The Book of Basketball (91 page)

38.
Chicago made the same mistake with MJ until Phil Jackson took over and rectified the issue. By the way, I just edited out a
Boogie Nights
reference. We were at capacity.

39.
In case you were worried about my objectivity relating to LeBron, during this same season, I criticized him for losing his passing chops and wrote, “The erosion of LeBron’s passing skills is the biggest tragedy of the past few years other than Lindsay Lohan losing her boobs.”

40.
The Cleveland fans took great pleasure in rubbing this section in my face a few months later. After the All-Star Game, he ripped off 33 PPG over his next 10 games and everything was fine. I’d like to think my biting comments were partially responsible—I mean, that column
did
lead ESPN.com. What, you don’t think LeBron has the internet and email? You don’t think he had time to plow through a 6,600-word feature? Just humor me.

41.
This section is about Game 5 of the 2007 Pistons-Cavs series in Detroit (aka the “48 Special”), when LeBron made LeLeap and propelled Cleveland into the Finals one game later.

42.
Possible explanations for Flip Saunders not sending a second guy at LeBron: (a) his blood sugar was dangerously low; (b) he had money on Cleveland; (c) he suffered a head injury en route to the stadium; (d) LeBron was so incredible that Flip actually went into shock; (e) he’s the real-life Forrest Gump. I vote for D or E.

43.
The most underrated sports movie scene now that every NBA JumboTron has beaten Pacino’s
Any Given Sunday
speech into the ground.
It’s not about the six minutes, kid. It’s what happens in the six minutes.

44.
I still believe that sentence to be true. I watched that game with my two-year-old daughter, who was lying next to me reading books and asking every two minutes or so, “What happened?” because I was making noises like, “Holy shit!” and “No!!!!!!!!!!!”

45.
Jason “Big Sexy” Whitlock later convinced me to name it the “48 Special.” I like that. Sounds like a ’70s rock band.

46.
That was Paul
Hirschheimer
, longtime NBA Entertainment honcho and diehard Knicks fan, as well as someone who took a sincere interest in this book, hooked me up with countless game tapes and demanded that Bernard crack the top sixty as his only payment. Done and done. Although Bernard would have made it anyway (I love ’Nard) and Grumpy Old Editor points out that he would have “destroyed the manuscript” if I didn’t. So there’s that, too.

47.
When I was working on this book (April ’09), LeBron looked so great that I left this footnote open and wrote, “UPDATE AFTER CAVS WIN TITLE.” Whoops.

48.
On second thought, Barkley and Salt Lake would have been like Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love: just a deadly, horrifying match in every respect.

49.
The NBA should throw a charity dinner where every NBA star has to show up wearing the same outfit that they wore on draft day. They could make tickets ten grand and I’d be willing to pay twenty just to be in the room. “Hakeem, I love your 1984 prom tuxedo! Looks terrific!”

50.
In ’86, Chuck and Moses finished 2nd and 3rd in offensive rebounds. After getting split up, Chuck finished 1st and Moses 4th in ’87; they finished 1–2 in ’88 and ’89; then Moses 1st and Barkley 2nd in ’90. Why did Philly break up a historic rebounding combo? Because an abnormal number of NBA executives are fucking idiots! I keep telling you.

51.
Malone and Stockton ranked right behind Laimbeer and Mahorn and just ahead of Ainge on the Top Five Dirtiest Guys of the MJ Era list. It’s true. I know there’s an eight-year-old Mormon kid crying right now and screaming, “Noooo! Noooooooo!” But it’s true. Scratch Salt Lake City off the book-signing tour.

52.
For example: “Karl Malone don’t like no HIV. Karl Malone don’t want to worry about no blood hitting Karl Malone in the eye.”

53.
Would KG have won 49 games and a division title playing with Johnny Dawkins, Hersey Hawkins, Ron Anderson, a fairly washed-up Mike Gminski and a just-about-washed-up Rick Mahorn in an extremely competitive season? No way.

