It's about not the evil players fooling the fire department, but Riley's persuasive powers. Central to all of this is his use of the Russell/Auerbach Celtics as a rhetorical device, even point of inspiration. The key passage:

"The Celtics won 11 titles in 13 years,'' he said. "That's the one dynasty."

Riley began throwing out names centering around Bill Russell on those Celtics teams like Bob Cousy and Jungle Jim Loscutoff. Sam Jones. K.C. Jones. Tom Heinsohn.

But the one name he left off, the one that began as coach and ended as team architect, is the one Riley's team and personal legacy chase now. So among the questions percolating around the Heat now, add this one: Will Riley go down as the Red Auerbach of the YouTube generation?

I left that last part on just because it sucks and isn't accurate, and shows how much this column buries its own quirky, if not brilliant, lede. Or, to be more exact, Riley's. I've written much about de-Jordan-ing Bron, which as Ian Thomsen has said, might be for the best for the league and its paradigm factory; many folks have pointed out that great teams all were deep as fuck. But no player has been as single-mindedly deconstructed in the name of winning as Russell, and no pox of talent more sublimated than the Celtics dynasty. Also, the Jungle Jim reference is so weird we should remember it forever. Paul Flannery told me this morning that his name -- just his name -- is retired, because someone more important (don't have time to cross-check, sorry) wore the same number.

No one's ever accused Bron of being a Kobe-like history buff, which is why it's so funny that Riley would mention Loscutoff, an enforcer who clearly didn't give up greener individual pastures by playing for team in Boston. But the genius of Auerbach's teams was that they were stacked to the point of congestion. And yet everyone put ego aside. It's the most extreme case of this ever, and from a bygone era. I want to know, though, why it would be totally invalid here -- and if we would mock James for wanting to be Russell to Wade's Sam Jones and Bosh's Heinsohn (that one needs work).

Okay, from same dude:

In the More Than a Game documentary, exactly 18 minutes in, Sian Cotton is talking about the decision to go to St Vincent's over Buchtel, and goes, "The African-American community had wanted us to bring our talents to Buchtel, and felt like we were traitors."

Also unnoticed (as far as I've seen) is the fact that the chapter in Shooting Stars where he and his friends decided to go to St. Vincent's is called "The Decision."

This really leaves you puzzled, doesn't it? The much-maligned "take my talents to" could be either a local, or hyper-local, or among-friends, idiom ... yet it's been picked apart like a political speech (whether or not LeBron should have been more careful, anticipating that reception, is another question). At the same time, that move and the title of the chapter suggest that hey, James has done this before. What was it about then? Camaraderie? Opportunism? I don't know. I'll go with "some of each", and make it the subtitle to my forthcoming LeBron James stop-time claymation epic.

Squishy Kernels

-This video will set you up.

-Here are my thoughts on Game 7. They just happen to have been written by Eric over at The Baseline.

-If you missed Hickory High's award-winning work on how players get going offensively, read it before it's too late.

-Rumor has it that #cuppinit will soon have its own domain name. Stay tuned.

-MORE: If you missed it, don't keep missing Avi/Shoefly's post on boxing/NBA Finals comparisons.

Ask Me About the Baptist

It's come to this. Yes, it's come to this. I suppose there are many courageous thoughts to have about last night's Celtics win, like how much they deserve to win it all if that keeps up. I wake up dreaming of titles and go to sleep crying about them. I live like a champion. But while I've gotten in a few sidelong remarks about Rondo's progress, and how a player who has always fascinated me has really taken it to the streets . . . now, it is the time of reckoning. The dams of restraint, and fatigue, have burst, and I can do nothing today but wonder: how and why does such an athlete exist?

Philosophically speaking, Rajon Rondo is my ideal basketball player. I say this when, in about thirty seconds, I'll be asked to explain my feelings for John Wall on pre-taped radio. Don't get me wrong, I still believe in Wall and his ability to throw basketball into a tizzy. Rondo, though, takes not such a direct route to dominance. I have perhaps been too caught up in his autodidact's legend; it dovetails a little too well with both my love of Other-ly foreign players, as well as rumbling, unfettered creativity that in LeBron James, we trace back to joy, not method. His mode of presentation, though, is as much Garnett as is his freakish build and skill-set. KG is at once out of control and totally within himself, exploiting the world's perception of the mask he can't help. I don't feel bad saying that Rondo comes across as otherworldly and borderline autistic; Doc Rivers swears the man loves to communicate, but is hard to get to. For opponents, that veneer of weird, tinged with hostility and detachment, is damn hard to read. Thus, for Rondo, personality becomes a weapon.

