Cultures of Basketball Course Diary: The Serpent's Tale (Day 14)

This is a hallowed day. They asked me to play. They actually asked me to play. Okay, well it wasn’t exactly that they asked me to play, but pretty much. Walking across campus to class from my previous class, the fantasy image flashed into the slide projector of my mind: an intra-class pickup game. The still image sprang into motion: all of us going up and down the court at Crisler Arena. I tried to push it aside, tried to stop it. No way I’m going to propose this in class and have the players break into uncontrollable sneering laughter. But then, I walk into class and I’ve barely put my stuff down on the desk when one of the players, having very courteously asked me how my broken hand was doing, said, “We should have a class game.” Moments later, another player walked into class and said the same thing.

I feel I shall burst with joy and excitement. If God himself, donning sweats, had parted the gray Ann Arbor skies, and entered the class on a Golden Litter, born by Clyde, the Hawk, Dr. J, and Wilt, and said, “you know what, that tree of knowledge thing, I was j/k!”, I could have been no happier. A weight of decades has been lifted from my shoulders. It was an auspicious way to begin the home stretch of Cultures of Basketball, after a two week hiatus, and leading in to the much-anticipated visit of none other than Bethlehem Shoals himself to our Ivory Tower next week.

We all began to babble excitedly about the match-up. “Players against the rest of us!” someone shouted. Oh no, I thought to myself, I didn’t wait nearly thirty years to play Division I ball in order to get clowned by a bunch of college kids. If you wanna go players and teacher against the rest of the class, I’m down, but otherwise we’re splitting the players up. Buoyed by my sudden surge of popularity among the players, and the riotous atmosphere of the room, I took a wild risk. I explained that I’d just been thinking the same thing on the way over to class and added, “But in my fantasy of this game, we’re playing at Crisler. So I want to give the players a special group assignment: make that happen.” I’m thinking that’s an impossibility, but that just saying it will curry even more favor. But lo, another player speaks up and says he thinks that shouldn’t be a problem. What! Verily, yea, I will tread the same hardwood as my forefathers CWebb and Jalen, and their forefather, Cazzie, did before them.

An evening of feverish tweeting and e-mailing ensued in which yet another player and I worked out the details of 1) a class lottery, presided over by David Stern, in which the eight players would draw names to round out the rosters for each of their teams and 2) the field of eight three-player teams would be seeded and compete in an April-Madness extravaganza culminating in the crowning of the first ever Cultures of Basketball national champion. My fiancée then tops it all off by suggesting we have the game on a weekend so that she can come up from St. Louis to witness, testify, and oversee the national media hordes that will certainly converge on Ann Arbor for the Blessed Event. So y’all can just get in touch with her about securing your media passes. I’m pretty sure that Ernie and the TNT gang already have their hotel reservations, Dicky V. called to make sure he wouldn’t be excluded, and the Goodyear Blimp, flown by Captain Jon Conrad and crew, has already secured airspace.

Talking to a student later during office hours, he shook his head with dread: “Maybe the players just wanted to play us so they could destroy us.” “Who cares?,” I said to him, “I just wanna play. It’s like when you’re little,” I explained, “you just want your big brother to play with you, you don’t care that he’s gonna beat your ass. It’s just about the attention.” My student smiled and said, “I was the big brother.” Well, okay, but you get the idea. I know I’ll actually be shitting myself on the day of the game, and I’ll probably dribble off my foot, shoot a couple of air balls, and – horror of horrors – be single-handedly responsible for decimating the ranks of next year’s Michigan basketball team by somehow injuring each and every one of the eight players through some clumsy display of aged overreaching. But really, who cares? It’s the sort of moment when it all comes together and several lifetimes’ worth of minor slights and trivial but embittering disappointments are swept away by a deluge that leaves your soul as brand spanking new and clean and naked as Adam and Eve in the Garden.

Speaking of paradise, today’s class was devoted to the section of FreeDarko’s history on Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, the first segment of Chapter 4: “The Gold Standard: 1980-1990.” But before we got to Magic and Larry Legend, and after we’d settled down, we had one more bit of topical business to address: the controversy over the Heat “allegedly” crying in the locker room after their 1 point loss to the Bulls the other day, at the time their fourth straight loss. I asked them what they thought and they told me, but then I realized that I didn’t so much want to know what they thought as tell them what I thought they should think, or at least what I thought they should bear in mind as they formed their own judgments of the event.

So we briefly discussed the possible meanings of tears and of emotions in general, the role that emotion plays in sport and in human life more generally, and the way that culture and upbringing, especially as coded by gender, shape the way we judge – and that we feel entitled to judge – public displays of emotion by other human beings.

One of the more interesting points was raised by a student, who pointed out that the gender double-standard also works against female athletes who show anger or swag in the course of competition. In both cases, culturally set parameters of appropriately “masculine” or “feminine” relationships to particular expressions of emotion wind up underwriting thoughtless critical judgments of particular athletes for crossing the boundaries of emotional expression.

It’s sad, really, that young men and women, athletes or not, should be subject to such constraints. And sadder, still, perhaps, that other young men and women should participate in limiting the scope of what it is possible to be and to feel and to show you feel as a young man or young woman. Nothing was resolved, of course, but I think that students by the end of our little conversation were equipped to do more than just accept the terms of the discussion as provided by ESPN or the guy next to them at Buffalo Wild Wings.

Having completed my pontification on the topic of emotion, gender, and athletics, we rode the FD time machine back to Bliss, the Gold Standard, the Paradise of the NBA in the 1980s. The religious, specifically Edenic, lexicon that I’ve been trying to weave into this post is neither accidental, nor really of my own invention. The illustration that fronts the Magic Bird chapter shows the two players, in iconic poses, emerging from a garden lush with sunflowers, ferns, daffodils and tropical foliage.

An unpaid student query about the significance of the image gave me the opportunity to say a few words about the myth of Eden and the kind of cultural work it can do in Judeo-Christian societies. I don’t want to go biblical on your ass, or be too dweebishly unsubtle about it (especially, in view of the compact subtlety of Jacob Weinstein’s visual argument), but it’s worth acknowledging, at least, the force and pervasiveness of that myth in the way that we lace often overly simplistic judgements of good and evil into narratives of memory and history. It’s not that Eden is always invoked explicitly, but rather that it doesn’t have to be because by now it is almost second nature (a distinctly un-Edenic concept, or maybe it is Edenic). Everytime you hear someone talk about the good old days, nostalgia, you know the routine, once upon a time – always, there Eden is at work.

In the case of Magic, and Bird, and the 1980s, it’s certainly understandable, and close to my own heart’s experience, that the myth of Eden should appeal. As FD writes in the brief Introduction to the chapter, the decade saw a truly awesome influx of talent into the game: not just Magic and Larry, but Isiah, Worthy, Jordan, Barkley, Akeem, Stockton, Malone, Ewing and others entered the league in the period. Moreover, unlike, say, in the 1960s, that talent was properly showcased by the rise of ESPN and other forms of media exposure and endorsement deals, all carefully overseen by the – whatever else you want to say about him – far-sighted and shrewd PR vision of Commissioner David Stern. The play on the floor was brilliant and more people than ever were getting to see it. FANtastic was born.

But there’s more to it than that. In Magic and Bird, of course, you had two players with a ready-made rivalry established in the 1979 NCAA title game (itself a watershed moment in most accounts of the college game), and a rivalry amped up by the storied history of the Lakers and Celtics, the franchises they joined. Moreover, as we discussed in class after watching clips of the two players, Magic and Larry truly showcased a remarkably complete (and remarkably similar – a fact I think that is often undernoticed) set of basketball skills.

