You See What You See

Hi, I'm Eric Nusbaum. I write a baseball blog called Pitchers & Poets with my friend Ted, and sometimes other friends. I've also written for Slate and been an anthology, one time each.

Forgive me. I'm primarily a baseball writer and as such I can't help but turning to childhood memories and nostalgia. It's a reflex. It can also be a coping mechanism. I can be wrong about basketball statistics or strategy or the finer points of its history. But if I'm wrong about myself, then at least you can't prove it.

For example: I was born in 1986 in Los Angeles. I was a sports-obsessed kid. I never cared about Michael Jordan.

Instead, I loved Nick Van Exel. When I shot hoops at the park, Van Exel was the player I pretended to be. This was true from his debut in 1993 until his departure from the Lakers in 1998. My interest may have lingered into one or two of Van Exel's Denver seasons. I don't remember.

Michael Jordan did not belong to me. He was a grimacing bald villain who wore villainous colors and played in a villainous distant city. He was an East Coast player, an Eastern Conference player. In my imagination, East Coast and Eastern Conference belonged to the same amorphous and distant reality. It was cold there and it had nothing to do with Showtime, which was what basketball was supposed to be, and in the mid-1990s, what Los Angeles still wanted it to be.

I grew up in the aftermath of Showtime. We were aware of it, my friends and I, but we only knew Showtime as some inexplicable ideal that the adults of the world placed firmly in the past. Showtime was shadows. It was a mystery. At one point, I must have thought Showtime was a person. Then I thought all fast-breaks were Showtime.

Michael Jordan was fodder for the unimaginative half of the playground. He was too easy to like, too easy to worship. It was too easy to stick out your tongue. Jordan was a brand. He was a constant. And he bored me. I realize now how absurd it is to write that. But what's so interesting about greatness? Why settle for distant beauty when there's something surprising and dynamic and kinetic happening just down the street at the Great Western Forum and on TV every night?

When I started writing this I didn't remember much about Nick Van Exel. I remembered that his nickname was Nick the Quick. I remembered that he feuded with Del Harris and that I never liked Del Harris after that. I remembered Eddie Jones, because Nick Van Exel and Eddie Jones were like the Batman and Batman of those Laker teams. I did not remember how exciting he was to watch. Or that he once shoved a referee. I don't think I ever knew that he was from Kenosha, Wisconsin, that he played one season at a community college in Texas, that his first name Nick is short for Nickey, not Nicholas.

Take fifteen minutes to watch him on YouTube. You'll see him passing up a wide open Vlade Divac for a transition three. You'll see him throwing half-court alley-oop lobs to Shaq. You'll see him putting Kenny Smith on the floor with a spin move and then popping a mid-range jumper. Nick Van Exel spun circles – not around anybody necessarily, just in general.



But maybe that wasn't the only thing that drew me to Van Exel. His name was fun to say and his superfluous point guard stylings were easier to emulate than soaring slam dunks. His game was joyous, zealous even. He shadow-boxed after big shots. He took his free throws from a few steps behind the free throw line – the kind of quirk that doesn't have to make sense because in sports things don't have to make sense.Nick Van Exel smiled when he hit big shots.

Van Exel was a second round draft pick. Character concerns. But I didn't know that until I wrote this story. He behaved like a first round pick. He acted like he belonged not just on the court, not just with the ball in his hands and the game on the line, but on SportsCenter in perpetuity. And this was before you were supposed to act like that. I was a child. I knew nothing of questionable decision making. I knew nothing of efficiency. I knew nothing of his draft position. But it didn't matter to me.

At first, they didn't matter to Jerry West either. “I thought we had found a player who was going to be there for ten or fifteen years,” he says in Van Exel's Beyond the Glory Episode (available on Youtube.) “I rooted for him so much because I saw the rough edges going away.” The truth is, I saw the edges but not as rough. I saw them as dynamic. People talked about Van Exel. He merited opinions. He was a lot like my favorite Dodger player at the time, Raul Mondesi.

Raul Mondesi's career mirrored Nick Van Exels. He broke in at the same time, winning the 1994 Rookie of the Year Award. He swung at every pitch. He butted heads with managers. He showed off. There was a tattoo of a cannon on his right bicep, and sometimes between innings after he finished playing catch with a ball boy, Mondesi would toss a ball into the crowd and then show off the cannon. His arm was volatile. In the same way that Nick Van Exel might throw the occasional unnecessary no-look pass, Raul Mondesi would take the occasional unnecessary headfirst dive. Van Exel was traded after the 1998 season. Mondesi after the 1999 season.

Do the players we are drawn to as ignorant children say something about the kinds of fans we will become as less ignorant adults? I didn't know any better when I decided that Nick Van Exel was my favorite basketball player or that Raul Mondesi was my favorite baseball player – if it was even a decision at all. They weren't my favorites because they were the best – they weren't even the best players on their teams. But they were local and they were compelling. . I was just a kid in LA in the 90s seeking something exciting.

Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: Exquisite Corpse (Day 15)

I'm tense. Whenever something good happens (like being asked to play last week), I'm immediately afraid it of it breaking. So I'm tense. Not only is Shoals about to come to Michigan to visit class and give his talk, but the Big Ten Tournament was to begin on Thursday and, while my students weren’t actually scheduled to play until Friday, I’d already received the form e-mail informing that they’d be traveling to Indianapolis for the tournament on Thursday. Still I gripped tightly to the vain hope that they’d be there on Thursday. After all, we had so much to talk about: our intra-class game had evolved in my mind into an intra-class World Cup style 8 team two round tournament complete with jerseys, nicknames, team names and logos and a ping pong ball lottery to round out the eight teams (each of which would be headed by a UM player).

Alas, as I walked into the room, my heart sank: no players. The e-mail had spoken truth. There were more important things in their lives than this class and the intra-class tournament … more important things than me. It’s weird to me, but I guess I can understand it. And anyway, my heart didn’t sink too far, because the flipside of the players being gone is that there’s more room in our classroom and it’s easier to keep the discussion focused and, particularly, to keep it on the text. I’m sure it’s partly just that the lower numbers are easier for me to handle. Partly also that I am more properly teacherly when I’m faced with students who do not simultaneously embody a fantasy that decades I once harbored of what I might, but failed, to become. But also, though I hate to say it, it is because those damn players giggle and whisper to each other like 6th grade schoolgirls at recess. What’s up with that?

Still, even without the players, it took us a while to settle down. We had to discuss their chances in the Big Ten Tourney, plus the various projections about where they might be seeded in the NCAA tournament. Then, of course, we had to talk about our tournament – lots of announcements there. And then finally, we had to discuss Bethlehem Shoals upcoming visit to our classroom and his public lecture at Michigan. Then, Oh God! they actually proposed that we should hold our St. Patrick’s Day class meeting, which in all likelihood would also be Michigan’s first day in the NCAA tournament at a bar with beer, or, in class with beer where, it was proposed, we could watch tournament games via the projector in the classroom. I’m thinking that this class has gotten away from me. I’m thinking that I never had this class in the first place. I’m realizing that I have gotten away from me.

As usual, I regain a grip on myself by ruthlessly repressing them. “Settle down,” I intone, repeating the phrase as if they were preschoolers, “settle down now.” I feel like a phlebotomist jabbing at an elusive vein. Except I’m trying to jab at that button that I thought a repressive educational system would have installed in these students long ago: you know, the one that infantilizes them, makes them afraid of authority and humiliation and incapable of thinking for themselves.

"Go to your cubbies, take out your mats, It’s time to have a short nap. After that we’ll have snack and then we’ll watch clips of the young Michael Jordan to go along with Shoals’ chapter on the subject.” I know they’re not the only ones who are excited. In fact, they didn’t even start it today. Well, maybe they did. The truth is I don’t remember. I just know that we’ve burned a good twenty minutes on fun, happy-go-lucky, laissez-faire bullshit and it feels like what the announcers call a “turning point”. I need to get a stop right here. I do, they settle in to watch the video, but I think it’s less out of fear, or even respect, and more just out of a kind of bored indulgence in my fantasy that this is actually a university classroom and not an annex of Good Time Charley’s that just happens to be located on campus.

We watch the 4:35 seconds of NBA sponsored, pre 1990 MJ highlights. I feel like I’m at a Fireworks show. Darkness, silence, expectation, restlessness – each in his or her own private world from which we emerge periodically, briefly, to exchange a collective “ooh.” It is, it strikes me, as though we are staging a skit about the birth of language and society. Or perhaps it is more than that because we haven’t rehearsed or planned this ahead of time and we are surprisingly unselfconscious. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that in these sporadic, exchanged exhalations we are spontaneously living a moment like the ones from which language first emerged.



