More than I can stand

Let me offer up a little advice for all my fellow NBA-scaling/rap-hawking/black-culture-jocking blog fleas: you might as well close up shop during Houston’s All-Star Weekend. The Weekend typically bears on its wings more wacky mental snapshots than our ilk can bear, but this year? Picking out the best and brightest moments will be like trying to date in Paradise, and we self-appointed connoisseurs of the radiant other will find ourselves paralyzed and impotent. Either our brains will fry from the glut of meaning or, bitter that the gems no longer need dusting off, we’ll be reduced to the gawky spectatorship that we’d like to think our wit exempts us from.



In fact, for our purposes the whole giant lobster may have already jumped the shark. Two words for you busters: Shaq with grills. Last night, while listening to one of the few H-Town mix shows that sounds like you’d like them all to, I caught the following (loosely paraphrased):

“We had Vince Young up on the mic. . . Shaq’s party was crazy. . . he’s been hanging out with Paul Wall. . . dude had front and bottom grills. . . he’s so dark and those grills were so sparkly. . . you know Paul Wall must’ve done ‘em.”

Don’t front like that didn’t just write your next 35,000 blog entries for you. And I guarantee that, even if I do nothing more that weekend than turn on the radio when I’m driving, I’ll probably have enough comparably mind-blowing (if not quite as singular) one-line anecdotes to pass on. But (that’s the FreeDarko race siren you hear about to run up on ya) this has got me feeling a little uncomfortable about my tabloid-like obsession with the ASW hoopla. The embarrassment of riches I’m expecting from 2006 is just an exaggerated version of what we’re always after: rappers, ballplayers, and other black celebrities either trying on each others’ hats or breaking down the distinctions between them.



You can argue that this kind of stargazing is perfectly natural, but the degree to which we treat all of the Weekend’s proceedings as a crazed novelty almost makes it out to be a four day-long ghetto of celebrity. Like this never happens except under these very special circumstances, and it’s some sort of cultural landmark for these folks to hang out and relate to each other. At the very least, we can only be so surprised that wealthy, successful members of the hip-hop generation in sports, music, and the rest of the entertainment business get together and make exotic black stuff happen; Page 6 and the likesuch are predicated on the assumption that white actors and rockers spend every night of the week grasping hands in a coke-fuelled shadow world. “Shaq with grills” isn’t some earthshaking occurrence that demands commentary; in all truth, it seems pretty much par for the scene you’d expect around ASW.



For anyone that finds that too arduously PC, I wanted to go off of something Ken said the other day (and I’d been thinking about posting on for a minute). In the context of god only knows what, Ken wondered aloud if any male sports fan “really wants a woman who knows all about Oil Can Boyd.” Two weekends ago, my girl and I were headed out; for no reason other than the magnetic hangman that is my laptop, I stopped to check my fantasy team on the way out. It was the night that Gerald Wallace, a key member of XtremeMentalTorture and one of my favorite players, went down, sending shockwaves through my emotional and professional life, and leading to about five minutes worth of distraction during the ride to who knows where. This got noticed, and, to make a long story short, I eventually ended up admitting that someone very dear to me had gotten hurt, but that I doubted she’d heard of him and didn’t really want to talk about fantasy sports (with her) anyway. She pressed me, and I finally muttered out “Gerald Wallace.” Her sarcastic reply: “I know who Gerald Wallace is. Remember, I do work here.”



(yes, that is Wallace. And in case this post is boring you, here's some fond photographic memories from the time he and his Kings teammates logged at a Sactown ink spot)

Honestly, I felt distant and empty. Like I’m glad that I’m with someone who will watch a quarter of a televised game with me, be cool with certain urgent, must-see contests, and appreciates the broader category of FreeDarko. And I’m hardly one to put much stock in gender roles, a man’s place, a woman’s worth, etc. But Gerald Wallace is exactly the kind of marginal sports figure who you don’t want your significant other to recognize. As marvelous as he is, knowing about Wallace signifies everything that I would never want in a woman: amateur scout, dunk obsessive, box score scourer, fantasy enthusiast, semi-regular watcher of League Pass. I’m not sure that I want to be part of a group of friends, much less involved in a serious relationship, where my NBA problem is the norm, not an endearing, endless freak-out.



Finally, basketball itself. It’s not too soon to start the MVP debate, but over the last week Kobe has practically forced the issue. Probably not worth going into the candidates, since we all know them well, and Kobe has to average thirty-five and make the playoffs before they’ll consider giving it to him. But Nash is certainly up there, doing more this time around with less than he had for last year’s exhilarating campaign. The real question is whether his MVP set a precedent or was one of those “we can’t not give it to him, but it’s partly so we’ll never have to leave it with him (or someone like him) again.” If it ends up with Billups, it’ll be mostly to shut people up, but Nash’s prior award might have accidentally made him the favorite.

Hound on hound

It ain’t Isiah, but for now, Babcock will have to do. Mere hours after I explained why the Knicks' embattled GM was doing his fair share of Association-destroying, the Raptors cut ties with the man whose track record can be most generously described as pitiable. The latest of many executives seemingly incapable of making a sound decision, Babcock’s most legit move involved snaring an All-Star in the Best Draft Ever; on the other side of the scales of justice, we find a delightful medley of the historically incompetent (giving away Vince, the immortal Araujo pick) and the subtly inept (overpaying for Rafer, losing ‘Yell for nothing). Usually it's just local fans who have strong feelings about GM's, but while Dumars and Donnie Walsh have become national celebrities through their cunning, Babcock's name is widely synonymous with sheer indeptitude. Just as we call for coaches’ head on the daily, whether or not we care about the fortunes of the team they lead, Babcock stood as an insult to the Association we fans deserve. Yes, he made decisions that lent an unfair advantage to some lucky opponents—whether it was those drafting after him, those chasing free agents when he’d mismanaged his money, or, as we saw so recently, any future All-Timer who happened to catch fire against them in a game. But more to the point, he was the front office equivalent of that “how is he a starter in this league” guy, someone whose very existence flew in the face of everything superlative we want to believe about the National Basketball Association.



