12.28.2009

Do a Little Paintng

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Really, I had no idea the decade was ending. Perhaps that's because, like most people with brains, I subscribe to the notion that decades are a fairly useless way of demarcating stretches of time and tend to get in the way of defining epochs. Except when it comes to the NBA, where history splits itself up into ten year chunks. More on that when the book comes out. So it's only natural, like the hair on my arms, that my personal favorite sports moment of the decade is the 2000's at their fulcrum: T-Mac/Bron on Xmas 2003.

Also, Ty Keenan busts loose with an exciting, sad, and definitive BELIEVE reminiscence.

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Two Grabs at Once



Please, keep the excavation of athleticism blazing far into the holiday season, whenever that ends. But I beg thee, take heed of this old and crumpled PSA, from a time when hair was hair and socks were socks. Is that Auerbach with the official voice-over at the end? Kind of like West, but when it comes to official league approval of stuff.

Share your warmest wishes here!

(Speaking of that video, here's some Larry O'Brien real talk from my main man Tommy Craggs. I am fine with Stern-bashing as long as his essential mythic nature is not called into question. To me, the man rests beyond causality or the most granular forms of history. O'Brien is the opposite. Sleep well, little pumpkins.)

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12.25.2009

Got to Get Off This Never-Ending Combine

Merry Christmas to you, and to all a brave tale! On this day of expanded NBA programming, Rough Justice of the smart-n-snazzy blog There Are No Fours comes to you with a heaping philosophical question and fodder for your viewing guide. Be well!
" All languages offer the possibility of distinguishing between what is true and what we hold to be true. The supposition of a common objective world is built into the pragmatics of every single linguistic usage. And the dialogue roles of every speech situation enforce a symmetry in participant perspectives.
- Jürgen Habermas, Postmetaphysical Thinking
Who is the most athletic player in the NBA? Picks would differ, but if you polled a group of people up on the league, you would get stars like LeBron, Dwight Howard and Dwayne Wade (Kobe probably also makes this list for a few years yet) but also players like Tyrus Thomas and Nate Robinson. The question that never seems to get asked subsequently, though, is what precisely constitutes "athletic" in this context. Literally, the term is pleasantly tautological, meaning simply pertaining to an athlete. For our purposes here, it seems reasonable to define it as "possessing physical characteristics beneficial in the game of basketball".

It's pretty easy to figure out the yardstick we're all mentally using to figure out the "athletic" list. Put together some combination of vertical leap, top speed and lateral quickness with bonus points for strength and height and you'll have a pretty good approximation of "athletic". But that's leaving out a lot of the physical tools that are beneficial to a basketball player. Take, instance, David Foster Wallace talking about the issue1:
Successfully returning a hard-served tennis ball requires what's sometimes called "the kinesthetic sense," meaning the ability to control the body...through complex and very quick systems of tasks. English has a whole cloud of terms for various parts of this ability: feel, touch, form, proprioception, coordination, hand-eye coordination, kinesthesia, grace, control, reflexes, and so on.
Hand-eye coordination is certainly vital to basketball. Without it, you'll have terrible handle, and even if you're a big who doesn't really need to dribble, you have to be able to handle the pass into the post. Body control is vital to taking contact without losing control on a drive. Fast reflexes obviously matter. The list goes on. So why do we limit the discussion of athleticism to jumping and running? It's pretty simple: A) We focus on the obvious. B) We pay attention to the impressive.
1: Yes, obviously he was talking about tennis, and I've yet to see Roger Federer run the fast break. Everything he's saying, however, is directly transferable to basketball.
Sit anyone down and show him/her a few minutes of a game, and he/she'll be able to point out which players can really jump. The guy that dunked, the guy that blocked a shot. It's evident and impressive when someone makes a play up in the air. Similarly, we can all tell when someone turns on the jets to get ahead on the break for an easy basket. It's right there to see, it's effective, so it gets noticed. A lot of the elements of this physiological cloud are subtler. Who has the best body control in the NBA? Nobody knows. You can tell if someone is on one extreme or the other if you watch them a lot, but no one could begin to rank everyone in the league. Who has the best hand-eye coordination? These aren't the things that are or even necessarily could get tested at combines, but they are things that partially determine how effective someone is on the court. If an individual athlete's cocktail of traits is low in several, he probably is going to wash out to the D League or Europe pretty quickly no matter what kind of ups he has.



"Athletic", then, has more to do with explosive than athletic. No one is touting (for example) Steve Nash's athleticism; all the talk is of his court vision, shooting skill and general savvy. I'm not trying to downplay his basketball IQ or court vision2, but watch this video and tell me he's not a physical specimen. The reason is narrative. We don't think of players as a spreadsheet of skills, we think of them as a story. Steve Nash is a creator who sees the court like no one else and capitalizes on that. His hand-eye coordination gets explained as passing and shooting ability. His speed and agility is part of how he reads defenses and goes where they can't stop him, and his body control isn't really part of the story, even though I suspect his stellar proprioception plays a surprisingly large role in his effectiveness.