If I'm stumbling, or raving, here, pardon. This has been building for a while and at some point, it couldn't grovel to responsibility all that much longer. At last night's SSSBDA meeting, I had a major breakthrough: Physically, Rondo isn't an alien, or a dinosaur. He's an alien-dinosaur. Or, as Kevin corrected, a dinosaur-alien. Alien-dinosaur would just be a space lizard; dinosaur-alien is creature from other realms overlaid with the qualities of a raptor. This is the first of several times I will repeat this statement: This is no physical being like Rondo. Yes, his arms are long, his speed beyond speech. But there's also his wiry strength, his internal gyroscope (at its best when spooling along with a bit of wobble), those impossibly broad shoulders, calculating gaze, and a face too smooth and empty for this town.



We are nearly arrived at the point of actual basketball. There's a pause here, a beat, and then no turning back. Here's what astounds me most about Rajon Rondo: He is pure style, with an almost nasty disregard for formalism. How often does Rondo make the same move twice? When he succeeds, does he attempt to repeat himself? And, more to the point, does anything in his game suggests he learned the canon, or anything resembling fundamentals? That's not to suggest that RR is a sloppy, or showy player. Nope, on top of all that, he makes the most gnarled, baroque maneuver turn into a given. There's nothing self-consciously fancy or stylized about him. Rondo simply creates, going on what works, and refusing to acknowledge boundaries of good taste or the existence of time-honored solutions. He acknowledges only the situation at hand, the players on the floor, and the forces he feels working against his mechanical will.

Rondo has no sweet spot, no geometry. Even the multi-valent Kobe Bryant tends toward certain areas. Rondo, he could be anywhere, and everywhere at once, toss up the shot or pass it off at any time. At all times, he knows exactly where he stands in relation to the basket and his fellow man. Most astounding of all is how, with Rondo, the most haphazard, loose, or wild moves will resolve into something utterly precise: a wild lay-up that bounces off the glass just so, a shovel pass swung from up high that hits the waiting man, an over-assertive dribble, nearly wild, that sheds all defenders and leaves him out in space alone. Most players get anxious or excited in that situation. Rondo carries himself like he's been there all along, like it's our fault we can't always see this. I believe somewhere in the archives, there's a piece about string theory and many dimensions and worlds unseen. That seems applicable here, as do out-of-phase sound and The Ghost Whisperer.

I suppose the lack of a jumper should bother me. Looking at the way he negotiates space, though, it's hard to fault Rondo for something as trivial as range. He can rearrange defenders like garden furniture, set them scattering with a flash of arms and legs that (yes, I'm resorting to musical analogies) is like the second line version of Ornette's early Prime Time. When we talk about LeBron James expanding basketball's parameters, Kobe Bryant seeing things others can't, or the presumed Frankenstein PG game of John Wall, we deal with—cue the Rumsfeld—the known busting apart at the seams. Yup, unknown knowns, where nevertheless we have the known as a foundation.

Rondo doesn't just work with a different foundation; he's anti-foundational, even. For himself, for the sport, even for the personae we try and latch onto as fans. He isn't progress, or variation, or even an eccentric. Rondo is the strangest player I have ever had the privilege of watching. To locate him in the game's unconscious is the safer, easier explanation. Rajon Rondo is an outsider—or an original who burrows that word back to its own lost beginnings. I have no idea if this kind of athlete happens more often than I think, but for now, I like to think I'm watching a true basketball alien.

Can't Find No Comfort, Don't Need No Relief

Some great talk in the comments about the contrast between the steeped-in-history Celtics-Lakers (at least as the league's trying to construct it) and the looming LeBron-lead master plan from without (within? no idea.) I know, the history thing isn't working so well with this year's teams, and James himself isn't explicitly leading the charge. But it's hard not to notice: on the one hand, we have the past glomming onto the now in ways reactionary and haunting (role of the Simmons book?). And on the other, the future that, even if you're cool with it, still stands to put players on top and give them their choice of colors.