What makes Babcock or Isiah so galling is that you, me, and everyone we know could, if given the opportunity, probably craft a more perfect basketball union. This isn’t a “my kid could do that” argument, but the fairly obvious contention that, judging from their professional histories, we hardcore basketball fans know as much about personnel, scouting, common cap sense, and abstract strengths and weaknesses as the clownier of the GM’s. I’m not claiming to be a master technician of the game, or even a particularly sound exec. Compared to Babcock, though, I feel myself to be highly qualified for the position of handing out millions to nervously assessed journeymen.



Now I speak: why is it that we spend so much more time shitting on coaches than GM’s? I know that Babcock and Thomas hear it at their respective arenas, and Matt Millen has been forced into the defensive crouch of a hurried tyrant. But for every extreme case like this, there are umpteen million examples of coaches getting called out on the regular, dramatically and often without much provocation. Granted the coach has more of an effect on the day-in, day-out performance of the team. His role, though, means nothing without proper execution and a roster that loves itself. As in, blame the system all you want, but how can you grasp the system when the actors come up lame? I know that in some far-off land, a man with hair in his ears and eyes holds out for a firebrand whose shouting vaults players into excellence. These figures, though, are by far the exception; for the most part, coaches are limited by what their squad is capable of or willing to make happen on the floor. And since this varies wildly from game to game, based on opponent, travel, change of the season, and players-only chemistry issues (in basketball, the coach is far more helpless in this respect than in football), it’s hard to get an accurate picture of just how great or terrible a coach actually is. As DLIC has said, this is a league of players, and especially in the case of a players’ coach like Doc Rivers, it’s just not always clearly his fault.



This is not a defense of crappy coaches; I'm just suggesting that it’s the GM we’re probably in the best position to criticize. He deals not with the vicissitudes of a long, misshapen season, but with the long-term prospect of an asset’s value and worth. Just as I rarely presume to know what the experience of playing in the NBA is like, I find it hard to endlessly feast upon the problematic intersection of coaching’s idealism and the messy tract of practice (“in practice” and “PRACTICE?!?!”). The Babcocks of this league, though, disappoint me in the very department I spend so much time visiting, getting maximum leeway and the luxury of pure principle. Not only do I think I could GM the Raptors, I also think that next time we kill a coach for “his” actions, it would do us well to look just as hard at the GM. We probably have much more of a right to knowledgably take him on, can pinpoint more clearly where he screwed up and, of course, he’s the one who handed a struggling coach those pieces in the first place.



Some random shit that might well be the beginning of a new series, NFL Homo Semiotics:

1.Did anyone else find it as weird as I did that, when Gillian Barber introduced the finalists for “NFL’s Sexiest Man” last weekend, they were Favre and Neil Rackers, a kicker? This probably belongs under “NFL Racial Semiotics,” since the NFL is, I don’t know, more than seventy percent African-American, but I know that even suggesting that Favre and Rackers might not be the best-looking NFL'ers might make some people uncomfortable.

2. Like two weeks ago, Colin Cowherd revealed his “man-crush” on Bill Bellichek. Last time I checked, the trailblazing quality of the “man-crush” was that it trafficked in some level of homo-eroticism; has Brokeback Mountain so traumatized sports talk that only unattractive, deathly boring figures—who safely rob the expression of all its sexual connotations—are now eligible for “man-crushes?”

Seriously, sports talk and American masculinity in general is mildly obsessed with joking about that movie. I can't figure out if this is a good or bad thing.

When too much is too much

I know, I know, it’s beyond the realm of comprehension that major strirrings involving FD idols could go down and we’d have nothing for you. I’m speaking, of course, of Killa’s bid for KONY and Ron Ron taking his “misunderstood and difficult” rating well past T.O. levels. In a brighter age, this blog might have been awash with tales of purple-plated cities and a QB headcase who had the league by the throat. But today catches me feeling something like



So stop reading right here if you’re expecting me to stick with the FreeDarko party line I have in the past so craftily hewn.

First with the trivial. I was up in the air when I first heard "You Got It," not in the least because I’ve never really cared that much about Jay-Z. To hopelessly overstate someting Ian pointed out, over the last twenty-four months, the blog gang has transformed Cam into nothing less than the rightful heir to Starks Enterprises, with the added plus of meaningful cred. Quoth my brother: “Jay may be the most popular rapper from New York, but Cam’s the most popular in New York.” This was a career-defining move by the artist who all those enamored of style—whether they be urban or suburban, real or virtual, white or black, paper or plastic—had to get behind. I went to sleep that night convinced that this was a banner moment for the FreeDarko cause, and that, What the Game's Been Missing or no What the Game’s Been Missing, our options were fine, inscrutable, and absolutely essential.



When I went to the grocery store the next morning, I felt something draining in my ear. I tried in vain to rally my internal security forces, but it was gone. Cam was going to war, but not for me. Then I read the afore-linked Sexy Results! post, which made word that which I had merely intuited: this was a lame-ass stunt that had nothing to do with “the Movement” and everything to do with standard-issue rap posturing. Instead of insisting that madness could reign supreme, Killa was abandoning the very expectations that kept him on our pedestal. He could’ve proved us right once and for all (in making him the figure we did), but round one of fifteen took all that subcultural capital and turned it into so much elegant cannon fodder. I listened to Purple Haze in the car yesterday, and already it seemed less a self-contained art object and more a joint effort, a simpler time when thousands joined hands to imagine the Dips into righteousness.



I generally hide the fact that I was once a practicing music writer; what happened above was to stave off the pain of inevitably addressing Artest for a few minutes longer. A minute or so into this season, I dropped this gem of a post that, once and for all, spelled out the magnitude of the Association’s least quantifiable public figure. Not only was Artest bent up in the headpiece, he was the ultimate fuck you back at the hoops purists who, like people in Kansas, constantly remind me just how far to the left I am in the grand scheme (of politics and/or NBA criticism). No personality and barely a brain, but Ron Ron utterly defied everything we thought we knew about today's organized basketball. How could I ever have anticipated that my “Artest for MVP” cries would end up impossibly dead-on; while sidelined, Artest has kept the entire league in a holding pattern, with all transactions and most second-half strategies dependant on where he ends up and when.