All of the physical tools that make him great are subtle, so we don't think of him as a stellar athlete, even though he is. Similarly, I think a lot of what determines an undersized player's success, unless he chooses to specialize in outside shooting, is body control, coordination and touch. AI's dominance was predicated on his aggression, but a willingness to take it into the paint against men twice his size and explosive quickness are no guarantee of greatness. Yes, he was lightning fast, but he could also take and adjust to hard contact and still finish. The way he could absorb a blow and still get the ball in the hoop played into and reinforced the narrative of uncompromising dedication, but had as much to do with his inner ear and broader athleticism as it did his steely resolve.
2: Part of the trouble here, of course, is that the subtle skills bleed into the mental realm. How fast I can run has everything to do with the fast twitch muscles I have, but the ability to thread the needle with a pass depends on (optical) vision, hand-eye coordination, the inclination to try and past experience. There's no way to disentangle them and isolate the merely/solely physical.


Another funny bifurcation exists within the treatment of players who are on the far right of the bell curve of obvious physiological traits. When is the last time you heard LeBron or Dwight Howard referred to as "athletic"? It doesn't happen. When a player is jaw-droppingly gifted in the obvious ways and dominant on the court, he is termed a "freak". This may be because his non-evident physical gifts are commensurately ridiculous (Dwayne Wade, I suspect), because they're at least acceptable and his strength/size makes him unstoppable (young Shaq, Dwight Howard) or both (this, I think, is what is so unfair about LBJ's abilities); regardless, he gets otherized by this categorization.

It would be easy to dismiss this as hyperbole in the mode of current sports coverage, but there's more to it than that. It is partly a result of the mythologizing of greatness, that a player is so gifted he is more than human. You see it in Jordan as messianic figure and its aftershocks of James as the Chosen One, but it's more decentralized. Howard as Superman. Wade as Flash. Half Man/Half Amazing3, even. This otherization cuts deeper, however. They are freaks not merely because they are so obviously amazing, but because theirs is a problematic greatness. Labeling them as a freak moves them outside the discourse of normality and allows us to consider them uniquely and not reconcile them with any other player. They become an exception to the norms of physique, and so therefore not subject to them. They're certainly athletic, but they aren't "athletic" because the second we move them to "freak", considerations of athleticism that aren't about them don't include them. We shove them onto another plane rather than reconcile them to ours so that we don't have to account for them in our evaluations of everyone else.

Instead of undermining the simplicity of our categorization and forcing us to account for why explosiveness translates into effectiveness for some but not others, they reinforce our categories by not having to fit inside them.
3: I would love to see someone give this nickname the exegesis it deserves. Given the trajectory and conventional packaging of Carter's career, its ironic accuracy is stunning.


So players, or at least players after their first year or two, tend to get labeled as "athletic" only if they're disappointing. The Tyrus Thomases 4 of the world tantalize you when they leap out of the building to block a shot or thunderously dunk, but they can't seem to put it together. The question hanging around such a player's neck is, if he can make that play, if he can make everyone else on the court look like they're standing still, why can't he dominate? Why can't he consistently take over a game? He stays "athletic" because we can't fit him into another narrative slot.5 He's not successful enough as a role player to be cast as a rebounder or a scoring swingman or even a lockdown defender. If a player succeeds in one of those roles, his athleticism becomes a trait, not a defining characteristic.

Ironically, it's often the lack of the subtler forms of athleticism that hampers this growth and stalls a career at "athletic". If he doesn't have the subtler skills to round out his game and instead is a leaper who makes one amazing play per game but can't consistently produce. The clumsy moments when a play doesn't come together for him aren't an abberation, a lapse of unharnessed motion, but rather as telling of the borders of his kinesthetic ability as the dunk. Because of the transcendent moments he'll stick around for a while, but because he doesn't have similarly high-level subtle athleticism, he is merely "athletic". The label, despite its surface connotations, is more indicative of a negative absence than a positive presence.
4: I realize Thomas is young and may yet live up to his promise. He is at least partially here a stand-in here for the type.
5: This is why you won't see Josh Smith or Gerald Wallace essentialized as "athletic" anymore. Josh Smith has settled down and now is a dangerous wing scorer, while Wallace's rebounding explosion has moved him into "freak" territory. Their gifts haven't changed, but because they're more effective this season our profiling of them shifts.

We do ourselves a disservice when we fall into the trap of the obvious. Conventional wisdom is dangerous not just when it's wrong, but also (and more often) when it's incomplete. An unnecessarily narrow understanding of athleticism informs a wan view of the NBA as a whole. If we focus only on explosions, we undervalue the rest of the spectrum of ability. Quiet excellence is every bit as interesting and important as loud excellence, it just doesn't give itself up as quickly. A debate like "most athletic player" has as its core an assumption that athleticism is both quantifiable and linear; neither is remotely true. A fractured view of athleticism that acknowledges the impossibility of full knowledge may at first blush seen irritating or gnostic, but is in fact the only responsible approach.

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12.22.2009

Listen to the Drips

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Dan is joined by Bethlehem Shoals to talk about the NBA on Christmas. And about making lists. And answering letters. And New Year's wishes for the NBA.



And Carl Landry's teeth.

This all sounds kind of nice, doesn't it?

Trust us, though. People will be offended anyway.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Songs from the episode:

"HandJobs for the Holidays" - Broken Social Scene
"Lisztomania" - Phoenix
"Eyes And Teeth" - High on Fire
"December" - Unwound
"Christmas in Hollis" -Run DMC

And, if you like the show, please do us two favors:

Hey! You! Subscribe via iTunes!