Though neither was an exceptional athlete by NBA standards, each had the intelligence and put in the work to maximize the gifts they did have and so to turn themselves into astonishingly creative passers and effective rebounders, ball handlers and shooters (more Magic than Larry for the handle, more Larry than Magic for the shot). Both were capable of scoring from unpromising angles and traffic situations, both capable of unselfishly raising the game of their teammates, both clutch and both winners, and both driven to lead by example in squeezing every last drop out of seemingly every play on the floor.

In their styles of play, both players, as Brown Recluse, Esq. (BRE) notes, embodied the happy marriage of ABA creativity with NBA stability. BRE even concludes by correctly observing that Magic and Larry left us as a legacy the freedom that would evolve into positional revolution with oversize point guards, and bigs who can hurt you inside or step out and hit the three. And finally, of course, one was black and one was white. Put it all together and that’s hard to top if you’re looking for Paradise in the history of the NBA.

The myth of the Garden of Eden, though, is more than just an emblem of unadulterated bliss. It describes a tricky pseudo-contract in which submissive ignorance is the price exacted for that bliss. Moreover, it tells us that pain, labor, and sexuality are punishments for the violation of that contract. You remember, right? Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, aspiring in the process to have their blind eyes opened and to see as God sees and, as a result, are cast out of the Garden. Ultimately, the narrative carries for me a dark side by which we are commanded to remain in a childish state -- lacking knowledge, desire, experience, and agency -- if we are to be happy.

I’m not the first to point this out, of course. John Milton in Paradise Lost (perhaps in spite of himself) and William Blake (very much not in spite of himself) long ago suggested or argued outright that it’s not so clear who might be the good guys and the bad guys in the story of our “Fall.” And I've even written about how Baruch Spinoza had a different take on the whole episode. More recently, the British author Philip Pullman rewrote the whole story in his remarkable trilogy His Dark Materials. There Pullman conceives that our “Fall” was really a kind of elevation, a growing-up of the species if you will, prompted by angels rebelling against a God who was really just the first angel, but had usurped authority, styling himself the Creator of the rest, and establishing a tyrannical Kingdom of Heaven in place of the immanent Republic of Heaven.

In Pullman’s reading, the rebel angels did us a favor and every time we think for ourselves, enjoy our existence as beings with minds and bodies, and make independent decisions, every time we assert the right to determine the course of our own futures, we are embodying the empowering legacy that the Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall would have us lament and repent for unto eternity.

Offering this counter-vision doesn’t mean that I think the myth of a fall from grace, or innocence, is useless or bad. Just that it’s a more complicated tool for organizing our understanding of ourselves than might appear at first glance. In my own case, the bliss ushered in by Magic and Bird’s appearance in the NBA (which was indeed a paradise for me: my room was plastered with Magic posters, and I still have a scrapbook I started keeping in 1979 with Magic clippings from the local papers and Sports Illustrated) coincided with my exit from the innocence of childhood via a number of doors simultaneously: I learned to shoot a jump shot, my parents separated, and I entered puberty.

So it was a complicated Eden for me, that: one that sends my mind and my emotional memories snapping back and forth wildly like a standard in a strong wind. But I wouldn’t trade that complicated and painful time – and all that grew from it – for the relatively less complicated, ignorant bliss of pretending to be Clyde in the driveway at age 7.

By now you might be imagining that I am of the Devil’s party, as Blake once said of Milton. Maybe that’s true in some sense. It is certainly true that the serpent is for me the most interesting character in the story. And, in relation to this Golden Era of NBA history, I certainly wonder where (or who or what) the serpent is.

About fifteen years ago, in a first futile stab at doing this kind of writing, during a leave year in which I received tenure at the University, I became fascinated with Dennis Rodman. Around this time Terry Pluto published a book called Falling from Grace (1995). Its subtitle was “Can the NBA Be Saved?” In it, if I remember correctly, Pluto characterized the then-current crop of young players as brawling, trash-talking thugs whose basketball fundamentals were decidedly underwhelming. I’m pretty sure Dennis was singled out in that book, along with a few other players as symptomatic of all that had gone wrong with the game.

At the time, I wrote an essay – now long lost – on the joy of being Dennis Rodman. I wasn’t interested so much in defending Dennis’ style choices (or behavior), so much as pointing out that in his play on the court (tenacious defense, hard-nosed intelligent rebounding, good passing), Rodman embodied many of the values that Pluto himself was nostalgically associating with a different, now bygone era (not to mention race, I remember feeling upon reading the book).

I’m not sure what I’d think of Pluto’s book or of my own argument now. Maybe I wouldn’t stand by it any longer. But I definitely do stand by the impulse I acted on to complicate simple notions of human history that characterize it as either a steady progress toward something good or a steady (or precipitious) fall from something good. That much, perhaps, is the serpent in me.

In fact, maybe the serpent isn’t so much a character in the story, or not only a character in the story, but a role we all step into whenever we question the story and read it against the grain; whenever we take the childish dichotomies we are offered – and which, make no mistake, can be quite useful in limited cases – and begin to poke at the boundaries separating them.

So when I think of the NBA since Magic and Bird’s time, back, when, as they recently wrote, “the game was ours,” I think as much of Bird’s legendary trash-talking, I think of the image of Magic posterizing some chump with a tomahawk jam and then pointing to him as he lay splayed on the floor along the baseline. He wasn’t beaming. Sure I think of and marvel at their amazing array of skills and their run of titles. And I’m genuinely moved by the way their rivalry evolved into friendship and love. But I also think of their personal lives, seriously troubled at times like those of any human being. I think as well, as Brown Recluse, Esq. advises, of the marvelous players that have come after them in a more or less continuous stream since that time, patterning their unusual combination of skills and size and styles of play on some permutation of Magic and Bird.

And when I think that way, the gate at the Eastern end of the Garden of Eden, the one guarded by the angel with the flaming sword, the one that Adam and Eve left through, and that supposedly clearly marks the line between paradise and our own sorry existence starts to blur and fade.

I like that moment because the alternative offered by subscribing to the Eden story is to spend all of existence trying to make up for something I didn’t do and that I don’t think was wrong in the first place. It is to hate actual existence in the name of a time that has long since ceased to exist and that I don’t think ever existed in the first place.

So when the gates swing open, and I can acknowledge the splendor of Magic and Larry Legend in all its complex shadings, then the present and the future open back up and I am once again in a position, as one of Phillip Pullman’s characters urges: “to build the Republic of Heaven right here, because for us there is nowhere else” and to appreciate those in the game and the world today who are laboring to build it too.

What It Is (Day 12)

Yago Colas posts again about his Cultures of Basketball course, but also, what the ABA means to us today. Especially in the afterglow of All-Star Weekend. Here's Day 11, on kids and the seventies Knicks, if you missed it.

I didn’t plan it this way when I designed the syllabus, but it seems especially appropriate to be teaching, thinking, and writing about the old ABA during the media-amped spawn of pure skill and utter silliness that is NBA All-Star Weekend. We wrestled no bears, but it was as though the giddy 70s hallucination that the ABA can appear to have been infected my students (and me) so that we had a wacky day worthy of the most surreal of that defunct’s league’s half-time shows.

I undoubtedly set the tone for this, in part, by beginning class with my personal anecdote about watching the Michigan game the night before at Applebee’s next to a couple of puffy, red-faced, slick-haired vulgarians who were ragging endlessly on each and every one of the players that I have in class. I was surprised to find myself offended. The students (players more than anyone) insisted on hearing the criticisms in all their blockheaded, paunchy glory. And with that I seem to have informalized the classroom beyond the point of no return.

From there, after a brief and meaningless introduction, I rolled a 3-minute clip of Julius Erving tearing up the ABA. As Dr J exhibited his assortment of pull-up threes, twisting finger rolls, and, of course, elegant swooping slams to a funky instrumental backbeat, the students got rowdy and loud.

