FD at University of Michigan

Strange but true. I will be giving a public lecture at the University of Michigan next Tuesday, as well as paying a visit to Yago Colas's "Cultures of Basketball" course. Hope to see you there!

You Dance and Shake The Hurt (Day 13)

The latest from Yago Colas.

My students, and readers following me here, know that in 1968, when I was 3, my family moved to Madison, Wisconsin and that my memories of my first few years there are dominated by the Bucks and their meteoric rise to a title and to perennial contention. But all that changed forever in the summer of 1975. The knowledgeable among you are thinking that’s the summer that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar left Milwaukee for LA. But that’s only part of it. The other part is that I celebrated my 10th birthday with a family vacation to Portland, Oregon (where I was born) and came back with a Trailblazers pennant. So this chapter of the Undisputed Guide to the History of Pro Basketball, which links the mid to late 70s dominance of Kareem and Portland’s Bill Walton, seemed tailored especially for me.

Maybe three months before we headed west for my birthday trip, Kareem played his last game with the Milwaukee Bucks on April 6th, 1975, a home loss to the Chicago Bulls. The season had been a disappointment, especially after taking the Celtics to seven games in the NBA Finals the previous season. But Oscar had retired, Lucius Allen, the other starting guard, had already been traded, and Kareem himself had missed the first two months of the season with a broken hand. Kareem was in the last year of his contract, and though he wrote fondly of the Milwaukee fans in his 1983 autobiography Giant Steps, he was feeling isolated, alien, and alone: a 7-2 black Muslim, native of Harlem, in a small market Midwestern city. The Bucks ultimately agreed to trade him to the Lakers, where, as everyone knows, he would play the rest of his career, winning 5 more championships alongside Magic Johnson and becoming the all-time leading scorer in NBA history.

As for the Bucks, they sucked for the next two seasons before Don Nelson began to turn them around in the 1977-78 season. I still liked them and wanted them to do well, but I had moved on, adopting the Portland Trailblazers as my new home team on the grounds that I had been born there and that I had visited there in 1975. I even had that Trailblazers pennant up in my bedroom, right next to the Bucks pennant. Now, the 75-76 Blazers weren’t anything to write home about either, finishing 37-45 and missing the playoffs. But even so they held my attention because, among other things, they had Bill Walton, in his second year out of UCLA. As I’ve written elsewhere, as far as college hoops went I was a Bruin. And indeed, the very next season Walton led the Blazers to the NBA championship and vindicated my decision to adopt them as my home team.

In his chapter on this period of my life – I mean, on these two centers and the period of NBA history they dominated – Shoals first establishes some of the contrasts, in fact and perception, around which we might organize our understanding of their careers. There are, first of all, the very arcs of their careers. While Kareem played over 1500 games in 20 seasons, Walton played less than 500 games over 10 seasons. Kareem won six titles and six MVP awards, and played in 19 All-Star games. Walton won two titles, one MVP award, and played in two All-Star games.



But if that were all there was to it, then it would seem Walton – exceptionally skilled though he was -- hardly merits a co-starring role in the story of this period of league history. But that’s not all there is to it. Though to fully and honestly understand why Walton continues to be considered among the all time great centers of league history and as one of the dominant players of the 70s we have to follow Shoals out of the arena and into American society at large.

There we find that each player embodied different facets of 1970s America. Kareem, as is widely known, converted to Islam and changed his name from Lew Alcindor in May 1971, the day after the Bucks won their first and only NBA championship. That was right around the time that Walton would enroll at UCLA and embark not only on a legendary college career, but also break the athletic mold by experimenting with a variety of extra-curricular activities from political protests to vegetarianism. Kareem, already perceived as stoic if not aloof, came with his conversion to emblematize angry blackness that would not be appeased or assimilated. Walton, meanwhile, would be seen as the eccentric, outgoing campus radical.

But in an NBA era in which the increases in black players, salaries, and reports of drug use would combine to turn off a white audience that would rationalize its disinterest as a sorrowful lament for the decline of the team game, the rise of egotism and flamboyance, there was more: Walton would be stationed as the standard bearer for the traditional game played the right (read: white) way. This perception would culminate, and Walton’s historical reputation be set in stone, when his disproportionately white Trailblazers team, playing an effective passing game, defeated what Shoals calls the “badder than thou” 76ers of Julius Erving, Darryl Dawkins, and World B. Free in the 1978 finals.

I was oblivious to these dynamics at the time, though in another way I was living them and, in yet another way, I was undoing or at least complicating them. As I’ve written before, one of the more striking aspects of my memories of the Bucks is how sparsely attended their games in Madison were. In Packer country, none of my (all white) Catholic school friends really cared much about the Bucks, let alone about basketball. So I gravitated to the only kid who did, who also happened to be the only black kid in my neighborhood, Robb. Robb had moved into the neighborhood in 1976 and went to public school. He was a Dr. J fanatic.

I will be the Blazers and Robb will be the Sixers. Best of 7. Blazers home games will be played in my driveway. Sixers home games will be played up on the court up The Park, which borders Robb’s back yard. His terrifying German Shepard, Ginger, chained to her dog house in the back yard, will cheer Robb on and intimidate me, especially when Robb, laughing, will say, “Kill Ginger Kill.” We will have boom boxes blaring music during our games and, for night games in my driveway, we will hook up shop lights to the garage door. We will introduce the starting line-ups: “at forward, from the University of Massachusetts, NUMBer SIX, JOOOOLLLLIUSSSS ERRRRRRVINGGGGGGGGGG.”

Robb had the edge in one respect for sure: it was much easier to imitate the Sixers than the Blazers. He could pull up for long jumpers and be World B. Free, he could back me in for a power lay up as Darryl Dawkins or a little Caldwell Jones jump hook, or, of course, he could swoop in for demoralizing driving Dr. J. layup – the crowd in “The Spectrum” going nuts (or the crowd in Memorial Coliseum hushed by the display of athleticism and blackness).

Meanwhile, what was I going to do: be Bill Walton throwing an outlet pass? Be Dave Twardzik hitting Bob Gross for a backdoor bounce pass? Maurice Lucas ripping down a board? Of course, I did all these things, but it wasn’t quite the same and I still recall the confusion I often felt as I attempted to translate what I was doing in my one-on-one game with Robb into the language of a Blazers broadcast.

I don’t remember how those series turned out. I remember we kept stats, “arbitrarily” assigning a certain number of points, rebounds, and assists to each of our “players.” Robb was about a year and a half older than me and though his time was split between hoops and football (and mine was not), I think he probably still won more of those games than he lost (that would change over the course of high school). I know that our games were fiercely competitive and serious, frequently leading to arguments, but these always seemed to resolve themselves over post-game meals. At the Spectrum, we would enjoy postgame homemade sweet potato pie and iced tea. At the Coliseum it was more likely to be fresh baked chocolate chip cookies and milk,

I came to consider Robb my closest friend, even though we went to different middle schools, high schools, and colleges. He introduced me to Earth, Wind and Fire, and later to Luther Vandross. We went to see Purple Rain together, several times (but also, before that, Rocky, also several times, and Conan the Barbarian too, because of Wilt’s cameo – just one time). We even “recorded” a song together, covering EW&F’s “After the Love is Gone” under the pseudonyms McAlister and Whitehead, for which we carefully drew the LP art.

To this day, Robb erroneously believes it was McFadden, not McAlister. We don’t get in touch regularly, but every time we do it is as if no time had passed. We smoothly integrate the victories and defeats of our respective passing lives into our friendship, a friendship we built when we were competing for the NBA title back in the 1970s and stumbling with awkward gait through family discord into adolescence.

But I realized reading Shoals that Robb and I were also playing with social and ideological, especially racial, dynamite. It’s as though the grownups left us these fucked-up toys and we still did something cool with them. After all, we saw and loved both Rocky and Purple Rain (maybe we loved Purple Rain a little more). Robb may have been the Sixers and I may have been the Blazers, he the hard-to-contain slasher, I the dead-eye shooter, he black and I white. But somehow, for better or worse (for better and worse), we never seemed to understand that these affinities had racial significance. Or maybe, at some deep level we did, but we didn’t care. I certainly don’t remember us talking much about race until we were older, maybe late in high school. Maybe I’ve repressed it and Robb remembers this differently. Maybe it just wasn’t as important as trying to find a way to feel less alone and more at home.

Or (and) maybe we were both tapping into something that Shoals points out toward the end of his chapter, something that undoes the dichotomous opposition between Kareem and Walton, Blazers and Sixers, and all the broader moral and racial meanings mapped onto those figures; something that the two of them shared, not only as players but as figures on different edges of the American mainstream at the time. “Each,” Shoals argues, “embodied a different kind of purism. In the stately Kareem and the playful Walton, there was a wholly original perspective on how to approach the game, philosophically speaking. . . . Each lived by his own version of the philosophy expressed in this statement by Kareem: “Don’t ever forget that you play basketball with your soul as well as your body.”