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12.20.2009

As Weird as Finger Panes



It's not online, but you'll have to take our word for it. In today's New York Times, the following words exist:

If Milicic does decide to leave for Europe, his lasting impressions on the N.B.A. may be as a cautionary tale about raw talent from overseas and the fact that he helped to inspire a young group of bloggers who started the site Free Darko.

The site has gone on to be one of the better N.B.A.-related blogs and last year produced the book "Free Darko Presents: The Macrophenomenal Basketball Almanac."


I lead with this not only to crease my own mask (it likes it!), but also because it pertains directly to a post I'd planned to write anyway. Darko is inseparable from "raw talent", albeit in practice, less often the overseas variety. We fixate on players in part for their singularity, but also in many cases because of their ability to tickle the imagination. It's alternately laughable and pitiable to watch NBA teams wait on, and ultimately admit their folly with, the likes of Darko or Kwame Brown. It's like the change of seasons, but with less Wordsworth and more scrap heap.

How then, is that so different from what we've been through with (deep breath) Andray Blatche, Amir Johnson, Rashad McCants, Julian Wright, Donte Greene, Javaris Crittenton, Al Thornton, Alexis Ajinca, Anthony Randolph, and Bill Walker, to name a few. Asterisk as many of these as you want, especially since some are recent or facing coaching oppression, but there's a sinking feeling associated with all of them. I know GMs in businesses are supposed to eat crow, but you've got to think their investment is more personal, emotional—as ours is entirely.

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We've also been right quite a few times, and in other cases been stuck waiting to see if, to name the ultra-dude, J.R. Smith will ever become whole. Or Thaddeus Young achieve stardom, Francisco Garcia get those minutes, and so on. Those may just be a question of admitting that not all ideas become flesh, or that a league full of superstars wouldn't make any sense (1965, I see you!). With someone like Amir Johnson—once posited as a stroke of luck who would make up for Darko—it's harder to know what to feel. Did we stake a franchises's future on him? No, but our enthusiasm for Amir was every bit as real and concrete as, well, ours for players real and concrete. And now, we are forced into an expressive bind: Either admit that we falsely expended energy, spewing it back forth into the cosmos, or find value in the act of love even if this love is in the end proven false.

And wait, isn't this textbook bad faith? GMs are just stupid. We are willing to let our love of the game, or at least some scrap of it, hinge on potential without a road ahead, sometimes well after potential has ceased to quiver and gone still, mocking, obdurate. We celebrate the uneasiness and blind faith, while GMs gamely wait on their investment to pan out. They made a choice, and are forced to live with the consequences. We believe more the less dreams come true. That's not to say we resent players who realize their potential, but that excitement is different than belief. Do GMs believe? Do enchiladas dream?

I would be happy to learn that the universe is one big circle made up of syllogism. So when I die, they would say "his blog ended up lending its name to the All-Star point-forward FreeDarko Greenton, as well as both encouraging and extinguishing a certain elitist strain of fandom." But I don't want to stop now. DON'T MAKE ME STOP NOW.

LiuFang

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PSA in the USA



I know it's embarrassing that I was home watching SNL as it came on, but I'm old, get used to it. And, as much as I like to see a sketch go from the back of the show to the front, I still wonder if "What's Up With That?!" isn't at least a little bit racist. Or maybe it's just a critique of BET by writers who have no right to make it. EDIT: Or of other African-American media, by someone who knows them, with "BET" added for accessibility's sake. Whatever. I think it's hilarious, and for everyone who has ever made some touching, but ultimately dismissive, comment about "Shoals's brain," this week's WUWT came pretty close to capturing what it's like in there. Special guests Mike Tyson, tormented and then dancing, a mute Jack McBrayer, a fake John Stockton, the most pointless use of an African-American marching band (fake or otherwise) since Brewster McCloud, and of course, fake Lindsey Buckingham. Then afterward, the screen silently announced that Charles Barkley will host the first episode of 2010.

We can argue if you want, but please, shut up and watch it. It's really stupid. Might post further later if the book continues to piss me off so.

P.S. Relax, I am not going to see Avatar twice in three days just so I can get the 3D experience. I stand by Cinerama as the ultimate in hyper-real cinema. It just requires a little more imagination, and hits you more in the gut. Warning, drugs ahead: Call it the heavy opiate/psychedelic divide. That is my version of integrity when it comes to action movies with heavy-handed ecological messages and evil techno-industrial war monsters who any decent person would shoot through the face. Note: If the plants on Earth were transmitting data and contacting Jesus, they would be far bigger business than wood. And they would cleave the Right in two.

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12.18.2009

Ring Out Loud

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Ken and Dan check with each other, and with the league as it is at this particular and exact time.



In summary: the Lakers and Celtics are good. The Timberwolves aren't. We're not sure who the second-best team in the West is. Everyone should probably make a trade, especially with Golden State.

Along the way we contemplate time and object permanence. Plus, Ken makes a special announcement.

It's as FreeDarko Presents: The Disciples of Clyde NBA Podcast as FreeDarko Presents: The Disciples of Clyde NBA Podcast gets. Dig it.