The lights come on and as always they break the spell. But somehow it seems gentler this time around. Maybe because even though the darkness has been dispelled, the silence pervades. I take a second to unhook cords, let the big screen roll back up, turn off equipment. Then I ask them what they saw besides elevation. Here is what they said:

1.Lots of run outs
2.Lots of isos
3 Few passes
4.Few jumpers
5.Everything at the rim
6.How adept he is at using his large hands and his body control to protect the ball in order to get a clean shot off in traffic.

All of these were accurate observations. In fact, I counted. The clip showed 24 different made baskets. Those 24 baskets came on 2 jump shots, 8 variations on the lay up, and 14 dunks. Tactically speaking, 11 of the 24 baskets came on fast break run outs, 9 came on half court isolation sets, and 2 came on give and go’s in the half court. And I myself had felt moved to write, when I was first watching the clip myself, that the way Jordan uses his body in mid air it is almost as though he is setting moving picks for himself.

Now, there are several students in the class from Chicago whose first basketball memories – as mine are of Clyde, Big O, and the early 70s Bucks – are of Jordan of the second three-peat era from 1996-1998. We call them Jordan babies. By no means were they the only ones to participate in the discussion but they were, I would say, perhaps, the most invested. For these students, this young Jordan really stood out. Don’t get me wrong: these are knowledgeable Bulls fans and they’ve seen this younger Jordan on video before. All the more reason why, perhaps, they were so clear and emphatic on the difference between this Jordan and the one of their early childhoods.

Which brought us perfectly to the FD chapter, written by Bethlehem Shoals, on “The Invention of Air: The Brash, Brilliant Doodles of Young Jordan.” The first comment a student made was that it seemed to him that Shoals was almost trying to “villainize” Young MJ. I felt the student was perhaps himself uncertain about his word choice, but I knew what he was getting at: that: Shoals’ chapter seems to be trying to keep alive for memory a rougher-around-the-edges, more confrontational Jordan, on and off the floor, than the one that these students grew up idolizing.

I had worried there would be resistance to this in class and this first comment put me a bit on my guard. I meant to ask him: “Why might this be so? What is the value of this move? Why does Shoals devote two chapters to Jordan, the young brash Jordan and the six title winning Jordan?” But instead, I immediately defended the choice. I pointed out that within the ethical universe of FreeDarko, a Jordan who isn’t always an obedient and polished corporate spokesman is less a villain than a hero, or perhaps best of all “an anti-hero” (which was cool, because that after all is the topic of Shoals upcoming lecture). He’s the one shaking up the comfortable, and their comfortable narratives. So I kind of spilled the beans.

But the students weren’t resistant to the idea anyway. On the contrary they seemed into it. They unanimously agreed that it was a good idea to split Jordan up into two Jordans. And they seemed intrigued by the characterization of the young Jordan; maybe the way some teenagers are intrigued by stories of the time their parents first got drunk, or smoked weed. I told them some stories about the Bad Boys and the rivalry between Isiah and Michael, which seemed to interest them more than any other stories I’ve ever shared with them.

Toward the end of class we got the point in the text that most fascinates me (and, I was pleased, fascinated them as well). But we didn’t get as much time on it as I wanted, so I want to do a bit more thinking about it here. Speaking of the transition, where Jordan began to give up the dunk for the jump shot, Shoals writes: “The dunk takes an instant and an eternity; it’s both completely frivolous and totally domineering, a flash of light so blinding and brief that it might as well have never happened. A shot was the stuff of narrative; it was itself a story with a built-in arc, climax, and resolution. It also served as the perfect punctuation to any possession, game, season, or career.”

The first thing the students and I both thought about this was that it was a stroke of hoops culture genius to yoke together two kinds of shot – dunk and jumper – with two forms of expression: the exclamation, let us say, and the narrative. Within the overall argument of the chapter, Shoals point is that Michael made a choice to alter his game, and his image, not only to win titles but to become the stuff of official NBA history.

It is to say that Michael’s transition from the high-flying solo dunker that we watched in class – all run-outs and isos – to the Triangle-playing, Phil-obeying, jump shooting team player that won 6 titles in 8 years was not only effective on the court in making his team more successful and not only more effective, thereby, in cementing his place as the consensus Greatest of All Time. It was also effective as a – admittedly probably unintentional -- poetic tactic whereby he made his game more amenable to narrative; narrative, which, after all is essential to the circulation of legend and its transmutation into the concrete forms of Official History.

I think about the fireworks. I think about the “oohs” and “aahs” in class. And I see perfectly what Shoals is saying. There’s no way to build a history out of those exclamations. They are, as I had felt in class, little more than a baby’s first words. Significant as such, but with little staying power, like leftover pieces of a puzzle we have lost; or the screws leftover after assembling some piece of furniture.

In this case, as Shoals already pointed out earlier in the chapter the Story of Michael’s Greatness borrows a specific narrative trajectory, well known to lit crit types like me: the bildungsroman, or novel of formation. In that novelistic form, the protagonist, usually a talented and energetic, but raw, provincial comes to the big city, to the center of culture in his universe. There, little by little, he is formed, shaped at once by his own ambition to be recognized by that culture and by the demands that culture makes of those who would be recognized by it. In the end, the individual accepts the prevailing ethos of the culture in exchange for recognition by it and that ethos is thereby affirmed.

According to Shoals, Michael, the brutally talented individual, eventually works hard, learns (from the Master Phil Jackson no less) how “less is more” (see the graphic in the chapter that shows how the Bulls win totals rise each year as Jordan’s scoring average drops), subordinates himself for the team and, in the end, wins titles and the eternal admiration of all.

As Obi Wan says to Darth Vader, “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.” Something like that is the deal the young Jordan strikes with the old Jordan. If you agree not to score 37 points per game for your whole career (which is an abomination to the game), then you can win titles with obscene ease, drain a few legendary game winning jumpers, and we will never, ever forget you. Young Michael lowers his light sabre, folds his hands across his chest, and is launched into hoops immortality.

I’m totally down with all this and think it does a brilliant job of rescuing some promising castoffs from the side of the road of history. I’m reminded of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s recognition that there is “no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” He meant that all that we remember, all that we celebrate as triumph is simultaneously a defeat for someone else, a record of something or someone having been crushed and tossed to the side. Accordingly, he recommended a way of thinking about history whereby those fragments might be gathered up. They might not ever form a standard narrative, but they could, with care, be held together, and presented as a kind of alternative to that standard narrative and a reminder that what took place was neither inevitable, nor one sided, nor without some struggle and violence.

Shoals here has presented the fragments left behind, the McDonald’s wrappers that Jordan and the NBA and hoops culture as a whole threw out the window as they tore town the Interstate at breakneck speed toward individual immortality and league global domination. It reminds me of the difference between Old Elvis and Young Elvis, between Old Marx and Young Marx and makes me think that Jordan, thanks to Shoals, gets like so few others to have it both ways: to have died young and so become immortal, and to have lived out and fulfilled his promise in the established world and so to have that immortality narrativized. Jordan is James Dean and Laurence Olivier; Maurice Stokes and Kareem Abdul Jabbar. Maybe that is what it is to be the Greatest of All Time: to dunk and shoot the jumper. And I can’t really improve on that version of the story.

But I’d like to extend it with some wondering. I’m thinking of the dunk as the monosyllabic exclamation. And I’m thinking of the smooth, inevitable jump shot as the narrative of ineluctable triumphant conformity. But then I’m thinking of the video we watched. 14 dunks, 2 jump shots. But there were 8 other shots that were neither dunks nor jump shots. What is their discursive equivalent?

They were Jordan taking off somewhere within the general vicinity of the basket, leaving behind some earthbound defenders, encountering other, rising, obstacles in mid flight, fragments of bodies – arms, and hands – floating into his space, and Michael’s response: the body beginning to turn away from the basket and the defender, or, the knees drawing up toward the abdomen and the ball extending in one hand, he may begin to float beneath the basket; in either case, Michael designs and creates a physical space that he occupies alone, as he designs and creates it, in order to get the clear shot. Really, it is a space just for his left or right hand and the ball since that is all he needed to have cleared.

These plays, which are what I most remember of Jordan’s career, seem to me to carry the power of narrative unfolding, like a jumper, but without the foregone, prewritten character of that more predictable and repeatable shot. If these are part of what Shoals means by the “brash, brilliant doodles” of the chapter’s title, they might also be seen, in poetic terms, as Surrealist exquisite corpse prose exercises in which the story begin by one individual is continued by another and finished by yet another and nobody really knows how it will end until it has ended and then, and only then, will it have looked inevitable.