When it happened the first time, the Kings trade was nothing to me. I’ll say it again: there’s not enough going on there for even Artest to build and destroy. Solid team, a smidgeon of attitude and image, marginal playoff chances. . . at least Ron Ron to the Spurs would have torn the world in two. Sactown would be the worst kind of exile for this man, whose work consists in equal parts of calamity and devotion. The Kings, my friend, neither accept nor reject the both of them.



Bring it back. The trade gets nixed, Artest and agent throw out all sorts of equivocating yang about their strong preferences that would in no way affect TW’s ability to wax professional anywhere in the league, Hunter gets involved, and before you know it, Artest has the one thing that’s kept him from coming off as a dick: power. Up until that very moment, dude was like the weather was to the modern American farmer; feared and respected, but never granted intentionality. Artest couldn’t help himself, and the rest of God’s green basketball force had to take proper precautions, stand back, and hope for a lush rainy season instead of rock-filled mudslide. As a rule, trade demands stink of selfishness and the weak, but in Artest's case, it had initially been a fairly sensible part of recovery, Good Ron's attempt to distance himself from—and get all preventive on—the ghost of his inner Brawl. Now, though, Artest was getting picky about redemption and showing himself in full, scheming control of his troublemaking. For the first time, it was impossible to not think of him as a manipulator, a spoiled, unsympathetic lout rather than the warped basketball genius we’d always imagined him to be. That the deal eventually went through hardly undid the damage; having reared the scabrous, disingenuous head we'd always thought he lacked, Artest was now just another disgruntled market force.

You could say that this was Artest’s folly truly overtaking the league, to the point of actively brokering deals where before it had merely factored into them with great force and permanence. That, though, misses what was so crucial before: Artest stood apart from himself along with us, watching the tide go by and asking sane questions. Those days are long gone, and with it, that sense of belonging. Not of Artest to us; like with Cam, we can always look back at what we said and how well we said it. But us belonging to Artest, really being a part of his world as he shared in our wonderment—that’s as dead and gone as Cam riding into battle on a horse named Style.



In case this post has broken your wings and made you long for when FreeDarko thanked its gods with help and random noise, Thurl wanted to pass along this one-time FD favorite that we first blessed you with so far back in last February that Thurl was yet unknown to us (though DLIC was aboard). Listen, love, appeal, and then join us again in this solemn, solemn hour.

An Emotional Preview of Tonight's Wizards vs. Celtics Game

In Dumb and Dumber, in order to make some extra cash, Lloyd Christmas describes selling a headless parakeet to a blind wheelchair-bound boy named Billy. The camera immediately cuts to Billy, unknowingly stroking the decapitated creature, while cooing, “Pretty bird. Pretty bird. Can you say pretty bird?”

For as long as I have followed the NBA I have avidly supported the Washington Wizards, an experience that has often left me feeling like Billy the Blind Boy. When I developed my attachment to them, I was simply too young and too naïve to understand that I was about to love something defective. Like Billy, I showered the object of my affection with love and attention, hoping that maybe a little more might lead to reciprocation without realizing it would never come.

Until last year, for the previous fifteen seasons, the Wizards were an undeniably bad team; in that span they won 483 games and lost 797. Without examining the composition of the numerous lineups that helped cement Washington’s status as “The Clippers of the East”, it might be easy to cast them off as a perennially underachieving team for whom failure was their only consistent accomplishment.

Yet Washington’s failures during the early period of my infatuation with them can be traced to two simple problems: horrible drafting and bad luck. Over a 10-year span (1991 – 2000), despite missing the playoffs all but one year, the Wizards failed to win a single top-three pick, the odds of which occurring was less than 7%. As a result, GMs Wes Unseld et al. apparently set in place several rules for drafting players, among them:

Rule: Select any available physical freak.
Result: While the vernacular of today might interpret the above rule as “draft superior athletes”, this rule was interpreted literally and resulted in the selection of 5’3” Muggsy Bogues, 7’7” Manute Bol, and 7’8” Gheorge Muresan. These picks would have made for a fine Ringling Brothers corporate squad, but little else.

Rule: Rather than scout players, consult genealogy charts.
Result: Washington drafts Brent Price (brother of Mark) and Harvey Grant (brother of Horace).

Rule: If all else fails, turn to divine providence.
Result: After trading their 1st round pick for a golden calf, God Shammgod is chosen in the 2nd round of the 1997 draft.


While hitching my emotional wagon to such a total disaster of a franchise might have ended my foray into following the L, a sort of NBA-related Stokholm Syndrome instead overtook me. Though the Wizards were home to the freak, the overshadowed younger brother, and the wayward deity, they were still my freaks no matter how many airballs they hoisted and no matter how many defensive assignments they blew. I came to see them as a group of talentless overachievers, a bizarre collection of individuals who miraculously could win almost thirty games against actual professional basketball players!

When the Wizards acquired Chris Webber, it might have appeared that they were ready to cast off the shackles of mediocrity, but I knew better. Winning just wasn’t something the Wizards did and Webber's four years in DC changed nothing. But it didn’t really bother me; I was happy to just to see Gheorge’s delightfully disfigured face on Snickers’ commercials and shout to my friends that my boy was on TV.For the next few years, the Wizards continued to cement their “culture of losing” and no less an authority on winning than Michael Jordan failed to prevent it. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

But last year, thanks largely to Gilbert Arenas (whose virtues have been extolled all over this site), the Wizards were able to overcome every invisible force in the universe to, not only make the playoffs, but actually win a series. Best of all, the Wizards won with the same kind of team I had grown to love. Antawn Jamison and Larry Hughes were both cast off from unsuccessful teams and played with chips on their shoulders; Arenas continued to defy skeptics, as he had at every level, and made his first All Star team; the Wizards returned to their proud tradition of signing the ugliest player in the league, bringing on Michael Ruffin (the last of the homo habilis) in the proud tradition of Gheorge and Popeye Jones.

The Wizards’ march through the first round of last year’s playoffs was among the most exciting experiences I’ve had as a basketball fan. There's no point wasting space trying to describe the feeling; just about every fan has known it at one point (it just took Wizards fans twenty three years to get there). Yet experiencing winning suddenly barred me from my garden of blissful ignorance; I had tasted the forbidden fruit and never again would I feel as happy to support a losing team.