Beating on their little desks, they screamed for more clips: "Where’s the drifting-out-from-behind-the backboard scoop?!!" "That was the NBA," I tell them, oldly, "against the Lakers." “We wanna see that!” “Julius in the NBA!” Inside I’m resisting – this isn’t about Julius per se, but about the ABA – but I’m weak. I don’t want to lose them, I don’t want to police them, and most of all, as I’ve said before, I could watch these clips all day. I want to see the Doctor too. “You really wanna see that?” I ask, suggestively, blithely unaware of the doom about to descend. “Yayyyyyyy!!” they shouted, birthday hats akimbo, noisemakers blaring, faces smeared with cake. “Okay!” I say brightly.

With my computer’s desktop projected enormously on the screen in the front of the room, I quickly Google “Dr J in the NBA”, self-conscious about how slow I am in this medium compared to these kids who were all born and raised in the Matrix (even slower than usual since I can’t type normally because of the splint immobilizing my right hand). But I manage to get to a long list of video links. Now I can’t decide. We see one called “NBA Julius Erving Mix”, with a subtitle in Spanish: “dunk de Julius Erving.” That looks like fun. I click and then watch with horror as the first static image appears on my screen (and therefore, I know, 1 billion times larger on the screen over my left shoulder, and probably on a monitor in the Dean’s office): a woman wearing a cut off tank-top with the words “Got dick?” emblazoned across the front. Yeah. Of all the stupid things I’ve done, of all the humiliations I’ve suffered in the classroom since I taught my first class as a graduate student at Duke University in 1988, nothing like this has ever happened. Now we are indeed in a time machine hurtling toward the ABA.



The students are like teenagers – well, most of them are teenagers – at their first keg party. Howling, laughing, shouting clever comments to the person sitting two inches away from them, hysterical with embarrassment and excitement at having blasted through a taboo. Jumping over a car seems like nothing when you've just seen that in your college class. My crippled fingers stab at the keyboard trying to make it go away, my clumsiness magnified exponentially as I try to restore a semblance of calm to what has become a roomful of very large, coked-up 6th graders. I find a new clip and, as always, the graceful moving images of baller excellence gradually bring them back to their senses, or, at least, make them quiet down a bit. But, as the last image fades, along with the last bellowed note of Whitney’s “Greatest Love of All,” I sense the loopy energy bubble back up to a boil.

I try to channel it: “what do you see in the clips of Erving? “ Some of the answers: “grace, dunks, the range on his finger-roll, his athleticism.” Great, I tell them. And then I remind them that much of what we saw in the Dr J clips was occurring at the same time as what we had seen two days before in clips of the Knicks. But it looks like a different game, like a different era, like our era. And, in fact, it’s true, they see it too, today’s NBA game – driving athletic layups, rim rattling dunks, three-pointers – owes much more to Erving and the ABA than it does to Red Holzman and the Knicks. Unfortunately, scintillating and promising though that postulation may be, they’ve lost interest and begin to bombard me with irrelevant questions about Dr J’s career. That happens a lot: class disintegrating into a streetball version of Jeopardy.

I countered by putting a concrete focal object in front of them. "Take out your books," I droned, "and open to this picture, on p. 86." At least they are obedient, even if glumly so. We look at Jacob Weinstein’s trippy ABA artwork, a two-page visual explosion, in magenta, yellow, and the palest of pale blues, of elevating players, towering stylized afros, skyrocketing shapes and stripes, squiggles and loops, and bears and dancing girls. It’s really a brilliant piece of work, like mainlining Terry Pluto’s Loose Balls (the canonical documentary account of ABA zaniness). “Let’s look at this,” I say, “like a work of art, what jumps out at you?”

First answer: “the 70s.” I press for a little elaboration. They do pretty well, pointing to the color palette and the explosive lines and forms just barely ordered. They smartly contrast this with the art work we’ve already examined in the class: the neat lines and subdued colors of the Celtics trophy machine, the slightly more individualized and fantastic but still by no means chaotic image of the Knicks plying their trade against a skyline of newspaper headlines and box scores. What do the 70s mean to you? I ask.

One kid’s answer: “I don’t exist.” By which, it turns out, he meant neither to roll out a slip-n-slide of Cartesian doubt, nor to transport us into a paradoxical first-person consciousness prior to his conception, but rather just to state the obvious: it’s before his time and so doesn’t mean much. It’s the flipside of the Trivial Pursuit version of historical interest: none. I choke back the rising gorge of self-righteous indignation so as to glide past that worrisome – and all too common -- ignorance and lack of curiosity about any frame of reference outside the first person singular in the present tense. Fortunately, someone else says, “It’s the 70s, it just looks like, like, anything could happen. You tell me something crazy happened in the 70s and I’d believe it, because anything could happen in the 70s.” A couple of students echo that, as though the first one hadn’t even spoken, like academics in a committee meeting.

Bingo. I can work with that. "The 70s," I say, "I’m hearing means possibility to you, an expanded field of possibilities." I hear a sound. Everybody laughs. I look confused. I hear the sound again. Not sure if it is a fart or a snore. Everyone laughs again. "Please," I think I begged, "can y’all stay with me here." A hand goes up: "Who is the guy holding the McDonald’s bag in the fur coat?" I look more closely at the illustration. I can’t remember and I’m so irritated by their unrepressed fascination with the marginal detail. Then I come up with it: Marvin Barnes. I tell them the story about Barnes refusing to board a St Louis bound plane in Louisville because it would arrive “before” it departed: “I’m not getting on no time machine,” said the player some felt could’ve been the greatest ever. No hand, but a voice calls out, "Who is the guy with the gun in the Condors uniform?" I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t fucking know. Their fucking attention spans are like the 2005-6 Phoenix offense: 7 seconds or less. I say none of this. Instead I laugh: "you can look it up if you want, y’all are so much faster on your devices than I am." (it was John Brisker, for the record).



I try again: "Possibility…" I say, richly trailing off, trying to make the word sound like an open door rather than a lead balloon. I really want to bring home the point that this marginalized insanity of the ABA, the league that apparently folded, had actually migrated into the NBA and taken over, viz. All-Star Weekend. But I also want them to get not only that historical point about the game, but to glimpse that there’s a way of thinking about possibility and growth, about marginality and centrality here. I fantasize about them going out in the world and scrambling social hierarchies because of Cultures of Basketball class.

"Wendell Berry," I tell them, "is an American poet and essayist, who is also a farmer in Kentucky." (Snickers). "He’s interested in questions of land use, farming, productivity, and ecology," I say. Back in the late 70s, just after the ABA folded, he took a trip to Peru to study the farming practices of Andean peasants there. I remember almost nothing of this essay except the following (which I may in fact be misremembering): Berry was struck by the fact that the Peruvian farmers would leave a wild margin all around their cultivated plots. Accustomed to the US practice of tilling and planting every possible square inch of arable land, Berry was puzzled. The farmers explained that the margin was sort of like a research laboratory. If some sort of pest, for example, destroyed their crop one year, they could look to the margins and see what had survived and in that way begin to develop hybrids that would resist that blight the next time.

Now it all started coming together for me. I began to see the students’ wildness today as an expression of, as a way of responding to, by reflecting, the wildness of the ABA. “What the hell was the ABA?” asks the subtitle of Bethlehem Shoals’s chapter (entitled Notes from the Underground) on the league in FreeDarko’s history of the pro game. Indeed, what the hell was that? The question we ask after something absurd occurs. Or, even more pertinently, after we come to our senses having participated in something absurd and inexplicable, or maybe even embarrassing. The question we ask having seen a UFO shoot across the evening sky, a quick trailing flash in our peripheral vision. It’s the question that might be asked of anything that grows in the unpoliced, uncultivated, untended margins of our attention. What the hell was that?

