A Website of the Radical Imagination
Bob Liss I. Coping. Trying. San Francisco
Designed to accommodate living across the country from the New York teams I’ve once again come to love, my aspirational strategy of using sports to insulate myself wasn’t entirely working: I found pockets of untarnished beauty, but not anywhere near a Trump-free zone.
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.
“Nothing can come of nothing.” –King Lear
I wrote plenty about Bill Walton when he was alive (alive as you and me) but, damn, even more so. I don’t want to let him go. Ever!
In our country’s battle to preserve what soul it had, there was no greater weapon and stronger voice than that of antic Bill Walton. He rarely dribbled, and never shut up. He truly mattered.
I. What Do I Know?
Just prior to college basketball’s conference tournament week (which I relish more than the giant carnival it relentlessly feeds, as rivers do the sea), I glanced briefly at an NBA game — just to check on the night’s outcomes — and caught a furtive glimpse at Lebron James going up for a jump shot. I noticed, with surprise, that James had drifted — egregiously — to his left.
“Uh oh,” I muttered to myself, watching the shot miss badly, reminiscent of the fate of many of The King’s early career jumpers, before he somehow corrected his awful habit of not going straight up, at long last making himself into a good shooter, not just a great scorer and everything else.
I took comfort in feeling that my ability to size up and divine what is happening, and what was about to happen — my cherished (if apocryphal) wisdom — remained intact; because, like many who count themselves fans of our beautiful game, I knew next to nothing about men’s college ball this year, outside the Big East: well, St. John’s and some of their conference rivals.
I dreamed I saw Johnnie Green (the NBA veteran who started out with the Knicks, and died last week) last night, alive as you or me.
Dreamer: Man, could you leap! Miss the bus to Heaven, you can get there on your own. Like Gus Johnson told Sports Illustrated about his storied leaping ability: “I just say ‘legs, jump,’ and they say ‘How high, Boss?’” I first saw you play against Walter Bellamy in 1957 when you were a senior at Michigan State, and Big Bells was just a soph at Indiana.
The NBA playoffs are always an overly long slog, not just a Manichean struggle.
Only a handful of players truly changed the game; among that select few, one revolutionized it.
Back in the day, the New Yorker was set to run the following letter in praise of an article on women’s basketball, but it got squeezed out. Still seems on point so…
As much as I like to fancy myself an expert in all things basketball — among the sport’s cognoscenti — there are lacunae, areas of ignorance my son made me aware of as he morphed from being my (forgive me) beautifully instructed phenom into a college player, and I receded into the ranks of high school assistant coaches.
“BIG JOHN… BIG BAD JOHN” – Song lyric from my adolescence (that has escaped Google’s dragnet).
Former Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson’s autobiographical account of his life and times I Came As A Shadow, written along with Jesse Washington, and completed just before Thompson’s death in 2020 at the age of 78 (2020), is a passionate, but sober paean to his parents’ teachings and love.
Klay Day.
1. Fallen Stars
Just as far right politicians, in France and the United States, indulge in theories that warn of the danger of being “replaced” by a population intent on taking not only their rightful place, but destroying them (annihilating their very being), the basketball world is experiencing an analogous phenomenon. And why not? Those “Basketball Is Life” t-shirts had it at least partially right: let’s settle for “Basketball Mirrors Life.” One can always find a parallel phenomenon.