I. Dislocation
Too Jewish for Christmas, not Jewish enough for Chanukah: I long ago began cultivating the practice of obsessively watching the NBA cavort on December 25, on which date both sectarian holidays occurred simultaneously this year.
Buffeted and submerged by the catastrophic electoral nightmare (my having anticipated it notwithstanding) that had returned an unredeemable scoundrel to our country’s highest office, and the world’s most powerful position, I had been making my best efforts to reconnect to sports. That connection could only be as a native New Yorker who grew up with episodic insider access to Madison Square Garden college dressing rooms (1). Marooned on the left coast, I was feeling my dislocation more acutely.
Out here in San Francisco, where the detritus of a fallen Golden State dynasty swirls through rainy, wind- swept mornings, straining to break through ocean fog, I habitually use Christmas day’s carefully curated five game twelve-hour NBA tsunami to catch up on the league’s happenings, then figure to hit cruise control until the All-Star Game, maybe even the playoffs.
But this year’s “NBA Cup,” the rechristened version of last year’s inaugural “In Season Tournament,” had jangled my accustomed rhythms, and lessened my feeling of involvement with the league I had so fervently followed since a childhood spent binging on doubleheaders and overhanging cigarette smoke in the mezzanine of the old Madison Square Garden.
II. Returning Home
The season had begun during my first visit (ten days) to my native town (2) since my mother’s death at 102 just over a year ago; blessed October days when it was still possible to maintain hope that our experiment in democracy could withstand the barrage of violence, hatred, and obscene wealth that the Doomsday Trump Machine had assembled. Songs of innocence that we all were singing had given way to ones of experience: cynicism, horror, fear for our country, our planet, our values.
Politics aside, sports were hemorrhaging significance during my visit. The Yankees were facing the Dodgers in a replay of what had been a riveting 1956 World Series (3), just as the NBA season was seamlessly succeeding the WNBA Finals (4), featuring another New York team (The Liberty) which eventually triumphed. So: baseball was beginning its world series just as basketball was transitioning (as it were) between sexes: although the Yankees could not hold back the Dodgers, New York had been liberated! For a four-decade ex-pat, but still a New Yorker to the core, was there ever such a time as now?
Maybe not, but, as per Pete Axthelm’s 1971 classic The City Game, along with–and parallel to–the Knicks, New York basketball has always also been about the playgrounds, where the Black game first came alive for me. There had always been two divergent paths: one toward college ball, and the other anchored in the playgrounds; typically divided by race. All this has radically changed: even the Southern basketball dynasties (most notably Kentucky, and then Duke) that refused to admit–or even compete against–“negroes” now regularly sport all Black starting fives.
III. Transition Games: Back West
A. College Ball
The “contemporary college game” is no longer segregated, and decidedly not amateur; rather, it is awash with “NIL money.” Well-known star players are compensated handsomely for the use of their “name, image, and likeness” (NIL) in advertising their sport of choice while wearing the uniforms of the colleges that employ them. Moreover, players can now transfer freely, without missing a year. There is no injunction against simply following the money.
And that means staying in the gym: brief samplings of my old New York neighborhood playground, over my subsequent forty years of visits, had made it clear that the best prospects- at least those with the size to be immediately identifiable–were elsewhere: playing AAU ball; indoors; all summer (5). Players no longer need a weatherman: just close the door; wind won’t blow.
So what has college ball become? Not as different as one might imagine, if you overlook continuity of players within franchises. It’s as if the playground model of “winner’s stay on, who’s got next?” now reigns supreme! In many ways, unrestricted player movement (by dint- if not virtue- of lawsuits brought on behalf of notions of player-centric equity against the corporatized NCAA) has freed up college ball of its need to genuflect to educational and humanistic values that have little place outside the three second lane.
As such, quite ironically, college basketball is shining in a new light. So I sampled a few of what I figured might be the most interesting games, apart from my typical menu of Big East battles, mostly featuring St. John’s, Marquette, Providence, and Villanova, but also UConn, the new beast on the block.
Thusly re-expanding my horizons, I first took on Duke-Kentucky, and found that Duke’s freshman phenom Cooper Flagg is not only a multi-skilled 6’9” all-around talent, but just one of a handful of McDonald’s All-Americans being showcased in what can be thought of as their “gap year.” And then the imports: like 6’10” Amari Williams, a slender but powerful, multi-skilled 22-year-old left-hander imported from Nottingham, England to Lexington, Kentucky. Early on against Duke, Williams made a shot I had to replay three times to believe; nay, to comprehend: having been upended, he somehow summoned the strength to force up–and make–a shot from a seemingly impossible (certainly ridiculous) angle, nearly parallel to the floor, by thrusting his left hand upwards–from close to the ground, as if pulling the trigger on a rifle. Kentucky’s one-point win fondly recalled the 1966 NCAA semi-final match-up between these titans, a classic that was rendered historically marginal the next night by Texas Western’s historic upset of Adolph Rupp’s all-white Kentucky charges that brought us Pat Riley and Louis Dampier.