Is it too much to suggest that the NBA/ESPN/ABC are in fact trying to push back against whatever radicalism comes to pass this summer? They have spent so long trying to get out from under Jordan's shadow, and now a new crop of stars seemed poised to do so. Except then they went and decided to undermine the very notion of tradition-through-sublimation. It had been coming for some time, post-Jordan, and been the popular fear, post-Jordan. Here's the thing, though: Jordan didn't do it, and no one else before the Class of 2003-based crew had the relevance to make it happen. They seemed headed in the right direction, whatever that means, and now they've really gone and realized exactly what the league always feared Allen Iverson would spread. It's apt, if accidental, that we're being treated to LeBron James's all-out blitz during the Finals. These Finals, and that players, of all things.

Let's face it, James doesn't need history like Kobe Bryant does. Kobe sits with film, and has become—in his age and relative wholesomeness—a reliable lodestar for old-meets-new. I've joked that LeBron should hire Kobe for reasons of growth. The difference between them, though, continues to grow this summer. Bryant is not only visibly older, he's also more readily absorbed now into not the post-Jordan morass, but a broader picture of How They Played the Game. His Nike ad involves siphoning in images from the last twenty years, including past campaigns that weren't about him (in the sense that Kobe is a single historical fact), plus a collapsing of Andre 3000/The Beatles that suggests not just cross-generational dialogue, but the importance of rejecting that rift. James, thought, reveals in his Larry King interview that he's a Jordan guy, which makes no sense considering his body and skills. However, while others have sought to imitate MJ (including Young Kobe), James simply adopts him in spirit, as the world-shatterer he entered the league as. This is the end of history.

In 2008, Lakers-Celtics screamed "bring the past back", except there was one kink. Both of those squads had been assembled that season. The Celtics invented the template for mercenary action that will be referenced many times this summer; the Lakers saw Andrew Bynum come into his own, then falter, and then soared only because of Pau Gasol's arrival—still incomplete at the time of the Finals. Maybe these two fit the Lakers-Celtics stereotypes well, in some rudimentary sense. However, this wasn't embracing the possibility of history, of an unbroken link to the past. That was all equivocation. Really, 2008 set the stage for what's coming after the Finals wind down. The Celtics now much more resemble a classic, categorized unit of the Russell years, maybe Bird's time if you think Paul Pierce is that ace. Lakers flow and spire, even as Ron Artest remains so key to altering the complexion of all that happens on the court without even making a sound (I'll say it again: NEW BATTIER).



James is not as crass as, say, so-and-so jumping teams for cash in the nineties. There are sound business reasons to work the mini-max, the Super Summit, and the shadowy plan to customize his destination as much as makes sense. This isn't pure self-interest. While it affects a limited number of players, this is somewhat earth-shaking, changing the way that not only the team and individual sync up when it comes to loyalty and such, but also the very question of who owns who. Who is accountable. Earning the right to a star, as opposed to simply danging cash in front of his face and expecting him to jump, alone, on to the next one. But—and here's the problematic one—history in sports has always been the history of institutions, or at least individuals against the backdrop of institutions (i.e. franchises). After Jordan, we worried it might devolve into Mad Max. Instead, though, we've gotten something more rational and, if done with tact, hard to argue with. In James, we have a player who has positioned himself against all history.

That raises another odd detail of this series. As I highlighted in an earlier post, and was also raised in the comments, Rajon Rondo aggressively rejects the past. He claims to have sprung, fully-formed, from some combination of other sports and Rondo's natural aptitude. Hence, an idiosyncrasy wholly distinct from LeBron's all-consuming template. Except, oddly, he's the one on this throwback Celtics. Would have made more sense if he'd been dominant in 2008, as opposed to playing a role. The recurring theory is that he's Cousy reborn, but even Cousy was referencing other styles. Rondo might be lying through his teeth or at least bending those teeth a little. Though doesn't seem self-conscious like that. Regardless, look at his game ... does this strike you as a man useful to anyone's agenda?

It all comes down to intention, and who struck first. LeBron as jerk, I cannot abide. LeBron as smasher of worlds, I have to acknowledge. If the twain meet, I'm not so pompous as to deny #1 if #2 does end up shaping the future—with results, and regardless of whether or not the past is ignore and the present defiled. For now, the past is pushing back hard. Whether this is a deliberate strategy, or just dope scripting, I have no idea. I can say, though, that is makes the present wild, incoherent, fresh, stressful, and subject to hourly reports. And that's ignoring the fact that there's an actual NBA Finals going on.