Indeed, that’s why I’ve allowed myself (why I always allow myself), against my judgment, to ramble about the seemingly unproductive, distracted and distracting occurrences and comments in class. The students seemed to me to be pestering for the identities of players on the margins of the picture, but they were really asking what the hell was that on the periphery of their egocentric, adolescent vision? What was that in a cowboy hat and six shooter? In a fur coat clutching a McDonald’s bag? Was Will Ferrell true? What was that world before I was born? (Indeed, the viral metaphor helps me understand how I kept getting carried away on the tide of their appetite for the decontextualized marginal detail; they were bitten by the ABA and I was bitten by them). What the hell was that?



And the answer, just like when someone hauls out the baby pictures (or better yet, the ultrasound images), is: it’s you, silly! Your game, your day and age. Saturday night Claire and I watched – riveted, bored, and embarrassed all at once -- a high-heeled, dolled up Heather Cox (I know its obvious, but really, why is a woman wearing heels to a basketball game?) escort Clippers guard Eric Gordon to a green screen, where he bashfully donned a Spartan helmet, grabbed a fake sword, and stood awkwardly before Jon Barry, ESPN commentator, who himself was also holding a sword and wearing a gladiator mask. They proceeded to mumble a few lines from the movie “Gladiator” and half-heartedly to knock their swords together like two embarrassed six year olds who are friends only because their parents are. “Thanks for the giggles, Eric” said Heather. He wandered off probably wondering “What the hell was that?” That was just before Justin Bieber nailed a three pointer in the celebrity game; which was just before he claimed his MVP trophy shouting props to “my boy Magic Johnson.” Did Justin Bieber really say “my boy Magic Johnson”? Did Magic really not only let him, but slap palms with him as he did? What the hell was that? The ABA –oops, the NBA – Its FANtastic! Have we really come so far from wrestling bears and playboy bunnies?

It’s true, the ABA may primarily be a mine of retro cache for a few urban hipsters, or a nostalgia trip for some middle-aged ballers like myself, but in some very real ways the ABA didn’t fold at all, it just implanted itself parasitically into the NBA and mutated (Shoals himself offers the viral metaphor in passing, and refers to the league as a “workshop or laboratory”). Add it’s not just the shamelessly, insatiable appetite for attention in the global media marketplace or the brazen techniques for securing it that the farmers of the NBA found and hybridized in the margins that were the ABA. It’s also, as I pointed out to the students, the game itself, the product on the floor.

If LeBron idolized Michael Jordan, well, it’s well-known that Michael idolized North Carolina State, then ABA, high-flyer David Thompson. Thompson may have burned out, but Dr. J didn’t, becoming instead a dominant gene in the host body of his new league. Where clips of the 70s Knicks offer an endless series of sober layups and mid-range jumpers (their regularity only emphasized by the oddity of an Earl Monroe scoop shot), the typical NBA game today presents itself as a series of 3 pointers, twisting layups in traffic, and mighty jams: in short, as a Dr J ABA highlight reel. And never is that more evident than during All-Star weekend, when the game turns itself inside out: parading as spectacular exhibition what in fact it is all the time.

There is a beautiful coda I would like to add, though it didn’t occur to me in class, lest I sound too disdainful. I’m only a little disdainful. After all, I’m of original ABA vintage and my authentic ABA game ball (autographed by the 1975 Spurs) sits proudly on our mantle. It’s in my DNA. But if I nonetheless seem less than caught up in the spectacle let me offer this by way of gratitude to the progenitors of Amazing.

The students, in responding to the artwork, mentioned the word “psychedelic.” In the feverish haze of my own ABA acid trip, I neglected to tell them that etymologically, “psychedelic” means “soul manifesting.” But it strikes me now that the phrase is a perfect response to the question: what the hell was the ABA? It was soul, manifesting. And while it may well have been an economically futile, exploitative, drug driven ride for a few martini-soaked businessmen, it also implanted some much needed soul (and style) into the genetic material of the mother ship that would first absorb and then be possessed by it.

Dunk You Very Much

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Catch A Cab By The City

Yago's latest post from his Cultures of Basketball course is up, where he subjects the students to my "Mikan and Modernity" essay. That's the chapter I was both most shaky on and, idea-wise, the most proud of. Yago homed in on my view of Mikan as the first true individual in the game, and in doing so, drew out the definition of "modern" that begins around Descartes. That view of individuality—that it is about style, the "how" as much as the "what"—informs most of the way I see the game, and would become indispensable to the game when African American players invaded in the mid-fifties. He told me over email that to him, the irony of uber-nerd loosing the concept of style upon professional basketball is almost too good to be true. It's worth noting, though, that the Globetrotters and Rens had been around before Mikan, which certainly suggest that Mikan was more an unlikely conduit, or a strange point of entry, rather than the originator.

When I was writing it, though, I was focused primarily on not how the individuality's relationship to time and space, but the notion that in the NBA, a unique relationship to time and space was the essence of individuality. Mikan wasn't an individual who proved this through a unique relationship to time and space; he was an individual precisely because of this. It's far easier to apply this logic to Mikan, or even Pettit, than Russell or Baylor in the years that followed. I will now blame it all on my framework, which I blame on a desperate need to either make use of what I learned in grad school, or justify all the pop-science-cultural-history reading I do for fun. I was thinking of the way that, after the Industrial Revolution had once and for all put a large part of the populace on the clock (literally and figuratively), new developments like the railroads, the telegraph, and widespread electricity destabilized this concept, as well as that of space.

How, in history, does this lead to individuality? I'm not quite sure, other than the fact that suddenly, daylight and travel were nearly as plastic as you wanted them to be; the transmission of information could take weeks or seconds, depending on your inclination. I will need someone far smarter than me to explain how that's a useful expansion of the metaphysical "I", rather than a distraction from it. I am certainly not ready to say that our sense of time's existential weight is what gives rise to George Mikan. We'll save Heidegger for positionality, where Being and Time is the internal, and later Martin is the external individual. Derrida or Ornette Coleman give us the organizing principles (such as they are).

To close this on a thoroughly self-deprecating note: Whether the historical analog is the early 17th century, or the late 19th, you have, in a sense, history being compared to history. It makes considerably more sense to explain how these developments in basketball parallel those of the larger cultural context of the time, as I did with Wilt and the Cold War. Too bad they don't. Actually, it reminds me of what Jacob said was the difficulty of making wacky comparisons in this book's illustrations: to paraphrase, all sports history is mythology. It's one thing to compare a current star to Shakespeare, or the Wright Brothers. However, someone like Wilt or Cousy is already in some sense a mythological figure. It's an awkward juxtaposition, so you either have to make it especially timely (a form of literalism) or retreat into symbolism. I have no idea why Naismith as Moses (or all the other things I compared him to) works.

Every Day Another Rumbling

As Dr. Santiago Colas conducts his Cultures of Basketball course at Michigan, and writes a bunch about it, we here at FD are committed to participating as second-hand participants, albeit with a somewhat privileged perspective. Yago's last two classes dealt with the early pro leagues and the great (and zany) barnstorming operations. Here, Jacob and I discuss his posts:

Bethlehem Shoals: It kind of blows my mind, and not necessarily in a good way, that our "textbook" includes the self-deprecating line about Jews being good at business and penny-pinching. Remember, we had to fight, gnash our teeth, and over-write in the master files to keep that in? At the time, it felt like a good inside joke, and the sort of thing we should be allowed to do, given our audience. But it is a little strange that college students would stumble across that line in what's, on all other counts, a pretty serious book about race and culture in sports. There's some sarcasm, to be sure. Flat-out irony, though? This might be the one line that lays it on that thick -- obviously, we only felt comfortable doing that with our own ethnic group -- and yet if the class isn't familiar with anti-Semitism (probably a good thing), I have no idea how that line comes across. The real shame might be that it comes at the high point of Jews as players of the game, which tarnishes that, in a way. Actually, maybe it makes it stronger, since there's no reason we can imagine the era of the Jews to have been one where, as a historical space, Jewish humor is free to roam the plains.