I’m not sure that the philosophy was a new one, but I think that the articulation of it and in those terms specifically was a new one and very much of its time. I suspect, for example, that Bill Russell also played basketball with his soul as well as his body, but I don’t think Bill’s time (nor perhaps his temperament) were ready to say so, let alone to stand for that. But Kareem and Bill both did stand for that, as did by the way, in my opinion, Dr J and the Sixers of that era. Those Sixers after all more than any other team at the time embodied the ABA genome that was just then impacting the NBA, a genome, as I wrote last week, that could be summed up with the phrase psychedelia, or “soul, manifesting.” It’s a nifty way to sum up, perhaps, what is shared by every wonderful player, event, or moment in the game’s history: they are played with soul as well as with body. I think Kareem and Walton hold the distinction of being the first notable players of the modern NBA to fully live the consequences of that commitment, on and off the court.

Given the durability of our friendship, and the other interests that we shared and introduced each other too, given the intensity with which we constructed an imaginary space in which we could, with soul and body, embody these heroes of ours, I suspect that Robb and I were more than anything loving and trying to live Kareem’s maxim in our games and in that way to elude the painfully alienating dichotomies that marked the time, and the game at the time, and that we were perhaps just beginning to fathom, each in our own way.

A French philosopher I much admire, Gilles Deleuze, once wrote in favor of what he called “intensive reading,” which he described in the following terms: “the only question [of a book] is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through you try a different book. . . . A book is a little cog in much more complicated external machinery. Writing is one flow among others, with no special place in relation to the others, that comes into relations of current, countercurrent, and eddy with other flows. . . This intensive way of reading, in contact with what’s outside the book, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each reader in the midst of events that have nothing to do with books, as tearing the book into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything…is reading with love.”

Let me now just type that passage again with some simple substitutions: “the only question [of the game] is ‘Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through you try a different game. . . . A game is a little cog in much more complicated external machinery. Hooping is one flow among others, with no special place in relation to the others, that comes into relations of current, countercurrent, and eddy with other flows. . . This intensive way of playing and watching, in contact with what’s outside the game, as a flow meeting other flows, one machine among others, as a series of experiments for each player and fan in the midst of events that have nothing to do with the game, as tearing the game into pieces, getting it to interact with other things, absolutely anything…is playing (or watching) with love.”

The cases of Walton and Kareem’s respective careers and personas, Shoals writing on those cases, and my own memories of the time offer, I think, another important instance of how the game is more than a game, or, in other words, of what it means to play, watch, and think about the game with love. In this particular case, the instance is inflected specifically by the tones of the era in question. And the cases are instructive of that time, in which during the decline of American civilization some people were still talking about soul, desperately trying to find their way to something like an integrated existence in a rapidly transforming (not to say disintegrating) culture that was America around the time of its bicentennial, in the wake of Vietnam, and Watergate, and in the thick of the energy crisis.

In this, we can see also the conditions under which the game allows itself to be experienced and understood as more than just the game, more than just the moves on the court, more than just the technical innovations. Kareem and Walton offer examples of throwing oneself so fully into the game that you come out the other side and see the game as a swatch in a much vaster fabric through which our very selves are threaded.

We were just playing, sure, Robb and I, just like Walton and Kareem and the Doctor were just playing, but we were also, like them, taking the promising and unpromising threads of our time and place, private and public, and weaving ourselves, body and soul, from them, And in turn, we were – we are -- weaving those unfinishable selves into the fabric of the world.




[postscript for readers with writerly interests: I didn’t actually have a class this week. I cancelled it to stay in St. Louis to care for my fiancée, Claire, who was sick. I expected that to have no impact at all on my post this week (odd as I realize that may sound). But it did. Normally, I leave class and take a few minutes to jot down a few key notions – some from the book, some from the clips, some from the students, and some of my own. Then later, when I have some time, I write out the blog, which usually comes out in the first draft more or less as you have been reading it. This time, of course, I didn’t have those notes. But I didn’t think that would matter at all. I wrote and wrote. What I wrote was a lovely, extensive recollection of my life between 1975 and 1977. But, as Claire, who I believe is a more talented writer and professor than I, gently pointed out when she read it, it didn’t have much to say about what was important, in terms of the Cultures of Basketball, about Kareem and Walton and the game at that time. We went back and forth once more: me drafting and she reading, before, lo and behold, I found myself jotting down a few notions: some from the book, some from the clips, some from the students, and some of my own. And these became the basis for the post you’ve just read.

That really might only be of interest to me. But it strikes me as offering yet another instance of what I think Deleuze is promoting in the passage I quoted above. I had mistakenly thought that the class and the students weren’t important to my own thinking; that, in a sense, I didn’t need anything but myself and my memories to communicate about the history of the game. And it’s not that that was useless. But it was, in a sense, closed. What Claire did, which is perhaps what my students in their own way do in class, is open the game, open my game, my experience of the game, and my thinking and writing about the game out to that wider world. Talking about this with Claire, she reminded me of an adage along the lines that you must study the Torah in pairs so that God can come in between. It might be sloppy analogical thinking on my part, but that strikes me as another way of recommending reading with love. Or sometimes, to put it in other words, the best way to tear the book, or the game, into pieces is to share it with someone else.]

SAN FRANCISCO TONIGHT!!!

7PM, Rockit Room. Eric Freeman, Eli Horowitz from McSweeney's, and myself. FREE ZILLER.

MORE INFO

I plan to be fully on, like in this video, where I'm acting like I just swallowed a school bus full of coke. But feel free to bring me pills if you want. Also I am trying to figure out if I broke a law by posting/typing this. I have to call my insurance company now. See you tonight!

Dunk You Very Much

If you aren't reading Yago Colas's posts about his Cultures of Basketball course, well, you're an idiot, because they just might be the most FD thing going right now. Sorry if I've used that line before. Sure, there's stuff about school in there, but even if you have no interest in academia or pedagogy, there's still a good 2,000 words on basketball and culture and memory. Here's Day 11; you can read the rest here.

I guess it's self-serving to keep in the parts that discuss the FD book, but oh well. That's context.

This must be a very precious memory. I’ve even written about it before, in passing, in the first substantial post on my blog, before I even knew there would be a Cultures of Basketball course. I am small, 6 or 7, maybe 8. And for today, I decide, I will be Walt Frazier in my driveway. I will dribble around aimlessly at first, warming up my imagination. And then: Time is running out (time was always running out). The Knicks are down by one (my team was always down by one). Frazier steals the ball from West and glides – yes, glides -- down the court (somehow fast and slow at the same time) but the Lakers are already back so he passes to Bradley on the wing. Bradley fakes a jumper and dribbles two steps toward the baseline, then facing a helping defender he flips it back to Clyde at the elbow, who rises, rises gracefully, cocking the ball back and releasing it like a gentle spring at the top of his jump.

My imagination loses sight of everything except the ball, its rotation and the perfect geometry of its arc to the basket. It’s good! It’s good! Frazier wins the game! Then I have an idea. This could be better. I get out my tempra paints and transform an old t shirt into a Clyde Frazier Knicks jersey. I look in the mirror. Better. But it could be better still. I get the paintbrush and carefully paint myself a moustache and sideburns, or maybe it was a full beard. I don’t remember. Now I am Clyde.

I loved the Milwaukee Bucks as a kid. They were born as a franchise the same year my family moved to Madison, in time for the 1968-69 season. The Celtics won their last title that year, Russell retired (I still have the issue of SI in which he announced it), and the field was open. The Bucks sucked that first year and I don’t really remember anything about them, But then they got Lew Alcindor from UCLA. And through the 1973-74 season they would amass the best regular season won loss record of any NBA team, win the title in 1971, lose in the Western Conference Finals to eventual champion Lakers in ‘72, lost in the WC semis to Golden State in ‘73, and lose in the finals to Boston in 74. I watched them in person when they’d play games in Madison (rarely), watched them on TV (a little less rarely), and listened to them on the radio (all the time).

The other perennial contenders of that time were the Lakers (champs in 72), Bullets and, of course, the Knicks, who won the 1970 and 1973 titles. These were my formative basketball years, the experiences and memories of teams, games, and players (Robertson and Jabbar, Wilt and West, Hayes and Unseld, and then, Reed, Monroe, Barnett, Bradley, DeBusschere, and, of course, Frazier) that to this day outsize all others in my mind; that make me bristle irrationally at any suggestion that any other NBA era was better, and that make it hard to even understand what teaching the period should look like, let alone to formulate a coherent lesson plan.

So I approached Tuesdays class, for which we had read the FreeDarko chapter called “The Get Along Gang: Why Everybody loves the New York Knicks”, with a mixture of intense childlike excitement, middle-aged nostalgia, and pedagogical cluelessness and panic. I have always loved reading, and there are certain writers that I have loved especially. But they are not confusingly intertwined with the core of my being like 1970s hoops. I feel that I’ve mostly managed to integrate my passion into my teaching without becoming wholly incoherent. So much for that.