Songs from the episode:

"It's So Obvious" - Wire
"Things I Did When I Was Dead" - No Age
"Love Will Tear Us Apart (Live)" - Joy Division
"Boys, You Won't" - The Wrens
"20 Minutes/40 Years" - Isis

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12.17.2009

Obama Ensures JA Vote Forever



(Start at 1:30)

Obama already had pretty strong support among Japanese-Americans (he got 60% of the vote), but he might have locked it up for good by shouting out JA hoops legend Wat Misaka, who had a cup of green tea with the Knicks in the late '40s, at a press conference recognizing the contributions of Asian-Americans to this great land of ours.
And we're talking about the competitive spirit of athletes like Wat Misaka, who played for the New York Knicks back in 1947 -- the first non-white player in the NBA -- and who served in the U.S. Army during World War II. Mr. Misaka is here as well today and -- where's Mr. Misaka? There he is. Thank you so much.
This is another example of the Obama administration's undying belief in the unifying spirit of basketball, following the President name-dropping Mehmet Okur in front of the Turkish Parliament and Attorney General Eric Holder talking about Connie Hawkins during his Senate confirmation hearing. The first year hasn't gone quite as well as we expected, but moments like this give us reason to continue to hope.

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No Peace in Fate



When Sean Taylor was murdered, a handful of folks typing about sports insisted that his rowdy past had played a role. Whether this was racism, immaturity or irresponsibility on their part end up mattering not. As soon as the police sunk their teeth into an investigation, the random nature of the crime became apparent.

Chris Henry passed away this morning. From his lengthy rap sheet, litany of suspensions, and career full of false starts, you might think Henry was just another defiant thug. But Henry was something far darker: A young man in grips of self-destruction from the day he entered the league; an immense talent who could often convince you he was the best receiver on the Bengals; and, by all accounts, a nice guy that the team simply refused to give up on. I spent last night reloading Twitter over and over again, which was both disturbing and strangely uplifting. This morning, when Henry's death was announced and the search went crazy, I was stunned at how many people professed a lack of surprise. Nothing makes me more judgmental than the internet. But then I thought about it and realized that, as unlikely an ending as it was, it wasn't just that Henry had been struggling against forces trying to drag him down since college, and that such things rarely end well. It was that, as with Eddie Griffin's grisly demise, the strangeness, excess, and whole miserable situation that surrounds it, this was exactly the kind of thing that would happen to Henry.

Chris Henry was always one of my favorites. He also, like Griffin, belonged to that rare category of truly troubled pros, guys whose run-ins with the law could be sad, even comical. There was nothing angry or threatening about him. Henry was just a sublime athlete who was terrible at being alive. Maybe being an NFL player made it worse; maybe it was true that his kids and impending marriage had helped him turn his life around. He was only 26. But, at the risk of sounding like a total jerk, it's hard to feel like all was well when it imploded so quickly, and with such disastrous results.

In the beginning, I badly wanted to see Henry fulfill his potential, start for the high-octane Bengals, and give me the chance to see him glide into the end zone on a regular basis. Palmer always did seem to look for him. Then, I was content with a big play every few weeks. At some point, that shifted to hoping he'd get to stick in the league. I haven't watched much football this year, but when I heard the first Henry news, I immediately started wondering if this meant his career was over. That quickly morphed into hoping he wasn't paralyzed. Then, that he wasn't going to have serious brain damage, or stay in a coma indefinitely. That was how it was with Henry. He kept us hanging on, rooting for him and utterly sympathetic, even as the gravity dragging him down got steeper and steeper.

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12.16.2009

No Boulder Too Vague



Hey, it's me. I'm back again. The video above is how I feel when my sick comes back, like it just did after a morning of relative lucidity. I have seen every Jekyll & Hyde movie and this is my favorite. It also made it very hard for me to believe that Spencer Tracey was not in some way related to the Martin Sheen clan, at least when he turned into an id-fueled monster.

You probably wonder why I'm posting, given that I'm writing like a happy seminar on text messaging. It's because, as you probably all know, THE WARRIORS ARE FOR SALE. No, not the team, but for all intents and purposes, the team. If you want to trade for anyone on the Warriors, you can. It hurts to see Nellie go out like this, the limits of his imagination reinforced so gravely. He has no idea what to do with anyone tall, no matter how multi-faceted they are. We all have our limits, and I suppose blind spots are part of true vision, but his inability to make Randolph work is just dumb. At least D'Antoni can plead "system." However, it heartens me that Curry can be had, too. I was worried we'd have to wait till this summer, when they draft John Wall and have to bring him off the bench (thus precipitating a sit-in by every local broadcaster around the league).

It's strange and possibly emotional, but most of all—and speaking of D'Antoni—the stage is set for forever. Have you ever heard of the Braves/Celtics swap? Here's an ESPN article on it. Walter Brown bought the Braves after taking cash instead of that crazy St. Louis Spirit settlement, merger blah blah blah. He was governor of Kentucky at some point and had a friend who died when he parachuted out of an airplane with too much cocaine strapped around his waist. It was in front of the governor's mansion. The parachute malfunctioned. But enough about him. In 1978, Brown sold the Braves to the guy who owned the Celtics, and bought the Celtics from him. Also, they traded the core of each team across state lines.

The analogy doesn't work perfectly, but for the sake of the living, let this happen with Golden State and the Knicks. What I mean by this is, if the Warriors want to lose everyone and save money, and the Knicks (as we know) have no one good and aren't getting LeBron, why not send D'Antoni someone to love in the form of Ellis, Randolph, Curry, and Morrow? That's like the absolute primordial super factual D'Antoni team! Sure, there's no PG, but it can't be worse than what they've got now.

