FREE RASHAD

Jay Caspian Kang believes it must be done. Rashad must be free. Join the FREERASHAD movement over at his new blog at freerashad.blogspot.com and follow Jay on twitter

"Is it because my car is nice, clothes are nice, because I listen to Jay-Z, cuz I'm kinda cute? Or is it just "jealousy"? This has got to be the weakest emotion that anyone can have. To be jealous that I have what you don't have. But what I don't understand is why hate on just me? Then I thought, ain't no one fresher than me, no one flier than me, no one realer than me. So I am the reason people hate, prime reason you should hate anyone like me. I think it's cuz I was "BORN 2 BE HATED." - from the diary of Rashad McCants

ON FEBRUARY 10 2004, UNC sophomore Rashad McCants entered the second half of a game against Georgia Tech having only scored three points. The Heels, struggling along with a 4-6 conference record in Roy Williams’ first year as coach, trailed by five. The half started with a quick Georgia Tech run that expanded the lead to ten.

Over the next sixteen minutes of game time, McCants put on one of the most dazzling one-man shows in Tar Heel history, scoring twenty-eight points, draining three after circus three. Unfortunately for the Heels, McCants’ performance on that night was matched by Tech’s BJ Elder, who scored twenty-four in the half, and Carolina ultimately lost the game 88-77, a star was born in Chapel Hill. But here, finally, was the remedy to the Joe Forte blues—the explosive scorer and charismatic dynamo who could lead Ol’ Roy’s Heels back to the Final Four.

Back then, when a defense of Matt Doherty was enough to start a fight at Spanky’s or Woody’s or He’s Not Here, we were desperate. Perhaps we overlooked some early warning signs with McCants. There was never any official reason behind the Doherty firing; the accepted story in Chapel Hill was that Felton, May and McCants, offended by Doherty’s suggestion that they might need a psychiatrist, incited a mutiny that cleared the way for the Roy Williams era. In retrospect, the sports psychiatrist story only seems relevant in the context of McCants.

McCants, perhaps in a first-ever in the history of lazy sportswriters using the word mercurial, actually kind of was, well, mercurial. His antics on the court were always strangely anti-Carolina. Instead of taking on any leadership responsibilities, McCants seemed to orbit around the team’s gravitational center of May, Felton and Jawad Williams—never quite engaging, but always nearby, always doing his own thing. McCants flashed the Roc-A-Fella Domination sign after dunks, he saluted the cameras, he popped his jersey and preened for the crowd. To his credit, his theatrics were acts of exultation—unlike other “emotional” players, Rashad never argued with refs, he didn’t bicker with teammates during time-outs or on the court, he was never cheap or violent. Those of us fans who count Rasheed Wallace among our all-time-favorite Heels were happy to see that Ol’ Roy hadn’t brought the stuffier parts of Ol’ Carolina Way with him to Chapel Hill.

Yet he also played with a detached, but fully-formed intensity somewhere outside the usual jocularity, sportsmanship and precision one usually associates with Tar Heel Basketball. Watching him play was sometimes like watching Mike Tyson tell a joke—you love the man, the commitment, but you sometimes wonder what the fuck might be going through his head, and if what you are witnessing is the charming mechanics of a serial masochist.

Nothing that has happened to McCants over the past few years comes as any surprise to those of us who watched his career at Carolina. College, especially college in Chapel Hill, is a cocoon. Once Rashad was fed to the wolves and every quirk, every mysterious story was exposed for what it was, once he quit being Rashad McCants: eccentric and lovable dynamo for our Tar Heels, and, instead, became Rashad McCants: public property, what would happen to him? He once equated playing at Carolina to being in jail and longed for his “freedom.” What would that freedom entail? Although nobody really talked about it, Carolina fans had already seen what was odd with Rashad.

