Tfeht dna Evol

I fell asleep and drooled on my keyboard and it made this. But for more serious writing, check out my latest FanHouse column on where the fuck these point guards came from.

Remember how Obama was elected President, and race no longer mattered in America? Here's some proof of that: West Virginia, coached by Bob Huggins, stocked with your usual Huggins players, is the latest underdog to inspire us all by taking the piss out of some uppity bunch of future lottery picks. Take that, John Wall. You were shut down, and while those lazy pros who would never heed a coach's scheme won't do it, West Virginia did. That's a mark of shame you'll bear forever. You couldn't take it to the limit, you are mortal, and your whole career will be a sham. DeMarcus Cousins, big dude, you can't handle the triple-team. But they won't throw that at you in the pros because they don't have the heart. Or too much ego. Those two are opposites.

Okay, let me stabilize myself, this boat is awfully rocky on the high seas of knowing what I need and want. West Virginia. What state says America more than that one? They've had the shit shot out of them for striking (I've seen Matewan for the acting!) and otherwise just die in the mines. But they keep on. Just like those Mountaineers. They refused to quit. You know why? Because they didn't need the NBA. They knew they might be playing the last game of their college careers. And since they were Huggins guys, they weren't getting a degree, either. Some might say "oh, they are just a bunch of wannabe NBA players, how can they be so noble?" The answer? They saw the light. They might as well be white people, the way they put Kentucky in their place. No way Ebanks declares this year, he's got unfinished business—and real men take care of business.

Coach Cal, shut the fuck up. Huggins made his team work, and drew up the X's and O's to make you sweat. Fucking Italian. Go back to Africa with your fucking team. I have to say, I never liked the Bearcats, or whatever the mascot of K-State is. But Huggin is the real deal. Appalachia is the heartland, just higher in the air. God's country. You lead a horse to water, but in the end, you need a real cowboy with his hands on the pump. Who was that black dude at the Tea Party rally? He was post-racial America. Go Mountaineers.

Friday Didn't Happen

You know Twitter has #FF, when no one says anything, or responds to anything, and the whole thing turns into an open-air bazaar for absolutely nothing? In honor of that, I'm doing a quick post here that's similarly pointless.

First, up top, an absolutely amazing drawing of Artis Gilmore from an old SI that, were this several years ago, we would be trying to put on a t-shirt. Now, I think the most we can do is put it up here and wave our arms some. Unless The Vault, which rules, wants to partner with us to do a series of old illo tees curated by us. Just a thought.

Last basketball: Very soon, I'm dropping a really long Gilbert Arenas piece over at The Baseline that I swear you will all love. Stay tuned.

Maybe you noticed that the store ads disappeared (for now) and ye olde Amazon widget moved up. I've decided to get back in the swing of that, partly for the added revenue stream, but in large part because I like writing blurbs about non-sports stuff. Up there now: Cooperstown Confidential, a Bloomsbury book that's less about scandal-mongering and more turning it's grotesquely, indiscriminantly mythic—and totally supra-American—past into something more believable. I think it saves history, while creating a bridge between those days and the imperfect present. I hope we manage that in the new book. Steven Johnson's The Ghost Map had me talking about cholera and shit to anyone who would listen in the week before my wedding, but is really worth it for the finale, where he smushes together the last sentence of every magazine feature he's ever written about civilization, evolution, terrorism, health, and the value of cities.

The Damned Don't Cry is one of those rare movies where Joan Crawford is both scary and hot, as well as a genre pic with layers, or maybe two genres at once. This coming from someone who watches at least one forgettable noir joint a week. I still don't get why there's a song on Africa Brass with the same name, and would prefer to not look it up. The Big O is well past my cut-off year for basketball memoirs, but Robertson's an intensely private man who decided to open up here, and as with his game and personality, you can feel the anger simmering just beneath the stately (okay, sometimes staid) prose. They Cleared the Lane is not only the single best book about race in the early NBA, but also, in its eye for detail, gives you some invaluable info and understanding of that era in general. Breaks my heart that this isn't more widely-read.

Finally, Heaven and Earth's I Can't Seem to Forget About You. Buying this import new is expensive, but there are cheaper used copies up there. The kind of sweet soul so haunting, and uneasy, it borders on scary. Oddly, "Let Me Back In" might be the song I most associate with my wedding weekend.

UPDATE: New column on Arenas now up and running.

It Rode Out in Denim

I never get the sense that anyone likes Antoine Walker. Somewhere around his thousandth three-point attempt in the NBA, perception appeared to have turned against him. After that, it never changed back. He was branded as a counterproductive chucker, someone not especially preoccupied with winning, and a lazy disappointment. Boston almost made the Finals once, and that helped him a little, but ultimately it didn't take. It might be the idea behind disappointment--seems like people expected more, didn't get it, and became eternally frustrated, if not angry. None of this is meant to sound derisive because I shared in the pain. We're not headed down a Rasheed path here; I've not come to rattle about with the notion of Antoine succeeding in his own way. Nor is this a post about his redemption. Toine usually left me upset, just as he might have left the rest of you.



This is a post about demise, actually. Antoine's recent arrest highlighted just how quietly he left us. Had you thought about him this summer? This year? His final seasons in the NBA were spent as some itinerant sideshow with an overeating disorder and historically comical shot selection. He was on teams like Minnesota and Memphis, Siberian outposts that matter on FD and few other places. (At least, given recent history. No offense, DLIC.) He sort of vanished, first exciting, then relevant, later curious, and ultimately just gone. That he bounced bad checks in casinos didn't even strike me as especially odd, as though there were a logical progression from what he had become on the court to what he is now off of it. Shoot some threes, work up a sweat walking across halfcourt, retire to the bench with those calf-highs the only things reminiscent of former pride, and then hit the Alaskan king crab buffet at Harrah's in between hands. For a few moments, I was puzzled by whether any team would care, and I was sad to realize that none would. The Walker arrest had the feeling of a Mickey Rourke movie, Wrestler or not.