Two other games that I sampled would qualify as classics in any era: Princeton edging Rutgers 83-82 in a game that featured several lead changes and many spectacular shots, while showcasing perhaps the nation’s two best players after Flagg (who is already his own category: just turned eighteen, he draws credible comparisons to Larry Bird and Luca Doncic): Rutgers team-mates 6’6” Dylan Harper, former Chicago Bull Ron Harper’s younger of two sons, and lanky, but muscular Ace Bailey, listed as a guard at 6’10.”
The other–fittingly–was in The Garden: UConn-Gonzaga was an elite-level dogfight between two schools that had gone from marginal Division I also-rans to perennial national powerhouses during my seven-decade tenure as a devoted fan of college ball, with a specialty in the NIT (6).
These “schools” have become franchises, extensions of the high school basketball academies.
College ball is now the squeezed middle between the NBA and the playgrounds. Not exactly pure, though maybe in the same way as gangster movies.
B. Sneak Peak: A Franchise Collapsing or in Flux?
Devastated as I was on the night after (November 6), I was grateful to have an interesting (however insignificant) basketball game to salve my post-election wounds, and was especially vociferous in addressing my TV: “Abuse him,” I exhorted my screen’s iconic image of Klay Thompson, as I discerned that Brother Klay was being guarded by the smaller Stef Curry, his long-time Splash Brother, this night cast as his antagonist, with Klay’s Mavericks invading a Warrior team that was over-achieving in early season. Klay looked trim, toned, confident, and content; business-like and friendly; fully ready for his return to San Francisco as a Dallas Maverick.
Physically over-matched, Curry had to foul, thereby ceding the game’s first two points (among the just deserts of the returning hero) to Brother Klay, but late in the second quarter, Stef played him man-up, effectively cutting off his penetration; soon thereafter, he absorbed Thompson’s foul on an and-one bucket. I keep forgetting: Stef’s gotten stronger. A 9-0 Golden State run highlighted the lingering magic that Stef and Draymond Green can together concoct.
Green has always been a brother to both Splash Brothers; in many ways their synthesizer, if not occasionally their therapist; or at least Stef, as Green often carried him through rough waters during his MVP years (7). Let’s praise both, and say “nurtured.” Kerr’s new twelve-man rotation can be of help to Curry’s project of not letting Green come to a boil, at which point he comes to resemble a boil of a different nature. Lance Draymond? Not in Kerr’s nature, but stick him with the thousand daggers of peons striving for spare minutes. Or dole out more of his minutes to raw 22-year-old athletic marvel Jonathan Kuminga, who is either untutored or simply un-coachable. Who knows what he can become? Unless he’s traded.
The Warriors had replaced Klay in bunches, using a twelve-man rotation. Green had slimmed down. He looked rejuvenated and toned, in his spanking new iteration. Thompson had 3 threes (2 on consecutive possessions) and 11 points in building Dallas a second quarter lead. The crowd swayed to and frow, buffeted by one or another splash brother, and it became a game of runs, spurts, Klayspurts, StefSpurts, often reaching playoff-like intensity. A majestic Curry three made it 118-114, providing the needed separation. Qualifying as a “barnburner,” it ended 120-117 with Curry tallying the last twelve Warrior points (37 total; ironically, the same number that Klay once scored in a single quarter), almost exactly reprising his Olympic Finals heroics. With Stef, the poetry writes itself; just bag your hyperbole and come for the ride. His brother was back, but Stef seemed to relish being an only child.
Dallas, with its star duo of Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving, provides an interesting fit for Thompson, who shot 6-12 on threes. No shock: there has always been an aura around Klay, from the time I saw him come off the bench against Cal as a University of Washington freshman, heralded as the son of Laker power forward Mychal Thompson, a very good NBA player by virtue of size and athletic ability, but without particular shooting skills to pass down to his son.
But rapid-fire, Klay went from probable NBA player to solid starter, to all-star, to part of a spectacular charismatic duo known as the Splash Brothers, a term of bro-chummy endearment to the gentrified Warrior fan base. They were, by consensus, the game’s all-time greatest shooting backcourt, winning four titles, which would have been five, had Draymond not thrown away their 3-1 lead, asserting his manhood by going after Lebron’s nuts.
Before their arrival, the franchise had seen rockier times. Their 1975 championship under Coach Al Attles, with incandescent prodigal star Rick Barry having returned to spearhead a 4-0 sweep of the Washington Bullets, had seemed like an anomaly to fans on the East Coast.