It certainly seems telling that the last image of McCants as a Tar Heel comes right after the final buzzer sounds in the 2005 National Championship. Felton, May, Marvin and Jawad mob one another under the basket. McCants is nowhere to be found. The camera finally finds him standing alone at mid-court. He has taken off his Carolina jersey and, with a smirk, presents it to the television audience.



SOCIETY-IN-THERAPY rarely extends its graces to the professional athlete. Ricky Williams is equated to Benedict Arnold; when Milton Bradley took some time off this spring to tend to some very obvious emotional issues, sportswriters piled on the usual absurd, man-in-a-foxhole metaphors. No matter how much Zack Greinke achieves on the mound, he will always be defined by the depression that caused him, God forbid, to question if he really wanted to pursue a life as a professional baseball player.

Although our post-racial language will not allow such an easy categorization, there exists a perception of a “Black depression,” that differs from its counterpart, “White depression.” Each iteration carries its own bag of causalities and images—White depression elicits bathtubs filled with blood, minivans, Mary Kay, Sylvia Plath, Edward Scissorhands, whereas the prevailing vision of Black depression is laid out along the narratives of economic hardship, limited opportunity and the ghetto operatics that much of America uses to define the totality of the African-American experience. In neater terms: White depression is The Virgin Suicides, Black depression is the fourth season of The Wire.

It certainly doesn’t need to be said that all these differentiations are myths, and dangerous ones at that, but the way they are processed seems paradoxical to certain core American values of responsibility. Why are we quicker to forgive White athletes for lapses in mental health? Why do we turn a blind eye to Josh Hamilton’s relapse, but pile on Dwight Gooden and Daryl Strawberry? Why are there glowing Sports Illustrated cover stories about the miracle of Zack Greinke’s recovery from anxiety and depression, but none about Michael Beasley? In the most essentialist vision possible, which also happens to be the touchstone for almost all discussion of sports in America, shouldn’t America (titanic) be more willing to forgive the kid with the tough ghetto childhood than the kid who gets bored with his privileged, suburban life? Why did society-in-therapy, so eager to embrace everyone that it produced a show about a mob boss and his psychiatrist, create a state of exception for the Black athlete?

Perhaps, ironically, it is exactly the self-evidence, and, in some ways, the simplicity of the causality of Black depression that creates the very narrative used to dismiss it. Because Black depression, again speaking in as essentialist terms as possible, is perceived as being the result of economically depressed living conditions, whereas White depression is written off as chemical imbalances, treatable by any number of medications, when a Black male becomes a visibly wealthy member of society, he is subjected to this catastrophic logic: Because he is rich now, the reasons for the Black athlete's depression are now gone. Therefore, he should no long show any symptoms of any mental health problems. If he does, he is simply not appreciating what he has been given.

In his pre-draft interview with the Miami Dolphins, Dez Bryant was asked if his mother was a prostitute and if she “still did drugs.” When brought in for a workout with the 49ers, Matthew Stafford was asked to discuss his feelings about his parents’ divorce. When he said he wasn’t going to talk about it, the 49ers brass downgraded him on their chart.

What is the expected answer? What could Matthew Stafford have said to convince Mike Singletary that he was mentally healthy? How was Dez Bryant supposed to react to a stranger asking him if his mother was a drug addict/prostitute? It is impossible to believe that anyone, much less a front-office employee of a professional sports franchise, could make a determination of psychological health based on these sorts of scattershot, shock-jock questions. So why ask them? What Superman is being constructed? And what, for fuck’s sake, do we expect Superman to say?

Even if we do not know, exactly, who Superman is, we know who he is not, and he is not Rashad McCants, or any of his looks of exasperation, disinterest or anger. He is not the tattoos he sports on each arm: “Born to be Hated,” and, “Dying to be Loved.” He is not the poetry McCants has written or the mostly unexplained hiatus he took from that 2005 championship team. He is not his moodiness or his outbursts. In fact, the only NBA-ish thing Rashad McCants has done in the five years that have passed since he left Carolina, was briefly date a Kardashian.