This season, the team seems to have settled back into familiar mediocrity. Ernie Grunfeld couldn’t bring himself to match Cleveland’s insane deal for Hughes and was forced to lose his 2nd best player without compensation. Flaws that last year made the team endearing, like Jamison’s lack of a post game, Arenas’s unconscious gunning, and Eddie Jordan’s completely unstructured “Princeton” offense this year appear simply as vulnerabilities. They’re currently barely the 8th seed in the east, a precipitous drop from last year, and haven’t shown many signs of having the offensive dynamism they had. They often feel like the same old Wiz: not good enough to make any noise in the playoffs, not bad enough to get a decent draft pick. They’re surging a little now, but where I used to be gleefully optimistic about the team, I can’t help think last year was just an outlier.

It pains me to say this, but I think I wish I had the old Wizards back. Before last year, no game the Wizards played could ever turn out badly. If they won, they amazingly beat the odds; if they lost, it was no big deal. Low expectations mean no disappointment and I was free to gleefully support my woe-begotten team and its rag-tag ensemble of players.

As a teacher, it crushed me when one of my students struggled with a test when I knew they could have done better. Every loss to a team like Houston and Orlando feels similarly; they should have beaten these teams, so why didn’t they? For the first time, I sulk after loses that I watch on espn’s near-useless gamecast.

It’s a pretty tired analogy, but winning really is like an addiction. Feeling it for the first time is a tremendous rush. But once you try it, all you want is to feel it again. So while rooting for the Wizards was once an unconditionally positive experience, it’s now a roller coaster of wins and losses and, honestly, I think I’d like to get off.

So tonight, I travel to the TD Banknorth Center in Boston on one of the two nights I have circled on my calendar: the two times the Wizards come to my newly adopted home of Boston. I hate the Celtics and the eye-gouging brand of basketball they play. In fact, I hate every team in this city and the smugness their fans exude. For me, tonight’s game is an extremely trivial battle of good vs. evil. I never thought I’d be reluctant to drop $20 I don’t have on the Wizards, but I never thought I’d be crushed if they lost.

Hate him now

Nothing I haven't said a thousand times already. But in case you didn't recognize, that's the second most points ever scored in a game. And Wilt's now-#3 was in 3OT. Seriously, I don't know how anyone can fault this Kobe moment; whatever he did, he's earned the right.

Happy Birthday to Us: FD's Greatest Misses

We've been getting a lot of traffic lately, especially after links from the mighty ESPN and Fox Sports (whattup Peter!) empires, and it's occurred to us that people new to the site might not really know what we're about. Not to get all Andre at the 2004 Grammys on you, but Stankonia is not our first album. We've been doing this. In fact, today's date means it's been exactly one year since Shoals dropped the first ever FreeDarko disquisition with his prescient explanation of why he still had faith in Kobe:

It happened in early 2003, when Kobe was on a Shaq-less scoring tear of historic proportions; I myself was spending a lot of time in New York, copping yay at wholesale prices and fucking a girl with a lazy eye. One night I was at a bar with too many chairs, celebrating the birthday of a total stranger and watching the Lakers/Rockets game out of the corner of my one green eye.

....

I don’t remember what Kobe did (other than score a lot), and I don’t know why this night was different from all others that month (an obvious choice would have been one of his assaults on the hapless Nuggets, which provided ninety-percent of that season’s Bryant highlights). But then and there, it dawned on me that resisting was a waste—Kobe was simply too good not to jock.

....

Mark my word, he’s got plenty of time and talent to burn—if it was all a dream, it never would have happened in the first place.

And since we've already been accused of being too introspective and self-glorifying, we thought we might as well help you "do the history" with a look back at some of our most memorable moments.

As you might have guessed from both the name "Free Darko" and the bit about Slovenian farm league analysis, the Masters of the Klondike are indeed fascinated by the European influx into the NBA. During last year's Draft, we were fortunate enough to get three guest diary entries from Spanish skulker Fran Vasquez, and then in August, we hit you with our Guide to the Euro, which featured a topless shot of Peja that mysteriously appeared on the Sports Guy's links page shortly thereafter, leading to Shoals' jeremiad against Bill Simmons.



What we definitely are not is one of those semi-journalistic blogs with snarky comments about whatever happened that day on the hardwood. But, we'll occasionally be current enough to post about events as they're happening. Peep Big Baby's transcription of Stephen A.'s interview with AI shortly after the Sixers acquired C-Webb, Andreo's welcome back to Zo, and our group blogging of an April contest between the Mavs and Sonics.

Shoals once pointed out that most of the Masters were "born under the dueling style signs of hip-hop and indie rock," and music is definitely one of the cultural forces that has shaped our worldview. With that in mind, DLIC hooked up with former NBA baller Thurl Bailey to bring you such bizarre hoops-related tunes as the Kobe-themed operatic metal epic "Troubled Smile" and Tony Parker's rap debut. Of course, this has also led us to wade into the murky territory of sports/music analogy like when DLIC tackled his newfound appreciation of Kobe Bryant and the phenomenon of reverse backpackerism.

Football/basketball analogy has also reared its mangy head on FreeDarko, most famously in Shoals' pre-exile post about Terrell Owens. Race was a factor in that discussion and is another topic that has certainly helped to define what we're all about. From the ongoing racial semiotics discourse to Shoals blogging about Hurricane Katrina, race is never too far from our minds and hearts. It has also provided a lens through which we've viewed such topics as the age limit and the new dress code.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the epic discussions that often take place in the comments box. It was there that the world first witnessed the brilliance of new Masters Brickowski and ForEvers Burns and also where Big Baby dropped the following jewel, possibly the greatest statement ever made on Free Darko:

Speaking of teams bitching about other teams, has anyone been following the Nuggets recent collective whine-fest about Manu, who apparently plays 'too ugly' for them. Following Saturday's game, Karl said about Ginobili's play, "I'm going to put it on tape and show my son how to play basketball -- just put your head down and run into people. I guess that's a new brand of basketball. It's not very pretty. He just goes in there and throws his arms up in the air and throws his elbows at us. He hits you as much as you hit him."