I am going to lie down again. Think it over and write some open letters!

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12.15.2009

The Meal of the Wicked



March 10, 1976: Colonel at Spurs, Gilmore and Gervin, through my brain right now.

The only good thing about having a fever for days is that after a point, you stop being exhausted and end up floating and all creative-like. I have so many things to add to the book today, and also wrote a 1200 word opus on why, indeed, small forwards matter for The Baseline. It could've easily appeared here, but it happened there. Check it out.

Also, don't forget to check out the last days of the Bill Simmons Book Club. The heat hath really been brought in the second round, and I kind of wish we could drop Simmons and just form a basketball-and-culture blog with this roster of writers. I know, keep dreaming.

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12.14.2009

Grief is Swift

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I can't lie, I'm up to my nose in book. But I'm trying. Maybe later this week.

Speaking of book, here's my latest for the Vulture Reading Room, convoluted but completely from the gut. Some other real big ones on the way.

Hold everything... Jonathan Bender comeback? With the Knicks, of course, but still hard to pull time back around itself like this.

McSweeney's gives you The San Francisco Panorama, me and Big Baby have something of note in it. I loudly protested the Curry poster.

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12.11.2009

Learning to Speak



We're back with a nice long show to take you through the weekend.



First, Dan and Bethlehem Shoals get together to try to talk like sports talk radio people. They intermittently succeed.

As usual, the topics vary. The Grizzlies and Kings - better than we thought? Point guards and confidence. Lineups with two or more small guards. The mystery of Ramon Sessions. Trying not to talk about Tim Donaghy, but doing so anyway.

At the end, Ken shows up so we can check in with the Knicks. Also, would Cleveland consider a trade with a team that might be a destination for LeBron next year? We talk as long as the baby allows.

Thanks for listening, no matter how long you've been doing so (or how long the show is.)

Songs from the episode:

"Baby We'll Be Fine" - The National
"Pigs in Zen" - Jane's Addiction
"A Horse Called Golgotha" - Baroness
"Never Gonna Kill Myself Again" - Rocket From The Tombs
"Before You Accuse Me" - Bo Diddley
"There Is No End" - Abyssinians
"Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!" - Do Make Say Think
"Speakers Push The Air" - Pretty Girls Make Graves

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12.09.2009

Swept Away



Hey, remember when that giant NBA history book came out, written by a writer I've in the past had lots to say about, and I didn't say anything about it? Or maybe you remembered that we're working on our own look at pro basketball's past, and figured "FreeDarko's too scared to speak!"

For those of you who care to hear my opinion on The Book of Basketball, kindly enter THE READING ROOM, where myself, Sherman Alexie, Tommy Craggs, Jonathan Lethem, Ben Mathis-Lilley, and Sam Anderson are talkin' Simmons. Presumably, you recognize all those other names. If not, you can meet new people, and read Sam's opening salvo, on the front page. So far, Sam, Sherman, and myself have posted; in the interest of self-promotion, here's a direct link to mine. We each get two, and are hoping for a lively comments section, too, so bring your Sunday best!

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12.07.2009

Just Another Black Man Caught Up in the Mix



The morning after Iverson's press conference, I referred to AI as "the athlete least likely to bare his soul, admit mistakes or appear in the least bit sympathetic unless you bought into his rhetoric." My friend Q. McCall took me to task for it, and after a lengthy chat, I recanted and convinced him to do a guest post. You can also catch his writing over at Swish Appeal.

I once lost a job over an argument about Allen Iverson’s cultural significance.

Actually, it was more a mutual agreement to part ways because things clearly were not going to work out, but that’s beside the point—a dispute over Iverson was ultimately the reason I lost income.

I was a 23-year-old black graduate student at a research university working with a professor at a smaller university on a project designed to “empower” an economically distressed de-industrialized black community. For me, the project embodied exactly the type of community work that I had always wanted to do – bringing together my academic knowledge with the budding activist impulse I had developed during undergrad. It was one way to participate in the ongoing post-Civil Rights struggle for racial equality that my parents (both from Virginia, father from Newport News) had convinced me was the responsibility of an educated black man.

However, a tension quickly emerged between the lead professor and I during the course of the project due to competing definitions of “blackness”.

The week prior to “the Iverson incident”, he sat me down in his university office after I presented him the results of a community survey that suggested we should slightly alter the direction of the project. He responded by telling me how the “white knowledge” that I brought from my university—in this instance, the use of a survey to determine the opinions and needs of the black people we intended to serve—didn’t apply to the folks of this community. My counter-argument—that we cannot understand the needs of the community simply by assuming we know what all black people need—fell on deaf ears.

The image of him wearing a dashiki with his doctoral robes hanging on the door of his office in the comfy confines of the ivory tower while telling me that I didn’t understand the struggle as a young academic is something that will remain forever etched in my memory. It was at that point that my admiration of his work was officially overcome by skepticism over his intentions.

In some ways, the interaction is representative of a generational disconnect that so many who lived through “the struggle” justifiably lament: while they fought and died for increased opportunity, we post-civil rights babies either didn’t take advantage, didn’t appreciate the newfound opportunity, or sold out. Within that framework, I was told in no uncertain terms that I was the sell out based solely on the fact that I attended a “white university”, was using “white methods”, and was honestly just sort of “square”.