Jacob Weinstein: While I agree that line is sort of a tonal shift from the rest of the book, what it really highlights to me is the awkwardness and artificiality of lumping all these barnstorming teams together to begin with. Given the space considerations of the book it made sense, but really there is a huge difference in the quality and the historical importance of teams like the Celtics, Rens and Globetrotters, and teams like Olson's Terrible Swedes or the House of David which were almost sideshow or novelty acts. The SPHAs were sort of a middle ground, neither a novelty act nor a truly dominant team like the Celtics, and I think an ironic aside sneaks in mostly because, as you noted, it was our own ethnic group, but also because the entire section was a weird mix of bold face tragedies (Globetrotters) historical footnotes (Kues) and pure absurdity (House of David).

And while the SPHAs certainly were a legit team, in my research it seems like even former players or fans still regard the team with some good humor. In no small part because the organizational structure of the time was such a mess, and the rules themselves were in such flux, it's hard to even get a read on the quality of the team's play. For example, what does the high point of Jews as players of the game even mean, if the game they excelled in was so alien from what we know as basketball today? It's almost like claiming to have been the best doctor during the Middle Ages. And that's why I think the ethnic underpinning of the team--and the accompanying stereotypes-- really become almost all there is to remember. Otherwise, we could have just featured some other random team from the era like the Paterson Crescents or the Brooklyn Visitations. Newark Mules stand up!

BS: It's only artificial and awkward insofar as the game itself was, at that time, still kind of a mess. Barnstorming teams, whether they were the Globetrotters or the House of David, played whatever competition that town could offer up. Since players in the early pro leagues (so strange to call it "early", since we're talking about nearly fifty years -- as long as the "modern" game has been around) were hardly getting rich, we can assume that they were part of that equation. That's what makes the Buffalo Germans so representative: it's impossible to tell if they were a total fraud because the line between legitimate and illegitimate ball was so blurred. I'm sure there were plenty of nights that the Original Celtics got to phone it in against a bunch of eager high school students.

What's interesting to me, though, is that while the barnstorming teams did have this self-undermining quality to them, they also introduced and disseminated new ideas about the game. I'm not one-hundred percent sure about this, but it seems like most of the actual developments in how to play the game -- as opposed to the parameters and rules -- came out of barnstorming teams. At least until the forties. The Celtics are important for developing the pick and roll, not their inflated win-loss record; the Globetrotters paved the way for pretty much any basketball played with style and creativity.

Oddly, this brings it all back to the Paul Gallico quote that inspired our own off-color line: the SPHAS may not have been a truly dominant team, or even all that well-organized, but it's clear that they brought something to the game that resonated with those watching it comes into focus. Granted, today we have a somewhat different notion of the "city game", and yet the idea of a tough, streetwise, crafty player who is slick without being smooth -- that's still part of the way we talk about basketball today.

JW: Yeah, I guess you're right. Basketball was just a mess back then. Even now I still have no idea how we could have presented those barnstorming teams in a more logical or truthful way. But what I think I was trying to bring the discussion around to was Yago's questions of "How do we tell the pre-history of something, when they didn't know they were a part of anything," which, likewise, I'm still befuddled by. The game these teams were playing between the 1890s and 1950s was undoubtedly basketball, but at the edges you sort of have to squint to convince yourself of that.

As for the barnstorming teams introducing new ideas to the game, I would definitely agree. And while non-barnstorming players were probably just as crucial in coming up with innovations, the barnstormers certainly were more important in disseminating those ideas, since they were playing hundreds of games a year all over the country. What's interesting to me is the constant battle between these player innovations and the rules from on-high--I guess what Yago would call spontaneity and calculation. And to further complicate it, the push and pull between the professional organizations and the amateur organizations.

So picking up where you left off in discussing chapter 0 of the book, if Naismith is the founding father of the United States of Basketball, and his original rules are the constitution, then for the first fifty years or so the amateur and collegiate basketball organizations were sort of "constitutional originalists' who kept nudging the game back to what Naismith imagined (or more accurately, what they imagined Naismith imagined). For example, the YMCA's and the AAU never adopted the cage, outlawed double dribbling, tried to keep the game nonviolent, etc. And to push this crude analogy even further, during the same period the pro leagues would have believed in a "living consitution", a sort of free-market functionalism where regional oddities (no backboards in the Northeast) and functional innovations (dribbling, the pick and roll, the pivot man, etc. ) were all thrown together and either adopted, discarded, or refined through new rules by the organizational bodies in control at the time.

I have no idea where I was going with the last comment. I guess Phog Allen is Scalia and Marques Haynes is Ruth Bader Ginsburg?

BS: Bringing back the Constitutional analogy makes me wonder how it is that Naismith's rules can be fetishized, but the next five decades are this alien world that, somehow, spit out the NBL and BAA. With the exception of Prohibition, the Constitution is changed to account for some very linear notion of progress -- one that holds up to this day. This pre-history of the NBA is more like we now understand evolution to be: a series of random mutations that, through their interaction with the outside world, are streamlined and refined into adaptation. So whether we're talking about stylistic innovations, or changes the rules, the trial-and-error quality of this period doesn't mean it's negligible. We don't even have a situation like the ABA, where a lot of the craziness was external to the game. It's pretty clear that the instability, and occasional breakthroughs, in basketball during this time were directly tied to how topsy-turvy its circumstances were.

The idea of a non-linear history doesn't come naturally to us, because we're used to narrative. But it's probably closer to, you know, the way things really are. So in a way, it's good that we can't quite make sense of the early pro leagues and the barnstormers. Maybe we should be trying to bring that kind of perspective to the history that, in our minds, works out much more cleanly.

Rockin' Steady: Then And Now

Jason Johnson is, by his own admission, not particularly stylish or athletic. He does however hold the distinction of being the world's tallest sports/style blogger. He can most often be found at Style Points, or on Twitter @frazierapproves.

When Shoals asked me to write a style piece related to the re-release of Walt Frazier’s seminal Rockin' Steady: A Guide to Basketball and Cool, I jumped at the opportunity. Rockin’ Steady is, simply put, one of the oddest books I’ve ever read. Equal parts memoir, style guide, hoops tutorial and 70s PG scouting report, it is profoundly weird. Like "Keep Portland Weird", or that cow-camouflage-blazer-he-wore-a-few-weeks-ago weird.



Clyde’s basketball tips still ring true, because fundamentally, the game hasn’t changed that much since his day. Instead of focusing on the basketball portion of the book, I thought I’d see how much of Clyde’s 1974 closet would stand up in today’s league.

SUITS:

Clyde’s closet boasted 49. With the not-so-new dress code in effect, it would be surprising if most ballers didn’t have a similar number. While Rockin Steady doesn’t detail each and every suit (I’m sure most were conservative charcoal or navy worsteds), it does highlight some of the more, ahem Clyde-ish items. I was unable to locate any modern lamb or cowskin suits, but Andrew Bogut seems to be keeping Clyde’s white twill suit alive.



PANTS:

Clyde saw no problem with wearing his suits as separates. Wearing suit pants without the cost is a bad move because, ideally you’d like them to wear and age equally. It’s an especially bad move if, like Clyde, your pants have no pockets. After scouring the web for days, I came up short in my search for NBA players in verifiably pocketless trousers. Were I a betting man, I’d venture that one or more of the fits from Kobe’s infamous “white hot” spread would fit the bill.