Even now, as I’m writing, I’m having a hard time weaving a story or a focused argument out of the tangled skein of memories and feelings that the period evokes for me. All the more so, since as I told the students at the outset of class, that decade of NBA history is often dismissed as a kind of low-ebb middle-ages sandwiched between the Celtics dynasty and legendary era of the 1960s and the resurgent media friendly era of Magic Bird and Jordan. The 70s offered no single dominant franchise. But that’s not all, the ABA helped drive salaries up and the league became mostly black for the first time in its history.



Meanwhile, widely reported drug use among the players gave a mostly white audience an excuse to cluck in moralizing disdain and to turn the channel rather than watch rich young black men ball. All of this, of course, in the context of Vietnam, Watergate, and the Energy Crisis. Oh, and disco. So what do you when your fondest and most powerful memories of the game are of what most – not all – NBA chroniclers would prefer to forget, if not write-off as an embarrassing exhibition of what is not-Amazing? What do you do when the story of your formative years is of dissolution and wasted promise?

1.Evasive action II: Nickname poll (What is your favorite all time hoops nickname?). Results: Iceman and Mailman tied with two votes each (Skip-to-my-Lou also got two votes but I invalidated them in unaccountable contradiction of the political philosophy I advocated on Day 10). My own choice: Black Jesus.

2.Time killer: Three video clips: one of Earl Monroe (see 1 above), one on the 1970 Knicks title team and one on the 1973 Knicks title team.

3.Passing the Buck open-ended question for the class: What made the biggest impression on you as you read the chapter on the Knicks or as you watched the video clips?

Hmmm. Lots of silences in today’s class. I clearly came neither ready to play nor ready to really expose myself and try to make my inability to be coherent into a teaching opportunity. Which doesn’t mean that they didn’t try to step-up and fill the void. I’d say they did. You know, sometimes it’s the students who have somehow to find a way on the spur of the moment to pull together and make a particular class work, a job that I could at least have made easier by confessing that I needed them to do it. But even without that they came up with several interesting observations. Among them, the one that most stuck in my mind is that the Knicks rarely dunked in any of the clips we watched. Why, a student wondered?

I don’t mean to be coy or over-complicating in what follows. I know that the prevalence of the dunk today really had its origins historically in the 1976 ABA inaugural dunk context, in the merger that brought acrobatic dunkers like Julius Erving and David Thompson into the NBA fold and of course especially to the confluence of Michael Jordan and ESPN, with its nightly parade of dunk highlights in the 1980s, not to mention the overall superior athleticism of NBA players today. So that it might seem that the responsible thing would have been to politely explain that the question was anachronistic, like asking why the pioneers on the Oregon Trail didn’t just take a plane. But not quite, because it’s not as though nobody dunked in the NBA back then (and, indeed, the NCAA had not long before banned dunking, imagining the threat that anticipated Lew Alcindor dunks posed to the game), and the Knicks defense certainly generated plenty of breakaway opportunities for crowd rousing jams. So it was a valid question.

And, anyway, when you are teaching or thinking about things, sometimes, I have found, it can turn out to be useful to recall and then set aside the obvious path and just pursue the question along whatever paths it takes you. You might not get to a better answer to the original question (we didn’t) but you might discover some interesting other thoughts along these not obviously promising side roads. Plus, like I say, I didn’t really have the presence of mind to come up with something on my own so I wasn’t about to piss away a student contribution. What emerged from the discussion were three points that weren’t necessarily, and perhaps shouldn’t be, related, but part of the fun of this writing is making dubious connections and offering speculative interpretations that are only tenuously tethered to the facts.



The first two possibilities were offered by students: 1) the Knicks didn’t dunk because it was at odds with the unselfish style of play to which they all obviously subscribed. The dunk might have felt like an attempt to drawn attention to oneself as an individual player. And 2) the Knicks didn’t dunk because they preferred the understated cool and fluidity of the lay up over the staccato violence of the throwdown. So, I observed, we have a moral interpretation and an aesthetic interpretation of the no-dunk Knicks. Before going on I just want to pause to point out how pleased I was with my students for thinking “beyond a boundary” and recognizing how much more there can be to understand in what appears to be a simple technical choice between two equally effective options on the court: do I lay it in or do I throw it down?

The third idea wasn’t so much an explanation of why they didn’t dunk as an account of the hidden racial politics dogging the dunk, which I offered off the cuff in response to a student question about the legal history of the shot. The dunk was never illegal in NBA competition, but was banned by the NCAA, as I mentioned above, beginning with the 1967-68 season until 1976, But the point I also made about the dunk in that context is that the first dominant dunker, Wilt Chamberlain, as has been amply noted elsewhere, terrified basketball purists who feared he would destroy the game (see John McPhee’s elegant paean to Bill Bradley, which is structured in part around the sophistication of Bradley’s style drawing McPhee back to the game in the mid 1960s after its pleasures had been spoiled for him by dunking giants).

It’s difficult, and probably unwise to separate the fears of Chamberlain in that era (and of Alcindor in the next) from white fears of a black uprising in the game, which in turn are difficult to separate from white fears of a black uprising in society. In short perhaps overly simplistic but still illuminating terms, the dunk was unconsciously (though also no doubt in some quarters consciously and explicitly) racialized as a brutish black play at odds with the more sophisticated white traditions of the game.

So, for now, just keep these speculative notions in the back of your mind: the Knicks preference for the lay in over the dunk could be read as having moral, aesthetic, and political layers of meaning. Meanwhile, our reading for the day, as I say, was Bethelehem Shoals’ investigation into “why everybody loves the New York Knicks.” His argument, already succinctly expressed in the title of the chapter: “the get along gang”, is two fold. In the first instance, the Knicks embodied a style of play (aggressive team defense and unselfish offense with quick passing and lots of movement away from the ball) that “was a direct descendant of the ball that had been played in New York colleges during the first half of the century. It harked back to the city’s past and resonated with generations of fans from the New York diaspora (and not just Jews).”

Second, the Knicks employed the style successfully with a roster of players who represented exactly the particular racial, ethnic, geographical, and socio-economic groups that were most definitely not getting along in American society at the time, In Shoals’ words: “everyone loves the one about the pimp [Frazier], the nerd [Bradley – also a Midwestern banker’s son], the black Southern Gentlemen [Willis Reed], the white workingman [Dave DeBusschere], the hippie [Phil Jackson], and the street urchin they picked up along the way [Earl Monroe]. The Knicks were America’s Team for a country trying to make sense of itself –and wondering what coexistence might look like.”

In addition, I think that Shoals, in his comparison of Red Auerbach (architect and coach of the 60s Celtics dynasty) and Red Holzman (laconic coach of the Knicks), is also suggesting that the Knicks offered a different kind of response to the essential hoops tension between the individual and the team. Where the Celtics became interchangeable parts in a durably and predictably (if also magically) effective winning machine, the Knicks players were all personalities, celebrities even, off the court who found a way to mesh perfectly on the court – despite, or perhaps because, of the considerably greater spotlight that the new era and their New York home shined on them.

I have zero objection to this view of what made (and makes to this day) the Knicks of that era so appealing. Indeed in class we talked about this (oddly arriving at it ourselves without reference to the book – a sign of my poor psychological preparation for the day) and it led to an interesting, if abbreviated, discussion of the kind of roles that teams can play for their cities and for the society at large. We talked about and cited the numerous examples of teams galvanizing and inspiring a city that is struggling (as with the Pistons and Detroit, both in the late -80s and in the more recent edition). But we also wondered together whether there was a flipside to the way teams can inspire and excite struggling cities (and societies). Whether there is a palliative effect at work whereby the success of a team and the feel-good atmosphere it can inspire can serve to dissipate anger at conditions and injustices that persist after all the ticker-tape has been swept up.



In other words, we tried to think about the ways in which a team’s success can lead us either to stop thinking that our society has problems that need our attention and effort or to stop working for those problems because after all, unlike a title run, there really isn’t a clear cut sign of final triumph in the struggles against, say, poverty or racism.

I want to emphasize that I’m not proposing an either or here, nor am I trying to tell anyone (including my students) what they ought to think about this issue, or about any particular instance of these dynamics in general. I’m just trying to encourage critical, well-rounded thought on the question and, in class, anyway to try to introduce students to a long standing debate in the humanities over the role of art in society (a debate of which I take, for the present purposes, the sports and society question to be a kind of related offshoot). I like and wished I had pointed out to the students that its possible to feel and think both ways at the same time, as Shoals does when he writes, “if the Knicks offered hope for the country, they did so while acknowledging that things would never be the same again. For America, these teams were not an attempt to deny the trauma of the sixties but a reality that offered a way forward. They continue to resonate because, in the end, the Knicks are about the possibility of shared values even after the whole world seems to have broken wide open.”