And that makes me realize that, whatever their differences, both the early Jordan dunk and the late Jordan jump shot share a sense of inevitability. But before one of the myriad variations on a layup that he improvised bounces around and drops in, before Michael lands in a cat like, thief like crouch, surrounded by defenders shaking their heads befuddled, before space once again becomes one, and grounded, and shared by us all – before all that, there is the dilated moment of extended exclamation, and wonder, and invested uncertainty: we don’t know how it will end, but it doesn’t matter, because we already care, it is already amazing, just as it is, a perfect slice of pure invention in process.

Dream Week: Clutch City Revisited

FD's Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History will 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.

Brown Recluse, Esq. is a founding member of the FreeDarko collective and one of the authors of The Undisputed Guide.

One of Jacob’s illustrations in the new book shows Michael Jordan’s immense shadow looming over the other stars of his generation, including one Hakeem Olajuwon. Bomani made the argument earlier this week, but were it not for Jordan, Olajuwon would likely be remembered as the towering figure of the 1990s NBA. Jordan haunts almost every aspect of Olajuwon’s legacy, in specific ways, as well as the more abstract, such as the way that Jordan's hegemony over the league altered our standards for greatness. A key aspect of Jordan's legend is the series of momentous game winners he made, including The Shot (indeed, it’s the jumping off point for an essay in the new book), The First Shot (in the 1982 NCAA Championship Game), The Final Shot (over Byron Russell in the 1998 Finals), or any number of instances where Jordan stepped up and hit a jumper to clinch a victory in the game’s final minutes. Those shots have come to define not only Jordan, but greatness itself. Kobe and every other aspirant to the throne live for those moments where they can prove that they too are clutch, for they realize its centrality to the mission.



A recent NBA.com article listed the top six clutch players of today, which essentially doubles as the biggest stars in the League, defining them as "those players taking most of the last shots." When the stat geeks crunch the numbers to determine who is the most clutch, they look for "game winning shot opportunities".* And when hoops observers rank the most clutch players of all time, they list Dream’s former associate Robert Horry, but not Olajuwon, because Big Shot Rob's clutchness also fit this definition.

A look back at the Rockets' two title runs reveals a great many clutch moments of the Jordan variety. Horry was responsible for some, but certainly not all, of them. Of note are his game-winning jumper in the final seconds of Game 1 of the 1995 Western Conference Finals against the Spurs, as well as his key bucket against the Magic in Game 3 of the 1995 Finals.

Other Rockets who stepped up in the playoffs include Sam Cassell, who scored the last seven Rocket points to clinch Game 3 of the 1994 Finals in New York, a performance Sam Smith of the Chicago Tribune proclaimed "probably the biggest for a rookie in the NBA Finals since Magic Johnson's 42-point performance in the deciding game of 1980." Big balls indeed.

Or maybe you recall Mario Elie’s "Kiss of Death" three in Game 7 of the 1995 Western Conference Semifinals against the Suns to put the Rockets up by 3 with 7.1 seconds to play.

A Mad Max guy? You'll make the case for Vernon Maxwell, who hit four of four from distance in the first quarter of Game 5 of the 1994 Western Conference Finals to knock out the Jazz.

Carolina fans like myself fondly remember Kenny Smith’s seven threes against the Magic in Game 1 of the 1995 Finals, including the dagger that sent the game to overtime.



The clutch shots piled up for the Rockets over those two years, earning Houston the nickname "Clutch City," but overlooked in all of this is the most clutch Rocket of them all: Hakeem the Dream. The wide open threes that rained down during that era were made possible in no small part by the interior dominance of Olajuwon. He commanded a huge amount of attention and still managed to up his scoring average from the regular season, averaging 33 points per game in the 1995 playoffs, while also significantly increasing his assists. Cassell admitted, in a rare moment of humility, "How hard can it be, setting up The Man?'' Or conversely, how hard can it be when you're set up by The Man?

In addition to his offensive dominance, Olajuwon owned the paint on defense, grabbing vital rebounds and blocking shots at pivotal moments in the game. The most memorable of these was a play as clutch as any Jordan jumpshot: the anti-gamewinner in Game 6 of the 1994 NBA Finals. It's a moment Knicks fans know all too well. With 7.6 seconds on the clock and down two, the Knicks inbound the ball to John Starks, who gets a screen from Ewing, dribbles to his left, pulls up for the jumper....and is blocked by Olajuwon! Dream had come over on the switch and managed to recover just enough to get his fingertips on the ball, thus sending the ball off course and preserving the 86-84 victory and extending the series to Game 7.



Truth be told, the Block has been the subject of its own "Where Will Amazing Happen This Year?" commercial and is hardly an obscure moment, but it still somehow fails to capture the imagination in the same way as Jordan's jumpers, or even those of Olajuwon's own teammates. So it goes for Dream's greatness, which may not have been as flashy as some of his contemporaries, but which still deserves to shine its own light.

(*To be fair, 82games.com's list of “clutch” stats does include all types of production, including blocks and rebounds. However, the most clutch shot blockers on the list are Andray Blatche and Brendan Haywood, neither anyone’s idea of a hero. By contrast, the leading clutch scorers—LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, Carmelo Anthony—are exactly who we talk about when we talk about clutchness and therefore greatness.)

Dream Week: Over the Mansion of Knowledge

FD's Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball History will 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.

Bomani Jones is the host of "The Morning Jones" on The Score on Sirius Channel 98, a contributor to ESPN.com's Page 2, and occasional talking head. After years of writing on sports, music, culture and politics, Bomani has served as an on-air personality since January 2008 and joined The Score in 2010. You can follow him on Twitter.

Before I start, let me stipulate that Michael Jordan is the best. Any time you talk about '80s and '90s basketball, you've got to say that first, like saying you're saved in front of a church. Otherwise, they'll think you're a heathen.

Especially when you plan to say something that maybe, just maybe, will come across as blasphemous.



Here it goes: forgive me, but can we please stop saying the Bulls would have won eight championships in a row had Jordan not retired in 1993?

For one, it discounts the tenuous nature of the basketball universe, how one change can throw everything out of whack. And, how after three full postseasons in a row and an Olympic run, even a superhero might get hurt.

Then there's the big part--have you ever heard of Hakeem Olajuwon?

It was he that was drafted No. 1 in the 1984 Draft and, unlike Sam Bowie, he didn't come with the lingering regret of passing on Jordan. It was Olajuwon that got his team to the NBA Finals in his second season, five seasons before Jordan finally conquered the Pistons.

And more importantly, he was the dominant center of his era, the best in an era that featured five Hall of Fame (or soon-to-be Hall of Fame) centers in or entering their primes. Of of them, he was the most singular. He was a power forward with quickness wings would kill for and a presence traditional pivots couldn't match. He controlled the lane at a shade under 6-10, and his repertoire of post moves made him just as unstoppable as Jordan (either you're unstoppable or you're not; there are no degrees).

Jordan vs. Olajuwon is the forgotten “what if.” What if the Bulls had to deal with a top notch center in the NBA Finals, which they never had to do in their six runs? What if Bill Cartwright and Horace Grant had to deal with a dynamic center, rather than a top-notch yeoman like Patrick Ewing? What if Olajuwon, as prideful and vindictive as Jordan, had a chance to exact a series worth of revenge against the team that broke his orbital bone three years prior?



We don't ask those because Michael Jordan would never lose a series. Maybe he wouldn't, but if any team could have slain the juggernaut, it was the nondescript outfit that won the '94 championship in Jordan's absence. I could point to the Rockets' record against the Bulls in the '90s, better than any other team's. Or I could point to the mercurial insanity of Vernon Maxwell, which assured that at least one person in the building wasn't scared, a stark contrast to the perpetual echo of Dan Majerle calling for help in the '93 Finals while Jordan put up over 40 points per game.

But the real answer stood in the middle. Olajuwon was just as averse to losing as Jordan and, more importantly, just as intense and singular on the floor. Undersized centers don't lead the NBA in rebounding twice or put up 12 consecutive 20-10 seasons without those qualities. The same fuel that pushed Jordan to carry the Bulls to immortality helped turn Dream from the league's biggest hothead--notorious for telling referees to “suck his d*ck” when he didn't like a call in his early days--to an unstoppable force. As no team had an answer for Jordan, the Bulls had none for Dream, other than the point of Cartwright's elbows.

