You Dance and Shake The Hurt (Day 13)

The latest from Yago Colas.

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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




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

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

Dunk You Very Much

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Nothing But Quick

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

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

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

The First Shall Be Last

Read today's Works even if you have a problem with certain other FanHouse material. It's about LeBron and race and sure to get some real howlers in the comments section. Okay, now that we've settled that ... time for some football!

I got back into basketball pretty organically. It just sort of happened one summer. Once it took over my life, it wasn't long before I wanted -- or saw that it made sense to be -- a generalist. Year-round sports, more material to mine, and the ability to hold my own in any basketball convo that, you know, veered off into another pastime. Comparisons are the devil, but if it weren't for parallels, life would have no movement to it. If I'm being totally honest, and tired, I'll have you know that the rush of fantasy sports had something to do with it, too. But I was lazy, uninspired, and it didn't stick. I don't think I got that every sport was special in its own way -- perhaps too special.

My brother, bless his soul, gives me shit for saying that I miss the NFL of eight years ago. He's a Steelers fan, which might be part of the problem, but really, I'm saying that I hate platoons and love dominant players with staying power. Even if the league is less that way than it used to be, still, that inclination shows that I never really got it to begin with.

That said, I've somehow started watching football again. I don't even know what I think about, or look for, on Sunday this season. I guess that's called learning, or humility. Who knows, maybe I will eventually form a coherent FD doctrine for the NFL -- if that's not an oxymoron. The reason this matters, though, is that it's more than a fraught narrative than Michael Vick is now the starter in Philly. Let's get this out of the way: Vick did a terrible, indefensible thing, even if you point out that he's hardly the Great Man of organized dog fighting. Talk about the banality of evil; I think that Vick's maturation as a football player is far more revealing than his so-called dark side. That's dull agency, further proof that people are at their worst when they work together mindlessly in groups, pressuring each other and softened up enough to be influenced by the world around them.

I am not sure what the implications of that theory are for sport in general, and any particular sport, so I'll leave it to someone else to go there.

Anyway, Vick was pure 2002. I used to base my travel schedule around nationally-televised games of his. His return last season, as wildcat wild card (is that redundant?), was totally 2002, at least as I remembered that time. That it was with the Eagles made the flashback personal to me, since I lived in Philly at that time. And, as such, I couldn't help but see a faint parallel with Allen Iverson -- who, coincidentally, was making his own abortive comeback with the Sixers as Vick's post-jail career began.



Allen Iverson never killed any dogs, spent time locked up that he actually deserved, or otherwise violated the public trust like Michael Vick has. AI probably would have enjoyed a far more quiet reputation if he had developed a taste for online roulette games or an online blackjack game. There's the crucial difference between the two. But at the dawn of the 21st century, these two products of VA's Tidewater area were the baddest thing going in their respective sports. Iverson's revolution was more cultural than basketballular, and Vick's dynamism on the field wasn't so explicitly linked to some sort of "hip-hop moment" in football. That's also probably why Vick had an easier time getting endorsements. Still, the two players were both positively enthralling and utterly maddening, rare talents with tools out the wazoo who, depending on how you saw it, pointed toward the future or just refused to embrace The Right Way. Oh, and in case you're a total moron, both signified race so loud you could hear it a mile away. Vick was the quintessential "black quarterback", and Iverson was, well, Iverson.

And Philly was, well, Philly. Race in Philly was, well, race in Philly. If you need a primer on that city's complicated relationship with the Answer; prepare to spend a day combing through old Inky columns. Vick was only peripherally related to this discussion, in the sense that McNabb was in the process of trying to change his game -- away from multi-dimensional threat that Vick took to a ludicrous extreme. When the Eagles beat the Falcons in the 2003 playoffs (after Atlanta's upset of Green Bay at Lambeau), it felt like a vindication of McNabb's development. Insert race and style as necessary here.

That Lambeau win was Vick's high watermark as a pro, the rough equivalent of the Sixers' 2001 victory over the Lakers in the Finals. He did it his way, and however fleetingly, bore truly grandiose results. Actually, that MVP year for Iverson was a lot like Vick's 2002, the season when, if he didn't "put it all together", at least he made believers of us all. Even if we knew we would crash sooner rather than later.