I find that to be extremely stirring, well-thought-through stuff. It even helps me to understand why, even as they eclipsed my beloved the Bucks in agonizing fashion in the early 70s, I was dressing up as Clyde and loving the Knicks. Now that I think about it, I realize that as a kid I was looking pretty desperately for a get along gang in my own family, which suffered its share of tension and strife at the time. I’m not saying I thought this consciously of course. Consciously I just knew Clyde was fucking cool and I was going to be him when I grew up (which as it turns out is exactly what happened as you can tell from my account of the first day of class), I’m just saying that unconsciously I had picked up on the get along discourse of the Knicks and had internalized it as a kind of fantasy I wanted to live in, even if I was too young to really realize that my whole country – and not just my family -- might have been in need of that too.

So I’m down with all of this. But I’m still left wondering how to solve the case of the missing dunks, and I’m still not content to go with the easy and true historical answer (that the dunk was just not yet a big part of anybody’s game in the NBA at that time). I want to try to put this all together. It’s actually pretty easy with the moral and aesthetic qualities we in class attributed to the non-dunk. That is: if the Knicks’ non-dunk is an affirmation of unselfish humility and of understated fluidity then it’s not hard to see how that supports the kinds of values the Knicks would be supplying their city and the nation as a whole.

I’ll admit all of this may just be the sign of an oft remarked upon general shift in basketball culture. I’d never noticed the lack of dunks on the Knicks. But it was one of the first things my students – and a “Jordan baby” from the Chicago area no less -- noted. And believe me, I was and am as seduced as anyone by those Knicks teams. Above all, they created open look after open look whether on a fast break off a steal or in their unstructured intelligent and cool offensive flow – everything looks so easy. Who needs a dunk? Who even misses them when you are watching that?

But when I think about the racial politics of the dunk I’m left a bit confused and uncomfortable. Let me explain. The City Game, published by journalist Pete Axthelm in 1970s, is a moving, elegantly written account of the 1970 Knicks championship season that shows why the Knicks were so popular in New York by telling their story alongside those of countless city playground stars who played the very same kind of ball the Knicks played. But as Axthelm acknowledges, as galvanizing as those Knicks were, they did not cure the ills of the city or of society, and many of those same enthusiastic playground ballers wound up strung out on drugs, trapped in poverty, imprisoned or dead. What feelings does that give rise to? And what is the appropriate expression of those feelings? Where I want to ask, in the Knicks playbook, is the basketball play that expresses the sadness and rage occasioned by that social violence, that colossal waste of human creativity and talent?

It is as though, in light of all this, in addition to everything else I have also felt and thought about the Knicks, that I feel and think about the Knicks, I am also provoked – in spite of myself -- to view them as a kind of populist compromise. I mean, the sort of populist compromise that appears to offer room for everyone and everything at the social banquet table, but that has actually done so at the expense of leaving some standing outside the door. Maybe that’s okay. Maybe it’s inevitable. Yet it doesn’t feel okay to me now, even as I still feel lured by the stirring style of play and success of those Knicks teams, even without the dunks.

If the dunk has historically been seen as the flamboyant, sometimes violent expression of individual power (if not anger, or gleeful anger), not to mention racialized as such, then I can’t help but think that there was no room for those things in the new reality the Knicks promised us. All of which would be just fine if it were also the case that the conditions that give rise to the feelings that get expressed in a dunk had disappeared from society.

But if they didn’t (and we know they didn’t and maybe that is the not so secret story of the lost decade in which I was formed, basketballically and otherwise), then what do we do with our desire – what do I do with my desire and I mean this as a real, not rhetorical question -- to forego the extra pass, eschew the easy lay up, and throw down a "Chocolate-Thunder-Flying, Robinzine-Crying, Teeth-Shaking, Glass-Breaking, Rump-Roasting, Bun-Toasting, Wham-Bam, Glass-Breaker-I-Am-Jam"?



Maybe I’m overstating things. I usually do. Maybe all I’m saying is that the missing jams look to me, now in retrospect, like an index of where we fell short in putting it all together. Where we are still falling short.

Catch A Cab By The City

Yago's latest post from his Cultures of Basketball course is up, where he subjects the students to my "Mikan and Modernity" essay. That's the chapter I was both most shaky on and, idea-wise, the most proud of. Yago homed in on my view of Mikan as the first true individual in the game, and in doing so, drew out the definition of "modern" that begins around Descartes. That view of individuality—that it is about style, the "how" as much as the "what"—informs most of the way I see the game, and would become indispensable to the game when African American players invaded in the mid-fifties. He told me over email that to him, the irony of uber-nerd loosing the concept of style upon professional basketball is almost too good to be true. It's worth noting, though, that the Globetrotters and Rens had been around before Mikan, which certainly suggest that Mikan was more an unlikely conduit, or a strange point of entry, rather than the originator.

When I was writing it, though, I was focused primarily on not how the individuality's relationship to time and space, but the notion that in the NBA, a unique relationship to time and space was the essence of individuality. Mikan wasn't an individual who proved this through a unique relationship to time and space; he was an individual precisely because of this. It's far easier to apply this logic to Mikan, or even Pettit, than Russell or Baylor in the years that followed. I will now blame it all on my framework, which I blame on a desperate need to either make use of what I learned in grad school, or justify all the pop-science-cultural-history reading I do for fun. I was thinking of the way that, after the Industrial Revolution had once and for all put a large part of the populace on the clock (literally and figuratively), new developments like the railroads, the telegraph, and widespread electricity destabilized this concept, as well as that of space.

How, in history, does this lead to individuality? I'm not quite sure, other than the fact that suddenly, daylight and travel were nearly as plastic as you wanted them to be; the transmission of information could take weeks or seconds, depending on your inclination. I will need someone far smarter than me to explain how that's a useful expansion of the metaphysical "I", rather than a distraction from it. I am certainly not ready to say that our sense of time's existential weight is what gives rise to George Mikan. We'll save Heidegger for positionality, where Being and Time is the internal, and later Martin is the external individual. Derrida or Ornette Coleman give us the organizing principles (such as they are).

To close this on a thoroughly self-deprecating note: Whether the historical analog is the early 17th century, or the late 19th, you have, in a sense, history being compared to history. It makes considerably more sense to explain how these developments in basketball parallel those of the larger cultural context of the time, as I did with Wilt and the Cold War. Too bad they don't. Actually, it reminds me of what Jacob said was the difficulty of making wacky comparisons in this book's illustrations: to paraphrase, all sports history is mythology. It's one thing to compare a current star to Shakespeare, or the Wright Brothers. However, someone like Wilt or Cousy is already in some sense a mythological figure. It's an awkward juxtaposition, so you either have to make it especially timely (a form of literalism) or retreat into symbolism. I have no idea why Naismith as Moses (or all the other things I compared him to) works.

FreeDarko Welcomes Your City: Seattle and San Fran

FreeDarko is hitting the road again, in support of the book that keeps on giving.

2/8: SEATTLE
I'll be at the University Bookstore, starting at 7PM, to talk about the book with Sportspress Northwest columnist Seth Kolloen. Trust me, you don't want to get just me and the electronic noise machine like Portland did.

2/24: SAN FRANCISCO
Get ready for fear, also at 7PM ... Green Apple Books is hosting a night of FD and beer. Join Tom Ziller, Eric Freeman, and myself for a panel, moderated by our old friend Eli Horowitz of McSweeney's. I don't drink but plan to eat lots of apples. Also, I have never actually met Tom before.

Every Day Another Rumbling

As Dr. Santiago Colas conducts his Cultures of Basketball course at Michigan, and writes a bunch about it, we here at FD are committed to participating as second-hand participants, albeit with a somewhat privileged perspective. Yago's last two classes dealt with the early pro leagues and the great (and zany) barnstorming operations. Here, Jacob and I discuss his posts:

Bethlehem Shoals: It kind of blows my mind, and not necessarily in a good way, that our "textbook" includes the self-deprecating line about Jews being good at business and penny-pinching. Remember, we had to fight, gnash our teeth, and over-write in the master files to keep that in? At the time, it felt like a good inside joke, and the sort of thing we should be allowed to do, given our audience. But it is a little strange that college students would stumble across that line in what's, on all other counts, a pretty serious book about race and culture in sports. There's some sarcasm, to be sure. Flat-out irony, though? This might be the one line that lays it on that thick -- obviously, we only felt comfortable doing that with our own ethnic group -- and yet if the class isn't familiar with anti-Semitism (probably a good thing), I have no idea how that line comes across. The real shame might be that it comes at the high point of Jews as players of the game, which tarnishes that, in a way. Actually, maybe it makes it stronger, since there's no reason we can imagine the era of the Jews to have been one where, as a historical space, Jewish humor is free to roam the plains.