For all his greatness, the only thing Jordan could do to help stop Olajuwon would be to leave a shooter wide open for 3. That was the trade team after team made against the Rockets, and it didn't work out well enough for any of them. What could a 6-6 guard do to counteract the Dream Shake? What could he do to bring out the man in Grant, who was too scared to consider shooting on the Bulls' last possession in the '93 Finals (he threw that hot potato to John Paxson)?

Is this convincing? It probably won't be. I could break out a computer simulation, and you wouldn't believe that, either, and that's the difficulty of playing the “what if” game on something like this. However, considering no one has won four straight NBA titles since 1966, the presumption of another ring for Chicago doesn't make sense. The '93 title team wasn't as good as the previous two, and it couldn't win home-court advantage in the East, let alone the NBA Finals (which they did not have in the '98 NBA Finals, either). The wear and tear of playing over 100 basketball games per season was enough to creep up on any team.



The end result of that conclusion, however, is a devaluation of Olajuwon. He was the second-best player of his time, behind Jordan. But Jordan sucks so much air out of the room that few even bother to think about who comes behind him. There's His Airness, then there's everything else, and those things that happened without Jordan in the house didn't matter.

Including two championships.

I've never been able to figure out exactly how that works. Does the Sixers' fo-fo-fo title count because Jordan was still in Chapel Hill? Do Tim Duncan's first and the first two Shaq/Kobe titles count since Jordan was taking a break? Hell, what about Kobe's fifth?

From what I can tell, only Dream's rings lack that luster. Only they come with an asterisk, even more so than the Spurs' lockout league title. As a result, Dream loses luster. Who gets less credit for back-to-back titles with matching Finals MVPs? What other center was the best of his time and somehow gets forgotten when listing the best of the best of his time, let alone all-time? And what player ever had that damn Shake, a junkballer's arsenal coming at 95 miles per hour?

But just as Jordan never won a title over a great big man, the great big man never even got a chance against the greatest on the biggest stage. Had he, perhaps these questions go away. Maybe a weary Bulls team would fall to the Rockets (or maybe even the Knicks), leaving Dream to give high-fives under confetti as Jordan walked off with his head down for the first time since 1990.



But as long as these questions linger, Olajuwon remains underrated. His accomplishments look great on his resume, but mean nothing in our memories. The title is the holy grail, and his are the only ones widely believed to not count because that other guy was Michael Jordan.

Well, this guy was Hakeem Olajuwon, and that meant more than any foe Jordan faced. And no matter what your memory says, that counted for a helluva lot.

THE TRIOLOGY: He Never Loved You

When Craggs did Durant, (my response, if you're interested) he asked us to acknowledge that no athlete is without ego. The nature of competition practically demands it, even if you're on an offensive line -- one big chain reaction where credit, and blame, ping-pong back and forth with only minimal concern for the point of origin. A point guard runs his team; leadership like that practically demands self-assurance and charisma. Durant, supreme scorer who holds the entire Thunder squad together, has more than quiet confidence going for him. When Durant says he wants to be remembered as the greatest ever, it may be more about process than entitlement. He's motivating himself through the belief that the goal is within reach.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: there's a modesty and restraint to Durant that sets him apart from other superstars. Yet there's simply no way to look on Durant mid-game and not see something vicious, even tormented, in his eyes. Sometimes, Tim Duncan gets riled in the playoffs; otherwise, he glides along the pathways to victory with a detachment often mistaken for disinterest. That in no way describes what it's like to watch Kevin Durant play. He possesses all the swagger of his peers, it's just been sublimated, or shoved deep down inside so it's even more combustible. Durant isn't a throwback to some genteel sporting past. But, it should be noted, that past never really existed the way people want it to today.

We can all safely assume that Durant doesn't stroll through the OKC mall thinking he's the baddest. In a twist that must intrigue David Stern, this NBA backwater has turned into an incubator, or haven, for players not overly interested in the glamorous life or the other distractions their job brings. Yet the intensity of his play can be unnerving, turning a smooth, thoughtful game into something downright spooky. Folks sometimes dare to call Durant the heir to Jordan's demeanor, but it make more sense triangulate him with MJ and Kobe (once he found his own voice). Kobe said he was "chasing perfection"; he never said that he had achieved it. To be the player he wanted to be, he had to always be peering over that next horizon. For Durant, those horizons are a successions of MJ-like carnage.

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

This Radio is On Fire

To start this episode, Ken and Dan provide some suggestions on how NBA fans can pass the month of March, and talk about Michael Jordan buying the Bobcats.

They are then joined by the new lead blogger at Yahoo!'s Ball Don't Lie, Trey Kerby. They talk a bit about his new job, and how he plans to keep the awesomeness rolling there at BDL.

They also talk about the Bulls, the greatness of Michael Jordan as a player, and come up with a new movie idea starring some unexpected NBA stars. In the process, they come up with a new phrase that they hope you'll all use from now on.

Really, it's your perfect post-trade-deadline, pre-playoffs, 20-games-left-in-the-season, early March NBA podcast. You can't not go wrong!

Be careful, it's hot:

Songs from the episode:

"I Got A Thing, You Got A Thing, Everybody Got A Thing" - Funkadelic
"The New" - J Dilla
"I'm New Here" - Gil-Scott Heron
"Greatest Man Alive (Man's Game Mix)" -Steinski
"One Two" - Cool Kids
"New Frontier" - Antipop Consortium
"Take A Rest" - Gang Starr

My Best Worst Friend

Had some kind of inexact deja vu as I read this story yesterday (emphasis added):

While Jordan declined to speak to reporters, he did plenty of talking on the court.

Needling Henderson relentlessly for being from Duke, the North Carolina product kept clanging jumpers off the rim as Henderson quickly won the first shooting game.

But then Jordan, wearing jeans and sneakers, started getting hot. He hit a free throw with his eyes closed to take the lead in the second game.

"What do you think, I just dunked my whole career?" Jordan asked Henderson after making a 3.

Henderson remained stone-faced when Jordan hit another outside jumper.

"You've got to miss eventually," Henderson told him.

"That's what Cleveland said," replied Jordan, referring to his last-second shot for Chicago in 1989 to win a playoff series over the Cavaliers.

I once played HORSE with Michael Jordan. It was in the summer of 2008. My time in New York was winding down, and I could easily take an extra hour or two for lunch as necessary. You don't forget the details of playing basketball with the man who's done it better than anyone else, and I can recall vividly that fateful Wednesday in June

The day started like any other. I got up, got dressed, rode the subway, and went to work. I peeled off my sports coat as the office air conditioning replaced the uncomfortable humidity of a sweltering trip to midtown. My desk was overflowing with papers from various assignments I was in the midst of closing out. I sat down at my desk, leaned back in my chair, sighed a few times as I considered what I wanted to accomplish that day, and then undertook the arduous task of checking my email. Back then, I was still responsible for supervising some time-sensitive reports that had to go out early, and that meant a glut of email greeted me every morning, seven days a week.

I got through my email, I got some paperwork in order, I moved on to other administrivia, and suddenly it was 11:15. I got up for a cup of water and some small talk with a few office friends. As we were chatting, my right pant pocket started vibrating, so I reached in, pulled out my phone, and hit the talk button without really considering the caller ID.



"Is this that flaming f***ot Joey?" a baritone grumbled through the phone. "You there, you punk bitch?" I don't like the f-word, and I don't like being called a "punk bitch," but I couldn't stifle my smile because nothing had changed: Michael was on the phone. I excused myself from the conversation with my colleagues, and I ducked into a vacant conference room.

During the bright days of June, I like to work with the lights off because the sunlight is adequate and rooms stay cooler when light bulbs aren't burning. So I staggered into the relative dark of a conference room and sat down as though I didn't want anyone to know I was in there. Only after I'd taken a seat did I realize how off-balance--literally and figuratively--I was feeling. I didn't hear from Michael all that often because I didn't (and still don't) have the bankroll for Vegas, strip clubs get old quickly, my golf game needs work, and I have never really gotten along so well with Charles Oakley. I loved him as a player, but his Captain Surly routine and Mean Girls-like focus on being the gatekeeper of MJ's inner circle make him less than affable. I have ceded that territory to Oak, though it means I don't talk to MJ much.

I hadn't really said anything since answering the phone because Michael just kept going. "That's right, motherfucker, I'm in town, I'm heading to the gym later, and I'm looking to whoop someone's ass. You know you owe me one. You know it, bitch. So get your shit, leave that cute little job of yours for a few hours, and come meet me at the gym."