Bosom Warfare

This day sucks, even if this game is awesome. Nobody wants this piece, not even the people who asked for it. I apologize if it's rough in places, or sounds like it's for a different audience, but I wanted to do something with it and couldn't spend any longer on it. I went deep into the John Huston marathon on TCM last night. Probably needs an edit, but I hope it will find a home here, rough edges and all.

Tonight, the Celtics and Lakers renew one of the most hallowed rivals in pro sorts. Pro basketball's two most successful franchises are hopelessly intertwined, even if the rivalry has really been a one-sided one.The Boston Celtics have an NBA-best seventeen championships; in nine of those Finals, they beat Minny/LA. The Lakers have hoisted fifteen banners of their own, two of which came against the Celtics.

Between those 32 titles, and the parade of Hall of Famers that made them happen, the Lakers-Celtics rivalry was the lifeblood of the league's pre-Jordan history. When the Lakers won three titles from 2001-2003 as the Celtics foundered, things just didn't seem right. These Finals aren't just a rematch of 2008—it's the league going back to its source, as well as the only viable distraction from the legacy of Michael Jordan.

But these two teams don't just have a stranglehold on the game's history. They've also been cast, however inaccurately, as the great yin and yang of the sport. The Celtics, like Boston, represent teamwork, toughness, tenacity, and loyalty. The Lakers mirror Los Angeles, encouraging big stars with bigger personalities, mega-watt play, and a touch of melodrama. Celtics are selfless; Lakers have egos. Celtics respect tradition and worship the old magic; the Lakers are avant-garde assholes. And, most inimically, the Celtics are for white folks; the Lakers, African-American. Yet none of this symbolism sprung up overnight. It evolved over four decades, a streamlined, and selective, version of Lakers-Celtics tailored to fit conventional wisdom. The question is, how did we end up here? And what got lost along the way?

From 1957-1969, the Boston Celtics owned the NBA, falling short of a championship only in 1958 and 1967. Red Auerbach was repsonsible for much of basketball as we know it; Bill Russell pioneered hair-raising defense and applied athleticism; and Bob Cousy defined the point guard position with an array of no-look passes and trick dribbles. Actually, back up. Minneapolis had been the league's original powerhouse. Under John Kundla, they won five titles between 1949 and 1954. Russell may have revolutionized shot-blocking and rebounding, but it was Lakers big man George Mikan who proved that size mattered. Slater Martin was arguably the first dedicated ball-handler. In a discourse obsessed with fundamentals, and foundations, it's the Lakers who set the sport into motion.

Anyway, in the sixties, the contrast between Boston's all-for-one talent mill and the star system of Los Angeles made for a neat rhetorical trick. Auerbach had more than his share of great players. Besides Russell, Cousy, and Sam Jones, Bill Sharman, Tommy Heinsohn, K.C. Jones, and John Havleciek all earned a spot in Springfield. We can debate whether the winning made them stars, or they were stars muted for the purpose of winning. Lakers Elgin Baylor and Jerry West were better all-around players than any single Celtic. Regardless, the fact remains that the Celtics were simply better than the Lakers during these years. Wilt Chamberlain came to LA in 1968, and even then, Boston came out on top. Incidentally, Wilt is as responsible for the Laker mythos as anyone, and he only showed up in town late in his career. Certainly, the austere West—universally admired by the Celtics—or the hyper-competitive Baylor didn't fit the bill.

When a single player, Russell, retired after the 1969 title, the Celtics went into hibernation. In 1972, the Lakers got their ring, but without Baylor. He had retired early in the season when his knees had made him a liability. The Celtics veterans had hung on as long as they could, with future Hall of Famers like Sam Jones coming off the bench well into their twenties; Baylor, one of the most prolific scorers the in NBA history, retired out of a sense of duty.

The Celtics rose again in 1974, winning it all behind berserker redhead Dave Cowens, the ageless Havlecik, and feisty guard JoJo White. They took another in 1976, a mini-dynasty in the midst of the NBA's most obscure, and tumultuous, era. As much as anything the Russell/Auerbach teams, these two titles brought into focus the Celtics mystique. Cowens proved especially important; his game was the polar opposite of a Julius Erving or David Thompson. As the league became "too black," the Celtics stemmed the tide. At the same time, in the mid-seventies, Boston became the site of bitter racial conflict when an effort to desegregate through busing lead to riots. Many white Bostonians saw themselves as being imposed upon by the federal courts in the same way that Erving or Thompson defiled the NBA.