IT IS NO SECRET THAT THE NBA has lost its personality. In this post-Gil-era, the mold of NBA superstar is more blank, unobtrusive and corporate-friendly than it’s ever been. Kids no longer run up and down the court with a specific player’s demeanor in mind, but rather, professional basketball has become a TV show in which every character aspires to be the bland, beautiful straight man. Of the top ten players in the league, only Kobe has a distinct personality, a set of easily codified traits that define who he is. What, really, do we know about Dwight Howard? When he came into the league, he was a shy, Christian kid who was so naïve that he once said that there should be a crucifix on the NBA logo. Now, he is Dwight Howard, smiling, corporate superman, stripped, with Mao’s efficiency, of any religious ornamentation. Howard’s quirks are so calculated, predictable, that he comes across as a gigantic Katy Perry. Kevin Durant is celebrated for his candor, but only in contrast with the clamminess or meanness of his fellow players Dwyane Wade is not much more than a collection of commercials, post-hipster glasses and velveteen suits. As for the league’s self-appointed King, part of the shock and rage over Lebron’s Decision Summer came from the fact that we are simply not used to such disturbances of our expected boredoms, especially from a guy who has Jordan-monotoned the cameras since his freshman year in high school. Even his recent twitter vendetta seems staged—the virtual flailings of a desperate, and, ultimately, blank man.

While it’s undeniable that a culture of sameness has arrived, one has to wonder if this is a product of the league’s relentless push into international markets (strip the game of the “Americanness” that might offend people in Europe and Asia, and watch it grow!), or if it is truly a reflection of something much more ominous: a society that has built up an industry of mental health to tamp everyone down into a docile vessel. Is there so much difference between McCants and Charles Oakley? Is he more polarizing than Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf? The NBA once was a place where volatile personalities were used as weaponry—players like Lambeer, Oakley, Mahorn, Andrew Toney and Mourning played not so much as individuals on the court, but as embodiments of their unchained egos.

What I am trying to ask is this: are we really still willing to accept eccentricity?



FREE RASHAD is for all of us head-cases, the misunderstood. It is for all of us who wanted to walk the earth with Ricky Williams, for those of us who listen to Mike Tyson and see a vision what we might be like if we had lived through a similar chaos. It is for those of us who, like Rashad, have never quite been able to bridge the gap between our conception of self—no matter how catastrophic it may be—and the functioning world. It is not as much a movement to get Rashad McCants back in the NBA, as it is a lament for the league we have lost. We accept, as Rashad has, his shortcomings as a teammate, as a basketball player. We are not even saying that if we were the GM of a team, we would offer our hero a spot on the roster. Rather, we ask for the league to FREE RASHAD in the hopes that it will restore a coliseum of volatility, a celebration of the eccentric, and, perhaps, in turn, delay the ever-expanding norm of the corporate, World-Wide National Basketball Association.

FREE RASHAD! FREE RASHAD! FREE RASHAD!

There Is No Scrap Impartial

Don't miss the Morning News roundtable on sports and writing, with Pasha Malla, Will Leitch, Katie Baker, Chad Harbach, Nic Brown, and me.

I think we finally have our Psychological Man. His name, much to my utter surprise and possible chagrin, is DeMarcus Cousins.

As long as this site's been live, we've harped on player psychology. Not "what is a point guard thinking in the clutch", but as best we can, tried to determine what makes these dudes tick. Especially when, as it so very not the case in other sports, uniform execution simply won't do, and the decisions players make—their respective styles, if you will—can't help but reveal something about them as people. It may be only a thin breach here and there, through which little light is admitted, or gaping blast of individuality, but either way there's humanity in them there ball players.

Somewhere out there, a unified theory of FreeDarko presents itself in the heavens. For now, I'd go so far as to say that style and personality are the strong and weak force of our NBA cosmology, which is why no amount of boring-ass critiques will make me lose interest in Kobe Bryant. It's also why Gilbert Arenas was for so very long our patron saint. His entire public existence depended on either riding or struggling against that interpretive undercurrent "quirk". With the locker room incident and FINGER GUNZ, it went so far as to suggest that, in fact, he had been (figuratively, duh) swept out to sea. At some point, the joke ceases to be on the rest of the world, and out-there behavior becomes either sad or self-destructive.