Now Vick is back, a changed player and one would guess, a changed man. In Philly, the same city that bickered over Iverson for a decade. The cultural baggage of it all is enough to make your nose fall off. Not to mention the sentimental lure of seeing Vick back in action, felony or no felony. What seems key to me, though, and why I started with my own passive return to the NFL, is that Vick's no longer the kind of boom-and-bust player who keeps passions high. But that makes him -- dare I say -- an inspirational figure instead of a looming outlaw. For the sake of his professional future, and his aging body, he's a combination of wiser and diminished. Come to think of it, he's living out Donavon McNabb all over again. Except, of course, with higher stakes, far more tension in the air, and a better white back-up for talk radio to clamor over.

Who Owns Hate?

Here's the deal: I'm back from vacation, and telling you to go read The Works today. I weigh in on Casspi, anti-Semitism in America, and what it means that Nate Robinson likes the WNBA. Ziller explores the concept of defensive hangtime. It was a lot of fun and now I need to hit the gym.

I am left wondering, though, if the swastika somehow "belongs" to anti-Semitism above all other forms of bias. Minus Casspi, it certainly connotes all sorts of hatred. But it's very difficult for it to, ahem, transcend its historical significance and express, say, some asshole's dislike of blacks or Latinos.

This is understandable; it's pretty hard to dispense with the enormity of WW2 (note: I didn't say "the Holocaust", because deniers happen all the time). Yet it also shows just how potent (and striking) Nazi iconography was. I almost think that a lot of Jew-hating is just an excuse to sport swastikas and lightning bolts. Who wants to wear a stupid white robe and drag around burning wood? Flip, I know, but obviously Hitler was far better at "branding", which is why his evil racist movement has had more staying power, in terms of look and rhetoric -- even if this means getting caught up in a cloud of translation.

Fun fact: Tris Speaker was a member of the Klan, but later went on to be the most important mentor Larry Doby had as he adjusted to life in the (white) majors.

Am I trippin'? Someone set me straight.

Luke Harangody, Boston and the Gathering Whiteness

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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



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

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

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



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

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

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

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

Tales Within Tales

In the inverse spirit of the Black-comedy-as-penned-by-a-Jew (most recently typified in Neil Berman’s appearance on I Know Black People) and Jews-writing-about-Asians (um, Flower Drum Song?) we present Robert Levertis-Bell (not a Jew) and Jay Caspian Kang (not a Jew) and their feature film treatments of the Amar'e Stoudemire (not a Jew?) pilgrimage. Follow the not-Jews on twitter at @thatkidicarus (Robert) and @maxpower51 (Jay).

There is also a contest! Anyone who wishes to film a scene from either Robert or Jay’s screenplays can submit it to freedarko-at-gmail-dot-com. Don’t worry about racial or religious accuracy—we can all suspend our disbelief, at least that much. The winner will receive a free copy of both FreeDarko books: The Macrophenomal Pro Basketball Almanac and the upcoming Undisputed Guide to Basketball History. These best of the best will also have their work featured on this very site!!!

Furthermore, you should check out Shoals and Spencer Hall on FDPTDOCNBAPC, and consider getting in touch with FD about app development.

THE ALL STARS OF DAVID
a romantic comedy by Jay Caspian Kang.

After missing a last-second lay-up that would have won the Knicks their first NBA championship in over forty years, twenty-nine year old DAVID PERCY (Chris Webber) drinks away his sorrows at Scores. When we first meet him, it is five in the morning. At a floura-lit table near the back, the strippers are stacking their singles. His teammates are nowhere to be seen. After being told by a bouncer that closing time has long since passed, Percy, a notorious carouser and serial womanizer, takes out his cell phone, punches in a long-forgotten number and leaves a weepy, drunken message.

The next afternoon, Percy wakes up and listens to his voice mail. Along with the expected consolations from his agent, his manager, and Knicks team-owner-and-former-President-Barack Obama, there is a message from a timid woman. She says she watched the game and wonders if he is doing okay. This woman is EVE KEDEM (Marissa Tomei), Percy's girlfriend from college who he dumped on draft night. Convinced that the material world was to blame for the cessation of their love, Eve rediscovered her Hasidic Jewish roots and moved out to Long Island.

The two meet in a diner under an ugly bridge. Eve listens to Percy talk about his growing disillusionment. He says, "It used to be about the love of the game, you know, back when we were a thing. But now, it's just about me, about my need to be great. What I realized last night in that strip club is that I don't love the game anymore. I only love what the game does for me." He confesses that he envies Eve and the peace her devotion to G-d has brought. She almost-touches his head and says, "men like you always seek out comfort from old girlfriends because you want to remember that even before you became you, that there was something worth loving."

Then she looks him straight in the eyes, does that Marissa Tomei squint-thing, and says, "There was something to love, Percy. But it's been too long for me to know if that something is still there."