I "owed" him one only because to beat Michael at anything is to forever arouse his anger. You saw his Hall of Fame induction, right? My transgression, my horrible offense at Michael's expense, dated back to when we first met, in the Detroit airport during the summer of 2002. I was flying out to Colorado and MJ was going to Los Angeles. He'd been in Detroit for some kind of charity golf event at Oakland Hills Country Club. I was there because I was still a student at the University of Michigan and had to attend a wedding right before classes resumed. We were both flying Northwest and a patch of that violent, unpredictable summertime Midwest weather rolled through, grounding everyone for a few hours. I had accumulated enough frequent flyer miles to travel in style for a change, and I hit the rich-person concierge area to wait out the storm. I walked in and saw Michael sitting on a couch with one hand on a cigar, the one bearing his wedding ring on some woman's thigh, and his eyes burning a hole through the television.

I always knew that Michael had a gambling problem, but I didn't understand its full dimension until I sat down across from him and got roped into his lunacy as he indulged his famously competitive zeal. The sky doesn't usually turn from blue and sunny to black and foreboding over the course of three minutes, but that's what had happened on this day, and the television was tuned to the Weather Channel so that travelers could follow the storm and adjust their plans. I guess that Michael had told the woman he was clutching that he could predict the weather--as though Michael Jordan needs pickup schtick--and fixing to mount the illusion of scarcity, she bet him a drink and phone number that she could beat him at it. Obviously, that got Michael going, in pretty much every sense of that well-worn expression. As I plopped down on the leather couch, he and the woman had just begun, and they both seemed eager to share their game with a stranger who could admire it and maybe cough up some cash.

"Excuse me--would you like to play a game with myself and my friend here?" Michael asked me.

"I'm sorry? A game? What's the game?" I could barely get out my response as my mouth tightened up into a grin that obviated any need for the usual aren't-you-such-and-such-celebrity routine. Michael could tell instantly that I was intrigued, that I was in awe, and that I was in.



He told me that I could buy into the game for whatever cash I had in my pocket--turned out to be $127. Small stakes for MJ, but nothing kills time like gambling, and Michael is an addict. No stakes are too small. In return for my cash collateral, I'd have a chance to win twice what I'd put up, and to exchange phone numbers with Michael and his lady friend. All I had to do was beat Michael and the woman at a series of prop bets that ranged all over, from how fast the storm was moving, to how cold it would be in Fort Lauderdale that night, to how much rain would fall in Ohio.

Over the next three hours, Michael, the woman, and I went back and forth, talking shit, getting drunk, and making outrageous bets about the most mundane and innocuous meteorology. When the clouds finally parted and planes began taking off again, I'd won 28 bets, I'd earned $254, I'd stored some random woman's number in my phone, and I'd become friends with Michael Jordan. Of course, he also stopped talking to me for 45 minutes after I properly predicted that the heat index in Mesa, AZ would hit 114 that Friday. He had said 113, and I was closest without going over (116 was the answer).

When I eventually landed in Colorado that night, I texted Michael that I'd enjoyed meeting him, and that he wouldn't believe the weather in Denver. He wrote back, "Eat a dick, motherfucker. I'll call you when I am next in town. I'm collecting my $254. GTG. Just left mile-high club." I assumed he was messing around, and that our paths would never cross again. He's Michael Jordan, and I'm me. But sure enough, about a year later, Michael got up with me in New York. He even cajoled me into buying him dinner just to stick it to me and because he could. From then on, we were friends.



I've never been forgiven for having had the temerity to win our bet in DTW, though, and when MJ called me to play ball that day a few years ago, I knew what was in store. The phone call alone was more than enough proof. What 45-year-old man unleashes a torrent of profanity and ignorance to entice his friends into playing basketball with him? This afternoon gym session with Michael was going to be the usual--he'd make shots, he'd make money, he'd make fun of everyone until he sensed he'd all but broken your spirit to live. Then he'd tell you to stop "being a bitch," and he'd suggest smoking cigars and meeting women. By 2008, Michael was divorced, so it wasn't as uncomfortable for me when we'd have a guys night. Tiger and Charles and Charles never seemed to care, and if they did, none of them ever said anything to Michael. Certainly not Tiger. Neither did I, but despite the way we met and everything I'd long assumed about him, I could never get past the cheating. By the time Michael and I played HORSE that June Wednesday, my guilt-by-association had gone away, and that made things easier.

As suddenly as he'd gotten on the call, he got off it. "Alright. 1:30 at the usual spot. Come ready, Joey. I'm gonna make it rain on your ass like you were Eric Smith." I hung up and walked out of the conference room. My friends had dispersed, so I returned to my desk without having to say anything. Though I've never lied about my friendship with Michael, I've also never been quick to bring it up. How can I possible explain to people that I am friends with one of the ten most famous people on the planet? With Michael Jordan?! Who would believe that? It sounds crazy, and it is. I am writing about it today only because this Gerald Henderson news has been making the rounds, and it's so funny that Michael just always does Michael.

Back at my desk, I quietly finished out some short-term assignments and emailed my boss that I had to run some errands and would be gone for a few hours. Around 12:30, I neatly stacked all of the outstanding paper still littering my workspace and headed out the door. As usual, the humidity outside was heavy, and it felt as though the air were filled with some viscous liquid that was inescapable. The subway only made it worse, and I was panting when I walked into my apartment. I quickly threw on my basketball gear and went back out. That day, I was going to play in my white-and-French-blue Jordan XIIs because they matched my blue Knicks shorts. Michael likes it when I show up in Knicks gear because it reminds him "of a career spent tea bagging Patrick." Who am I to deny Michael Jordan a basketball indulgence?



Another subway ride left me at the gym. Michael Jordan can't play at local parks or public centers, of course, so we always go to a private facility. I'd mention where, but Michael still hits this place on a regular basis, and I already have blown up his spot enough in this post.

I walked into the gym, and it was eerily quiet. The room was still and dry, permeated by a plastic smell given off by some new padding along the walls. Michael was lying on the floor stretching, and I didn't see anyone else around. He told me that Oak was on the way, and that a bunch of other guys were going to be joining up later. In the interim, though, he wanted to get warmed up. In classic Michael fashion, he cast himself as the magnanimous fellow making a generous gesture. "I'll tell you what--we'll play HORSE. That way you won't wanna go home crying too quickly. I know you can't dunk, but I've seen that scrawny ass of yours hit some shots." To be friends with Michael is to forever indulge his vanity and his inward focus, but his biting sense of humor and willingness to abandon judgment once you've earned his trust make him seductive all the same. He's the sort of person whom you can't quit very easily. The fleeting moments of fun always pull you back before his pettiness creates too large a void.

Hoping above all else to not pull something, I stretched a little as Michael and I revved up the playfully adversarial banter. I can't talk shit about my basketball game to him for obvious reasons, so I always have to go elsewhere. I was gonna be on my knees; he was gonna be in a paternity suit. I had ruined my chance with some woman; he had ruined the Central Florida athletic department. I picked the wrong day to mess with him; he picked Kwame Brown. I couldn't get one letter off of him; he had letters S, T, and D to spare. Finally I was warmed up and ready to go.

The game started simply at the free-throw line. I got to shoot first, and I chose a spot from which I was confident. Establishing a rhythm, however it happens, is crucial when playing against Michael. Be it HORSE or a real game, you have to see yourself making a few shots if you're going to stay on the court. He answered, and he did it with his eyes closed. "That's some Mutombo shit right there, Joey!" Yes, we all remember.

Next, I walked over to the baseline and put down a 16 footer. Michael matched that, too. If it seems like I was choosing basic shots...it's because I was. As much fun as it would be to beat Michael Jordan at HORSE with an array of specialty shots and high-difficulty conversions, that's not really within the realm of possibility for a mediocre player who has spent most of his life doing things other than playing basketball. It's especially hard when playing against the greatest player of all time.



My game came unraveled after I missed my next shot, a three from the extended elbow on which I called bank. The ball did bank, only it caromed so hard off the backboard that it missed the rim and wound up back at half court on the other side of the floor. "Damn, Joey. That was uglier than my divorce settlement!" I told you that Michael can be fun. "Now we're gonna separate the men from the bitch-ass motherfuckers."