That's also what happened with Michael Beasley, whatever happened with Beasley. He entered the draft speaking with uncommon candor—which in retrospect, turned out to be a "don't let me do this" cry for someone to keep him in school. At the time, though, it really seemed as if teams were being forced to confront the possibility that players could be weird, and yet still thrive. Arenas was a high-wire act, someone who played up his shtick for commercial gains and then found himself seemingly fall victim to his own act. Beasley entered the league not playing pranks and committing absurd gestures, but simply refusing to make sense. Again, at the moment it's hard to say he was taking a stand for anything but his own immaturity. And I mean that in the most light, sympathetic way possible.

All of which brings us to DeMarcus Cousins. You all know the story by now. Cousins was, all the way back to his high school days, branded "a problem". He didn't have Arenas's charm or Beasley's enigmatic qualities. DeMarcus Cousins had, as they say, an attitude. He was not a high-character guy. Supposedly, he fought with coaches, loafed, and wouldn't stay in shape. Whatever had happened at Kentucky, where he proved so dominant that John Wall was often relegated to a supporting role, was fool's gold compared to the monster he would become as a pro. It didn't help that, in many ways, the most apt comparisons the pros offered were Zach Randolph, Eddy Curry, and reaching back a ways, Derrick Coleman (that one more than ever after Vegas, but I'm getting ahead here).

I was staunchly anti-Cousins, though mostly owing to the fact that I thought his college career was a mirage and his height not what it turned out to be. When the whole thing got all weird and paternalistic, I realized which side justice smiled upon. Cousins was trapped in a strange rhetorical bind best described as "worst available". He was the bad seed of the draft, the high-risk, high-reward guy who got all the ink, and of course. Not every draft class is so lucky as to have one. But once anyone can be stuck in the "bad kid" or "problem" category, they will catch hell up until they prove otherwise.



Beasley, incidentally, saw his stock of evil rise (fall?) as the draft approach. Draw your own cause and effect conclusions here, but Cousins loomed larger and larger as a talent and became more and more of a potential thug creature. Don't blame FreeDarko; we dispatched Joey Litman to meet Cousins and observe him acting like the kid he was. Beasley had said "I'm a kid", but for him that opened the door out onto all sorts of weirdness. Cousins really just came off as sweet, likable, and hardly the kind of ass who would warrant such premature nay-saying.

Fast forward to the Vegas league, where Cousins's debut was awaited almost as eagerly as Wall's. When he proved even more of a force (granted, Wall had very little to prove), and flashed skills and awareness that had once been mere fluff in the mouths of his biggest supporters, Cousins instantly became the second-biggest star among the rookies. That attitude we heard so much about? Damn right it's there. But it's fire, intensity, and the desire to flat-out destroy his opponent, especially other big men. It's exactly what so many other bigs are lacking, and why they end up a very different kind of bust. Cousins rages because he cares. It's that simple. To say that his personality can be rough or stubborn at times is to say that he's a gamer. Attitude on the court, if it's this kind of edge and determination, is the exact opposite of what off-court attitude will sow.

And it's not like Cousins is lacking in self-awareness, something we can debate all day about Arenas or Beasley. The Timberwolves, of course, tried to throw him off by antagonizing and harassing him, expecting him to crack and show the lunatic no one wanted to draft (including them). Except as soon as Cousins caught on, he disengaged himself and opened scoffed at the tactic. Does this sound like a wayward brat to you?

All of which brings us back to psychology. Cousins did, indeed, possess many of qualities NBA scouts feared in him. Except he possessed them in a way that manifested itself primarily on the court, where they were a decidedly good thing. Differentiating between on and off-court personality, as well as mapping out their intersection, has never been more important than now. What's more, the "good kid"/"problem" binary has revealed itself to be, if not a farce, at least utterly simplistic, the kind of clap-trap that no journalist—much less a scout—should bother to hang his hat on.