Over the years since arriving here in 1985 (the same year as Chris Mullin), I had put in my time rooting for the Warriors, who had transitioned from Attles to the brilliant but championship-deprived Don Nelson (8), and were flailing to recapture Barry-era significance. Nelson’s teams were always fun: able to make a playoff run, but needing an upgrade at center from Joe Barry Carroll (9) to go much further. They tried but failed, when they picked up Ralph Sampson for Carroll–in a trade that a friend (10) characterized as a “a conundrum for an enigma.” Each was headed on his own downward trajectory.
I had staunchly defended the Warriors’ early embrace of small ball, when Nelson had Mullin running wild (almost like today’s teams) with perfectly suited comrades Mitch Richmond and Tim Hardaway to forge a dynamic offense that was always one standout BIG away from title contention, but they forever lost my love by trading Richmond for 6’9” rookie Billy Owens, who never became the stud that scouts imagined. For the additional four inches that Owens had over Richmond, Nelson had dealt away the long-suit of the Warrior franchise–its soul (11)–to get four inches bigger. The Bad Karma resulting from this trade soon dictated Chris Webber’s antagonism toward Nelson, which was later echoed–with amplification–in Latrell Sprewell’s attempted choking of wildly unpopular Coach P.J. Carlesimo (12). Sprewell had developed so rapidly under Nelson that he, with his outlaw persona, was Charles Barkley’s choice for the league’s best player the year Jordan spent playing minor league baseball.
Nelson returned for one fabulous cameo, with Baron Davis spearheading an historic eighth seed upset of top seed upset of top-seeded Dallas in the 2007 playoffs’ first round. Then more darkness, until Silicon Valley management took control, and made what in retrospect were sage draft choices, aided in their sagacity by Draymond Green’s unanticipated availability in the second round. I prided myself in being an early responder to Green’s then-subtle suggestions of greatness: I found him cunningly brilliant, and became his biggest fan, to the point of championing him as his team’s most valuable player and the diesel engine in the Curry locomotive.
Sir Draymond, however, lost me as a fan–for himself and for his team–when he threw away–with one swipe at Lebron’s nuts–what would have been a second straight championship–and the missing piece in what would have been a four-repeat! Perhaps this was too close to the sun for Icarus Green to be traveling.
IV. The Big Day
With all these balls in the air, Christmas was finally upon us, and the NBA was getting ready to showcase its five select games, even as they had undercut their appeal with the teaser of the faux- tournament they had concocted to get us to pay attention sooner.
The day’s fare began in the (new) Garden, with the Knicks hosting San Antonio’s Spurs, with Coach Greg Popovich still recovering from a stroke, and Bernard King in the stands, emanating the vibe of a working class Duke Ellington. The still-lowly Spurs were on the day’s menu because of their slender and remarkably skilled 7’5” 21-year-old Frenchman, Victor Wembenyama, whose arrival was awaited in ways precedented only by Wilt Chamberlain, Lew Alcindor (who became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), and LeBron James (13).
Wemby racked up 42, breaking a variety of records for rookies; he was on pace for way more, but seemed to run out of gas, as might be expected with his youth and slender frame. People seem to agree that it’s only a matter of time before he takes over the league, but Mikal Bridges nearly matched him with 41, as the Villanova Knicks came through for the Christmas home crowd, even absent those clouds of overhanging smoke that used to grace the arena on 50th Street. Karl Anthony Towns looked powerful and skilled enough to rival 76er star Joel Embiid: two incredibly skilled 7’ giants as rivals at the center position in the Eastern Conference.
Later on, a slimmed down version of recently-returned Embiid helped Tyrone Maxey and the 76ers hold off the defending champion Celtics, whose arrogantly indiscriminate barrage of threes could not bring them back from the deep hole that same strategy had dug for them. The Boston Tsunamis had been stopped at the castle’s gates.
Embiid was back (for now, at least), but in the game in between, Dallas’s Doncic had limped to the sidelines. The league’s superstars seem ever more rapidly to succeed one another on the injury/disabled/load management list. But all that could be put aside for the coming next iteration of the Lebron and Stef retirement tour, which can be anticipated to fall somewhere between those (looking backward) of John Havlicek, and (gazing into the future) perhaps of Taylor Swift.
Nothing’s new; everything’s new: with Lebron turning forty and talking about retiring soon, we might ask: Is the game in good hands? For one thing, there is the apparently limitless potential of Wemby, who already plays The Garden like Oscar once did. His very being seems to validate the belief that a friend and I formulated about sixty years ago that the human race would require about a half century to catch up with Wilt.
The league seems to me to get better and worse in roughly alternating years, but the talent level is simply ridiculous. The game’s essence is about more than discrete individuals. It courts the cutting edge of great new talents that propel the imagination forward.