What follows is a montage of Percy in famous New York spots: eating corn outside Cafe Habana, drinks w/ Jay-Z at 40/40, at various nightclubs w/ NBA stars KEVIN DURANT, RAY ALLEN, DWIGHT HOWARD and YAO MING. In each shot, Percy's mood is pensive, reflective. His hand is frequently in contact with his chin, which, as we know, is C-Webb’s go-to move when he wants to look pensive. When the montage spills out, Percy is sitting with JALEN ROSE at Katz's Deli. He is looking up at the sign that points out the exact spot where Meg Ryan faked her orgasm. After a hazy moment of reverie, he bolts upright and runs out of the deli, leaving behind a confused Jalen Rose and a very large non-Kosher reuben.



Outside, he pulls out his cell phone and demands Eve come meet him back at that diner under that ugly bridge. She says yes. At the diner, the two sloppily confess their love for one another and say some stuff about remembrance. Percy blurts out a marriage proposal. Eve goes cold. She says that she can only marry someone who is Jewish. Percy says he will convert. Eve shakes her head and says that the new young Rabbi at her synagogue has strictly forbidden marriage with outsiders. To be even considered, Percy must be able to prove that he can trace his bloodline back to Moses on Mount Sinai. Percy erupts at the news and the two have a long, serious discussion about racism and religion.

Crestfallen, Percy returns to his hedonistic ways. Chris Isaak’s "Wicked Game" plays in the background. The NBA season starts and he plays terribly. TV sports personalities (SKIP BAYLESS, JIM ROME, MICHAEL WILBON) all wonder if the great David Percy might still be shell-shocked from missing that lay-up. The team's leadership begins to shift over to TONY STAPLETON (Tristan Wilds). After a particularly bad game against the Celtics, Percy gets drunk at a nightclub and calls his mother. He explains what has happened with Eve.

The next morning, he wakes to the buzzing of his phone. It is his mother. She reminds him that it is important to be yourself, but that yourself is never exactly what we think it is. Sometimes, she says, yourself is what yourself was and its important to understand that that was has never left, but has simply been sitting patiently for us to notice its absence. She says she will always love Jesus, but that she has always known that Percy has only ever been able to love Eve. Devotion and faith, she says, means doing what it takes to properly love who you love.

Percy touches his chin and purses his lips, grimly.

The next morning, Percy drives out to Long Island and meets with the new young Rabbi (TAMIR GOODMAN). He demands a chance to convert. The rabbi is hesitant, but when Percy refuses to leave his office, the rabbi sees the good in him and asks, "Why do you want to do this, my son?" Percy sets his jaw and says, "Love." The Rabbi nods and sighs. He says, "I was in love once..." and tells a story about a girl he once knew. He agrees, but under one condition-- Percy must walk the straight-and-narrow. One slip-up and the education will end.



Percy moves into a humble one-room apartment above a pickle shop. Everything smells of brine. He lays down on the short couch and takes it in.

Montage 2: Percy getting fitted for a wool suit, Percy learning the Hebrew alphabet, Percy and Eve walking in Central Park hand-not-in-hand, a laughing Percy playing pick-up hoops with a group of Hasidic kids, Percy pulling down the hair around his temples, imagining the sidelocks of his future, a shot of Jim Rome saying that Percy David's shot selection has become more economical, clips of Jay Mariotti making military metaphors about Percy's refusal to play on Saturdays, Percy at the bar with his teammates with a glass of grape juice, Percy playing chess with the Rabbi, Percy at Second Avenue Deli with Eve-- this time he opens up a corned beef sandwich to reveal the absence of cheese, Percy appreciating half-sour pickles, Percy putting the “chhhhhhuuuh” in "chutzpah." Spliced in all these scenes are short clips of Percy scoring all over the league and bonding with his teammates. We see his play progress. We see the Knicks make the finals.

Game 7 of the NBA Finals is scheduled for a Saturday. His teammates who, strangely enough, have just kind of overlooked the montaged Saturdays of the season, plead with Percy to play. He does not know what to do. In the locker room, Tony Stapleton sidles up next to Percy and tells him that when he was growing up, Percy David was his hero because he played basketball like it was a religion. The respect he showed for the game, the heart he showed on the nightly—all of it was the closest thing the young Tony had to church.