Cousins might seem to call into question whatever it is that Arenas and Beasley represented. On the contrary, in his contradictions, he make more urgent than ever the need to develop a more psychologically sophisticated approach to assessing prospects. Arenas asserted the right to be kooky, unpredictable, and obsessive; Beasley, incoherent, compelling and loud. That was a fair description of each at their best, and if their stories ended today, each would serve as a cautionary tale against this kind of player. Cousins, though, makes the case for the development of something new, something that might actually better equip a team for an Arenas or Beasley—that is, anyone other than an outright bust.

Earlier today, Ziller wrote about Rashad McCants. McCants, it seems, was Cousins before Cousins, and had the bad luck to not be born very tall. No one has yet been able to tell me exactly what it is that makes McCants so horrible and unemployable. Maybe he's not the best defender, and there have been some confounding incidents with scheduling and contracts (like TZ's post today). But McCants himself believes he had been blacklisted, and I'm inclined to believe he's not far off. McCants deserves a chance to succeed based on his abilities, not some shit-poor conception of what makes for good and bad soldiers in a mechanized world that never really existed in the first place.

Profiles In Strange

A little slow on the uptake here, but I have to pay respects to one of the most freakish freaks of all time: Daunte Culpepper. So often the term, FREEDARKO, gets equated with "style" or "flair" or "absurdity," but a huge component of what it means to be FD is to be full of unrealized potential, and no one walks away from the game with more unrealized potential than Daunte. For all intents and purposes, Vikings fans (like me circa 2004) should hate Daunte Culpepper and should be pointing "told you so" at him right now. Indeed after Daunte whined his way out of Minnesota, the flyover fucks on the Vikings message boards were quick to toss out racial epithets, highlight the fact that Daunte was born in a prison, and welcome Brad Johnson (BRAD F'ING JOHNSON) as the new savior. There is something about Daunte's exit from the sporting world though, that is undeniably sad.

















I don't care that it was his fault, pride, stubbornness, stupidity, whatever that kept him as his own agent and kept him from playing this year. We are losing one of the bizarre wonders of the athletic form in Daunte. I know there is this racialized way of talking about black football players' physical attributes while focusing on white players' "smarts" or "work ethic;" and I know that the way announcers used to talk about Daunte's "bigness" was as annoyingly common as remarks about "Matt Birk went to Harvard," "Brett Favre looks like a little kid out there," etc. Still, I fear that we may never see another player like Culpepper. There was the story about how Mike Ditka wanted to draft him as a tight end. He almost signed a baseball contract. I remember him tackling the shit out of some guy after he threw an interception. Before the injury I have never seen someone that big also run so quickly with such a cannon of an arm. Culpepper was what steroids are supposed to make you be. Losing him in the NFL would be like the NBA losing Ron Artest, a guy who I still think should play center at some points. The sheer peculiarity of Daunte's skill made him a joy to watch. Almost like some Coen Bros-curated football film.

And now we look destined for a decade of Aaron Rodgers, Joe Flacco, Matt Ryan, and Jay Cutler. It will be a turning of the tide indeed, but we will have to wait for someone else to bring oddity back to the quarterback position.


















Profile in Strange Part II. Some of you may be aware of our roots, and how a decent few of us had a bubbling interest in the indie-rap explosion of the mid-1990s. At the center of this movement was Bobbito Garcia's legendary Fondle Em record label and the fifth release on that label, Siah & Yeshua Da PoED's EP. The EP contained six songs, each a classic in its own right, including the magnum opus, "A Day Like Any Other." Siah and Yeshua had Posdnuos/Dove-type chemistry on the mic and ill fantasy jazz production. Like so many groups from that era, they became ever more obscure. Yeshua remained strong in the New York scene with his group Wee Bee Foolish and I believe he started a label of his own. But Siah became a mystery. One of the most promising voices in rap became a ghost.



