The irony is that the Celtics had perhaps done more in the name of integration than any other NBA franchise, going all the way back to the drafting of Chuck Cooper in 1950. But that was the Celtics, not Boston, a distinction Russell is quick to draw throughout Second Wind: Memoirs of an Opinionated Man. Russell pulls no punches when discussing his experience as a black man in Boston. Calling it "a flea market of racism", he describes in wrenching detail the harassment and vandalism he and his teammates were subject to. The 1974 team, though, was as much a Boston team as a Celtics team. What mattered was that its values, and star players, resonated with the fanbase. The Russell/Auerbach teams, which had trouble selling out the Garden, were strip-mined for what suited the audience.

In 1979, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson came into the league, having faced each other for the NCAA championship only months before. They would restore its popularity and its relevancy; their teams were the two best in the NBA, and seemingly locked in battle from the first day of Bird and Johnson's rookie year. Bird and Magic became the face of the league, a masterstroke that allowed fans to focus on either Bird or Magic, Bird and Magic, or the dynamic between the two.

Larry Bird was perhaps the only Great White Hope, in any sport, to actually make good on his promise. For fans made uneasy by the direction the game had taken, Bird's ascent made the NBA safe again. It was the Cowens Effect, but on a national scale. Titles in 1981, 1984, and 1986 proved a point not only about the Celtics, but about what brand of basketball worked best. The Lakers, with their up-tempo, exuberant game, larger-than-life point guard, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar at center, were cast as their foil. HBO's Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals devotes quite a bit of time to detailing how, during the eighties, Lakers-Celtics split NBA fans along racial lines. If anyone's keeping score, the Lakers came out on top in this round, with rings in 1980, 1982, 1985, 1987 and 1988.

The rivalry was compelling exactly because, through Bird and Magic, the sport found itself on solid ground; these two laid the groundwork for the product to move past the disjointed, dysfunctional seventies. The heart of basketball wasn't at stake; it was a testament to the strength, and unity, of Bird and Magic that allowed the illusion to flourish. They may have simulated racial strife, but it was all theater, seized upon by consumers eager to find meaning in basketball. That they turned the sport into that effective a canvas is why it makes as much sense to refer to them as one entity, rather than real rivals.

The same might very well hold for the Celtics and Lakers writ large. This year, we're expecting a Lakers-Celtics series that runs roughshod over all the old myths. The question is whether this is progress, or a failing of the rivalry.

Let History Get Smudged

Earlier today, I wrote the self-explanatory "Deconstructing Lakers-Celtics". My pal Paul Flannery shot me an email that extended that conversation and needed to be read by all. Plus I wanted an excuse to link to my column.

Paul covers the Celtics for weei.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @Pflanns.

Digging in a little deeper: Rondo is Cousy, the original weirdo point guard, who controlled the game with his speed and creativity as much as his traditional skills. It's telling that during Rondo's rookie season, when no one really knew what to make of him, the two people who called his greatness were Cooz and Tommy. They could see it. They knew.

As for Kobe, he would fit in perfectly around here. They admire his cold-blooded ambition and recognize it for what it is: no foolin' around while there's work to be done. I'm talking about the team. Let me put it this way: If you were to have a Kobe-LeBron debate in the locker room, you'd probably get more on the Kobe side. They are into results, not projections, and they're also oddly more into aesthetics than stats. It's not enough to be the best, they want it to be known. The fans would embrace Kobe once he made his first game-winner, but they wouldn't be so keen on the outward displays of frustration. That's a definite difference between the two cities, where one appreciates an emotive performance and the other just wants you to get your ass down the court. But they'd adjust and again, that's about place, not time.

On the racial component. Did you notice the C's don't have any Euros? Rather, they are basically an amalgam of black America: country, city, suburban, old heads, young bulls, Duke educated and products of public high school. They have a guy who prefers to do his networking on the golf course and another who's a holdover from the Revolution. A guy from Florida who never says anything and one from Seattle who never stops talking. Fittingly, Quis and Nate became fast friends. It's an underrated aspect of their success that they generally grant each other the space to make it all work. I'm sure the same could be said of the Lakers given their diversity.