Backed by the opening bars to Ghostface's "All that I Got Is You," Stapleton says, "It's hard sometimes, man, to see God in the neighborhoods where we grew up. You look and he isn't there. At least not always and so you look harder and then you see him, man, in what you've always loved. When I was coming up, man, I saw that in your game. Take us to that next level, man. Make up for the past. Write the resurrection for your career. This is Easter, man, this is our reckoning day."



Conflicted, Percy visits the Rabbi. The Rabbi says that he agrees with young Tony Stapelton—God exposes himself in all the things we love, but devotion to what we love is always honed through discipline. He reminds Percy of all the days he spent practicing free throws, all the parties he skipped, all the sweat and blood lost in the gym. If Percy is to love G-d, the Rabbi says, he must abide by his rules. But, he says, our only freedom in this world is our freedom to point our heart in whatever direction we choose. He tells Percy that because he, the Rabbi, has chosen to point his heart towards G-d, he will not be able to tolerate Percy's decision to work on a Saturday and that if he does indeed play, his Jewish education will end.

Percy returns to the apartment above the pickle shop and lies back down on the couch. He calls Eve. She tells him about the moment when she first fell in love with him—it was their sophomore year at Tech U. Her boyfriend-at-the-time had dragged her to see a game. In front of the adoring crowd, Percy dropped 45 points against Duke and even though ESPN was there and the cameras were on and the game was close throughout, he played the entire game with a C-Webb smile on his face. She had never seen a man so blessed-- who else, but basketball players, bring so much joy to people through a beautiful act? How could that ever be called work?

A look of great, epiphanic relief falls over Percy's face. He calls Tony Stapelton and tells him he'll be playing in Game 7. He then calls his COACH (Chad Coleman) and tells him that he will not be collecting a check for the game.

The Garden is packed for Game 7. Percy, smiling the entire time, drops 50 on the Lakers, but he is matched by an equally spry and thinly disguised Kobe Bryant-type named SEAN FLASH (Sean Combs). With time running out, the Knicks find themselves down by 2. The Coach draws up a play for Percy. In the huddle, Tony Stapleton says, "we got one shot, we got one chance here, let's go one time!" He turns to Percy and says, "One love, one love." Percy shakes his head, smiles, and holds up three fingers. He says, "Three loves."

The ball is inbounded, Percy, in super-slow motion, catches it, fakes twice, steps behind the three point line and drains a three. The Garden erupts.

His teammates mob him. He holds up three fingers as he is carried off the court.

EPILOGUE: As the credits roll, under the watchful eye of the Rabbi, Eve and Percy stomp on the glass and everyone yells Mazel Tov!

Then, the horah.

MESHUGGAH
Feature Film Treatment
Robert Levertis-Bell



ACT ONE:

The film opens on a basketball game in progress, the St. Louis Canucks at the New York Knights. MARK JACKSON, STAN VAN GUNDY, and MIKE BREEN are announcing. It's in the fourth quarter with only a minute to go. The Canucks are up 97-72. DON NELSON is standing the Canucks sideline, he's yelling at the court, hammering with roll of paper. One might think he was overdoing the pantomime as a manner of contradicting reports that this was, indeed, his final game as an NBF coach. MESHUGGAH SMITH (Mehcad Brooks) is playing for the Canucks, the camera follows him as the announcers wrap up the game:

BREEN: The clock is winding down in this final regular season game for these two middle-of-the-pack teams. Neither will make the playoffs and the game is completely meaningless…

VAN GUNDY (interrupting): But what about Meshugga Smith?! Nobody told him this game was meaningless.

JACKSON: 55 points?! Are you kidding me? Mama there goes that man!

BREEN: Yes, a phenomenal night, but still a disappointing season by Meshuggah Smith—whose off-court issues are very well-known. And, even despite this great performance here in New York, you have to wonder if Meshuggah will find a team this summer in free agency.

VAN GUNDY: Absolutely, a player of his calib...

Zap. We pull out from a television inside a luxury box in the same arena. Inside, the Russian oligarch SERGEI BAZAROV (Vladimir Cuk) and PAUL MCCARTNEY (Ricky Gervais) are sitting with the Knights' current majority owner DANIEL GREEN (Paul Lieberstein) and his financial advisor DIPESH CHATTERJEE (Aasif Mandvi). The foreigners have offered Green a staggering $2 Billion to purchase the New York Knights, one of the most storied franchises in professional basketball history, in order to relocate the team to London. They wish to create, in the British Knights, the Old Country’s sole representative in the National Basketball Federation, and a singular magnet for European talent from Ljubljana to Buenos Aires. Green and Chatterjee are very receptive to the offer as they have recently lost their shirts building an as yet unoccupied office park with money embezzled from the Knights.