Jacob Weinstein: While I agree that line is sort of a tonal shift from the rest of the book, what it really highlights to me is the awkwardness and artificiality of lumping all these barnstorming teams together to begin with. Given the space considerations of the book it made sense, but really there is a huge difference in the quality and the historical importance of teams like the Celtics, Rens and Globetrotters, and teams like Olson's Terrible Swedes or the House of David which were almost sideshow or novelty acts. The SPHAs were sort of a middle ground, neither a novelty act nor a truly dominant team like the Celtics, and I think an ironic aside sneaks in mostly because, as you noted, it was our own ethnic group, but also because the entire section was a weird mix of bold face tragedies (Globetrotters) historical footnotes (Kues) and pure absurdity (House of David).

And while the SPHAs certainly were a legit team, in my research it seems like even former players or fans still regard the team with some good humor. In no small part because the organizational structure of the time was such a mess, and the rules themselves were in such flux, it's hard to even get a read on the quality of the team's play. For example, what does the high point of Jews as players of the game even mean, if the game they excelled in was so alien from what we know as basketball today? It's almost like claiming to have been the best doctor during the Middle Ages. And that's why I think the ethnic underpinning of the team--and the accompanying stereotypes-- really become almost all there is to remember. Otherwise, we could have just featured some other random team from the era like the Paterson Crescents or the Brooklyn Visitations. Newark Mules stand up!

BS: It's only artificial and awkward insofar as the game itself was, at that time, still kind of a mess. Barnstorming teams, whether they were the Globetrotters or the House of David, played whatever competition that town could offer up. Since players in the early pro leagues (so strange to call it "early", since we're talking about nearly fifty years -- as long as the "modern" game has been around) were hardly getting rich, we can assume that they were part of that equation. That's what makes the Buffalo Germans so representative: it's impossible to tell if they were a total fraud because the line between legitimate and illegitimate ball was so blurred. I'm sure there were plenty of nights that the Original Celtics got to phone it in against a bunch of eager high school students.

What's interesting to me, though, is that while the barnstorming teams did have this self-undermining quality to them, they also introduced and disseminated new ideas about the game. I'm not one-hundred percent sure about this, but it seems like most of the actual developments in how to play the game -- as opposed to the parameters and rules -- came out of barnstorming teams. At least until the forties. The Celtics are important for developing the pick and roll, not their inflated win-loss record; the Globetrotters paved the way for pretty much any basketball played with style and creativity.

Oddly, this brings it all back to the Paul Gallico quote that inspired our own off-color line: the SPHAS may not have been a truly dominant team, or even all that well-organized, but it's clear that they brought something to the game that resonated with those watching it comes into focus. Granted, today we have a somewhat different notion of the "city game", and yet the idea of a tough, streetwise, crafty player who is slick without being smooth -- that's still part of the way we talk about basketball today.

JW: Yeah, I guess you're right. Basketball was just a mess back then. Even now I still have no idea how we could have presented those barnstorming teams in a more logical or truthful way. But what I think I was trying to bring the discussion around to was Yago's questions of "How do we tell the pre-history of something, when they didn't know they were a part of anything," which, likewise, I'm still befuddled by. The game these teams were playing between the 1890s and 1950s was undoubtedly basketball, but at the edges you sort of have to squint to convince yourself of that.

As for the barnstorming teams introducing new ideas to the game, I would definitely agree. And while non-barnstorming players were probably just as crucial in coming up with innovations, the barnstormers certainly were more important in disseminating those ideas, since they were playing hundreds of games a year all over the country. What's interesting to me is the constant battle between these player innovations and the rules from on-high--I guess what Yago would call spontaneity and calculation. And to further complicate it, the push and pull between the professional organizations and the amateur organizations.

So picking up where you left off in discussing chapter 0 of the book, if Naismith is the founding father of the United States of Basketball, and his original rules are the constitution, then for the first fifty years or so the amateur and collegiate basketball organizations were sort of "constitutional originalists' who kept nudging the game back to what Naismith imagined (or more accurately, what they imagined Naismith imagined). For example, the YMCA's and the AAU never adopted the cage, outlawed double dribbling, tried to keep the game nonviolent, etc. And to push this crude analogy even further, during the same period the pro leagues would have believed in a "living consitution", a sort of free-market functionalism where regional oddities (no backboards in the Northeast) and functional innovations (dribbling, the pick and roll, the pivot man, etc. ) were all thrown together and either adopted, discarded, or refined through new rules by the organizational bodies in control at the time.

I have no idea where I was going with the last comment. I guess Phog Allen is Scalia and Marques Haynes is Ruth Bader Ginsburg?

BS: Bringing back the Constitutional analogy makes me wonder how it is that Naismith's rules can be fetishized, but the next five decades are this alien world that, somehow, spit out the NBL and BAA. With the exception of Prohibition, the Constitution is changed to account for some very linear notion of progress -- one that holds up to this day. This pre-history of the NBA is more like we now understand evolution to be: a series of random mutations that, through their interaction with the outside world, are streamlined and refined into adaptation. So whether we're talking about stylistic innovations, or changes the rules, the trial-and-error quality of this period doesn't mean it's negligible. We don't even have a situation like the ABA, where a lot of the craziness was external to the game. It's pretty clear that the instability, and occasional breakthroughs, in basketball during this time were directly tied to how topsy-turvy its circumstances were.

The idea of a non-linear history doesn't come naturally to us, because we're used to narrative. But it's probably closer to, you know, the way things really are. So in a way, it's good that we can't quite make sense of the early pro leagues and the barnstormers. Maybe we should be trying to bring that kind of perspective to the history that, in our minds, works out much more cleanly.

And We All Got Married Forever

First, the bad news. For those of those alien to Twitter, or undisposed toward general interest sports blog, FanHouse is no more. Actually, let me pause with the hysterics: It will live on, just with an almost entirely new staff, and under the direction of the Sporting News. Also, this transformation doesn't go down until March 1st, so you get another month and change of pedal-to-the-metal output.

Why is this all happening? As best as I can tell, AOL decided that its experiment -- hiring "national voice" columnists and sending out reporters with generous travel budgets, all in hopes of becoming a first-order content generator -- wasn't working out. There had always been some risk involved, but as I understood it, the plan was to be patient, and wait before passing judgment. Apparently, though, it was proving just too hairy a financial proposition. So rather than re-design the site so that more than two or three articles got traffic, or cut ties with some of the over-paid, under-performing "names" who ate up much of the payroll, AOL decided to cut their losses. They sold the reputable brand name, and the real estate, to a company in need of both.

So that's that. The Works will officially be no more, and Eric and myself will have a lot of time on our hands. Don't hesitate to get in touch if you know of any writing or editing work!

Speaking of which, I do have a few things lined up already. For one, I've begun contributing daily to Business Insider, writing about stuff like free agent strategy and branding. Crunching numbers has never been my strength, but everybody knows these things are much about quality as quantity, even if we're talking about the distribution of contracts.

***

Okay, the good news. Fast friend Yago Colás, whose Go Yago! is one of the rightful heirs to this long-in-the-tooth blog, has -- as some of you may have read elsewhere -- been using The Undisputed Guide as the primary textbook for his Cultures of Basketball course at Michigan. I'm hoping to make it out there some time this semester, but in the meantime, I'm limited to the fascinating, and somehow intrusive, practice of commenting on his posts about how The Undisputed Guide works in the classroom. I know I don't want to give too much unwelcome behind-the-scenes detail (or defense) of why the book is the way it is; nor do I think it's wholly constructive for me to, after the fact, drop in on Yago's classroom discussions like I know best.

For example, Yago explained to True Hoop that he liked the book's breakdown of historical periods. The funny thing is, Jacob and I came up with this schema and a compromise between the decades (works well enough, suits common sense) and an incredibly arcane system that had some epochs lasting only two or three years. So while I would like to claim some credit for this model, it's really just decades, but with enough tweaks thrown in to justify all the time we spent poring over these parameters. So, Yago, don't tell the kids that.

In his post on Day Two of class, Yago has the students read both Naismith's account of how he came up with basketball's rules, and FD's chapter on the game's invention. Naismith walks the reader through the reasoning that led to his original rules. In my chapter -- which owes a major, major assist to my agent Chris Parris-Lamb -- I tried to look at the different kinds of creation myths we can attribute to that reasoning. It was prompted by Jacob's observation that basketball was, unlike other sports, invented rather than evolved out of folkways. At the same time, what it means for a sport to come about in this way depends on what kind of meaning we wish to imbue it with.