54.
The definitive Barkley stat: in 44 playoff games from ’93 to ’95, he hoisted up 124 threes and made just 33 (27 percent). That’s an embarrassment. I would have fined him ten grand per three.

55.
There’s a famous story about Barkley hitting Manhattan the night before a Sunday afternoon game at MSG, subsequently stinking out the joint, then Danny Ainge waving his ring afterward and screaming, “That’s why you’ll never have one of these!” Only when Barkley’s personal life began to fall apart recently (a $400,00 debt to a Vegas casino plus a DUI arrest) did the media start mentioning Barkley’s drinking. Everyone loved him too much. Including me. I spent two days with him for a 2002 column and buried three phenomenal Barkley stories. I just liked the guy.

56.
Biggest help: spending the summer playing on the Dream Team and getting pushed by MJ. This also drove LeBron to new heights—working out with Kobe and Wade during the ’08 Olympics and getting those “Shit, I still need to get better” juices flowing. Like the effect Stephon Marbury had on Carmelo Anthony in Athens, only the exact opposite.

57.
This should have given Chuck the winnability edge over Malone, but his penchant for carousing and keeping teammates out for all hours made it a draw. MJ would have loved playing with Barkley, but he would have been more productive with Malone.

58.
Are we sure Malone wasn’t a giant a-hole? What about when Kobe accused him of hitting on his wife? Actually, that made me like the Mailman more. Go Karl! I never thought Karl allegedly telling Mrs. Kobe that he was “hunting little Mexican girls” got its just comedic due.

59.
Grumpy Old Editor refused to make the leap: “Ranking Pettit this high is a joke. He’d be like every oversized white guy with post moves and cement feet who gets trampled in his first pro season. Think Kent Benson or Big Country Reeves.” Yeah, but still.

60.
If not for Hack-a-Shaq, Pettit would have averaged more FTs per game than anyone with 50-plus career playoff games (10.4). That’s reason no. 345 to hate Hack-a-Shaq.

61.
Did you know that the ’58 Hawks were the last all-white team to win a title? I’m going out on a limb and predicting that’s holding true 100, 200, and 500 years from now.

62.
If you were a seventies magazine editor and
didn’t
use a “What’s up, Doc?”–type headline for Doc, you lost your job. I’m almost positive. Here’s Doc’s former ABA coach Al Bianchi (from the same story): “Julie used to take off and really soar. And that’s the sad part of seeing him now. The Doc can’t fly no more.” An unnamed NBA coach added, “I don’t know if it’s the big contract, plain disgust, concern about his longevity or just that he’s burnt out and can’t do it nightly anymore, but Dr. J is not the player we once knew. The electricity isn’t there. The truth is that—except for a few playoff games in ’77 and the all-star games—the guy has been on vacation for three years. Somebody else has been masquerading as no. 6. On a consistent basis Julius has played to about 40 percent, tops, of the ability he showed in the ABA.”

63.
I’m dubious of Doc’s ABA stats. This was already a league where nobody played D, only ABA opponents were about as physical with Doc as President Obama’s cronies are with the prez during a White House basketball game. Could that help explain why he never found quite the same success in the NBA? I think so.

64.
Poor Doc played for one of the most selfish/overpaid teams ever assembled (the postmerger 76ers), shared the ball with me-first guys like McGinnis and Free and never played with a table-setter until Mo Cheeks in 1980. Doc was too nice to fight for shots. If he had a drawback, it was a legendary weakness for the ladies—he even knocked up a beat writer who covered Philly in the late seventies (fathering future tennis player Alexandra Stevenson with her). When they said Doc was the greatest interview in the league, they weren’t kidding.

65.
In Doc’s first 14 seasons, he played 1,277 of a possible 1,349 games (including
seven
seasons of 95 games or more) without suffering a major injury. That’s an average of 91.2 games per year! Considering his style of play—acrobatic, up-and-down, above the rim—that’s incredible, no? Or do we credit the Obama treatment for at least some of that durability? Much like no pitcher wanted to be the dick who broke Cal Ripken’s hand and ended his streak, nobody wanted to be the dick who broke Doc’s leg with a hard foul. Let’s agree that he was superdurable and superrespected.