They are especially skittish as Knights employee, MINDY ROSEN (Bar Refaeli), has started to ask questions about missing funds and Green and Chatterjee are eager to cover up their crime. However, they inform Bazarov and McCartney that, though they wish to sell, the team is far too beloved by the people of New York — especially the black and Jewish fans — and by the league’s commissioner to ever allow such an important team to leave the city. Bazarov replies that he has already witnessed, over the years, that Green has a knack for mismanagement and squandering the good will of Knights fans. He and McCartney can wait a year. McCartney asks Dipesh and Green: “Do you think you can turn the city and the commissioner against the team enough to allow the sale in a single year?” “Yes,” they reply in unison.



Meshuggah in street clothes visiting his MOTHER (Khandi Alexander, with a green wig) at the hospital. She is dying of breast cancer and is lying on the bed while Meshuggah and his fiancé ASHA (Kat Stacks) argue over the remote. She wants to watch the playoffs, he wants to watch Life is Beautiful. They switch back and forth between the NBF Finals and the film and they don’t notice at first that his mother is calling him to her side. They finally hear her summons just as the television switches for the last time to the NBA Finals. He rushes to her bed.

“I have to tell you something, Meshuggah…” “What is it mom?” “It’s about who you are, who we are, something I’ve never told you before and that you’ve never guessed…” “OK?” “Something that will change everything about the way you live from now on…” “Mama, what is it?” He leans in and listens. His eyes widen. “You’re Jewish!”

His mother flatlines… “Beeeeeeep.” His mom expires and when he looks up, he sees his arch nemesis PRINCE HALL (Carlos Boozer) score the championship winning shot over RON ARTEST in order to lead the San Diego Wolverines to the championship. Hall’s teammates mob him. Green and Chatterjee in their office brainstorming what they can do to alienate their fans and the commissioner so they can sell the team. They could field successively worse basketball teams. Tried it and the fans still show up. They could engineer an embarrassing sex scandal that affects both players and management. Tried it and the fans still show up. Something will come up, surely, Green announces and turns on his television, on which is Meshugga at a press conference on ESPN, wearing a yarmulke. He’s announcing that his mother told him that he’s a Jew on her deathbed and that he would from now on be living a Jewish life. “I think I got it,” Dipesh announces.

ACT TWO:

Green forces his GM, FRANK FRANCIS (Idris Elba, with an American accent) to sign Meshuggah Smith to a max one year contract. Posey is beside himself — Meshuggah is a notoriously bad teammate, won’t fit the offense, and is a known “headcase” — “remember that time he was arrested for using a Colt .45 on the Whack-a-Mole at Chuck E. Cheese?” — and is in the midst of a bunch of bad press for the bizarre claim that he’s Jewish. “Sign him or resign,” Green says. “Fine.”

Believing Meshuggah to be a member of one of the problematic Black Hebrew sects, who believe that blacks are "the real Jews," the plan is to encourage Meshuggah incite New York’s racial hostilities by making a public show of his “Jewish” identity while alienating the city’s “real” Jews. In the beginning, the whole thing works, Meshuggah makes a host of disastrous public comments, including one on the eve of his visit to the Western Wall. Asha is very skeptical of the whole enterprise and leaves him. The season starts and soon the team is attracting heat from the JDL and from an anti-Semitic black group headed by FAROUK SHAHAD (Wyatt Cenac) as Meshuggah very publicly “learns to be Jewish,” under Green’s tutorship.

On ESPN, with JIM ROME, Meshuggah announces that he’s been “learning Hebrew… making bagels…. doing standup comedy… and learning to balance his checkbook,” all things Green has told him to say. After this, the Post and Daily News let him have it. The Knights Arena has hordes of protesters outside but hardly anyone inside. Meshuggah, for his part is distraught over the whole thing but Green reminds him of the noble truths of Judaism: “life is suffering and that suffering comes from attachment — you have to let go, Meshuggah and walk your own path, who cares what the fans say, shake them Nazis off. Shalom!” Meshuggah gives another interview to ESPN, this time very stridently denouncing any and all critics as haters including the girl who he thought loved him, but left him because she was jealous of his faith.

After hearing this, Asha returns to confront Meshuggah. She tells him that she’s done some background checks and Green isn’t even himself Jewish — turns out that there are people with that name that aren’t Jewish — and he’s been getting a fake Jewish education all along. Meshuggah is distraught but it only makes his faith stronger, and he’s glad to have Asha back. He feels guilty for falling victim to the ruse but he can now focus on basketball.