There were rumors he moved to Israel or went to law school. Thanks to the internet, I discovered that Siah went to grad school at Johns Hopkins for a poly sci degree. The crazy thing though is that his advisor was then neo-con Francis Fukuyama, with whom he co-authored a paper for the Wall Street Journal on radical Islamism. I'm not sure if this matters to anyone else, but it is blowing my f'ing mind and is perhaps the most FREEDARKO event of my life. To those unfamiliar with Siah (and Yeshua), an appropriate analogy would be like if you were growing up in 1968 and got really into the Velvet Underground banana album, and then the group disbanded and a few years later you found out Lou Reed was making a living as a famous sculptor for Madame Tussaud's wax museum on London. Ill.

At any rate, please listen to Siah: here, here, here , here, and here.

One last thing. The Recluse points to the hilarity of Bossip not knowing who the hell Rashad McCants is in this photo. Perhaps that's a little more tragic than hilarious.
























Freedarko will be returning to its regularly scheduled programming of politics and bullsh!t shortly.

FD Guest Lecture: Poetic Primacy

We've long been fascinated by the poetry of Rashad McCants and have argued passionately in the comments about its literary merit. To strengthen our case, we brought in an actual academic for today's guest lecture. Below read the words of Chartin Muzzlewit, English PhD student and future big red tree, analyzing the McCants poem "Number 1."

At first glance, this poem indicates the speaker's investment in guidance by a spiritual power. And although power is initially accessible solely in a dream-world, it has troubling effects on the speaker's body ("I sense the veins in my body thicken"). The striations of muscles coming to life could indicate sheer physical strength, but this possibility is complicated by the later homoerotic intimacy between the spiritual presence ("him") and the speaker's body. For example, when the speaker imagines a spiritual consummation, the body seems both infinitely compartmentalized ("my eyelashes touch") and entirely reduced ("no thought or sound"). This combination of extreme particularity and obliteration imply that the spiritual encounter is, in fact, a self-shattering sexual encounter.

Throughout the poem, power links to sexuality in a dangerous way; access to the spiritual plane is possible, but the body challenges the spirit while it simultaneously acts as a route to spiritual life. Physical power bursts forth in the poem's opening line, only to be undercut by a progressive reduction in the body's ability to apprehend the world around it ("my eyes just blink. No thought or sound"). This is a speaker poised between a desire to enter a spiritual world that chips away at the physical body and a realization that true power can only be achieved through that body ("he knew that my life would demand some sin"). The spiritual power's foreknowledge of the body's "sin" indicates that the power dynamic (troubled by the image of the self's engorgement in the first two lines) remains in place – the spiritual power maintains its hierarchical relationship to the speaker's body.

The resolution of the poem links masochistic submission to the spiritual power ("with a command from him") with recognition of the speaker's chosenness ("I am here for a reason"). The poem closes with a momentary identification between the speaker and the spiritual power ("To be/#1"). But the question raised by this elision is, of course, how the speaker's willingness to submit to the spiritual other relates to the central tension in the poem – the sexualized connection between the spiritual and the body.

R.I.P. THE BIRTHDAY CAKE

Blah blah blah, Dwight Howard brought the Dunk Contest. Whatevs. For those in the know, 2/16/08 was about one man and one small baked good. Well, two men actually. Regardless, here is the official FD post-mortem on the real star(s) of the evening.