Oddly, this particular melancholy resonated with me, almost literally. I felt it in my chest, through my body. Involuntarily, my shoulders went up, my brow wrinkled up, and my mouth turned down, the posture you adopt as you mull over something perplexingly sad, or nearly unspeakable because it's just that unpleasant. I don't know Antoine Walker, of course, and he always seemed decent but nothing more. His color, to the extent that he had any, was washed out and unremarkable. I think that's what makes me so uncomfortable.

Before Antoine, there were forwards who could pass, and forwards who could shoot. There were tall men who could drift outside. And since Toine, there have been men who do those things better than he ever did them. Standards have changed, though. Big men who played like Walker before there was Walker were not so common, and I don't only mean that the three-point line irrevocably altered basketball. I mean that James Worthy was swooping to the hoop if not occasionally popping out for a mid-range jumper, and that Karl Malone was throwing his elbows into you. (Or hooking with his off arm before spinning away from a defender and the ref.) I mean that every year, now, we look at drafts filled with tall guys who must improve their post games because so many have dedicate their respective youths to developing a guard's skill set. We celebrate Kevin Garnett and Dirk Nowitzki for being the standards of non-standard, and every team seeks to find some non-standard of its own. The perception of what forwards can do, and how they should play, has changed in many ways.



Walker may not have been a true originator, but for me, in the stream of my own basketball consciousness, he was emblematic of the evolving style that a forward could effect. Antoine was a symbol, no light distinction given the company among which he stands for a 27-year-old. He was a true hybrid--he had guard skills and guard range (plus that crazy-person shot selection), but he also was naturally gifted around the rim and a wonderful rebounder. Not a lanky giant and not a small man trying to play a big man's game, he had the true hybrid body, too: the ass of a guy who could post up, complete with a sturdy base (which those socks may have reinforced, ever so slightly), yet he was nimble enough to run a little (when he still ran), and his upper body was not muscle bound or an impediment to his shooting.

And, of course, he was propelled toward stardom by excelling in a college system that encouraged someone like him to bomb from three and press all game. His combination of varied skills, multipurpose body, and atypical doctrine was truly different, and it came at a time when a critical mass of forwards who play a different kind of way was only beginning to build. Now, we take for granted that there will be tall men who can play inside and out, but Walker was a key figure in helping the orthodoxy arrive at such an assumption. I do Toine a disservice when I write this, but there is no Skita-as-bust without Walker, because no one's looking for some soft-ass Euro named Nikoloz in the first place.



Certain players serve as cultural touchstones, and Antoine was one of them, both good and bad. He embodied an archetype of innovation that enjoyed out-sized notoriety because of its intrinsic qualities and extrinsic influences. The intrinsic has been touched upon--Walker was among a new class of forwards who were neither "The Next" anything nor wholly divorced from the past. Toine and his set were, and are, an amalgamation of parts meant to conjure progress. The extrinsic was a function of time: Antoine et al. arrived (as in, emerged, not just "were drafted") as the first players charged with governing the NBA after Michael Jordan. Almost too perfectly, he debuted as Allen and Kobe reached these altered shores. Toine's game was laid as part of the foundation for this new era.

So, consider all of that. Really take some time to appreciate who Antoine Walker was. First, the star pupil of a masterful coach, and not just a mere beneficiary of Rick Pitino radicalism. Rather, Walker enabled it. He was a paradigm, and no small reason why 1996 Kentucky stands as one of college basketball's most talented and all-time greatest. Next, a member of a new oligarchy which came to the NBA with a mandate for change. He appeared with a game that expanded the boundaries of our thinking, and a body perfectly tailored for the way he was supposed to move.

Antoine Walker was a revolutionary figure, and that was lost along the way.



Also: Recent events compel me to make mention of a few other things:

First, I find the NFL's treatment of Michael Vick odious and racist. You can read about it here. The post quasi involves eschatology, if that's any incentive. That said, as Shoals has pointed out, there is irony in the fact that despite everything, Vick is more likely to find employment than Allen Iverson.

Second, when it was reported that Iverson might be signed by the Clippers in a desperate attempt to sell tickets, my heart sank. Not because I am such a huge fan of AI's game, but because I do tremendously value AI's meaning in the sociocultural continuum. Reducing Allen to the NBA equivalent of a carnival attraction immediately summoned sad notions of minstrel things. For several years, now, I have been unable to stop thinking about Iverson and his unforgivable blackness, to borrow the the Jack Johnson term. Whatever else he was or is, and however sincere it might have been, Iverson's identity has always counted his blackness as a primary component. Seeing a symbol of the black experience he has been held out to represent reduced to a sorry gimmick would feel horribly gross. Though maybe Allen crossing that threshold would necessarily entail leaving behind whatever we claim he represents and emerging as just the latest broken-down mercenary.

Third, the Stephon Marbury saga. This is not a desperate athlete's contrivance meant to court attention in the wake of an unwelcomed retirement. (At least, no solely, or even mostly.) This is, rather, a legitimately deranged person who has always used basketball to forge an identity. Bereft of basketball, and no longer pigeonholed into the rote selfish-malcontent narrative that may have obscured his eccentricity, Steph is being Steph. Really, the only thing that has changed is that he now has much more free time and much less sense of purpose. I've always maintained that there might be something Mike Tyson-ish about him. I hope not.