ACT THREE:

The Knights begin to win games and the whole plan begins to backfire. Meshuggah’s conversion continues, in good faith now with Asha (a Catholic who clutches rosary beads during close ball games) and his new buddies JASON SCHWARTZMAN and OMRI CASSPI at his side. The Knights make the playoffs and Meshuggah-fever sweeps New York City. Fans leave the picket lines to enter the arena. When they return, the fans sport celebratory clip-on payos and hats and chant for the team in Yiddish. Black-Jewish relations (cf. Jeffrey Melnick) are at an all-time high in New York. Reconciliation montage: There’s a sign on the door of Sylvia’s that says “now 100% kosher!” The Post and Daily News are back on their side.



Meanwhile, the old and potential ownership groups get desperate and start trying, and failing, to astroturf a race war, even going so far as to anonymously funnel money and guns to Farouk Shahad, who stays in front of the arena with rifles and a megaphone denouncing Meshuggah as an affront to the black race. But when the Knights make the Finals, Shahad switches his tune “Meshuggah Smith should be at THE FRONT of the black race. Mazel Tov, my brother!” Frank, the GM, asks Mindy, the Knights employee, whether she’s sure she did the right thing; she says yes and they kiss. “I support you always,” Frank says to Mindy. “I support you always,” Asha says to Meshuggah.

The Finals come and Meshuggah ends up with a perfectly balanced stat sheet—“Just like his checkbook!” Jeff Van Gundy jokes. When he scores the series winning shot, over Prince Hall, the arena erupts into a round of “Hava Nagila.” As everyone is celebrating, the FBI show up to Green’s luxury box and haul off Dipesh and Green in cuffs. Paul McCartney looks at Bazarov, who’s looking down, and says “Oy Vey!”

Final scene: Meshuggah and Asha get married in a Jewish ceremony at Rucker Park. Those in attendance include Tamir Goodman, Larry Brown, and Jordan Farmar.

Yellow Fever

Jay Caspian Kang says fuck Harrison Barnes, Year 2 of the John Henson Project is what will make the kids alright. Part 1 of this piece ran back in January. Follow Jay @maxpower51.

In these recent years, I’ve found it hard going to accept the totality of my multi-cultural education. While my wiring (Korean, raised in the South, over-educated in the Academy’s blah-factories) precludes me from completely abandoning its dreams, these lessons have lost their dimensions, gone fuzzy. The vision of a post-race America, fed to me and my classmates by well-intentioned teachers, then radiated out in college seminars, lectures, where the same ideas repeated themselves in fancier clothes. It all seems as naïve to me now as a bumper sticker pleading for the end of all wars.

And yet, I still feel the need, mostly ridiculous, to accept the vision as something good, essential. It is a joke, sure, and not a funny one, but it is the joke that plays on repeat in my head.

Like all repetitions, the joke has long been reduced into the clutter of its component parts. These parts float chaotically, the same way snippets of Illmatic and Liquid Swords do—accessible at all times, but never quite in any recognizable pattern. Just as I will be sitting uncomfortably in an airport terminal and hear the words, “My father was the greatest samurai in the empire,” flit through my head, so too will the mantras and rules of my multicultural education just come upon me suddenly, without warning or reason.

I wonder if it’s much different for anyone else, if all of us who identify with the same vision, who post links on Facebook about "Racist Things Republicans Say", who like the sound of the word disenfranchisement, who feel comfortable enough to roll our eyes at Kwanzaa, but not quite comfortable enough to roll our eyes at Jesse Jackson, at least not in public, might simply be reacting to race-things with an utterly random array of pretty sentiments and recycled thoughts.

I do not bring this up because I mean to chastise—certainly, of all people, I find myself guilty of such detachment, indifference, randomness—but rather to figure out why, exactly, that when I heard that Jeremy Lin was going to come home and play for my Golden State Warriors, the first thought that trailed my elation was, calm down. He doesn’t owe you anything. He is not a representative for every Asian-American kid. He is just Jeremy Lin.

The thing is, even though those sorts of nice words still constitute my go-to reaction to all things racial, I don’t believe any of that multicultural dinosaur bullshit. Jeremy Lin, sorry, is not just a kid from Palo Alto-to-Harvard who made good in the NBA. He is not just Jeremy Lin, basketball player, who owes nothing to nobody but himself and God. And while good manners stop me short of saying that Jeremy Lin owes me something, personally, I will say this: Michael Chang be damned, there has never been a more important Asian athlete in the history of this country than Jeremy Lin.