Dr. Lawyer IndianChief: As I was saying, the most miserable person in the building blew out a pink frosted cupcake.
Bethlehem Shoals: Was that dunk a metaphor for Gerald Green himself? Some "weeping clown" shit?
Tom Ziller: That makes sense. A sordid celebration of a career in the can.
Dr. LIC: There was like a glitch in the space time continuum. Harlan and Barkley said he didn't blow it out. But then replays showed he did
TZ: I never knew Kobe Bryant was such a huge fan of cupcakes. He seemed inordinately pleased, as far as Kobe Bryant goes.
BS: You obviously don't have kids. And I don't either. But I live by this cupcake place, and those things are like the Oxycontin of the grade school world.
Dr. LIC: Gerald Green and McCants are still children. Is that what you're saying?
BS: That's true too. And likely drug abusers. But I just mean that Kobe had an in-joke with himself. Kobe the dunker versus Kobe the parent, united for one special moment.

***

BS: Does this doom McCants by association?
TZ: I don't know, McCants became the star.
Dr. LIC: McCants was the only one frowning during the superman dunk. McCants had more airtime than Damon Jones.
TZ: If the Wolves stay together, McCants is like their ringleader or carnival barker
BS: If you put McCants' brain in Green's body. . . oh wait, that's what that dunk was.
TZ: Rashad took it so seriously too, like that was a dunk involving a cupcake, but he understood the heavy importance of the matter. Like Jameer Nelson would have been cracking up. Kyle Lowry would have tried to rebound the cupcake.
BS: Cupcakes are a lot like clowns. They seem happy, but they're also melancholy. Think about how severe it is. One bit of cake. One tiny candle. But made into its own lonely, finite unit.
Dr. LIC: Ironically, there was no actual cake. It was nobody's birthday. Yet it was THE BIRTHDAY CAKE.
BS: It reminds me of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. (NOTE: I meant the Kennedy Memorial).



TZ: Isn't the single birthday cupcake a romantic movie cliche?
Dr. LIC: There were homo-erotic overtones during the whole contest. I hate to get all "Mobley likes Francis bwahahahahaha"
TZ: Jameer and Dwight were off the charts
Dr. LIC: But yeah, exactly.
BS: Dwight Howard is totally homo-erotic. Clarification: I'm not saying he's gay.
Dr. LIC: Everyone kept talking about Dwight's body. Kenny Smith. . .
BS: Exactly
Dr. LIC: And later Mark Jones.
BS: Nice guys who work out and wear costumes. Sorry, that's the stereotype right there. Was that dunk contest a topography of today's gay scene? Cupcakes=twinks?
Dr LIC: Green kept throwing up the Hawaiian aloha sign. But I couldn't tell if that's just because he has four fingers. I think it was his good hand.
BS: Were they in Hawaii?
Dr. LIC: Green thought it was the Pro Bowl.

***

Dr. LIC: Green's Houston tattoo is off the chain. I just randomly found this while web-searching for it:

"Shawn Marion has a fantastic belt buckle. It’s big, it’s probably silver, and it sports a stylized skyline of the Windy City. Above the buildings, it reads “Chicago.” Below it: "S. Marion." It’s sort of urban cowboy, which is kind of how we’ve always pictured Shawn Marion in his daily, non-basketball life." (via CityPages)

BS: Is he from Chicago?
Dr. LIC: Dude is from Waukegan
BS: I'd always assumed he sprang up in the desert amd marched to UNLV (NOTE: I know that, in real life, he stopped off for JUCO in Indiana first).
Dr. LIC: Exactly.



TZ: Dawkins should be a permanent dunk contest judge.
BS: The dunk contest is really white i've decided. Or just very stoner, maybe. Case in point, Dawkins. Or maybe just like that scene in "Waiting to Exhale" where they drink a bunch of wine. How many players do you think smoke before coming to watch the dunk contest?
TZ: Everyone but Kobe. Caron's moment of realization on what Gerald was going to do was incredible. His eyes light up and then he pre-enacts it.
Dr. LIC: Kobe kidnapped all star weekend and tried to make up for it by looking really happy during the dunk contest. My brother pointed out a key moment in the Dwight Howard superman video: When he chest bumps Kobe after the dunk, Howard totally gets kneed in the balls.
BS: We should get back to THE BIRTHDAY CAKE. Was that the underground king of the evening?
TZ: Absolutely. No one will forget it.