Michael walked underneath the basket, leaped out toward the back wall, spun in the air, and easily put the ball in the hoop after floating it over the backboard. Before I even tried, Michael was hooting at me, "Can't spell Hoey without an H." He was right, both grammatically and in a basketball sense. I got an H and fell on top of myself in the process. As I was getting up, Michael was strolling back toward midcourt, and he stopped one step from the line. Without turning back toward the basket on which we were shooting, he lofted the ball over his head with one hand, and it fell through the basket without hitting the rim. Then Michael shrugged at me and said, "That's what Portland saw when they didn't respect my J. I bet you didn't think I could do that." Really, this is what we're talking about?

I was quickly a HO. R and S came on the next two exchanges when I failed to make a three from my knees, and then when I saw the ball lip out after Michael insisted that I mimic his famous layup against the Lakers. If you're keeping track, I made my first two shots, missed my third, picked up four letters on the next four shots, and endured references to faded glory from 1991 and 1992, a full 17 and 16 years earlier. The sad thing is that Michael almost always talks about or somehow invokes these moments. Reading what he said to Gerald Henderson the other day compelled me to share this story because while Michael's post-career descent into a certain lowlife hedonism is well known, his enduring competitiveness and depressing inability to let go remain beyond tangible comprehension for most people. This is a man who wouldn't allow me to have water on the day of my Gerald Henderson experience until I was at HORSE. He explained, "Craig Hodges used to want water breaks, and look what happened to him."

Luckily for me, I am not too proud to cast my lot with someone like Craig--whom MJ and I once ran into on the street in Chicago; it was really awkward--and the sweet rapture came soon after I was at HORS. (Or, as Michael said, "Get that Pietrus-ass French 'HORS' shit out of here." A reference to an active player was actually encouraging, so I didn't even mind that it was an insult, and that as far as insults go, it was about as weak as anything Michael has ever summoned.) Michael's next shot was a straight ahead three, something I could convert. The charity was limited, though, because after I matched him, he returned to the spot from which I had missed a bank three and effortless executed a spinning fadeaway off the board. Game over. HORSE for me.

"That's the shot I hit to beat James Worthy after my first practice at UNC," Michael said. "I challenged him to a game of one-on-one, and I nailed that shot just to show him that I could. He said 'No way you hit this' as it was in the air. And after I put it down, I told him 'That's what Leroy Smith said to me.'"

As you can see, some things about Michael have never changed, and apparently, they never will.



(As you might not be able to see, this post is a work of fiction. But what does it say about Michael that it seems so believable? -- Ed.)

How Dew U Wan Tit?

Seriously, fuck Lost. Go to the doctor. Read my ultimate Gil outpouring.

Sing With The Pollen

This post follows directly from Dr. LIC's consideration of myth in the NBA, so read that first if you expect to be on my level. Other suggested reading: Pasha Malla on "Where Amazing Happens" during last year's playoffs.

A few weeks ago, I fired off an ill-advised email pitch to an editor, proposing a comparison of divinity in the NBA vs. other sports. The gist: In other leagues, God reveals himself in the form of miracles, an external agent that, no matter what the skill level of the players involved, must intervene in order for The Immaculate Reception, The Catch, The Motor City Miracle, The Shot Heard 'Round the World, or Bill Buckner's Folly, to occur. The NBA, on the other hand, attaches this hand of heaven to players. The Shot is amazing, but there's no question that Jordan and Jordan alone made it happen. That's why we fear him so. Similarly, nicknames like "Black Jesus," "The Chosen One," "Magic", "The Answer," and "The Dream" imply the otherworldly, if not the supernatural. They are the agents, they make "amazing" happen.

How to reconcile this, then, with the writings of Dr. LIC and Pasha? I agree that, as conventionally understood, myth just doesn't adhere to the NBA in the same way as it does football, baseball, or even college hoops, and that forcing that modality onto the Association just feels wrong. What we see, and how we remember it, is always dense, less distant, and despite the prevalence of the highlight, harder to boil down or distill. The highlight may be susceptible to this treatment, but it's worth noting that compared to still photography, the highlight is more clamorously here-and-now—the way, I think, NBA action and memory is best understood. It's not so much about marketing as it is the proper cognitive framework. In the same way that watching a game depends on uninterrupted attention, THE MOMENT can only be abstracted so much.

Unless, of course, we're talking about Jordan. MJ asked in one fairly recent ad if he wrecked the NBA. Certainly, in terms of introducing both myth and split-second history into the fan lexicon, he did. Never mind that Jordan's own myth falls apart if you whitewash his early years with Chicago—he was a menace, not just a young buck paying his dues—and disregard what was being said about Jordan by people who had seen him outside of Dean Smith's system. Or that, as Pasha points out, the highlights that define Jordan's career have been transformed through sheer force of marketing. The Jumpman, iconic as it is, doesn't really capture that dunk. It's just the most convenient way to communicate it as product. The same goes for Jordan-over-Ehlo, or Russell. Bird and Magic might have made the league palletable again, but they existed very much in basketball-time. It took Jordan to really put things over the top, due in large part to Nike's turning him into a myth, and walking bit of history, a la baseball or football.



That's why the NBA wrestles with the problem of mythology—its greatest player ever distorted the sport's true meaning in a clever commercial ploy designed to compete with the NFL and MLB. Fans like myths. But they're not a natural fit for basketball. Jordan fooled us, and it's unfortunate that, to paraphrase Dr. LIC, Kobe and Bron have left to contend with his example. Chasing his example on the court is no problem—it's the distortion of everything else involved in stardom, wrought by Jordan that's left them flummoxed. And, I'd say, made the NBA seem so less impressive in his wake. It's because MJ changed the way we consumed the league, what we expected of subsequent players. Of course, we forgot that Jordan was a process, even his construction as a corporate entity. We were at once too smart and too stupid to appreciate the NBA on its own terms.

This season, I'm not feeling the same prophetic fury I usually do. Bron is Bron, higher than all; Durant will astound us; Kobe's intelligence and discipline can shatter you just to watch. Wade is spectacular, Chris Paul's a walking clinic where the sweets never stop flowing. But I'm not in full-on manifesto mode. I would ordinarily chalk that up to being overworked, or otherwise burdened. But instead, I've realized that I'm finally coming to see the NBA clearly.

And herein lies the answer to the riddle of divinity. What marks the earlier examples of NBA otherworldiness isn't immanence, but action. I'd go so far as to make that "acts." Players who earn these appelations don't rest on their laurels, they define themselves time and time again through simply unfathomable play. We don't watch superstars with eye toward the past or future, but to see them fully realize the present. Vince Carter's "Half-Man, Half-Amazing" gets at the root of it: These are mere mortals who defy these limitations on a regular basis. Not myths expected to fulfill expectations, or symbols lining up to enter history. The NBA is where, above all else, the experience of watching it unfold in real time, only to be eclipsed minutes later, is the essence of stardom. Casual, disposable, and yet utterly indelible.

We are all witnesses, but that doesn't mean we're not greedy for more.

Unknown Unknowns

I don't know exactly how noz, proprietor of the world's famous Cocaine Blunts, came to tell me he had this record. It was definitely off-hand, like "if I can find it and you're interested, I'll send you a rip." My hand went numb with anticipation, but even that was only a taste of how awesome this is. Well, more how awesome it is that it exists. Happy Hall of Fame, MJ!!!!!!!



MOST PEOPLE PANIC FOR A WAY OUT. BUT MYSELF, I IMAGINE A THOUSAND DIFFERENT WAYS TO GET MYSELF OUT.

Put this right up on the playlist alongside the Ultramag All-Stars intro and Taborn's Manute Bol ode "Block the Ball", another gift from noz.

For reasons I don't get, the DivShare player sometimes turns up blank unless you go to the actual post URL (as opposed to plain old FD.com). Here's a link. Sorry, and someone explain.

I Believe in Windows

Miss me? If you want some Protestant assurance that I'm not abandoning the goal of endless written output, regard The Baseline, or spy on me in coffee shops as I draft chapters of the next book. So yes, the blog lies fallows, but it's not dead, and elsewhere I thrive.

But I did want to drop by my own ghastly quarters to reflect upon something David Falk. That sound a lot like Stalin's Writings: A Critical Perspective. Really though, there's at least one really telling passage in this Washington Times ode to a great man, one who might belong to a bygone era where superstars actually needed agents for all-hands-on-deck negotiating (these days, you can get by with a lawyer once the sneaker contract's set). Regardless, here's the quote that got me thinking:

"Michael Jordan is a very good player. Is he the first best player in basketball history? That's arguable," Boland says. "Is he the first best endorser in basketball history? That's not even a question."

Agents and marketers have copied what Falk refers to as the "Jordan blueprint" - a strategy Tiger Woods, LeBron James and Kobe Bryant have tried to replicate. For all that Falk did to launch Jordan's career off the court, the agent says, "Michael Jordan not only made my career, he made my life.