Comparing Naismith to Moses, Martin Luther, the Founding Fathers, logical positivism, and Romanticism was over-the-top. But, in addition to giving some sense of the peculiar historical and cultural juncture at which this sport came into being, it also lent a framework to all the basketball history that would follow. Perhaps it's too much to think of Naismith as a visionary, but certainly, the rules he created carried within them the seed of all that followed. Basketball's history is not one of appropriation or strident interpretation. It evolved quickly, and there have certain been moments that qualify as revolutions. But one thing that always trips me up when I try and talk about the book, usually on the radio, is that basketball history is full of near-constant reinvention and repetition. You can say this over and over again, and it will never get any less true, or cringe-worthy: baseball may be the national pastime, but basketball is America.

Enough about me. Here's Yago:

At this point, I somehow forgot all about Naismith and the point of this whole comparative exercise, and, caught up in the testimony, just blurted out: “in what ways is basketball like or unlike a religion for you?” Here's where I should acknowledge that Shoals’ argument really goes from the mythico-religious (Moses) to the historico-religious (Martin Luther) to the secular (the Founding Fathers) and concludes that Naismith bears more of a resemblance to a founding father. So really the question should have been: "in what ways is basketball like a country to you?"

Ah, the perils of this exercise: I wish I could say I had this progression in mind, but really, i was thinking in terms of the different ways our culture has for accounting for revelation, true originality, or inspiration. All of these were present, and relevant, in the time of Naismith, can be read into basketball, and can be found in the sport today -- just as they can still found be discerned in culture. The discussion in his classroom of how basketball is or isn't like religion, and whether basketball deserves that level of fervor, leads back to the question not of how important basketball is. That's why it's instructive that, in his post, Yago suggests substituting "country" for religion. Religion, or the religious impulse (like there's only one kind; I included two modalities) is part of what we understand as America. If basketball contains one, or both of these -- and indeed, can be said to matter in all the ways that America grounds meaning -- than as far as sports go, it's kicking some serious ass.

***

By the time most of you read this, it will be MLK Day. There are NBA games on all day, even more than on Christmas, and I might hit up a regional high school tournament later in the evening. It's also low-hanging fruit for any columnists looking to approximate solemnity without exerting himself too much. The day is important, black people do more than play sports, etc. I have yet to see anyone attempt the more gymnastic opposite: that really, there is no more appropriate way to celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. than to play and watch basketball. I suppose, based on what I wrote above, I could be persuaded, but it sounds way too much like something a rightie shock jock might say for all the wrong reasons.



I will say this: on the local level, where basketball can work as a proxy for, or an extension of, community, I don't see what's wrong with it. The problem seems to come when the NBA, which traffics in blatant consumerism, tries to get in on the spirit. Then again, this is a league that makes teams play on Christmas and New Year's Eve. It's a federal and state holiday, which means people of all colors and creeds will have the day off, and be looking for things to do. Now, would the world be a better place if everyone -- after all, MLK Day isn't just about African-Americans doing right by themselves -- took the day off to volunteer, go to speeches and rallies, and otherwise carry on the tradition of the man whose name the date bears? Obviously. The truth is, though, that it's hard to get people to spend their day off doing things like that, no matter who they are. They want leisure, and the NBA gives them more product than usual to kick back with, or attend in person.

The pitfall comes in making an obligatory nod to the holiday. But that's nothing more than good corporate manners. That the NBA has to acknowledge MLK Day doesn't mean we have to accuse them of equating Civil Rights with today's pro sports leagues. Instead, we should blame ourselves for creating the demand, or at least the audience. No one's forcing us to watch basketball instead of going out and making the world a better place. If you do so on a regular basis, well, you deserve a day off.

Love Your Relatives

On this day of being around older folks, and possibly watching basketball and/or discussing FreeDarko, here's something to ponder: Who was the first true SF? We have Frank Ramsey in the book. But a grouchy Amazon reviewer says Jim Pollard who also, like Ramsey, played next to a bigger 4. You could also make an argument for George Yardley, although he had shooting guard's game that was way ahead of its time, and size enough to play the PF.

Also, consider this an open thread for today's games, as Twitter is down. Please tell me other generational debates concerning our favorite sport! I am at home with a cat and pancakes, neither of which is much help, and my father is already in the doghouse for talking me out of putting Dick Barnett in the book.

FD at the Strand

Most of us plus Will Leitch did a panel at the Strand on 11/30. Now you can watch it in its entirety. Then invite us to speak at your next corporate event.

Book Tour!

I'll keep this really simple:

-Tonight in New York: Panel moderated by Will Leitch, FD runs nine deep. Strand at 7PM. HHR hooked up the party at Slainte, with booze.

-Friday in Portland: Solo date at Powell's, 7:30PM. Stay tuned to BlazersEdge for further news, including after-activities.

Also, you may have missed my post here on John Wall and Blake Griffin.

What Hideous Curiosity

Over the years, FD has become associated with many things, some good, some bad. Among the leading positives is Big Baby Belafonte's dazzling artwork. Since the Style Guide was first released--ironically, you can't even see it anymore--Big Baby has popularized a distinctive, resonant way of looking at basketball. Literally. The Macrophenomenal Almanac and the Undisputed Guide expanded the audience for this exciting, perceptive, creative thinking, and Big Baby's work is as inextricably FD as anything else. We're all fortunate to say so. Those prints are something of a trademark. And a cash cow!

(Please note that I can write all of these nice things, however factual, because I've had absolutely nothing to do with the art. Like anyone else, I am a fan who looks on with amazement and appreciation.)

It's not just Big Baby, though. FD has been the launching point for a number of artistic explorations. Who could forget when Tom Ziller used his third-eye vision to teach that the day's mathematics was Z? Or more recently, when Hakeen was remembered amid the scribbles in your notepad that invented your life? FD has a proud artistic tradition.

Today may mark a departure from this distinguished history. Certainly, there is artwork that follows, and it very much endeavors to comment on this basketball which we hold dear. But that's the end of the similarity. Our latest episode offers decidedly less aesthetic appeal than that which is common among its predecessors. It might not even make any sense. The images that you're about to look upon are purposely lo-fi, functional in the service of expressing an idea, but not exactly ready to adorn the lavish halls of Slim Chin's manse.

These images grew out of a confused, meandering conversation that I had with Shoals one night last week as Derrick Rose played a sensational game that we hated. You may recall the capstone:



Less obvious while in plain sight, Derrick Rose took a customary straight path to the basket. He seems to always do that, eschewing soft angles and minute precision for hard darts and raging athleticism directed in a single vector. Rose can change directions, of course, but he explodes in a series of discrete movements, no matter how quickly he may change from one to another. His motion isn't united as a single brush stroke. It is a collection of lines, a pile of pickup sticks arrayed in new patterns but always limited by the component parts. Another image that immediately appeared in my mind was one of a locomotive laying down its own tracks as it rumbled along. Shoals was almost mad at Rose for this. We agreed that it was dissonant. For all of his obvious physical prowess, Rose has a limited game. Only, the limit is born of convenience. He isn't a wonderful shooter, his court vision is not an unmistakable strength, and he does not pose a threat from all over. Derrick Rose doesn't need that. Instead, he's something of a perfect scoring weapon, a man who invariably finds himself at the rim after picking a trail and racing forward along it. The shit works.

Brute strength and straight-line basketball are shrill traits for a point guard in this new era of the position's pitch-perfect primacy. While styles among the leading point guards vary, seemingly each one makes far more sense for its master than Rose's does for a player as physically competent. Shoals and I mulled this over for a while before intervening commitments left us at the point where artwork comes into the story. Lost in the morass we commonly create as our online ruminations crash into each other, we agreed that I would endeavor to create simple visuals that captured the overriding impressions respectively left by my favorite guards. This, we thought, might help us better articulate what Derrick Rose is, exactly. I am not sure that I succeeded, but maybe it will start a better conversation.

(Click to enlarge.)

Chris Paul, Angle Master




Derrick Rose, Raging Bull




Rajon Rondo, Cat on Ice Skates




Russell Westbrook, The Magic Carpet Ride

Nothing But Quick

More shortly. For now, enjoy this Monta-Bill Withers highlight bonanza, commissioned by yours truly, realized by Outside the NBA. So happy they decided to make this happen.

Colin Cowherd said some shit yesterday, it made me sicker and sicker, so here's 2,000 words on FanHouse taking him to task line-by-line. What a punk.

The dudes at BwB/HHR have been kind enough to put together a booze-soaked afterparty in NYC, following FD's Strand reading on 11/30. More info here. You should sign up for headcount purposes, but it's free, and everyone's invited.

Things We Used to Say

For the first time in years, last night around 8, I shut my laptop and said loudly to no one in particular, "I can't write about basketball anymore tonight." Which is a shame, since I have tons of things I want to put down in this space, including Dr. J's pre-career and nature of corrections; one final consideration of the Bron ad; and those Warriors, who filled my heart with love when I woke up this morning. If you're going to point out that the previous sentence sounded kind of homoerotic, well, religion does lots of time, too. Leave this site forever.