Dear Denver: let me introduce you to a country known as Argentina, where the national sports hero for the last twenty five years has been a fat, cocaine addict with a Che Guevara tattoo, named Diego Maradona, who in a world cup game scored one of the famous goals in sports history, not with his foot, but with 'the hand of god'. The point here is that in the rest of the world (i.e. soccer), scorer's are supposed to be insane, cheating is acceptable, and 'the flop' is an art form. If your leading scorer isn't falling flat on his face while doing a spread eagle and screaming in pain at the slightest tickle from a defender, something is wrong. I'm not necessarily trying to defend players flopping here, I just think it's funny that Carmelo and Karl are acting like Ginobili is some sort of unprecedented one-armed chicken, (which in some sense he is, since most foreign playerss are seven foot tall Balkan refugees who if they ever fell over, probably wouldn't get back up before their contracts expired), when it just seems obvious to me that Ginobili's just not American. Anyway, Ginobili plays crazy, and I like it.

While I'm bitching, if I hear another player say "Pick you poison" or "We got our swagger back" in these playoffs, I'm going to pants them. The only player I'll make an exception for is Kenyon Martin, who actually does swagger so much it looks like he's about to pull his own shorts off at any moment.

And that's just Round 1! Where's Sauce Money at??

Call it pyrite, it's shiny for a reason

I don’t want to talk about All-Star selections. By now, any half-conscious NBA fan should know the drill: homers vote for their stars and, shamefully, their half-decent subs; Yao racks up a ton of votes and the xenophobia kicks in; Vince makes the starting line-up and purists feign outrage (ironically, he deserves to start this year but isn't getting the votes); and every columnist in the universe weighs in about who deserves a spot and why. The thing is, this serious consideration of "merit" and "accomplishment" is misleading, if not an outright joke. The All-Star Game isn’t a real game; it’s a glorified exhibition, and we watch it to see crowd-pleasing players at their most loose, brash, and exceptional. All the arguments that apply so readily to the MVP race—key guy on winning team, big numbers in the service of mediocrity, effect on teammates, clutch ability—have zero to do with what someone can make of a J-Kidd lob on the break. In fact, the Association has fifteen spots set aside for the Rip Hamiltons and Tim Duncans of this world: they’re called the All-NBA teams, and they’re supposed to reward players for outstanding work done during the regular season. I guess the East/West rivalry meant something a few years ago, when the West had such a gaping advantage that the occasional East victory came as a revelation and proof of substantial basketball worth. But with the two about even again, there’s hardly the need to excel at success that should be the hallmark of, say, the Olympic squad.

All-Star rosters should be most concerned with compiling that season’s most enthralling players. They’re out there to please the crowd, show up each other, and appeal to pure sickness, with the outcome irrelevant if it’s not a product of style. In a close game, it comes down to which team can discipline themselves without losing that all-important playfulness. It’s worth noting that T-Mac is historically a far better All-Star that Kobe, for the simple fact that Kobe has it in him to be methodical and gravely determined. T-Mac, on the other hand, takes chances and is immortal enough to improvise his way to a thirty-point outburst. Iverson may be the consummate All-Star performer, since for AI getting loose and bearing down are one and the same. I’m not proposing that we open the floodgates and fill each team with raw dunkers, but certainly the All-Star Game, consumed as a contest of style, needs to be recognized as that by those who take this “honor” seriously.



Now for the inevitable FreeDarko socio-cultural angle. If the NBA is making a conscious effort to downplay its hip-hop constituency, All-Star Weekend might as well be a lost cause. The Weekend is the Association’s dirty little admission of how much it owes the very fans it’s slighted as of late; in a month, it goes down in Houston; reliable sources tell me that last night, one of the local news channels ran a segment on the Ying Yang Twinz. The three day long party and highlight production tank pretty much screams “core audience,” and is as notable for its off-court action (AI renting out the whole damn Gallery comes to mind) as the celebration of dunking, long-range bombing, and the backward competitive spirit. And as much as Stern is concerned about the pale, corporate faces at courtside and in the luxury boxes, it’s that public’s willingness to treat All-Star Weekend like a national holiday (whose joke was that?) that gives it some sense of occasion and allows local businesses to capitalize. I know of no other sporting event whose identity hinges as violently on its pre- and post- merriment; you could have the most sorry, dog-earred East and West rosters imaginable, with a defensive gem of a Rookie Game and a Fred Jones-style dunk contest to boot, and it wouldn’t do a thing to the atmosphere of All-Star Weekend.



I’m not looking to racialize style—I think any FreeDarko reader knows that, for better or worse, I’ve done enough of that to last a lifetime. More to suggest that, as fans of “real” basketball exert more and more of a stranglehold on the Association’s official agenda and propaganda machine, would it kill the league to acknowledge that it does acknowledge the importance of style and the fans who find value in the “polluted” game? You can argue that, by this logic, All-Star Weekend amount to a caricature, segregation, or some other belittling of the excessive baggage that comes with the sport’s internal strife over the role of style. Politics, however, is rarely done in shades of gray, and in this case, conceding All-Star Weekend seems like a relatively minor gesture of goodwill. Yes, people of many colors vote in the starters, but everyone knows where those preferences originate; going platinum doesn't automatically make a rapper pop.

Then again, Stern seems to have his own ideas about the relationship between All-Star Weekend and the "real" game:

Even the trumpets fell

How could I have been so naive? Together or apart, Shaq and Kobe really do need the other to justify their respective existences and, on a basic, man versus sky level, make themselves whole. You can decide for yourself if this discovery nulls and voids everything I said about the two of them last month, i.e. whether they're now closer together or even further apart in their polar radiance.