KNOTS:

Circa 74, it seems that ties had fallen out of fashion. Ever a man of the times, Frazier purported to own no ties. This is incongruous with the photographic evidence presented in the book. From what I’ve seen, Frazier favored white silk ties with black suit/shirt combos. Gangster. Paul Pierce can be seen employing this particular look to questionable effect.



KICKS:

Shoes are dangerous. They’re a sartorial gateway drug. Every true clothes-horse has an even bigger shoe habit. Clyde was no exception. At the time of publication, he estimated that he had fifty pairs of shoes; 20 lace up and 30 loafers, mostly suede and leather, nach. One would expect that his shoe game would be relatively easy to export to into the new millennium; unfortunately, I was unable to find any pics of current players in 2.5 inch Cuban heels. I do, however, believe some college players wear them for on-campus pre-draft measurement.

COATS:

Endangered species laws and changing attitudes make it virtually impossible for a modern player to walk around in an elephant or seal skin coat like Clyde, but that didn’t stop Nate Robinson from stepping out in this full size Yeti-fur coat.



LIDS:

Walt wouldn’t have become Clyde without the hats. Frazier had a penchant for wearing wide brimmed hats before they became popular. After being ridiculed by veteran teammates, Frazier nearly abandoned the hats that gave him his now-iconic nickname. They called him Clyde because his hats were similar to those worn by Warren Beatty in Bonnie and Clyde.

Today, hats remain a sartorial power-move. They’re high degree of difficulty items that should only be attempted by the most accomplished Clydes of our day.



There will never be another Walt “Clyde” Frazier. So much of what made him has been lost. That time, that New York is long gone. The city isn’t edgy anymore. MSG doesn’t mean as much as it used to, and the days of weirdo fashion plates leading entertaining Knicks teams are long past.

And We All Got Married Forever

First, the bad news. For those of those alien to Twitter, or undisposed toward general interest sports blog, FanHouse is no more. Actually, let me pause with the hysterics: It will live on, just with an almost entirely new staff, and under the direction of the Sporting News. Also, this transformation doesn't go down until March 1st, so you get another month and change of pedal-to-the-metal output.

Why is this all happening? As best as I can tell, AOL decided that its experiment -- hiring "national voice" columnists and sending out reporters with generous travel budgets, all in hopes of becoming a first-order content generator -- wasn't working out. There had always been some risk involved, but as I understood it, the plan was to be patient, and wait before passing judgment. Apparently, though, it was proving just too hairy a financial proposition. So rather than re-design the site so that more than two or three articles got traffic, or cut ties with some of the over-paid, under-performing "names" who ate up much of the payroll, AOL decided to cut their losses. They sold the reputable brand name, and the real estate, to a company in need of both.

So that's that. The Works will officially be no more, and Eric and myself will have a lot of time on our hands. Don't hesitate to get in touch if you know of any writing or editing work!

Speaking of which, I do have a few things lined up already. For one, I've begun contributing daily to Business Insider, writing about stuff like free agent strategy and branding. Crunching numbers has never been my strength, but everybody knows these things are much about quality as quantity, even if we're talking about the distribution of contracts.

***

Okay, the good news. Fast friend Yago Colás, whose Go Yago! is one of the rightful heirs to this long-in-the-tooth blog, has -- as some of you may have read elsewhere -- been using The Undisputed Guide as the primary textbook for his Cultures of Basketball course at Michigan. I'm hoping to make it out there some time this semester, but in the meantime, I'm limited to the fascinating, and somehow intrusive, practice of commenting on his posts about how The Undisputed Guide works in the classroom. I know I don't want to give too much unwelcome behind-the-scenes detail (or defense) of why the book is the way it is; nor do I think it's wholly constructive for me to, after the fact, drop in on Yago's classroom discussions like I know best.

For example, Yago explained to True Hoop that he liked the book's breakdown of historical periods. The funny thing is, Jacob and I came up with this schema and a compromise between the decades (works well enough, suits common sense) and an incredibly arcane system that had some epochs lasting only two or three years. So while I would like to claim some credit for this model, it's really just decades, but with enough tweaks thrown in to justify all the time we spent poring over these parameters. So, Yago, don't tell the kids that.

In his post on Day Two of class, Yago has the students read both Naismith's account of how he came up with basketball's rules, and FD's chapter on the game's invention. Naismith walks the reader through the reasoning that led to his original rules. In my chapter -- which owes a major, major assist to my agent Chris Parris-Lamb -- I tried to look at the different kinds of creation myths we can attribute to that reasoning. It was prompted by Jacob's observation that basketball was, unlike other sports, invented rather than evolved out of folkways. At the same time, what it means for a sport to come about in this way depends on what kind of meaning we wish to imbue it with.



Comparing Naismith to Moses, Martin Luther, the Founding Fathers, logical positivism, and Romanticism was over-the-top. But, in addition to giving some sense of the peculiar historical and cultural juncture at which this sport came into being, it also lent a framework to all the basketball history that would follow. Perhaps it's too much to think of Naismith as a visionary, but certainly, the rules he created carried within them the seed of all that followed. Basketball's history is not one of appropriation or strident interpretation. It evolved quickly, and there have certain been moments that qualify as revolutions. But one thing that always trips me up when I try and talk about the book, usually on the radio, is that basketball history is full of near-constant reinvention and repetition. You can say this over and over again, and it will never get any less true, or cringe-worthy: baseball may be the national pastime, but basketball is America.

Enough about me. Here's Yago:

At this point, I somehow forgot all about Naismith and the point of this whole comparative exercise, and, caught up in the testimony, just blurted out: “in what ways is basketball like or unlike a religion for you?” Here's where I should acknowledge that Shoals’ argument really goes from the mythico-religious (Moses) to the historico-religious (Martin Luther) to the secular (the Founding Fathers) and concludes that Naismith bears more of a resemblance to a founding father. So really the question should have been: "in what ways is basketball like a country to you?"

Ah, the perils of this exercise: I wish I could say I had this progression in mind, but really, i was thinking in terms of the different ways our culture has for accounting for revelation, true originality, or inspiration. All of these were present, and relevant, in the time of Naismith, can be read into basketball, and can be found in the sport today -- just as they can still found be discerned in culture. The discussion in his classroom of how basketball is or isn't like religion, and whether basketball deserves that level of fervor, leads back to the question not of how important basketball is. That's why it's instructive that, in his post, Yago suggests substituting "country" for religion. Religion, or the religious impulse (like there's only one kind; I included two modalities) is part of what we understand as America. If basketball contains one, or both of these -- and indeed, can be said to matter in all the ways that America grounds meaning -- than as far as sports go, it's kicking some serious ass.

***

By the time most of you read this, it will be MLK Day. There are NBA games on all day, even more than on Christmas, and I might hit up a regional high school tournament later in the evening. It's also low-hanging fruit for any columnists looking to approximate solemnity without exerting himself too much. The day is important, black people do more than play sports, etc. I have yet to see anyone attempt the more gymnastic opposite: that really, there is no more appropriate way to celebrate the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. than to play and watch basketball. I suppose, based on what I wrote above, I could be persuaded, but it sounds way too much like something a rightie shock jock might say for all the wrong reasons.



I will say this: on the local level, where basketball can work as a proxy for, or an extension of, community, I don't see what's wrong with it. The problem seems to come when the NBA, which traffics in blatant consumerism, tries to get in on the spirit. Then again, this is a league that makes teams play on Christmas and New Year's Eve. It's a federal and state holiday, which means people of all colors and creeds will have the day off, and be looking for things to do. Now, would the world be a better place if everyone -- after all, MLK Day isn't just about African-Americans doing right by themselves -- took the day off to volunteer, go to speeches and rallies, and otherwise carry on the tradition of the man whose name the date bears? Obviously. The truth is, though, that it's hard to get people to spend their day off doing things like that, no matter who they are. They want leisure, and the NBA gives them more product than usual to kick back with, or attend in person.