However, I would seriously advise you to listen to the latest FD Presents: The Disciples of Clyde NBA Podcast episode. Not only is it the first-ever one-on-one meeting between myself and Kenneth Paul Drews -- it's probably the most raw, uncensored, uncut, and potentially damning interview about the book I'll ever do. Fun fact: I first got in touch with Ken and Dan after I listened to their discussion of the Almanac, where Ken spent the whole time questioning whether or not FD wasn't just one big elaborate con. Now, we're having a cozy conversation about the new joint.

Because it must be said: if you listen to one really long podcast about the new FD book, it should probably be this one. LISTEN.

UPDATE: MORE MEDIA!

-Me + The Basketball Jones for only the second time in forever. What could go wrong?

-Q&A w/New York Magazine with lots of Knicks wisdom, and some very long sentences I apparently say out loud.

We'll Always Have the Next Day

Some of you might have noticed, and even taken a shot at, our Allen Iverson paper doll funny contest. Yesterday, we received an entry from artist Emily O'Leary, along with an admission that "I think I sort of misinterpreted the Iverson paper doll thing". It's true, she did. However, the world is a much better place for it, and I wanted to share these with you all as soon as possible.

Don't forget to buy the books, leave Amazon reviews, and check out the store's new offerings. Peep the excerpt on Deadspin, including comments that ruined my morning. And speaking of Deadspin, check back later today for a special, earth-shattering surprise involving yours truly.



I hope this doesn't mean all of you will stop submitting your Iverson creations. Remember, Emily didn't follow the rules. Though I think we'll all agree that an exception might be order. It's kind of like AI himself ... as I describe him in the book!

FreeDarko Player Rankings 2010-11 + BOOK TIME!

Today is a momentous day, so of course I slept three hours more than I meant to. The book is out! Starting today, FreeDarko Presents: The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History is available everywhere, and ready to ship from the web. Also pay a visit to our store, where we've just added the much-requested MJ "long shadow" print, and check out our Q&A on NYTimes.com (and in print last Sunday). Also, PLEASE LEAVE AMAZON REVIEWS. They help our cause tremendously.

But as much as I would love to dwell in the past -- the above photo of a 1969 Connie Hawkins basketball camp in Pittsburgh is boss -- the present is once again here! With the 2010-11 NBA season about to jump off and get all frisky in your lap, for the second time ever, we present our FD Player Power Rankings. These were last conducted in October 2006. My, how the world changes, and doesn't. Don't ask about the method, or who was involved. Just know that, based on a far-reaching survey of FD associates, you have this list to guide you.

1. Kevin Durant
2. Rajon Rondo
3. John Wall
4. Russell Westbrook
5. Amar’e Stoudemire
6. Brandon Jennings
7. Anthony Randolph
8. Carmelo Anthony
9. Kobe Bryant
10. DeMarcus Cousins
11. Josh Smith
12. LeBron James
13. Monta Ellis
14. Gerald Wallace
15. Serge Ibaka
16. Rodrigue Beaubois
17. Tyreke Evans
18. Ron Artest
19. Steve Nash
20. Gilbert Arenas
21. J.R. Smith
22. Nicolas Batum
23. Chris Paul
24. Blake Griffin
25. Lamar Odom
26. Andre Iguodala
27. Stephen Jackson
28. Pau Gasol
29. Dwyane Wade
30. Derrick Rose
31. Andray Blatche
32. Terrence Williams
33. Larry Sanders
34. JaVale McGee
35. Joakim Noah
36. Brandon Roy
37. Francisco Garcia
38. Kevin Garnett
39. Stephen Curry
40. Tyrus Thomas
41. Deron Williams
42. Jrue Holiday
43. Danny Granger
44. Trevor Ariza
45. Ersan Ilyasova
46. Thaddeus Young
47. Amir Johnson
48. Hassan Whiteside
49. J.J. Hickson
50. Paul George

Discuss. We love you!

P.S. Like many of you, I freaked out early over the new LeBron ad. Here's my multi-layered reading of it; ignore the AOL comments. However, since last night, I've wondered about the last line. To me, the genius of the ad is that it suggests that LeBron himself wasn't always sure, or at least acknowledges that after a point, this summer had become a mess that no one man could make sense of. I like my "defiantly rhetorical" description.

The last line, though, seems to chip away at that fine balance. Asking the audience "should I be what you want me to be" sets up a you/me binary, as if the only complexity came when everyone tried to tell LeBron what to do. The admission that LBJ himself found himself sucked into the pit of confusion -- that it wasn't just nasty fans and media telling him what to do -- is a far more subtle, and charitable, version of events. I guess it can still be read that way, if others try and define/own James by telling him what he should do from afar. Still, it totally removes him from the equation, and suddenly it feels like blame is being assigned. The problem becomes us, not the all-encompassing clusterfuck I describe in my post. If you go with that interpretation of the ending -- perhaps added as a hook -- the whole ad is weakened, I think.

Dream Week: Fast Is a Feast

FD's Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball Historywill be officially released on October 26, but the celebration is beginning early. Inspired, and curated, by Brian Phillips of Run of Play, DREAM WEEK features some of your fastest and most favorite writers trying to crack the mystery of Hakeem Olajuwon and his Rockets.

Starting with the 1990-91 season, when he became more observant and changed his name, Hakeem strictly observed Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, which required him to forgo food and drink from sunrise to sunset. One of the enduring myths of his career is that his game actually improved during this time despite the fact that he played through hunger and often without drinking fluids. In 1997, for instance, he scored 32 points in a win over the Bulls in a game in which he didn't hydrate. In February 1995, he averaged 29 points per game and was named NBA Player of the Month, even though the entire month fell within Ramadan.

Hakeem himself thought he was better during Ramadan and has said in interviews that his statistics went up when he was fasting:

But it's true. When I was playing, we were travelling and all my team-mates were drinking water. To me, it didn't matter. It made me stronger and my statistics went up; I was better during Ramadan, more focussed… lighter.

At the beginning of my career, when my team-mates heard I was fasting during the season they thought it would affect my game and were concerned. But when they saw that it actually made me better there was a lot of admiration and intrigue: 'How can you play at this level without drinking water, when you must need water and must be thirsty' they would ask.

But did fasting actually boost his stats? Intrepid FD reader Eric Marsh ran the numbers, and the math says not really.











Except toward the very end of his career, when the fasting graphs tick up noticeably, Hakeem's Ramadan stats barely waver from his career averages. Which means that, by the numbers anyway, not eating or drinking didn't make him a better player. But it didn't make him a worse player, either, which is frankly impressive enough.

Dream Week: An Open Letter to Sam Cassell

Dream Week takes a brief digression, as Jay Caspian Kang reaches out to one of the Dream's more notable teammates. Speaking of FreeDarko, check out our NYTimes Q&A (also in print), and if you absolutely can't wait till Tuesday, rumor has it that some big chain stores already have the book out for sale.

Jay just started his own Tumblr. His other work has appeared in the Awl, the Morning News and TheAtlantic.com.

Yes, money and rings exist, but ugly is also hard, real. Naively, I reasoned your face was what forged your skills—the herky-jerky post moves, the busted jumper, the slowed-down fast-breaks. We eventually outgrow the need to turn our mothers into symmetrical ideas, but our favorite athletes suffer our meddling hands, our limitless scrutiny, until, one day, we discard the metaphor.

When you came to Chapel Hill and declared it a wine-and-cheese crowd, I was twelve and living on a block lined with dentists and perfectly spaced dogwoods. The dogwoods were all dying on account of an airborne pathogen. The dentists held coke-fueled orgies, to which my parents, of course, were never invited. Do I need to explain my allegiance to a brash, ugly man?

It worked. For years, really. When you were drafted, I went to the trolls in the hobby shop and traded my Dave Justice Leaf rookie for ten of yours. I’ ve since reached an age where I must acknowledge fiscal irresponsibility, but I still count it as one of the great moral coups of my lifetime. Houston proved me right, Minnesota, too. All the while, you and Popeye made all the top-five-ugly lists. Because I liked you for this, I assumed you liked you for this, too.

But then you were in Boston with no knees. The braggadocio had no more context—you barked and swore from the bench. Your khaki shirt was indefensible. At halftime, Charles called you Gollum. For the first time, I calculated the toll. Charles was defined by the rings you earned. Any man could have been made by your money. But there you were, holder of rings, money, stats, the hard evidence of a very-good-career, and your ugliness would still not deflate.

I can twist my selfish concern into the language of therapy and say: I wish you would talk about it. But, hard is hard, and, as they say, everything builds character. We are not friends, anyway. Instead, Sam, let me say this: we only notice the perfect teeth on the people we hate.

Dream Week: The Prisms of Our Tears

FD's Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball Historywill be officially released on October 26, but the celebration is beginning early. Inspired, and curated, by Brian Phillips of Run of Play, DREAM WEEK features some of your fastest and most favorite writers trying to crack the mystery of Hakeem Olajuwon and his Rockets.