Black K Street

I don’t think I was the only exciting NBA fan thrown into crisis by Ray Allen’s foray into the physical last week. As the Recluse himself pointed out, this was not just a incidental blow or two; as NBA fights go, this was about as fully-realized as they get. Like most people, I probably assumed that Allen wouldn’t hesitate to mix it up within the flow of the game, but would demurely fall back the minute it came time to actually square-off

The implications are raw and obvious. Everyone knows that Ray Allen is, despite his debonair exterior, world-class art collection, thing for pedicures, and credible grasp of the acting profession, a basketball machine of the highest order. If you looked up “quiet assassin” in the yearbook of frost, expect to see Allen’s likeness rendered therein. The thing is, he’s also Grant without the ears, Obama with a jumper, and top to bottom the single most likely NBA player to follow the legion of footballers before him into office. Surely we must live in a racist police state when Allen remains a mere citizen and the powers of law-giving are in the hands of former athletes like



Allen, though, was the one that sent Dooling flying into the stands, making punching all but inevitable. And for those of you not fortunate enough to have seen the footage, clearly there was nothing on Allen’s mind but beating the shit out of that scoundrel Dooling (who, according to Stevie Francis, would’ve been the odds-on favorite to walk out alive). Dooling’s post-fight pursuit definitely cast him as the villain, or at least the imbalanced one, but Allen was all up that fray and stank of it for the next few days.

What’s so amazing is how elegantly Allen, his coach, and even Dooling worked to explain away the entire thing. Playing both ends against the middle, the quotes that follow show you a world scheming to bring out the man in Allen while downplaying the animal within. This became something less than even a typical sports incident; by the time the spin was complete, this was the anti-Artest, two gentlemen defending themselves against the fire imposed on them by, well, the game itself. Allen’s not that kind of guy, but he can be if his duty to the game demands it. Like, I’m not a killer, but I’ll do it for my country.



"I know he ran underneath the tunnel and I guess he tried to meet me on the other side and he got met by some of Seattle's finest. I think once everything cooled down, I think he realized it was ridiculous. Things happen at the heat of the moment, and I guarantee you both parties regret what happened." —Allen

"I definitely regret what happened ... but it seemed as though it was unavoidable. It was almost like I was attacked and, you know, I responded in a way that I think any individual, any man or woman, would respond. Most people thought that I was this kind, even tempered, mild-mannered individual -- and I am for the most part -- but there is a line. My buttons can be pushed."—Allen

"Basketball is an emotional game. Sometimes you don't think, you just react and tonight was one of those nights."—Dooling

"I deserve [the suspension], bottom line."—Dooling.

"I thought Ray did the right thing staying on the ground and Dooling came back at him. At some point you have to protect yourself. I thought Ray handled it as well as he could. And if Ray didn't handle himself that way, I'd say it.” —Bob Hill.

"I never saw that in [Dooling]. He's very competitive ... but I'm a little surprised it went that far."—Riley

One notable thing here: Allen could have thrown Dooling under the bus, but instead took the highest of high roads and forgave his aggressor. Perhaps it would have sullied his public image to have admitted he’d sunk to the level of a wretch like Dooling, or have weakened his “all in the game” stance had he claimed that evil had lurked within his opponent—then, of course, it could just as easily have resided in him. Either way, you’ve got to figure that now Dooling inadvertently benefited from the ordeal, having now had no less a moral authority than the FBP himself offer a perfectly palatable explanation for Keyon’s bad behavior. If you don’t believe me, look no further than the Franchise’s insubordination—which, with no such blessings from above, was made into the (highly deserving) scapegoat for all the evening’s bad vibes (by an organization with credibility problems of its own).



When this post first dawned on me a few hours ago, I was dead set on laying out an elaborate FBP in a fight/Capitol Hill under siege metaphor, easing anyone caught in the blind, deaf, and dumb along by means of the thunderous quotable “work with the kid.” Then I caught the first two hours of Bauer Unlimited, witnessed the passing of the original FBP, was forced to accept that dude who plays Curtis has put on too much flesh to give us a premature look at older Dwyane Wade, and now believe the world awash in geo-political conspiracy. I thought it went all the way up to Stern. But that would’ve obscured what is actually a pretty solid point, so suffice to say JACK BAUER IS BACK, TRICK!!!!!!

Tears of Some Clowns

It began with an email confession from Shoals that "every time I see that stand-up comedy part of the KG commercial, I start crying," to which DLIC replied with the pronouncement that it was the "SADDEST COMMERCIAL EVER" and that KG was a very lonely man not unlike "David Ruffin circa first album post-Temptations." Shoals came back with "That commercial is totally Chris Bell in Europe," and it was on. Many emails and a couple text messages later, quite a list had been compiled, which is presented here for your enjoyment:

that commercial is oj simpson by himself watching the 2006 rose bowl
that commercial is jameer nelson on draft night
that commercial is rob babcock
that commercial is zora neal hurston in the last years of her life
that commercial is biz markie on celebrity fit club
that commercial is cappadonna
that commercial is tony soprano at the end of last season
that commercial is rashard lewis in the green room
that commercial is chris farley's death
that commercial is what "last days" should have been
that commercial is bo kimble's nba career
that commercial is ed harris' character in 'the hours'
that commercial is shareef abdur-rahim's arthritic knee
that commercial is BG
that commercial is geno auriemma
that commercial is derek fisher at the espy's
that commercial is charlton heston on the set of wayne's world 2
that commercial is peyton in new england
that commerical is johnny thunders in new orleans
that commercial is seth cohen in portland
that commercial is arthur ashe
that commercial is grady little
that commerical is peter jackson's "king kong"
that commercial is eating bi bim bab with my ex-girlfriend
that commercial is david letterman
that commercial is eminem's "say goodbye to hollywood"
that commercial is the gobi desert
that commercial is sophomore year homework involving 501 spanish verbs
that commercial is john chaney
that commercial is the ewing theory

that commercial is jandek
that commercial is bruce willis raising his kids
that commercial is carson palmer/chris henry
that commercial is "in living color" re-runs on bet
that commercial is the last scene of "aimee and jaguar"
that commerical is the finale of "cheers"
that commercial is beans waiting for visitors
that commercial is the end of an eightball
that commercial is tvz's major label deal
that commercial is "the dock of the bay"
that commerical is unitas in san diego
that commercial is the veterans' committee
that commercial is "mr. lonely" screwed and chopped
that commercial is every z-ro song not about sex or guns
that commercial is vincent foster
that commercial is richard manuel in "the last waltz"
that commercial is just akon
that commerical is big o crying
that commerical is kickers
that commercial is that gary wilson album
that commercial is thin lizzy
that commercial is the obligatory white big man on every big 10 team
that commercial is the gigantic building-sized cross near amarillo, texas
that commercial is webber's TO
that commercial is al gore conceding
that commercial is time travel
that commercial is sinatra at the oscars
that commercial is dimaggio sending weekly roses to marilyn's grave
that commercial is kobe bryant

It ended with Shoals lying in bed for an hour clutching his woman's arm, unable to speak, finally mustering the energy to send one final email: "You don't understand how incredibly sad this has made me."