It was within this broader context that the job-ending Iverson argument occurred. It was not at all random but an extension of this tension over “blackness” and “authenticity” between us.

The argument began at a dinner party he was hosting. He claimed that he could identify “conscious brothers” merely by the fact that they were wearing dreadlocks and not walking around with sagging pants and cornrows. I chuckled at the simplicity of such an assertion—regardless of what it means to wear dreads, the idea that one can could so confidently assert knowledge about a person’s identity based merely on their physical appearances strikes me not only as bizarre, but anti-intellectual. The statement was even more troubling given our collective investment in improving the conditions of one small black community many of whom have chosen not to sport “conscious” hair styles.

As we went around in circles evaluating a multitude of rappers and other public figures as “thug” and “conscious”, we eventually came to then-Sixers guard Allen Iverson, who had recently come off an outstanding run to the 2001 NBA Finals.

He claimed that Iverson’s swagger, sagging pants, do-rag, and chains hanging from his neck (“bling” was not really part of the lexicon at this time) clearly indicated that he was a “thug”. No longer worried about keeping the job at this point, I blurted out, “That’s ridiculous.” At that moment, the other graduate students in the room—all white—gasped and everyone got quiet waiting for him to respond. Which he of course did.

After he and his more loyal graduate assistant—a white man a few years older than I who had grown up around black people and had thus established his “street cred”—explained to me the strong relationship between sagging pants and thuggery, I responded with a simple question that ultimately got us nowhere: “What has Iverson done to constitute being a thug?”

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I listened to him rant, was accused of not understanding the struggle by a white assistant as the professor’s white wife chuckled, and I eventually left early with no intention of working for the man again. I had no desire to have my “authenticity” judged by a university professor wearing a dashiki, nor did I care to listen to him categorically dismiss others based on a priori assumptions of who they are all under the guise of “racial uplift”.

What I found “ridiculous” was his apparently simplistic categorization of black people—whether it be calling me a “sell out” (yet simultaneously surrounding himself with educated white people), dudes wearing dreads “conscious”, or Iverson a “thug”, not to mention establishing his own “revolutionary blackness” by wearing a dashiki in a university office. It was simply too convoluted, contradictory, and hypocritical a standard to tolerate given the nature of the work we were doing.

I probably need not explain at length the problems with casting people into epic characters without granting them the dignity to possess multiple character or personality traits that might fluidly create a unique identity (and not necessarily fit our preconceived notions of who they should be). That’s what makes us human, if you accept Mikhail Bakhtin’s analysis of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work. Of course, there are times when that can go too far; “liberal individualism” that demands unlimited freedom to define and express oneself disconnected from larger structures can be damaging. Nevertheless, as human beings, one would think that we should all assume responsibility for respecting that there’s an internal world within any person that cannot be accessed simply by seeing them in one press conference or walking down the street.

When we look at representations and personas of black men in particular, it would be naïve to believe that our judgments of them are formed by what we see alone. As bell hooks once said about “rappers like Snoop Doggy Dogg” in 1994, “…it is essential for everyone to remember that they are not only more complex than the way they represent themselves, they’re more complex than the way white society represents them as well. This notion that Snoop Doggy Dog defines himself 'as he really is' is something I reject. He clearly defines himself with a persona that works in cultural production in this society.”

In other words, we must acknowledge that both black male celebrities and the white society that consumes them have a role in the creation of these personae. However, to then take those personae as universal truths that can be applied to anyone, anywhere, without any attempt to understand them on their terms, is problematic at best.

Yet mainstream society has somehow managed to mindlessly conflate “being a thug” with record studio manufactured images of thuggery. It works well for entertainment executives that sell albums to suburban youth with an interest in romanticizing “thug life” as an exotic counter to their own lives, and who possess disposable allowance to support the inquiry. However, the fact that Iverson “fits the manufactured description” is by no means evidence that he consistently exhibited the violent criminal behavior that would constitute thuggery.

Yes, he’s had run-ins with the law, but the facts in the most egregious cases were so unclear that they are almost inadmissible as evidence to substantiate the claim that he is in fact a “thug”. The usual way that people even begin to associate Iverson with being a thug is by linking his image to these artificially manufactured images of “thug life” and our lingering fears of the black “super criminal”.

More than anything, this demonized “AI” persona is the personifcation of stereotype convergence: that of the hypermasculine black male athlete and a record industry manufactured “hip-hop” bravado that has lost its “utopian impulse”, as once described by Cornell West. It is ultimately a shallow caricature of the “hard”, hyper-individualistic, misogynistic, narcissistic, simple-minded, swaggering black male.

It is sad example of how our perceptions are shaped not only by what we see, but also by conceptual frameworks that we draw upon as short hand to “make sense” of the world, as described by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their classic book Metaphors We Live By. The problem is that to the extent that we draw upon pre-existing metaphors to make sense of people, we strip them of the agency to represent themselves as human; while these metaphors frame expectations for behavior, they also irrationally justify us assuming that our perceptions are universal common sense and those who don’t fit can be demeaned, dismissed, mocked, or vilified.