Ichiro slaps at balls and plays with a Zenny detachment—there is a narrative for him, steeped heavily in our preconceptions of those kooky Japanese. Yao’s narrative is consumed by his size, his gregariousness and the machinery of Chinese athletics. Hines Ward is half-black and therefore, by our fucked-up calculations, doesn’t really count. Eugene Chung played offensive line and went bust. Dat Nguyen, Parcells devotee, could have come close, but he was undersized, as everyone would have expected him to be. Michael Chang could only win with finesse, on clay, no less, and only did it once.



There is no narrative for an Asian American kid who led his team to a state title, went completely unrecuited, settled for Harvard, for chrissake, dominated the Ivies, went undrafted and then signed with an NBA team straight out of the summer league. Does anyone’s story in the NBA deserve more of a FTW? And while it might be technically true to say that he is his own man and should not have to bear the yoke of his people, that truth is utterly irrelevant. His story is so perfect that it will be gobbled up and turned into metaphor, he will be a experiment for how ESPN discusses “his kind,” he will be the litmus test of where Stu Scott can go and where he cannot, he will be most easily accessible, visible counterpoint to the emasculated Asian male. He will be the Great Yellow Hope for millions of Asian people, not just in the Bay Area, but in Flushing, K-Town, Little Saigon, Annandale, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei and Beijing.

And yet, while repairing our faith in the multi-cultural vision by placing himself in the country’s most unlikely forum, the Great Yellow Hope of Jeremy Lin is not about equality at all. He might make a smiling cameo in the soft-handed dream, but he didn’t get to where he is because of it. His promise buries itself into more personal and violent lines—we are asking him, or, rather, his body, through the arbitrary act of helping five other men put a ball through a hoop more efficiently than five other men, to undo the harm of the stereotypes we do not discuss, to give us an icon to rally around without reservation or fear that our great hero might also reject us for the novelty of our wiring.

We are asking, and not nicely, for him to give up his racialized body to those of us who might need it much more than we will comfortably admit. As the first of his kind playing in the country’s weirdest and most intense racial metaphor, he will carry the weight of evolving into the counterpoint, the measure of pride. In this way, he is more DiMaggio than Jackie Robinson, more of a symbol to his people than a trailblazer. He will be picked at, conflated, celebrated, deflated, trashed, defiled and mocked on the road. He will certainly not deserve any of this. But, despite what the random volley liberal, multicultural responses might say, deserve has nothing to do with it.



The mantle of trailblazer goes to Rich Cho, the former Boeing engineer from Federal Way, who, on Tuesday, was hired as Portland’s General Manager. He is the first Asian-American to ever head up the front office of an American professional sports team. It is certainly a strange coincidence that these two events would occur within the same forty-eight hour span, and while the linearity-loving part of the brain lights up with the possibility of stringing these two events together into some story about acceptance, pushing barriers and progress, Rich Cho and Jeremy Lin have as much to do with one as another as Barack Obama and Venus Williams.

Cho is the fruit of the multicultural dream, his success validates the mantras of expanded equal opportunity and the boon that comes when you stop thinking assuming that certain races are better suited for certain jobs. He is why our well-intentioned teachers had to preach what they did, a beacon, not for the possibilities of his body, but rather, for the possibilities of what our racial math has already confirmed: Asians, if given the chance, can succeed in business endeavors of all kinds. Cho, despite being really the first of his kind, (Lin has Wat Misaka, and, to a lesser degree, Yao, Yi, Sun Yue, Yuta Tabuse, etc. as his forbearers) will never be anything more than another immigrant kid staking a claim in the White world.

As I wrote in FD back in January, the majority of Asian American kids raised in the United States are taught, oftentimes insidiously, to covet the bounties of Whiteness. Pro basketball, with its “hip-hop image,” its Big Black Supermen, its near-naked display of the athlete’s body and its association with that vague place known as “the street,” has an immutable connection with Blackness. And while, of course, the act of running an NBA team places you within the constraints of White success, to actually play the game, to dunk, preen, block shots, bomb threes, all that is uncharted, volatile territory, something that falls not only outside of the possibilities envisioned by Asian immigrant parents and their children, but on the wrong side of an unspoken racial divide that has found its ugly and violent outlet in every Riot the country has seen over the past thirty years.