It is remarkable how Curry and James–together and apart–collide and collude on center stage at the most significant junctures: their level of combined performance in all-star games is only eclipsed by their collaboration in the Olympic Final, for which I give Lebron the same level of credit I gave Green for Curry’s MVP years.
If Lebron leaves us at 40, like Wilt did at 37, we will be much the poorer. When Magic Johnson retired, he agonized about whether he had left Michael Jordan on his own too soon. Wemby looks like he’s almost ready for the next chapter. He’s even got New York smarts. N’est ce pas?
NOTES
1 Most memorably, the NYU locker room, at age eleven, listening to legendary coach and 1920 Olympic shot-putter Howard Cann, while being teased by burly 6’4”forward Mark “Tank” Solomon.
2 Since my childhood home (a rent-controlled 1800 square feet apartment in the upper West Side’s stately Apthorp, where my 25×18 rectangular room had once served as an indoor gridiron for two-on-two football played by twelve-year-old boys) was no longer available, my home base was a hotel room in Harlem, two blocks from The Apollo Theatre.
For just which quid could this be my quo? The Apthorp is a palatial twelve-story, four entry-way century old stone fortress with gargoyles, doormen, and a drive-through courtyard! Ah, rent control. But my visit could not without consequence be easily postponed: I was becoming aware that I was feeling afraid to visit, and needed to nip a phobia in the bud. Always cherishing a cheap identification with Freud, I kept conjuring up his long-standing fear (which he finally overcame) of going to Rome, though that had far different dynamics from my reticence to pay $350 a night for a 12×18 room in Harlem. Hotels–in Harlem or not–were heretofore not a part of my life, save for an occasional convention.
3 The 1956 series was the one in which Don Larsen pitched a perfect Game Five. I listened while walking–solitaire–around my private high school’s quarter mile track. It was a weekday afternoon.
Who else among my private school classmates even knew the game was being broadcast? Shout out to my high school classmate, the founder of Kenyon College’s American Studies program: Peter Rutkoff!!!
4 Used to be, I resented having to specify the gender when referring to the NCAA tournament. Baseball doesn’t have that problem. The women play softball and pitch underhanded. They don’t play tackle football. In basketball, they use a smaller ball. Watching from the stands or on TV, that’s easy–and convenient–to ignore or forget. But it’s not such a small difference. This one, you can try safely at home.
5 In the early 2000’s, when my son was playing high school ball and facing the college recruitment mill, I happened upon Reclaiming the Game, a treatise on the retrograde educational effects of college basketball recruiting, by William Bowen and Sarah Levin, which became the subject of a memoir, as well as my bridge to coaching in high school for nine years. Since that time, college ball has morphed into even more of what it had been becoming for decades. And everyone knows!
6 The NIT, in its declining hegemonic years, featured previously unknown Walt Frazier at Southern Illinois, using the tourney to first stake claim to New York’s hearts and souls. The other quintessential New Yorker to own and hype the NIT was Al McGuire, who eventually got his NCAA championship in 1976, after waiting out John Wooden’s departure from the coaching ranks, with ten titles in twelve. As long as UCLA was hegemonic, Al preferred the NIT. Because of him, they took away the option. Imagine McGuire in the NIL era.
7 During Curry’s MVP years, I did not think of him as anywhere near strong enough to be called a superstar. Ironically, I see him as having become–in the past 3 years–the player others always thought he was. (Look at pictures of him then and now.)
As a coach, that is. He had plenty as a player in Boston under Red Auerbach. Additionally, he is credited with having helped Mullin weather the alcoholism into which the stress of transitioning West from New York had initially plunged him.
9 Acquiring the draft rights to Carroll had cost them both Robert Parrish and Kevin McHale, in a single trade! With Red Auerbach, of course.
10 Does it matter that this was a guy who suicided about a year later, in an era in which the Golden Gate Bridge had no better guardrails against suicide than the USA has against Maga Thugs?
11 Liss, R. “Billy O: Just Say No.” WELCOMAT, 1991.
https://www.si.com/fannation/backinthedaynba/nba-great-mitch-richmond-says-trade-from-golden-state-to-sacramento-was-devastating-01j484aq69rh#:~:text=The%20Warriors%20received%20first%2Dround,a%20fan%20of%20the%20move.
12 Someone joked: “Why did Sprewell choke Carlesimo?” Answer: “He was faster than any of the other Warrior guards.”
13 James’ predecessor, Oscar Robertson was only known locally until he reached college, and could not join the NBA until he was 22; ironically, it was Robertson who opened the door for all the early turns toward professional leagues, instead of college. Spencer Haywood deserves inclusion here as well.