Kind of boring, I know. But consider this: FreeDarko has long trumpeted on-court action as a function of personality, a symbiotic bond, even. Why wouldn't marketing, or at least public persona, be similarly tied into who players are? Not saying there's a direct correlation, and this might be more about the "how" than the "what." Think about it, though: Maybe Jordan didn't just fit "the blueprint," he was able to inhabit it, because of who he is as a player and as a person. Private, kind of boring, single-minded on the court, a natural at keeping the ferocious murder-mask and Southern gentleman-ly countenance.



Falk made Jordan. Fine. It was a feat of tremendous vision. But, in the same way that Jordan's game allowed for a new dynamism of sneaker marketing, didn't the entire package of grown-up MJ make a particular marketing plan possible? Somehow, this template has been treated as if multiple athletes found it tried-and-true at the same time, despite their differences. When in fact, to imitate this plan with Jordan's (real) personality or (capacity for) persona is to put the cart before the horse.

It was never going to work with Kobe, for the simple fact that Bryant and Jordan could not be further apart as people. Beyond the "intensity on the basketball court" thing. Not coincidentally, I think that Kobe's mature game bears less and less resemblance to Jordan as he's given rein to be his own basketball-industrial complex. LeBron, too, will learn soon. He's funny, outgoing, and mystical in ways Jordan never was. You can't just transpose a strategy that presumes blandness, control, and compartmentalization and assume it makes sense with the player. Tiger, fine, maybe.

Some, most likely those out to murder Kobe Bryant in his sleep, will argue that the young Bryant tried to emulate MJ as a player, as a man, and in ways that went deep enough so as to sync him up with the Falk/Jordan plan. The lesson, though, comes in the fact that eventually it came crashing down, and there were cracks in the fissure well before the rape case.

Marketing is a form of style. Let's just admit that, no matter how corporations may see it, you ultimately can only get so far by expecting an individual to fit a strategic plan crafted in someone else's image. Thus, even on that plane in which the lie is common currency, athletes must be themselves in order to do so in a way that's, well, honest enough to stick.

No Chase in Leaving

Every once in a while, my world stops turning here, but continues elsewhere, meaning that I have one foot in motion and the other at rest. That may make some of you angry, and it's a little awkward for me, but I think it warrants a post in case you don't just love FD for the template.

The big Gatorade gundown: Simple, hella corporate, and yet awakening the competitive spirit I didn't think I had in me. Click on that link and vote for my favorite Jordan moment of all time, so it can end up on a bottle across the nation. For space reasons, they had to cut the part where I suggest MJ finished in this manner to send a message to Bias, who had just had his potential game-winner blocked by Sam Perkins. Not quite the 1992 "eff Drexler" half that Skeet selected, but in the same vein. In case you've never seen it:



At one point, I was thinking of using this web classic:



I've posted it on here multiple times, but what fascinates me is that YouTube has allowed for a rediscovery of early Jordan. This grainy footage of his ninth game, the first time he really exploded as a pro, is quite possibly the most raw example of Michael Jordan, threat to the known universe. And relatively speaking, it might as well have never existed before this video was posted, except as a box score. Certainly, it's only recently that we've been able to drill it into our own heads, to memorize each move and, for me, reassert a past that's quite special in its own right. It's allowed us all to experience a relatively obscure moment as real, even consider it for the canon.

Moving on, the ol' day gig has produced some possible posts of note. I was in a bad mood when I read Dave Berri's "underpaid/overpaid" post, and ended up writing a column about it. Slight slip in terminology notiwthstanding, I think it's a point that had to be made, even if Ziller really hit hardest. I also found out that Berri himself does't think so highly of me, though I suspect he only reads my stuff about him, and might think that everything on FD is by me. Regardless, this blurb is a keeper: "As always happens when I read Bethlehem Shoals, I am left wanting the last few moments of my life back. He generally offers a few personal attacks and then reveals he didn’t quite read what was written."

A commenter suggested that, to paraphrase, I should be sympathetic to Berri because we both look at basketball in an unorthodox way. What do you think?

FURTHER LINKS:

-Can't miss cult classics for 2009-10

-I am confused about J.R. Smith's gang leanings

-Over at Rethinking Basketball, Q. McCall recaps every single conversation we had at the Storm/Mercury game, most of which involved comparing the men's and women's pro games (as style, and product, etc.)

To Hold On Tight We Must Let Go

The days are not good for Allen Iverson. The one-time beacon of personal integrity, triumphal dysfunction, and "fuck the world" stylistic rights currently sits out in the cold. He's hoping some team will look past his recent disappointments, figure several accelerated half-lives have made his legacy less radioactive, and give him a chance to make a roster like a blaxploitation Kevin Costner character. So perhaps now is not the time to launch an entirely new critique of AI.

However, the rise of Twitter has me rethinking that foundation of Iverson's NBA being: his authenticity. Allen Iverson, above all else, was his own man, did what he wanted, and forced the world to accept him on this own terms. This was where he picked up momentum as a hip-hop icon, which is to say, while others screamed "thug", he simply brushed them off as ignorant or sheltered. There's a tendency, even a need, to separate AI the world-historical figure from AI the athletic performer. In both cases, however, Iverson exemplified "realness"—perhaps to a pathological degree, but nonetheless in a way that informed the direction of the league and the players who came up idolizing him as much as Jordan.

Hence, as much as we speak of the post-Jordan days, I myself had become accustomed to the "post-Iverson" age. In this (gulp) dialectic, there seemed to always be a hard edge, or uncompromising bluntness, to be reckoned with. There was Jordan's universal appeal, met head-on by Iverson's populist bluster. The players spat out of this maelstrom were some combination of the two; Allen Iverson came to symbolize a mish-mash of unapologetic ghetto roots, "wrong way" ball, not taking shit from no one, and a wary intelligence that could often be its own worst enemy. Carmelo Anthony, post-Iverson because he was hood plus Magic Johnson's effervescent charm; Gilbert Arenas, idiosyncratic and disruptive as a player and person, but writing his own script with all the whimsy of a Saturday morning cartoon.

Jordan was a sales pitch, Iverson a doctrine. Except that, at the risk of offending a bunch of people, Iverson's persona was itself a posture. This may sound pedestrian, or simplistic, but at what point did we decide that Iverson (or Tupac) wasn't, to some degree, faking it, putting it on, selling us a bill of goods based around a very deliberate refusal to play by the rules? AI was certainly faced with difficult circumstances, and had to make tough decisions about what path to follow. And yet over the long haul, it became as opaque a guise as Jordan's Sphinx-like mask. They may have been polar opposites, but their inflexibility and predictability ultimately made them two sides of the same coin.

Should we bemoan the fact that, in the age of Twitter, authenticity is no longer about any iteration of “the struggle,” or truce between the two sides, but the possibility that individual athletes be both accessible and undeniably themselves? The stakes may have been lowered, and yet better a feed like Rudy Gay’s inform our sense of athlete “realness” than AI’s on-message scowl. Relaxation on its own is empty, taking a stand indefinitely is its own kind of blandness.

Incidentally, anyone who’s seen Iverson in the locker room, or otherwise with his guard down, knows that dude would be a monster on Twitter.

FD Guest Lecture: Thank For the Memories

Today's very special Guest Lecture comes to us from Pasha Malla, author of The Withdrawal Method, All Our Grandfathers Are Ghosts, and a scouting report on Teen Wolf done for our mutual pals at McSweeney's.

Michael Jordan never kicked Craig Ehlo in the head. For years I was sure he did: Cleveland, first round of the 1989 Playoffs, Jordan hits The Shot and hysterical with joy cuts Craig Ehlo down with an accidental boot salute; Ehlo drops like a drop-kicked sack of bricks and the assault is largely ignored—in the making of history, after all, the vanquished are irrelevant. Cue the Legacy. Awesome.

During this year’s Playoffs, The Shot has resurfaced in heavy commercial-break rotation, and each time it plays I’m thrown into painful paroxysms of embarrassment at drunken arguments I’ve had with strangers—“He kicks him, man, I’m telling you. Just watch for it.” But, fuck: Jordan’s Nikes are clearly nowhere near anyone, Ehlo’s collapse is only out of grief and shame, and it turns out I’ve deluded myself for two decades. I don’t feel so bad, though: sure, my Shot-and-Kick was a fabrication, but so is the actual footage.