What's curious to me is that the coaches are playing into the old stereotypes. Doc Rivers is basically saying that we're the Celtics and we're coming to take your lunch money. While Phil used the word "resilient" instead of tough and is throwing it out there that it would be cool if his team was allowed to play without getting beat up. That's certainly for effect, and there's a definite officiating component to all this, but it's also true that they're playing to their bases. To me, Doc is one of the most compelling people in this series because he has embraced his inner Celtic throughout the playoffs in ways that he hasn't done before. While not as enthralling as the FA summer, he is going to be the most sought-after coaching commodity on the market because no one here has any real idea what he's going to do after this is over. Phil has his admirers, of course, but Doc has TV and he's younger. He's not just good old Doc anymore. He's the blood and guts coach of the Celtics and that does still mean something.

The old Celtics-Lakers paradigm does make sense in one way. Doc and Paul Pierce are playing for their Celtic legacies in this series, while Kobe is playing for his Laker legend. That's where all the history is apt, but it's got little to do with what we're about to see.

He Came from the Forest Where the Floor Was in Flames

Been traveling and with family, so a bit behind. Regardless, catch the latest DoC, and read these columns o' mine on "player tampering" and WNBA separatism.

So often when SLAM has a cover feature they're particularly proud of, it gets an online preview. It's excerpts, a teaser, leaks, whatever you want to call it. However, the snippets Lang gave us of his chat with Rajon Rondo pointed in another direction. There were certifiable bits of gold in there, that, when isolated and melded together, give you the perfect composite picture of what makes Rondo Rondo. Why he's the folk hero heir to Garnett and at the same time, a demonic update on a popular Celtics icon. That could either refer to any number of great guards past, or the leprechaun himself. Most likely, in his cartoonish, self-taught brilliance, an equation that combines them all.

Here, then, is the boiled-down, purified, essence of that interview, which gives you only answers on that most fundamental of levels. I love it. And I can't wait to read the rest, so I can repeat this scholarly (or completely trivializing) task:

"People probably don’t even know I made the All-Star team. Some don’t, some do ... Bron was running the point. I was just out there (laughs).

"I went to Oak Hill, and I knew Josh Smith was going to the League. I thought, OK, if he’s going to the League out of high school, and I’m just as good as him and put up the same numbers, even though we’re different positions, I was confident."

"So I got serious and started working at it. That was before my senior year."

"I wasn’t a big NBA fan growing up. I didn’t watch it. I just knew it was the highest level of basketball you could be at, and I just wanted to be there."

(Lang asks what the closest NBA team was in Louisville). "Pacers. It’s an hour-and-half drive. I never went to a game."

"I didn’t watch the NBA until maybe my freshman year of college, because I was trying to get there. It just wasn’t interesting to me."

"I mean, I’ve never even seen Jordan play, really. I just didn’t watch it."

(Lang gives Rondo props for his Dream Shake against the Cavs) "I’ve never seen him play, though. I’ve never seen Hakeem play, never seen that move. I always do that move, and Kevin always tells me it’s the Dream Shake. To me, it’s the Rondo Shake."

"I’m a little different. I’m never really in awe of people. I don’t get caught up in the moment when I’m playing with people."

"I feel like I’m the man, that’s how I put it. But if people don’t consider me that, I’m not bothered if you say I’m not a top five point guard. Every night I prove it, but that’s just how it is."

The Phantom Menace

You're welcome for the totally unrelated but awesome videos that someone else excavated. Read me exulting in the Celtics and calling John Wall the first major 2010 piece. Here are some other ideas I've had to deal with:

Okay, so my suggestion about a year ago that max players be given stock options was a silly one. I can't even find it today. The larger point, though, was that the mini-max could be the beginning of players truly starting to control teams—something they have been accused of for years. This summer, when all the marquee free agents will sit down and carve up the territories, or partner up, or whatever analogy puts the funniest hats on their heads in your head, we'll see the next step. Like the Celtics before them, LeBron and company will be renting franchises as staging areas for their championship dreams. Power to the people.

Now, if I can step out of my cloak of self-seriousness for a second, here's the absolutely silly aspect of this all: I blame USA Basketball. Colangelo initially wanted a college-like team where role players and pliant superstars would come together in the service of this great land. Instead, he ended up with the best of the fucking best overcoming the universe with the sheer awesomeness of their aggressive, up-tempo play and bonding over it like a bunches of kids at summer camp. It was their show, not Coach K's, and Kobe teaching Bron about shooting is symbolic player self-determination on every level imaginable.

Team USA was meant to return basketball to America, snatching it from the hands of thugs with big salaries. Instead, it created a tight-knit community of NBA A-listers, including most of this summer's big free agents. In a way, what's resulted is the worst nightmare of this original Colangelo vision of basketball. Plenty of these guys were already friends, but this made it official. If you don't see a direct line from Beijing to the conversations expected to take place between the Class of 2010, you're a fucking idiot. It's a cabal whose internal deliberations will have a huge effect on the alignment of power in the NBA for the next decade or so.