Jon Weinbach writes about sports business and West Coast news and hosts a video interview series for FanHouse. He recently completed producing and writing Straight Outta L.A. for ESPN's 30 for 30. Jon was previously a longtime staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

I’m no Dick Vermeil, but it doesn’t take much for me to shed a tear. Political speeches, soccer highlight videos and even (shudder) the first Sex and the City movie—they’ve all made me well up in recent years. It’s a little embarrassing.

But for all my apparent mushiness, I don’t cry over pro sports. Anymore, that is. The last time it happened was May 21, 1986. It was a Wednesday night, I wasn’t quite 10, and Ralph Sampson was responsible. The sinewy, 7-foot-4 Virginian torpedoed my beloved Lakers that evening. From our second-level seats of aisle 16 in the corner of The Forum, I had a clear view as Sampson, all socks and ’stache and Pumas, feathered a reverse set-pass into the basket as time expired to give the Rockets a 114-112 win. It was a spasm of volleyball-rific athleticism that would have made Karch Kiraly proud. And it was perfect in its awfulness: The shot beat the buzzer, it bounced tauntingly off the rim before going in, and, of course, it eliminated the Lakers—the defending champs—from the NBA playoffs on their home floor (see 4:35 mark).

Somewhere between the Forum massive men’s room (1) and my Dad’s car, the trauma overwhelmed me after the game. The order of my universe had been turned upside-down. For the past four years—or roughly half my life, at that point—the Lakers had annually advanced to the Finals, twice winning titles. It was one thing to lose to the goddamn Celtics or the Moses/Dr. J Sixers—but the Rockets? (2) All the doubts about the Lakers’ toughness, about Kareem’s age, about Worthy’s mediocre rebounding, about Scott’s shaky confidence, about Magic’s value vis-à-vis Bird (3), they all came rushing back at once. And all I could envision was Bird, his ’86 mullet, McHale, frigging Jerry Sichting, unbearable Ainge and the rest of the goddamn Celtics beating Houston in the Finals and making life miserable again. (4) (Which is exactly what happened, of course.)

Worse yet, to my fourth-grade eyes it seemed like the Lakers might never get back to the top, even in their own conference. Houston was young, they were fearless, and, of course, they had Sampson and Olajuwon, the Twin Towers who made Kareem look decidedly feeble. Even their backup center, the knee-padded and hyper-active Jim Petersen, seemed tougher than Abdul-Jabbar, and the Rockets had made the Lakers look instantly old, soft and stale.

And so I bawled. More accurately, I probably sniffled through a few tears after stammering some passionate and totally sophisticated observation like “Byron just sucks!” I’m sure my older brother was whining even louder about the Lakers in the parking lot, which only made me more depressed and my dad more irritated. All I know is, we got to the car, I was definitely crying a little, my Dad said something along the lines of “Magic doesn’t cry when he loses, you never know if he’s ten points up or ten points down, so don’t be a poor sport." (5)

Then he probably put in Billy Joel’s Greatest Hits Volume I and II—or maybe a tape from the classic rock collection Cruisin’, which my brother had ordered off of TV and which remained in my dad’s car for YEARS—and I went to sleep.



What does any of this have to do with Hakeem, or as he was known then, Akeem? One of the oft-forgotten details about the Sampson game—like Robert Reid’s game-tying three with 12 seconds left and Granville Waiters’ sideline cheering—was that Akeem was actually ejected from the game. He got tossed through the fourth quarter, at a critical juncture when the game was tight and Akeem had already scored 30 points and was obliterating the Lakers. On an otherwise innocuous play, Olajuwon squared off in a brief but memorable fight with Lakers backup center Mitch Kupchak, whiffing repeatedly before being headlocked by the Lakers’ Maurice Lucas in the ensuing skirmish.

When we think of Olajuwon, we generally envision the even-keeled, shaking-and-baking, Ramadan-observing Hakeem of the Rockets’ championship years. But I will always recall—and with some fondness—the earlier, more predatory iteration of Akeem, the untamed soccer goalie who leapt at the slightest provocation, dunked with ferocity, and swung wildly at one-legged Kupchak that night in ’86.

“I’ll never forget [Akeem] coming out of the locker room after the game, half-naked, happy like his life had been saved,” says Bill Fitch, the Rockets’ former head coach, who’s still spry at 76. “I’m sure his whole life passed before him because he probably thought I was going to kill him for getting thrown out.”

It’s easy to forget, but Akeem was by far the less-heralded Tower, and was a fairly crude player—offensively and defensively—coming out of college. As Fitch reminded me and countless reporters over the years, Olajuwon had a limited grasp of basketball terminology and fundamentals when he debuted with the Rockets in ’84.

“If I said, ‘run the backdoor,’ he’d sprint toward the exit sign,” recalls Fitch, who still lives in the Houston area and has incredible recall of individual games. “Every time someone faked, he’d go for it. He’d get two to three silly fouls a ballgame.” After one particularly frustrating practice, Fitch scolded Olajuwon and implored him to stop getting baited on defense. “I told him, ‘goddamit, if you’d just stay out of the damn popcorn machine and stay down, you could became a pretty good defensive player.’ And of all the things I said to him, that stuck.”

When Olajuwon was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2008, Fitch came full circle with his critique. He bought Hakeem a full-sized, old-fashioned popcorn machine emblazoned with the Rockets logo. “People forget how much these guys can improve,” says Fitch.

Sadly, that night was Sampson’s one shining moment. At the time, that game felt like the tipping point for Sampson and Olajuwon, the launch date for a new NBA era defined by “Twin Towers” lineups that would alter the course of basketball history. In November of ’86, in Sports Illustrated’s NBA preview issue, the magazine ran a photo spread entitled “Twin Towers on the Rise,” spotlighting the trend toward double-center frontcourts across the Association. (Who can forget Joe Barry Carroll and Chris Washburn in Golden State? Or William Bedford and Buddha Edwards in Phoenix?) The feature opened with this unforgettable image, which I particularly love for the Etonic high tops worn by Akeem:



But it was never to be. Sampson's balky left knee, which had been problematic during his college career, gave out in early 1987, and he and Fitch feuded off-the-court. “Ralph would have been a much better player had he had two good legs,” says Fitch. “When he did have ‘em, he was great.” In December of ‘87, Sampson was traded to Golden State, where he endured more injuries and disappointment. He had brief stints with Sacramento, Washington and a team in Spain before retiring before retiring in 1992.

Akeem, of course, continued to improve, found Islam, added an H to his first name, and after several middling years in the late ’80s and early ’90s, became the NBA’s most valuable player after Michael Jordan retired for the first time.

For what it’s worth, the fight in ’86 was the last moment of Kupchak’s playing career. It was a feisty end for the former North Carolina star, who unluckily shredded his knee in the days before ACL operations and “micro-fracture” surgeries became routine procedures. Kupchak, who came to the Lakers as a controversial and high-priced free agent from the Washington Bullets, insists he didn’t try to agitate Akeem in an attempt to get Olajuwon ejected. “Did I go into the game looking for trouble? No. It was a skirmish like many others.”

Kupchak, who now has presided over four titles since taking over as the Lakers’ GM in 2000, says it occurred to him on the drive home from the Forum that the tussle with Akeem would be his final NBA play. But he was more bitter about the way the season ended. “We did not have the chemistry, something was amiss, we were not firing on all cylinders, and I’m not sure there was anything that could have changed the outcome of that series—we were going to lose,” says Kupchak. “Then again, I retired and [the Lakers] won back-to-back titles, so maybe the problem was me.”



(1) It’s unthinkable now, but the Forum had ONE men’s room on each side of the arena to accommodate the urinary/defecatory needs of most of the fans. And you had to trek down a scarily steep set of stairs to get to the stalls and urinals. It’s amazing there weren’t more accidents/fights/chaos.

(2) I’m not sure if I knew then that the ’81 Rockets, led by Moses, beat the Lakers in one of the bizarre three-game “mini-series” the NBA used to have. I’m pretty sure I didn’t. I don’t think the memory of that loss would have made the ’86 defeat any easier to take.

(3) This was before Magic’s first MVP in the ’86-’87 season, when the prevailing wisdom among most NBA observers—and the few really fucking annoying Celtics fans at my Jewish summer camp in SoCal—was that Bird was by far the more valuable and clutch player.

(4) It really is incredible, and more than a little disturbing, to realize in retrospect how ALL of my venom of the Celtics was focused on their white guys. I think the white-on-white hatred of the ’80s Celtics by Caucasian NBA fans laid the groundwork for the Duke phenomenon in college hoops during the ’90s and 2000s.

(5) Contrary to my Dad’s assumed wisdom, Magic did cry after big defeats. After the Lakers lost Game 7 of the ’84 Finals against the Celtics, he cried in the shower alongside Michael Cooper and spent the night being consoled in his Boston hotel room by Mark Aguire and Isiah Thomas.