The pitfall comes in making an obligatory nod to the holiday. But that's nothing more than good corporate manners. That the NBA has to acknowledge MLK Day doesn't mean we have to accuse them of equating Civil Rights with today's pro sports leagues. Instead, we should blame ourselves for creating the demand, or at least the audience. No one's forcing us to watch basketball instead of going out and making the world a better place. If you do so on a regular basis, well, you deserve a day off.

Top of the World!

"This is what I imagine JaVale McGee will look like in the dunk contest" - me
"Now I know how Brandon Jennings will win this dunk contest" - Eric

Kyle from Truth About It hipped me to these -- he was working on a truly massive, admirable post on the lost 1977 contest, and had some questions. I responded with "I remember reading about this", and drooled over this video for about five years. If you want to see my early thoughts on this year's field, here I am. Katz has compiled video previews. I failed, though, to stress enough that I really envision McGee experiencing some sort of centrifugal mishap and being torn limb-from-limb like Rabbi Akiba.

I woke up this morning and asked myself if this wasn't a totally new dunk contest paradigm: no swingmen, three big men when every one of those other than Dwight Howard has failed to impress (I never liked him much in the contest, either), and the wild card/sidekick in Brandon Jennings who is there only to entertain. That DeAndre Jordan, not DeMar DeRozan, seems like the biggest snub tells you something about the direction this group of competitors signals. I'm not sure exactly what the aim is -- get back to me after we see how it pans out -- but this represents a clean break with the past. Embracing the misfits and introducing a clear element of absurdity. Or maybe focusing on new kinds on weaponry. Whatever, when the dunk contest matters, it's as central to the culture of the sport as any non-playoff game. We look to it year after year because inside, something's been missing for a long time.

I now want to turn my attentions to a more serious topic: the Ted Williams story that has all the country aflutter. First, let's get one thing out of the way: some part of me will never stop laughing from reading a "Cavs Hire Homeless Internet Sensation" headline on my phone while still in bed. Sorry dudes, that's how it is. Also, for Williams, this is great. Obviously. I know nothing about him, but when a guy goes from nothing to something overnight, and finds his life back on track when he thought he was done for ... well, that's when I write sentences like that. And the more I think about, the more insidious, and just plain manipulative, it seems.

For one, the whole notion of random, unicorns-and-rainbows charity administered in a state with really, really serious job shortages and foreclosure plague (how are drug sales these days? I'm guessing no one can afford it) is kind of insensitive. Maybe even crass. I understand that Williams is a decent guy who is very deserving of a fresh start. But come on ... it wouldn't make more sense, as something other than a publicity stunt, to spread the charity around a little? I know, this also lands the Cavs and others a valuable employee (job creation!), so it's not pure altrusim. And yes, they are paying him -- he's working for his! Still, though, if you want me to feel like the world is a better, kinder place for this, well, it takes more than a one-off stunt. Making dreams come true isn't the same thing as affecting change, obviously, but at least we can ask for action that falls somewhere in between the two. It's the only remotely sane, responsible thing to do in this day and age.

And, while all this is great for Williams, there's something too Hollywood about this that seems a little unfair. He's not the only homeless dude with marketable skills, or a hard luck story that at one point, showed real promise. Especially -- not to sound like a broken record -- in this economic climate, in places (like Ohio) where jobs and homes can no longer be taken for granted. I guess now everyone can dream of being discovered by viral video, or stake all their future hopes on the Internet. Except then, don't we just have the homeless version of inner city kids trying to make the NBA? This isn't proof that America still makes it happen -- it's yet another gross distortion of the American Dream (whatever that is), pushed to such a clown-ish extreme that it replaces the social safety net with a fucking game show.

I'm also not entirely convinced that this kind of instant-fix is a recipe for lasting stability. Recovery and the transition back into polite society isn't like flipping a switch. Not saying we should punish anyone, but again, everybody knows that overnight success is rarely the foundation for a strong and constant future. Finally, never underestimate Dan Gilbert. He roused a lynch-mob against LeBron to keep the Cavs brand in the headlines and remotely relevant; when that inconvenient team got in the way, he had to pivot, and become a saint. Who knows what's next? It's not like they have anything to lose as an organization.

Speaking of all this, THE SUNS FIRED CONNIE HAWKINS, CURRENTLY FIGHTING CANCER, FROM HIS LARGELY CEREMONIAL POSITION CANCER. Apparently he didn't show up at the office enough. Fuck that team, once and forever. I invite someone to give me a good reason to retract that.

You should read this Go Yago! dude. He writes regularly and is keeping the flame alive.

The Heart of the City

Matthew Kreisher was born and raised in the North Carolina with a love of writing, basketball and music. You can find him at The Fadeaway or follow him @makreish.

Sunday morning is my favorite time to walk along Hargett Street. There’s no traffic; most of the sound comes from brunch-goers on makeshift patios, and an unsettling quiet surrounds downtown Raleigh. Sunday neither belongs to the week nor to the weekend; past and present become one, and time slows to a crawl.

It was on one of these mornings, a few weeks back, that I walked into Father and Sons vintage shop and found myself staring at two game-day programs from the ABA’s Carolina Cougars, this state’s first foray into professional basketball. I was born and raised in Charlotte, and can attest to the fact that this state’s cult of hoops isn’t just about UNC and Duke. I recently admitted to a friend that I had owned a life-sized poster of former Hornets star Alonzo Mourning, a revelation that led to a contentious debate over whose vault of Hornets memorabilia was greater. The Cougars are forgotten traces of my state’s NBA heritage; Sunday was the perfect time to find myself thinking of how far North Carolina has come since the days of the red, white and blue ball.



In 1968 the Houston Mavericks, like most ABA franchises, were struggling to turn a profit, a problem they (like most ABA franchises) chalked up to their current market. They were sold and then relocated to North Carolina. In hopes of capitalizing on the state's fertile basketball soils, the newly-named Cougars became a regional franchise, splitting home games between Raleigh, Greensboro and Charlotte.

In theory, the regional approach made a certain amount of sense. At that point, the state was without a major metropolitan city, and the North Carolina basketball tradition was a statewide thing. But the plan backfired, as the Cougars never got enough of a local footing in any city. North Carolina has always been a hot-bed of rivalry between four schools (NCSU, Duke, Wake Forest and UNC); hoops was a matter of particularism, not the universal. With each city hosting roughly thirteen games a piece, the local pride so key to the state’s rabid hoops culture was never able to take root. The Cougars were built upon the supposition that North Carolina’s basketball history had built unity, when nearly the opposite was true.

In 1905 Wake Forest University was the first to bring basketball to the state of North Carolina, followed quickly by Trinity College (later named Duke University after Washington Duke, owner of Bull Durham Chewing Tobacco Co.). The two schools played the first collegiate basketball game south of the Mason-Dixon line on March 2, 1905. NC State and UNC followed, both forming teams in 1911. It was Carolina who, in 1945, became the first of the four teams in make it to the Final Four, led by NC State transfer Bones McKinney. In 1946 Chuck Taylor, then a traveling salesman for Converse, suggested Everett Case for the job as head coach at NC State. Case built a 12,000 seat arena and recruited nationally, caused Duke and Carolina to revamp their programs and planted the seeds of today’s Tobacco Road mega-rivalry.