In other words, the idea that Iverson is a thug is a fictive reality conjured up in the racialized imagination of a society that remains fearful of young black men in spite of electing a black man president. To the extent that Iverson’s image resonates with a set of racialized metaphors we live by, he never had the agency to truly be understood.



As such, “AI” can never be separated from the fact that his persona was created in a U.S. society that was built upon racism, that never figured out how to deal with racial diversity at a structural or interpersonal level, and has a tendency to dismiss the very mention of race as a factor in public life as “playing the race card”. However, it doesn’t take much thought to recognize that even in our treatment of athletes, we cannot really escape racialization much less expect that we might reach the post-racial promised land when race is used as a cheap ploy to sell everything from records to detergent.

Iverson is thus simultaneously romanticized for and trapped within a racialized “thug” image: some disaffected inner-city black youth can draw inspiration from him while others lament the burden his image causes in their daily life; some affluent blacks have looked down upon him with self-righteous disdain while others see him as an example of a meritocratic myth in the U.S.; some well-meaning whites have seen him through a romanticized lens that masks fears of an urban lifestyle their families fled long ago while others claimed racial neutrality; fans can cheer his dominant scoring when he’s winning and blame his ball dominance when he’s losing.

What is often—not always—lost is that AI is a product of circumstance in a world that demonizes black men more often than not. In that context, it becomes unreasonable to assume that he would even want to cater to a media that merely perpetuates a distant and shallow racialized portrait of who he is to a mainstream audience that mindlessly consumes shallow images.

I was initially annoyed by Shoals’s Baseline post about Iverson's press conference:

So fine, even if Iverson can't play like he used to, doesn't really work with the Sixers current coach or cast and is superfluous once rising star Lou Williams returns, there's this breakthrough, which is as much about us—and for us—as it is Iverson. After a decade of being the athlete least likely to bare his soul, admit mistakes or appear in the least bit sympathetic unless you bought into his rhetoric, Allen Iverson hasn't just come home. He's finally made himself accessible. But that's only part of the equation, because now we might have to try and better understand what Iverson really meant during all those standoff-ish years.

It would be pathological for someone to bare their soul to people who have repeatedly torn him down without any genuine attempt to make sense of him. Within the historical context of this country, it makes even less sense for a black male who is consistently misunderstood and boxed into a manufactured “thug” persona.

Nevertheless, to say that Iverson didn’t appear “the least bit sympathetic”, is now more accessible, and less “standoff-ish” completely ignores the honest ways in which he has indeed demonstrated directness, honesty, and passion in his interactions with the media. Shoals refers to former Sixers teammate Eric Snow in the article, describing how outsiders—us fans and members of the media—never really got to know him. However, it’s also difficult to ignore the many occasions in which he was nothing but honest, opinionated, and passionate. The only reason to dismiss those moments when seeking evidence of a sympathy and accessibility is that they might not have come when or how we expected.

How could you ignore his repeated expressions of gratitude for Georgetown University coach John Thompson? How could you ignore his expressions of respect for former Sixers coach Larry Brown? After his ranting about his frustration with the disproportionate attention to him missing practice, how could you dismiss the Detroit press conference in which he lightheartedly laughed at himself? Even in the infamous practice rant, the point was clear: the man wants to win games.

Ultimately, the evidence does not amount to an unsympathetic, inaccessible, ruthless figure but a human being forced to struggle with a complex set of life circumstances. Even if it did, how much can you legitimately claim to know about a person’s character sitting at home and reading the accounts of a few newsmen and watching a few press conferences?

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It shouldn’t take a heartwarming homecoming story and on-camera tears to make it clear that Iverson is a man who loves basketball and most of all loves to win. Unfortunately, that has simply been lost as people continually attempt to cast him as an epic character who fits what they want to believe.

The argument that a superstar athlete should expect this type of treatment is indicative of a sick and ugly sense of voyeuristic entitlement in U.S. society. It’s almost irrational to expect someone to take all that and continue to cater to people who make no attempt to understand him as a person because they’re confined to their own metaphors. In that sense, it’s not so much that he’s inaccessible, as much as truly accessing him would cause a form of cognitive dissonance that would force people to challenge their racialized assumptions. The idea that he is inaccessible speaks more to the inability—and even refusal —of some people to make sense of Iverson as one representation of “blackness” in the U.S. than anything having to do with Iverson himself.

While Shoals rightly suggests that “now we might have to try and better understand what Iverson really meant during all those standoff-ish years”, why does it take him choking up on camera for us to make that attempt? If people have to see him publicly overwhelmed by emotion to feel as though he’s safe, what genuine desire is there to understand the man?

When I chatted with Shoals, he said, “I don't think Iverson was capable of being someone he wasn't, but he kept a lot inside.” If that is so, then the very people who have demonized him penalize him for being neither superficial nor a transparently simplistic person. We could certainly smugly sit back and say, perception is everything and Iverson has merely been caught up in his perception. But commenting on Iverson as though his blackness is not somehow implicated in that perception is either naïve or anti-intellectual.

That’s not to deny that Iverson has some responsibility in the creation of his own image—he has dressed and behaved in ways that certainly seem to resonate with a manufactured “thug” representation. In my present role as teacher, I certainly do my best to prepare young black men for an unfair world not by telling them to hate or embrace it, but to acknowledge it and figure out how to navigate it. Has Iverson navigated the public sphere perfectly? Not necessarily. But at some point we, as observers, have to take some responsibility as intelligent life forms to do more than point fingers and make simplistic assumptions.