While nba.com claims, “As the ball nestled through the net, Jordan pumped his fists in jubilation, completing a video highlight for the ages,” this is a moment that has only ever existed in replay. Those watching the game on TV didn’t see Jordan’s celebratory histrionics; the original CBS telecast cut immediately (and bafflingly, in retrospect) to the reaction of then-Bulls coach Doug Collins. If the NBA is to be believed, the popularized version of The Shot ranks with the moon landing and JFK assassination among the great, suspect, live experiences in American television history—regardless that the spread-eagle jump and fist-pumps only surfaced later. But we need a moment to commemorate the birth of a legend, and so the redux has been fed to us and has become, now, how we remember something most of us never saw.



The “Where will amazing happen this year?” ad campaign is weird for a lot of reasons. First, “where” seems an odd choice of interrogatives. The host city or corporate-sponsored stadium hardly seems significant—rather than the victories of teams, to me “amazing” connotes sublime moments of individual athleticism, like The Shot, that linger in our collective memory. (E.g. I have no idea how deep that Bulls team went in the ’89 Playoffs, but I do know, and can explicitly picture, how Jordan hangs in the air, waits for Craig Ehlo to land, and then bangs that jumper.)

“Where” is especially lame when you consider the alternatives: “Who will [make] amazing happen” acknowledges both the simmering potential of superstars and the possibility for unlikely heroes, “when” insinuates suspense-laden expectation, “how” a reverence for physical theatrics, “what” = mystery, and “Why will amazing happen (and why will it matter)?” could even be (existentially, abstractly, and especially if voiced by Werner Herzog) kind of funny. But we get “where”—right.

Anyway, aside from the fact that it’s a clunky non sequitor of a motto, the corresponding commercials make me uncomfortable on a more personal level. I’m of an age, demographic and cultural moment that filters my enjoyment of the NBA, like most things, through a scrim of nostalgia. As a result, I’m routinely compelled from the present to a poignant anchor in the past: the slight shudder of melancholy, for example, I suffer when a former star I grew up loving (Sam Cassell, say) checks in for garbage time at the end of a blow-out. And I like my version of the past just fine. I don’t want it co-opted and fed back to me as advertisements.

Mainly what gets me about WWAHTY? is its perversion of nostalgia. The highlights—shown without context, slowed down, flipped to black and white (= The Past), soundtracked to the sad parts of the score from Amelie—self-consciously create wistfulness they may not warrant. The suggestion that each of these plays is “amazing” relies on us remembering each of them and what, in their respective games, each one meant—whether, for example, that alley-oop to Andrei Kirilenko came late in the fourth quarter with the scored tied or early in the half with Utah up by 20. I’m not a Jazz fan—does such a thing even exist?—so I have no idea.

I watch a lot of basketball and I have to confess that I don’t remember most of the plays in these commercials. Collectively, they feel a bit like a compilation of money shots to the porn enthusiast: glorious moments, for sure, but what about the build-up, where the real drama happens? And even as pure highlights, few strike me as particularly amazing. I see Lebron dunk and Dwayne break ankles and Manu bank lay-ups all the time; without the context to inform these plays, I’m a little lost—blame my ignorance, maybe, or failing mental capacity, but that the NBA is relying on us to imbue these moments with meaning feels not only ostentatious, but counter-intuitive to what really makes playoff basketball so exciting. In the regular season, highlights are fine; but after the 82 are up, it’s all about when the big shots happen—and for that, context is absolutely necessary.

“Remember this?” the WWAHTY? ads seem to demand. “It was important. Remember this.” The whole business smacks of contrivance, but it’s not disingenuous. In fact, nothing could be more revealing and apt than what is articulated through the whole campaign: all of us—the NBA front office and players and coaches and owners and media and fans—want to believe that, with each round of the Playoffs, we are experiencing history.



If we are to believe the marketing campaign that has loomed over and punctuated the past few weeks, we are already living the past: the highlights of the night, the days of our lives, the memories of our future. The NBA isn’t rhetorically asking where amazing will happen; it’s more an open call to players to create moments to be relived, later, in endless replay, and for fans to be ready to acknowledge them. The effect is sort of a living archive, which, at least for me, has been causing some problems, because it’s impossible to figure out what’s genuine.

There was an interesting conversation on this site last year in the wake of the Celtics’ Championship win—and, more so, Kevin Garnett’s. Was his lycanthropic howling— “Anything’s possible!” “I’m certified!” &c.—premeditated, contrived and fake, or was it an authentic expression of emotion? There were arguments; things got heated. Assessing other people’s motivations is always futile, but Garnett was a special case: here was a guy who we’d always believed, whose sincerity was unquestionable, who came correct with the straight real and wept in John Thompson’s lap like a failed son. But, then the made-for-TV moment—and even worse, it felt made-for-replay.

Everything seems to go back to that old Michael Jordan bucket-and-swag—which, keep in mind, but for one savvy cameraman we might have never seen happen. Michael Jordan is history, but also Michael Jordan Is History: his great airy legacy looms over the league and everyone in it. Comparable Greats—Pele, Gretzky—are certainly paragons of individual achievement, yet their shadows don’t loom quite as vastly over soccer and hockey as Mike’s does over the basketball. Maybe it’s because neither has an eponymous “highlight for the ages” that not only defines their careers, but the modern era in their respective sport.

Michael Jordan provides pro ballers more than the archetype for all achievement; he’s created a model for the very idea of legacy—not only in how dominantly you play the game, but how you’re remembered. And having a metonymic, iconic image is imperative to that. So it feels, at least to me, that today’s NBA has created a culture in which players, if they want to be ranked alongside Jordan, or at least recalled in the same breath, need a watershed moment, and they need that moment recorded, and they need that moment replayed—so it’d better be good, and it’d better be theatrical.

It’s the way that this need for performativity manifests in the flow of games that troubles me the most. I shudder at the contrivance of, say, an and-one Lebron James shoulder-shimmy, which seems so concertedly not just mugging for the cameras and fans, but mugging for posterity. And, perhaps most amazingly, that sort of affectedness seems to be trickling down from the league’s top tier to its lesser lights. Even way back in the first round, the unbridled exuberance of a relative nobody like Joakim Noah felt exuberantly put-on. The league needs the wild-looking, sorta foreign youngster with a limited skill-set to have the heart of a hyperactive lion who roars and roars. And Noah—much as I grew to like the guy—seems to recognize that. Good thing we’ve got it on tape!

This sort of cynicism sucks, because I love the Playoffs. I want to believe what I’m seeing is real. But what I don’t want is to have the best moments fed back to me in slo-mo black and white by the league’s marketing department. WWAHTY? replaces the agency of subjective memory with the stagnant banality of fact; it repackages joy as commodity. If they ever were, each of the athletes in those spots is no longer doing anything amazing; they are merely figures in advertisements, reduced to hapless shills. The suggestion seems to be that players who aren’t performing something easily quantifiable as “amazing” will not find their way into a TV spot and, accordingly, will never remembered by anyone.



I think I allowed myself to believe that Michael Jordan kicked Craig Ehlo in the head because back then that sort of bizarre accident actually felt possible—let’s keep things moving and blame pre-adolescent innocence rather than retrospective idealism. But my corrupted memory also makes me think about how excited I’ve gotten when this year’s playoff action has spilled into the unpredictable—Rafer Alston smacking Eddie House on the head, Derek Fisher’s cross-check of Luis Scola—and I feel even sadder. Are eruptions of violence the only time when I let myself feel that I’m not watching programmed automatons, but actual human beings?

Maybe it’s more that I know these are scenes the NBA can’t co-opt, blemishes that the league is in a constant battle to buff and polish out of its pristine product—see the resultant suspensions and ejections. And, when it comes to basketball, I don’t crave or fetishize violence; Vernon Maxwell punching a fan in the face is pretty amazing, in its way, but it’s certainly not a moment in league history that I particularly cherish. No, I just want my memories for myself. And what I don’t want, ever, is to think the stuff I’m playing out in my head (like John Starks’s career-defining dunk on Horace Grant—and MJ, bitch!) is just another commercial.

There’s a weird tension between the celebration I associate with The Shot, which feels absolutely genuine, and the knowledge that I might have never known it happened. In retrospect, it’s more than Michael Jordan’s metamorphosis from showman to winner, but also from man to brand. And while lamenting the commodification of Jordan is a bit like standing in the Ganges and whining that you can’t drink the water, there is still a precious purity to my fantasy about that fabricated replay—after all, Craig Ehlo taking a roundhouse to the temple isn’t the version that’s being played ad infinitum, as a promo for the league.