Eric Freeman said of all this "It's just like government. Those with the most money conspire to shape the league under the guise of patriotism." Except in this case, the "guise of patriotism" was at first a means to put players in line. Instead, LeBron and friends ended up overthrowing the damn thing. What they're left with is collusion forged in the crucible of intense love-for-country. To me, that sounds even more like the fundamentals of government.

The Fourth Man

In the next paragraph, there will be much humiliating disclosure and rehashing of matters no one's interested in rehashing. As everyone who has followed these pages faithfully, through riches and through death, knows, I have never been a Celtics fan.

I can now hold my head high and admit that, had I really done my homework on the Russell teams at that point, my stance might have been somewhat mitigated. My dislike for the city of Boston, where I've spent time, has something to do with it, but really has no place in the discussion—a team is not its fans, and the sixties Celts knew this. Much of the "Celtic Pride" that galls me so starts with the Cowens teams; it's somewhat perfunctory on my part, and I've always been quick to defend the genius of Larry Bird.

Yet when Garnett and Allen joined forces with Pierce in Boston, I was skeptical, in large part because of my feelings for the franchise. I also wasn't into the purely mercenary nature of this alliance, though now it seems like a foretelling of the league's player-power future rather than a new low in ring-chasing. That was in part because the legend of KG in Minny had taken on such amplitude (one that, on Thursday, Garnett himself has said he regretted), but also because of my questions over how this could ever feel natural, as opposed to manufactured. Again, I am a Romantic clinging to an era that about to die forever.



It might also have had quite a bit to do with the fact that KG was always one of my favorites, Ray Ray, too. Pierce, I somehow grew to dislike over the years, and there was the small matter of FD sun-god Rajon Rondo lurking in the mix. Briefly, I thought that maybe they would all work together in a way that made the most of their former selves, but instead, sublimation was the name of the game—in terms of both style and personality—and it worked like a charm.

Factor in the team's tough guy-posturing, the stupid Lakers-Celtics binary that forced me to spend weeks explaining why the Lakers had value, and how much I hated myself for not feeling good Garnett got his title, and I came to resent this team. Mightily. Really mature, I know.

As we all know, though, the dynamic has shifted in Beantown over the last two seasons. The ascendancy of Rondo has now put him front and center, with the three vets essentially backing him up (maybe "providing the foundation" makes more sense, except Paul Pierce should never be equated with stability). It started when a KG-less team, with Rondo doing it all, made a respectable playoff run. This season was a learning process; they started out crazy, but Rondo receded. Then injuries hit hard, and Rondo failed to, as they say, step up and carry the team. Now everyone's back and healthy, Rondo's the strongest player, and all is right in the Land of the Green. A Suns-Celtics Finals would essentially be a battle of momentum, if not luck.

In 2008, I had to watch Allen being used ineffectively, and Garnett eschew much of his multi-facetedness in favor of defensive ... enthusiasm? Pierce, whose team it somehow remained, had gone from endearingly awkward to just plain awkward, and somehow gotten even cockier in the process. Rondo was the respectful understudy, or maybe the caddy who advises on putts. Right now, in 2010, the question isn't whether Rondo is one of the league's elite point guards, but whether anyone feels like calling him better than Paul or Williams. Garnett looks healthier, more kinetic, than at any time since he got to Boston, and maybe it's me, but Rondo's progress allows him to more seamlessly fit into an offensive flow. He is right now the veteran version of the long, leaping high school prospect he first entered the league as.

Pierce has his nights, but it's no longer "his team." And, most importantly, Ray Allen is positively tearing it up, also looking better than at any point since he left Seattle in a trade. Allen needs the ball in his hands some, isn't constantly in motion off of screens, and doesn't excel as a stop-and-pop guy in games. A weird combination of strengths and limitations that I often get tripped up trying to describe, and explains some of the ups and downs he's experienced in Boston. If Garnett was trying to prove a point, Allen often simply seemed thwarted, flustered.