KG, we feel your pain.

The President, the King, and Mehmet Okur

I made small talk with the school janitor each day as she cleaned out my classroom. On one particular Friday, she asked my weekend plans. When I mentioned that I might try to make it to the Clinton Library in Little Rock, she stopped sweeping and leaned against the end of her dust mop before saying: “Ooh wee, Mr. K, if that Bill Clinton walked in my house, he could take me right there on the kitchen table. My husband could watch, I wouldn’t even pay him no mind.”

I am not aware of any particular social conventions for responding to an elderly woman who just graphically professed a desire to cheat on her husband with the former president. Consequently, I sat silently at my desk, struggling and failing not to visualize Slick Willy and our balding, pumpkin-shaped janitor engaging in coital relations as her husband watched aghast.


While I hoped for some time that I would find a way to repress that memory, it has proven indelibly burned in my mind. But disturbing as it was, it speaks of the magnitude of Bill Clinton’s physical appeal. Yet for all of its intensity, it did not seem to have any clearly apparent source; he was too chubby and creepy for it to be purely aesthetic. I’ve heard repeatedly that women are attracted to power, but I've never heard any woman openly pine for a mustache ride from Joseph Stalin. Yet the Clinton appeal would make itself clear to me in the most unexpected of places.

I’ve been to Graceland five times; that’s not as weird as it sounds if it’s a few hours away and you live in a town of 800. Before you tour the mansion, you can watch a montage of Elvis’ performances, with the first half focusing on his early days. The room is always crowded and filled with the noise of idle conversation, even through the beginning of movie. Yet as each person momentarily looks to the screen, their gazes are captured and an awestruck silence sweeps over the room.

Suddenly, you “get” the whole Elvis phenomenon. He was the most captivating figure the world had every seen and, above all else, the personification of pure human sexuality. Elvis had the power to transform groups of meek fourteen year-old girls into screaming mobs that turned riot police pale with fright. No figure in history brought out in people the magnitude of emotion that Elvis did, and when you watch him closely, you begin to understand why.

On my fourth tour, among the numerous decorative handguns and the rotating circular fur bed with a mirrored ceiling, I noticed to my amazement that Bill Clinton looked distinctly like a young Elvis. Granted, they wouldn’t pass as twins, but notice the chubby similarity of their facial features; they walk with the same quiet confidence; they speak with the same soft southern drawl. (You are obviously free to disagree with my various contentions of physical resemblance, but I definitely stand by them.)

To this day, I am convinced that one reason for Clinton’s ability to bring out the basest emotions in people is due in part to the subconscious connection that people make between him and Elvis. They were both similarly captivating. The same kind of repressed women who yearned for Elvis for being a southern rouge that daddy wouldn’t approve of would have found Clinton desirable as well; the same kind of uptight white men who have an aneurysm at the very mentioning of Clinton would have regarded Elvis as the harbinger of impending moral degradation, where man and beast lay together free of social consequence. (Shoals alerted me to a book by Greil Marcus comparing the two, which can be found here).

As we all know, time was not particularly kind to Elvis. As his sideburns grew, so did his belly and his ego. In embodying the American dream, he came to embody all of America’s wretched excesses as well. As he found sequins, capes, and the lyrics to Neil Diamond songs, he lost his moves, his mojo, and his artistic credibility. But like rubberneckers at a train wreck, America couldn’t avert her eyes, packing concert halls and stadiums to hear a fallen angel forget the words to “Sweet Caroline.”

When I saw Mehmet Okur play for the first time all I could think was, “Holy crap! He looks like fat Elvis!” Okur simply does not fit with the aesthetic of the league. How many other players sport ridiculous sideburns, chest hair, and a clock-stopping double chin? Scott Pollard takes great pains to look different, but he comes across as wannabe hipster with too much time on his hands; every time Memo steps on the court, he looks like he could have just slept with one of LBJ’s daughters.

Okur also plays exactly how I would have imagined that the older fat Elvis would have played. Mehmet plods around the court with all of the grace of a drunk dinosaur. As he lurches towards the basket, he clears defenders out of the way, either by the sheer momentum of his girth or because opposing players just don’t want to touch someone so hairy and sweaty. He plays no defense whatsoever, allowing even the likes of Mark Blount to light him up at will.

Yet Okur is mesmerizing when he shoots the ball. He technique is otherworldly; it’s not just that he doesn’t hold his follow through, his release is fluid but from a strange angle; he looks awkward and natural at the same time, not unlike Bird. But the man can shoot. A few days ago, I saw him knock down three 3-pointers in the first quarter against the Celtics. For the first time, that night I saw a center shoot a technical foul free throw. Yet when his man has the ball, he looks like a bewildered but curious bird, peeking his head to get a look at the action and then darting it away the moment something moved. Okur looked confused and diffident constantly, but in the act of shooting, he had the confidence of another man.

Fat Elvis would have been a gunner too. He'd trudge out to the arc, lauch a three off the glass (he calls it, of course) and then make some stupid "return to sender" joke. In his later years, he was a walking disaster area, but still managed to release a few shockingly good songs (sorry FreeDarko, I love Edan as much as the next guy, but deep down I’m country to the core). Beneath the cartoonish clothing and piccolo accompaniments, there were times when fat Elvis still shined. In the same way, you can spend thirty minutes watching Memo shy away from driving opponents and throw passes into the stands while wondering if he even knows what team he’s on. But when he shoots you forget all of his gaffes and spend the rest of the game screaming at Deron Williams to run more pick and rolls.

America couldn’t avert her eyes from fat Elvis because of the spectacle he offered. I need to watch Okur for the same reason. He’s a walking antithesis to Wade, LeBron, Iverson, anyone really. How one man can move so goofily but shoot so sublimely seems to defy any logical conception of how human beings ought to play basketball. He looks like Elvis, he plays like Elvis, and I can’t look away.