The Mavericks were bought by a conglomerate of North Carolina businessmen hoping to add professional basketball to this history. They hired Bones McKinney as the franchise’s first coach in 1969; the team finished 42-42 and were swept by the Pacers in the first round of the playoffs. The team regressed in their second year; McKinney was fired halfway through the season, replaced by Jerry Steele and the Cougars finished 35-50. Steele was promptly fired at the end of the season to make way for third year coach Tom Meschery, (Russian immigrant, former NBA player, today a member of the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame). In those first few years the Cougars made a habit of hiring homegrown talent, like All-Rookie guard Gene Littles, in his first year out of High Point College, and former Duke All-American guard Bob Verga. This practice led to one of the biggest coups in ABA history as the Cougars signed former Tar Heel star Billy Cunningham away from the NBA Philadelphia 76ers while Cunningham was still under NBA contract.

The Cougars signed Cunningham during the 1969-70 season to a 4-year $455K contract starting with the 1970-71 season. The contract called for a $125K signing bonus of which $45K was paid upon signing and Cunningham, who was getting old but still very capable, was to receive the remaining $80K upon turning down his option year in Philadelphia to join the Cougars; however, the Sixers star orally agreed to play out his option year in the NBA after claiming to have never received the full bonus. There is speculation as to whether a miscommunication took place or Cunningham was hedging his bets after fully realizing the financial instability of the league; either way he attempted to return the $45K bonus and then signed a new, 5-year contract with Philadelphia. Cunningham returned to the NBA for two seasons while a series of court cases decided his fate. Ultimately an injunction handed down from the US Court of Appeals barred Cunningham from playing for any team but the Cougars until his ABA contract expired. Cunningham would not join the team until the start of the 1972 season. In 1971, Joe Caldwell, not playing in the NBA but technically under contract to the Atlanta Hawks, jumped to the Cougars without spending the obligatory year in limbo. Five years before the Oscar Robertson suit, Caldwell and the Cougars circumvented the reserve clause, in effect inventing free agency. Caldwell was later traded when he attempted to hold the organization to the terms of his deal, and ended up causing so much trouble that he was blackballed.


In 1972-73, recently-retired ABA guard Larry Brown -- a UNC alum -- took Meschery’s place. It was Brown’s first-ever coaching job of any kind. The combination of Brown and Cunningham sparked the Cougars, who went 57-27 and became the first ABA team to shoot over 50% from the field. Cunningham earned MVP honors and Caldwell, no longer expected to carry the entire franchise on his back, flourished. The Cougars went on to win their only playoff series, sweeping the New York Nets, before losing in the second round to the Kentucky Colonels. Unfortunately, this success was short lived. Cunningham was plagued by kidney problems throughout the Cougars’ fourth year and they were eliminated again in the first round of the playoffs. The franchise was sold for $1.5 million to two New York brothers, Ozzie and Daniel Silna, and their lawyer Don Schupak, who moved the team to St. Louis.

The Cougars may have been doomed, but they stood for something bigger. The ABA was rife with experimentation -- even if most of was in the service of financial desperation. The NBA had not challenged its own conventional wisdom since the introduction of the shot clock in 1954; it was conventional wisdom that said players were bound to an NBA team for life unless the team said otherwise. It was this spirit of departing from the norm that allowed the Cougars to experiment, and ultimately fail. That is Raleigh’s legacy of professional basketball. In retrospect, that they failed to establish a regional franchise is less important than the fact that they tried at all.

I was born and raised in Charlotte, but now call Raleigh home. When I was growing up, Charlotte was a small banking city, whose goal of becoming a nationally recognized banking city unified a community. In 1989 the NBA rewarded the Queen City with the Charlotte Hornets. By the mid-nineties, Charlotte was somewhere between a small Southern past and a future of financial growth, an identity that took hold just as the Hornets took off. New NBA teams succeed when they’re integrated into the culture of the city, and capitalize on civic pride. This was why the Hornets succeeded at first -- that and Charlotte’s determination, as a mid-level city fighting for national recognition, to make sure they succeeded. Then George Shinn happened, and by the time the Hornets moved to New Orleans in 2002, the community was unified behind its dislike for one of the NBA’s worst owners (and worst people).

When the Bobcats started life in 2004, Charlotte was the worst kind of city for an NBA franchise. Today, the state is a very different place. The struggle for recognition that once galvanized the people of Charlotte ended in 1998 when the Bank of America merger turned it overnight into the nation’s second-largest banking city. With the struggle for recognition over, the civic pride that manifested during the city’s period of growth quickly eroded. Charlotte is now defined by the corporations that now call the city home. The NBA's second attempt to tap the basketball gold mine that is North Carolina now perennially ranks toward the bottom of the league in attendance levels. With the CBA negotiations going nowhere, David Stern has begun talking contraction; many point to Charlotte as the most logical team to cut.

However, Charlotte wasn’t the only growing North Carolina city. Raleigh has quickly risen to second largest metropolitan population in the state and along with Durham and Chapel Hill forms the Triangle part of the Research Triangle Park. In 1973, Cougars owner Tedd Munchak wanted Raleigh cut from the regional plan because attendance numbers lagged dramatically behind both Charlotte and Greensboro, where the Cougars were once attacked by bugs left over from the previous day’s cattle show. Raleigh now grows at a rate of 22% a year. The Research Triangle Park (RTP), located between Raleigh and Durham, has become a destination for technology firms. Since RTP was located on what was once farmland, away from the heart of Raleigh, there was no need to bend to corporate will in the way Charlotte did. Instead, Raleigh responded by renovating historical buildings in attempt to preserve the past. Small businesses began forming where once there were only government jobs and local culture was allowed to flourish and evolve. The New York Times recently described Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill as North Carolina's "Axis of Cool."

What makes the area unique is the strong sense of culture and community within each city. Chapel Hill is Chapel Hill, and Durham built a culinary empire around local, individually owned restaurants like Magnolia, Nana’s Steakhouse and Vin Rouge. Not coincidentally, that’s also the UNC and Duke binary. Raleigh, though, has found its own way, one whose strong local culture and love of basketball could make it a Southern version of Portland.

A few years ago, Ivan Howard of The Rosebuds invited me to a regular pick-up game at some outdoor courts tucked away behind Peace College. I play there regularly, along with Victor Lytvinenko, founder of high-end denim brand Raleigh Denim; writers like Grayson Currin, music editor of The Independent, co-creator of Hopscotch Music Fest; and musicians like Howard, Megafaun’s Brad Cook, and Steve Popson, bassist of FD favorite Polvo, who after his time in Chapel Hill moved back to Raleigh to open King’s Barcade. I’m close to convincing him to buy NBA Jam ‘93 for King’s. It’s people like these -- hoops fanatics who also now make Raleigh such a vital city to live in -- who remind me of the legacy of the Cougars.



The Bobcats will continue to have my support, but every time I watch them play in front of an empty stadium, I feel like I’m watching a wasted opportunity -- for the NBA and for my state. My whole life I have been proud to call North Carolina home. The glory years of the Hornets left a stamp on my childhood -- I experienced Larry Johnson’s rookie year, witnessed Jordan in the ’98 playoffs, and fought back tears after hearing the news of Bobby Phill’s crash -- and created a lifelong NBA fan. It was hard to embrace the Bobcats at first, mainly because of the once-strong ties to the Hornets, but ultimately I couldn’t resist. Yet they play in a city that barely cares, and part of me wonders what could have been had NBA officials ignored the conventional wisdom that has become Charlotte’s mother tongue.

Thirty years ago, Raleigh was home to an ABA franchise that challenged the norm, however disastrously. With labor negotiations stuck in the mud and the possibility of a lockout on the horizon, it appears both sides have lost. The spirit of the ABA and the changes it provided are needed now more than ever. The Bobcats are indicative of all that’s gone wrong with the NBA; we may never know how different things would be if, instead, they had followed in the footsteps of the Cougars.



(You can view both programs in their entirety here)