66.
Undeniable symbolism given Kobe’s love for MJ: an actor with the initials M.J. played the Wolf (the character who represented Kobe’s struggles the most). Also, my friend Christian once argued that Fox picked number 42 as an homage to Jackie Robinson because he was the first werewolf to play organized, competitive basketball. Lots to think about with
Teen Wolf.

67.
His enduring advice: “There are three rules that I live by: never get less than twelve hours sleep; never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city; and never get involved with a woman with a tattoo of a dagger on her body. Now you stick to that, and everything else is cream cheese.” This was also good: “It doesn’t matter how you play the game, it’s whether you win or lose. And even that doesn’t make all that much difference.”

68.
From what we saw, Fox notched 14 points (5-for-6 FG, 4-for-4 FT), 6 assists, and 2 steals. Number 45 (young Bill Russell) chipped in with 10 points and 3 blocks. Fat Boy had 5 and number 33 had 6. We saw 35 of the 47 points after Fox’s return; I projected his stats for the 12 we missed and ignored looped footage (no sports movie had worse editing).

69.
My unofficial count from columns includes Tony Montana, Sonny Corleone, Michael Corleone, Fox/Wolf, Hollywood Hulk Hogan, Crockett/Tubbs (along with Shaq), Eddie Murphy, A-Rod, a porn actress named Houston, and my personal favorite, Marlo Stanfield.
“My name is my name!”
Couldn’t you see Kobe screaming that?

70.
Looking back, it’s too bad Kobe didn’t have a heel turn (to borrow a wrestling term) right after the ’02 Finals. During the champagne celebration in the locker room, Kobe could have done an interview where he hugged Shaq, waited for Shaq to start walking away, slammed a steel chair against his head, ripped off his Lakers jersey to reveal a “Kobe No. 1” jersey, then kicked Shaq’s unconscious body repeatedly as Stuart Scott screamed, “Nooooooooooo! Nooooooo! My God, no!” like the WWE’s Jim Ross. Instead, he went the other way and tried like hell to be a babyface (wrestling lingo for a good guy). I’m still disappointed.

71.
When Colorado police interrogated Kobe about sexual assault, Kobe inexplicably mentioned that Shaq dealt with stuff like this (apparently meaning a hookup gone wrong) all the time. FYI: This is why Shaq hated Kobe! Also, there’s a legendary tale—probably apocryphal—about David Stern’s team having an emergency meeting to discuss Kobe’s charges, with someone theorizing that Kobe’s mistake was not realizing this innocent Colorado girl wasn’t as experienced as NBA groupies, so when he tried for “the trinity,” it didn’t go over too well. A confused Stern apparently asked someone to explain the trinity. There was an awkward silence, followed by someone hesitantly explaining a popular sexual act in NBA circles that I am afraid to even print. Apparently the look on Stern’s face was beyond priceless and hasn’t been approached before or since. Also, House and I had a coin flip to see who got to use “The Trinity” for their next fantasy team name. House won.

72.
Artest earned 2005 LVP for obvious reasons. Artest is to the LVP trophy what Jerry West is to the NBA logo.

73.
It’s always riveting to watch a basketball player score copious amounts of points, even if he’s freezing out his teammates in the process. At halftime of a late nineties Celts game, they had a Special Olympics contest and one kid seemed a little too, um, competent to be playing in it. Not only did he drop like 20 points in four minutes, I’m convinced to this day that he was the impetus for
The Ringer.
In fact, this kid was so good that everyone in my section feared Rick Pitino would sign him to a $30 million contract. But guess what? Even though it didn’t seem quite fair that the kid was playing, it was still a moment. Everyone was riveted. Everyone was cheering. Of course, I was drunk at the time, so this might not have happened the way I remember it. The important thing is that
I
believe it happened.