As Shoals also said in our chat, “Real thugz don't stick around to have HOF careers.”

Like many athletes before him, Iverson forced the sports world to confront a manifestation of blackness that is bound by both his origin and particular time. Race is the elephant in the room that people are normally frightened to discuss publicly, with friends, or at the dinner table. Perhaps it’s time to start discussing that rather than making clearly racialized assumptions from a color-blind stance—or claiming to have the capacity to evaluate one’s character based on how they dressed.

Neither is a particularly valuable way to proceed toward the post-racial society that so many people yearn for to relieve them of the burden of shielding themselves from the reality of race.

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12.04.2009

Rolling Waves

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Ken and Dan got together late Wednesday night to try and talk about normal basketball things, like Allen Iverson going back to the Sixers, or the futility of the Nets, or how we like the NBA Today podcast from ESPN.



We tried. But as is usual when Ken and Dan get together, things got a bit weird. A lot weird. So you'll also find talk of John Tesh, Jean Shepherd, and the impact of Carlos Boozer on Ken's life. Amongst other oddities.

Also, at the end, there's the first ever FreeDarko Presents: The Disciples of Clyde NBA Podcast "hidden track." Let's not mention the fact that me telling you about it makes it not that hidden.

Songs from the episode:

"Beyond Comprehension" - Gang Starr
"Weird Fishes/Appregi" - Radiohead
"Stop" - Jimi Hendrix
"Highway of Endless Dreams" - M83
"Somebody Put Something In My Drink" - The Ramones

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12.03.2009

When the Light Came Callin'



It's funny, I've had mixed feelings about AI over the years, but this last act has me feeling like none of that ever happened. Or, as Iverson himself seems to be saying, that part had to happen to get to this one perfect moment. Iverson's career needed resolution more than anything else. "Going home" may do little to justify his time in the league, or convert doubters. But if this is how it ends, AI's myth only gets deeper. And Allen Iverson's reached a point few athletes ever do, where we really need a new kind of story to explain what they did.

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12.01.2009

We Need to Dance

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After the Miami Heat intro vids and The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings: Ninth Edition.

**** Dwyane Wade, Number Three Guard. Highly unexpected set from an alto player best known for his pitch-perfect standards and ballads. Here, Wade stretches out in various spare trio settings. With piano and drums, he sets up dense thickets of squelches and squeals; piano and bass bring out his deliberate, elegiac side like never before; in the more conventional sax/bass/drums format, Wade tears through angular post-bop originals like a man pushing his creative capacity to the point of exhaustion, even collapse.

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*** Udonis Haslem, Forty Forward. Haslem had always been a sturdy pianist in the Bobby Timmons vein, but when got the chance to record for Blue Note, he took advantage of the extra rehearsal time and created something far more ambitious. Sticking to the standard soul jazz trio, and finding himself constantly returning to its cliches, Haslem nevertheless aims high with these forty short pieces about his conversion to Islam and travels in the Middle East. Engimatic bassist Babar, making his only appearance on record here, is the only one whose solos consistently realize this exalted mood.

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***1/2 Mario Chalmers, C-H-A-L-M-E-R-S. There were plenty of other trumpeters around New York with the same slashing tone, technical facility, and knack for heady skeins of harmonic sophistication. Sons of Miles and Dizzy alike, they were a dime a dozen, each more impressive than the next and thus somehow bringing the whole bunch down. What makes Marion Chalmers's debut so remarkable is that not only does he capture a moment, he transcends it due in no small part due to the fast company he keeps.

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***** Michael Beasley, Forward. Beasley was a prodigy in the truest, and most unfortunate, sense. He was barely in his twenties when this masterpiece was recorded, and already had several standards to his name. Forward was unlike any other jazz being made at the time, and it remains elusive to this day. Employing a crude form of multi-tracking, unorthodox combinations like flugelhorn, banjo, and bagpipes, and sometimes changing instruments mid-improvisation, it's nevertheless Beasley's raw, vibrant piano that steals the show.

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**1/2 Carlos Arroyo, Number Eight. Blue Note rarely attempted to cash in on trends, but one of its few truly venal records is also one of the strangest. Arroyo was a largely forgettable salsa pianist with progressive tendencies. Cutting Latin versions of the music from the then-obscure British television series The Prisoner falls somewhere between crass opportunism and off-beat pop culture plundering. Arroyo is all over the place, sometimes solemn, oftentimes festive, as if he were at once trying to take the material too seriously and reject its source. A curiosity worth hearing.

*** Quentin Richardson, Five. An oddly iconic title for such a workmanlike set. Richardson's trombone can be heard on a slew of other recordings from this period, ranging from proto-funk to cerebral cool. He's the sort of player, and writer, whose solos and compositions typically include at least one passage of utter ingenuity and another that borders on pap. Five is his only solo effort. While far from the archetypal quintet outting, it's nevertheless admirable from start to finish.

** Daequan Cook, Number Fourteen Guard. Cook was a sporadic, slapdash drummer best known for his hi-hat flourishes and otherwise low-key timekeeping. This is the kind of record that should discourage drummers from ever thinking they can take the lead in the studio, even if the label's put them up to it.

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