As is true with all racial violence, at least in this country, the targeting of Korean-owned businesses during the Rodney King Riots was more about the ways in which each group measured their battered bodies up against the pristine and guilt-proof White. And although the Rodney King Riots slammed the door on the possibility that us Asian kids could run away from Whiteness, the violence of the Riots still radiates outwards—this year in the Bay Area, there have been several high-profile murders in which Black assailants have purportedly been targeting Asian victims. Having lived in almost every major American city, I can say that I have never been in a place where the tension between Blacks and Asians is more palpable than it is in the Bay Area: 2010.

This is the context in which Jeremy Lin, Palo Alto kid, comes back to pursue his dream: he will be playing in America’s Blackest game in one of America’s Blackest cities and every goddamn connotation of every word will have its sway on how we view him. To say that all these things are on the minds of Lin, his teammates or most Warriors fans is a stretch, but to deny their sway over how we process Lin, to barrage him-within-his-context with our simplistic, easy, liberal, multicultural rhetoric is just flat-out dumb.

As such, I do not think it is a stretch to say that Jeremy Lin’s successes and failures in the NBA will redefine how Asian-American males view their bodies. In some ways, the redefinition has already begun. Videos have already begun to sprout up that attempt to anthropologically break down Lin’s fabled summer league showdown with John Wall.

The comparisons that were made last January, when similar videos of Lin dunking on UConn started making their rounds through the blogosphere, have been ratcheted up. What was once hypothetical is now real. The comment board at Golden State of Mind have been clogged with ecstatic Asian hoopheads who have been posting comments like, “it feels as if one of us just walked on the court and started playing.” The statement is ridiculous, yes, (I wonder if Alfonso Ribeiro, better known as Carlton Banks, feels the same way whenever he witnesses Lebron dunk on somebody’s head), but it shows the peculiar desperation of the Asian American sports fan, the manic need to find some outlet to place ourselves on the mount with the rest of the Athlete Gods.

To reach such heights, Jeremy Lin, human being-who-is-entitled-to-just-be-himself, could very well be sacrificed. It would be nice to hope that this doesn’t have to happen, but to tell the truth, it probably already has happened, and, as long as he provides the heroic figure, I do not care either way.

Still, I will probably buy a Jeremy Lin jersey. There is not a Rich Cho jersey, but, if there were, I probably wouldn’t buy it.



So, how will he do? We have already seen Jeremy Lin’s game against the NBA’s next Most Gifted One. Matching up one-on-one against John Wall, Lin looked big enough, quick enough, and, more importantly, competed on every possession. Sure, it’s summer league, but Lin proved to be a patient, well-coached, and pretty fucking big point guard who could get into the lane with ease. He showed flashes of a jump shot, most notably the fade-away three he hit with Wall in his face, but nothing to indicate that he could fill, say, the point guard’s shooting role in the triangle.

With his size, competitiveness, quicks, patience and admittedly average passing/court vision, he reminded me most of Jarrett Jack. Lin is already a better shooter than Jack will ever be and might even be a step quicker and although the restrictions of summer league made it impossible to see if Lin also possessed Jack’s ability to lead a team, his footage at Harvard shows a level of focus and unselfishness that should translate well into the pro game. Other than that, it’s really impossible to tell—he played well in Vegas. But so did Marco Bellinelli.

Within the context of the Warriors, (is there even a context?) Lin’s signing creates a weird culture contraption in which a point guard from Davidson will be backed up by a point guard from Harvard. While Jarrett Jack is the most immediate game-comp, it is Curry who offers the more interesting conversation—both move with deceptive speed, both attack methodically, carefully, and both are surprisingly adequate rebounders and defenders. More interestingly, both guys come into the league with questions about their athleticism, their ability to D-up against the league’s big guards.

In some measure, both Lin and Curry face such scrutiny for fucked-up reasons: Curry, because he is light-skinned, frail, “well spoken,” and played at Davidson. Lin faces a similar scrutiny because he is Asian, with all the cocooning context of that word, and played at Harvard. Both guys dominated in college, albeit on different stages.

I feel safe in saying that Lin will never be the player Curry has already become, but having watched a few of his games at Harvard and the entirety of his summer league performance, I will say this: Lin, like Curry, is fueled by a heady competitiveness. He knows his spots on the floor and seems to get up for the big stage—remember, we first began paying attention to him after he blew up UConn for thirty points, and, as one youtube poster counted, two dunks. His best game of the summer league came against Wall, when he knew everyone was watching.

These two moments certainly don’t quite measure up to Curry’s NCAA run, but they do provide some evidence that Lin will not be swallowed up by the scrutiny of being the NBA’s strangest player.