In these playoffs, though, Allen is back, even closer to his pre-Celts self than Garnett (who has, in truth, undergone a metamorphosis). It's then that I realize what an innocent bystander he's been in my dislike of this team. You can't really level the "what became of you" accusations against him like your Garnett (if you've got a stomach for that), since Allen has been, in some sense, the forgotten star. In some ways, both KG and Pierce lend themselves to situational play better than Allen. Garnett's found a niche, and Pierce is there to create if he can. Allen should be in the game forever, bouncing around and getting his shot off. He's LIKE A FINE FUCKING WINE, in that he's always already been kind of old, or waiting to age, and now is simply loping along on that continuum. Or maybe he's gracefully inverted it. I'm not sure.

So officially, this Celtics team—with Rondo in charge, Garnett reinventing himself without too many ugly rough edges (yes, I recall round one), Ray Allen set free, and even Tony Allen getting to do his thing—has my vote. Can I say I'd pull for them over the Suns or Lakers? Probably not. However, the hatred is gone. Not only for the team, but for the players on its. I don't feel anymore like we've lost them forever. Big fucking deal, you say. Well, it is to me. Things are starting to feel whole again.

Calm as Flies

There, that's Corey Maggette sparring with some dude. Really puts everything in perspective.

Speaking of a lack of perspective, check out the new FD Presents the Disciples of Clyde Podcast, where I have a nervous collapse over the idea that sports are nothing but a marketplace for enacted cliches and mankind's limitations.

Or what about this amazing piece I wrote over at FanHouse on coping with these crazy times we've entered?

A point I want to make: Garnett looks damn good. Better even than when they won in 2008. I like watching him again, even if he's still pissing me off. Along those same perplexing lines: his comment about loyalty wasting your youth was at once the most KG thing he's said in forever, and a slap in the face of what we construed him to be back in Minny. Which would make it somehow the most and least KG thing out of his mouth in years, or maybe suggest alternate KGs that must battle to the death to decide which one gets remembered. This certainly suggests they cannot co-exist.

Check out Joey on LBJ. He definitely has a sense of perspective about this, one far more useful than that provided by watching Maggette throw weak punches.

Your Channel Is Bleeding

Couldn't let this ground go cold without saying one more thing about Rondo. Here's Kevin Pelton on Double R's Game 5, and how it compares to the Wilt/Oscar Night:

. In some ways, Rondo's controlled Game Five performance was as much a sign of maturity as his takeover of Game Four. He picked his spots, deferring to his teammates early and finding the perfect time to exert his will on the game. Rondo and Allen were both highly efficient, combining for 41 points on 27 shooting possessions.

That's a chunk from a paragraph, and as Kevin noted during the game, Rondo's plus/minus indicated that a surprising amount of the Celtics' assault came with him on the bench. However, I would like to compare this to something I wrote here back in March of 2007:

Rondo is like a thousand angry voices in one. This isn't a Kidd-like all-around consistency; I don't think anyone's projecting him as a consistent triple-double threat. Rondo's box scores read like a decent all-around player who relies on demonic possession to excel at any particular one. It's tempting to call these outbursts situational, but the overall pattern is one of provocative randomness. When the unpredictability becomes a predictable feature, you throw up your arms and run toward the light.

Wow, things were so much different then. Whatever, if you're crying for the past right now, read that Suns thing I did for today. It's both closer in tone to 2007 and about why change must come. But enough about me. I remember that, when I posted that thing on Rondo, someone laughed it off as a function of the C's ragged, insistent play. Also probably something about Rondo trying to do everything at once because there was no structure to suggest otherwise.

But looking back, those rookie lines seem like evidence not of skills, but of a single skill—the exact one Kevin describes above. Rondo falls back when he needs to, and asserts himself however the team needs him to. That can lead to all-out domination, or game-management, or some odd combination of the two. It's an advanced, aggressive version of the point guard instinct that somehow registers less impressively, and consistently, than master craftsmen like, say, Stockton or Steve Nash.

Rondo might well be a new kind of pure point guard, one marked not by his ability to set the terms but to adapt and adjust within the game situation. That may also be his greatest strength and his ultimate weakness, since you have to wonder how this strange skill fares once you take away support (note the word choice) from the likes of Garnett and Allen.

Update: Suns link is repaired.

Fields of Garnish

Check out "Lamar Modem," my first foray—along with some help from my FanHouse comrades—into NBA video art. "Stop, Or LeBron Will Shoot" was going to be next, but after last night, who knows? Really though, I did say at the time, and forever, that Rondo was taking too little money.

Speaking of me writing else, this column on the Suns and the nature of revolution will appeal to readers here.