Were I a more spiritual person, or maybe if I just did more drugs, I might argue that Elvis’s spirit somehow occupies Okur’s body. Maybe one day, he woke up, looked at himself in the mirror and said, “Well, I’m seven-feet tall and Turkey’s got no rock and roll, so I guess I better learn myself a jumper.”

The basketball snob in me says that I waste my time with Okur when there’s so much good basketball to be seen, as if indulging in Okur is the basketball equivalent of Lot’s wife turning back to look at Sodom and Gomorrah. But until I turn into a pillar of salt or unless he dies on the toilet, I’ll tune in whenever I can.

There is sound for the worthless

If no one noticed, I had partly planned to stop writing my lion's end of FreeDarko for the foreseeable New Year. I'm tired, angry, bored with the NBA, and have far more pressing things to do than spending several hours a day debating Lamar Odom's breast size on tv. I've also come to realize that, while as a blogger I'm supposed to want to cast a big tent, draw in the gross and distended for the sake of environment, people like Faith make me not want to visit my own site.

My scruffy 'ol relationship with the Association has so far fallen that yesterday I sent THC an email saying that I felt "embarrassed" for having tickets to a Wizards/Celtics jab-off that, incidentally, was set to overlap with the Redskins first playoff game in recorded history. Not that I care about Portis on the field anymore, or Moss more than two downs per half, but it just seemed like bad form; missing the NFL playoffs is nothing if not ignorant, and to do so in a city engulfed by post-season fever borders on youthful treason. Luckily, THC shot back with the observation that Arenas/Ricky Davis was a match-up akin to Hercules, I remembered what built this blog in the first place, and I was able to enjoy a lovely night of basketball without worrying who was angling for a field goal way off in the distance.

I could speak to you for eons of the zealotry and provident hand-outs that watching these two zesty, yet perfectly damned squads face off provided. The night was thick with such magical note cards as Gheorghe Muresan IN THE BUILDING to give a halftime award to the son of an owner of a favored chili spot. . . Larry David look-alike behind me who spent the entire fucking game yelling at the Wizards, especially Arenas, to "play defense" and "give it to Brendan". . . Delonte West, smooth as ice. . . Scalabrine put in to make one single clutch three-pointer from the corner, then promptly yanked again. . . the realization on my part that, in this here NBA, victory is about capitalizating on the opponents mistakes or overplaying your own, not executing flawlessly. . . my purchase of the single most honorary Arenas shirt known to horsekind. . . the chance to observe, in perfect form, the once-and-for-all deading of the "Butler is the next Pierce" nonsense. . . Ricky Davis, that damn good. . . some chubby, bespectacled mama's boy pulling off the most accomplished dance cam performance I've yet seen.



But what I really want to do is what I do best: heap shame upon the white man and back-handedly, somewhat imprecisely, praise those of the minority persuasion. One of my absolute least favorite things alive is white men, usually slightly older, talking sports to women who clearly don't need or want to hear it. At a crap Italian restaraunt back in H-Town, I nearly got up and punched some British guy who, when the conversation at his table turned casually to the geographic wonder that was the Rose Bowl, proceeded to bust loose with an amateur scouting report on Vince's pro prospects, the difference in defensive schemes, etc. Then last night, the man behind us had a running monologue going, presumably for the benefit of his wife/date, about the Princeton offense, Tampa Bay's defense, other garden variety ESPN.com information. Two rows back, the aforementioned LD impersonator would occasionally stop bellowing about defense (WORLD'S DUMBEST WIZARDS SEASON TICKETHOLDER. the Wizards are not built to play defense, just to score and get steals in transition/on the perimeter) to tell his daughter (??) about which Wizards were really valuable to a sound team game.



I am not a sailor or an adventurer, but something has become clear to me as I wash this earth with my scalding blood: if someone's not responding, they don't care. Either that, or you're talking way over their head. Granted, half of what people say out loud at a sporting event is to sound knowledgable around their oh-so informed peers in the bleachers. But if you are really, truly, talking about screens as a way of bonding with your female companion, it's not working. Keep in mind the model of the baseball game: at any given time, only about 70% of the spectators at a ballpark can apprectiate the nuances of the action, but that doesn't mean the others aren't having a good time. In fact, they're probably enjoying it on their own terms, with as much as they need to know, and find it intrusive to have someone browbeat them with technical wank. At the risk of pissing off our very limited female audience, usually a woman (or any non-fan, for you parents trying to force a burgeoning art fag to play catch) agreeing to go to a sporting event is itself a loveable concession. And if he/she is managing to enjoy the experience, its on her own terms, not through a cloudy, just-discovered lens of identical fandom that God calls upon you to polish. Otherwise, Sundays would not be a day of solitude, and playoff season would not be a unrelenting string of excuses and avoidances on my part.



What I have just taunted applies by and largely to the white man. In fact, in my grippingly amateur work in the field, I am fairly certain that I have observed nearly the opposite behavior among African-Americans, especially younger couples. I think that it has something to do with the black NBA Date, from hereon known as BNBAD. Most younger white people at games are there with their boys, maybe their father (like I can afford these tickets). It's basically an extension of the "yelling in front of the television" setting that gives rise to retarded, self-important sites like this in the first place. But younger black couples at games have a curious dynamic going on—the game is a legit dating (or at least "date") activity, but it doesn't overwhelm things. This could easily lead to some dangerous suppositions about African-American women being genetically predisposed to understand basketball better than their ivory-toned contemporaries (someone, please, take the bait and fight me!), but more likely it has to do with an understanding of the fact that a sporting event can mean different things to different people, and there's no reason that everyone can't enjoy it in their own sweet way. Or that, if the man has already gotten his way by going to a game, he owes it to his woman to make the experience as pleasant, and un-dude-ish, as possible. I am forcibly lead to believe that it's the absence of this institution among the white race that leads to such awful pieces of shittery as "man lectures woman with two-bit commentary" that I have on so many occasions observed.



I hardly remember any other sports well enough to elaborate on this across the boards of discipline; I wonder if it's not an NBA-exclusive phenomen, even if the content sometimes ranges far and free. All I want to say is teach your children well, and maybe future generations will be spared my wrath.