Bob Liss gives love for love in this review of Earl Monroe’s history of basketball…
1. Love Is All You Need
October 8: still the off-season; hadn’t been using my television much; barely knew how my smart one works; preoccupied; preparing to read from my still uncatalogued basketball pieces at a Berkeley café the day before Thelonious Monk’s 96th birthday.
Intoxicated with the breadth of topics to select from in order to fill–but not exceed–my thirty on-stage minutes, I began to harbor an old fantasy of writing a definitive history of the game [1]. Enter Monk’s basketball incarnation, Earl Monroe.
Not only had I been unaware of the debut of ESPN’s duly heralded “Basketball: A Love Story,” a twenty-hour long collection of fragments, aired in four hour installments over five weeks, but also that the NBA regular season was about to begin, two or three weeks earlier than was the accustomed date, ostensibly to reduce injuries by expunging back to back games from its schedule [2].
So I arrived at the table late, but when I got down to watching ESPN’s marathon paean, co-produced by basketball’s original Black Jesus, I had the eerie feeling that Earl had just eaten my lunch: after laboriously pouring over enough statistics to buttress my impressions against the dominant opinion of the new scientific method promulgated by Generation Analytics, I saw it all spin left- away from my prospective pen- under the loving and painstakingly researched co-direction of Earl The Pearl.
Earl had already proven his off-court media mettle several years ago with a ground-breaking four hours on the legacy of basketball’s black colleges. This was even more ambitious, but, after all, the unseen hand was Earl’s, the man who, with only Elgin Baylor to precede him, accomplished the introduction of jazz rhythms, as Oscar had with the soaring flights of classical music, to a game previously played largely on the ground [3].
Intending to illuminate the game’s greatest moments, players, and historical markers, Earl and Company get it so right that during the first twelve of the twenty hours, my only impulse to correct was in response to the notion that the early Celtics were a weak rebounding team before acquiring Bill Russell, despite having Tommy Heinsohn, falsely implying that Heinsohn had played at least one full season with Boston before Russell’s arrival.
In fact, with Heinsohn at center (backed up by Rochester Royal refugee Arnie Risen), the Celtics were at long last leading the Eastern Division when Russell joined them after the 1956 Olympics. Heinsohn, having had an early start, deservedly won Rookie of the Year honors. Russell would receive his due share of accolades later. C’mon, now: this hardly qualifies as a major peeve!
The show has a shockingly high percentage of hits on the obvious mega-subjects: Dr. Naismith; the formation of the Big East; the Boston-L.A. rivalry; John Wooden’s UCLA dynasty; Elgin, Wilt, and Oscar; the genius factor in great players; the essential similarity between Earvin Johnson and LeBron James (leaving Jordan out here). How simple! And there is plenty of Oscar Robertson, in multiple contexts, without making him into the curmudgeon that many people falsely conjure.
They even get right the outsize significance and centrality of Spencer Haywood, who, as an unknown 19 year old Junior College phenom, saved the 1968 USA Olympic team, after the seemingly devastating loss of Lew Alcindor, Wes Unseld, and Elvin Hayes, the trio of great young big men who chose to join the black boycott, in solidarity with Harry Edwards, John Carlos, and Tommie Smith.
After one more year of college, Haywood jumped to the ABA, which did not prohibit players from turning pro before completing college. In his first and only ABA season, at 21, Haywood led the Denver Rockets to the ABA’s Western Division title, while leading the league in scoring and rebounding. He was selected as the ABA’s Rookie of the Year, MVP, and all-star game MVP.
Still restless, Haywood initiated a successful anti-trust lawsuit that brought him from the ABA to four all-star years in Seattle [4], and then became the first major sport superstar ever to be sold outright to a rival franchise, the desperate Knicks, who were reeling from their fall from championship status and emptying the vault [5] for incompatible fading superstars, Haywood and later Bob McAdoo.
In late career, Haywood became a drug-addled journeyman, a laughing stock belying his incredible career, and a prime casualty of the cocaine epidemic that threatened the league’s future before it was saved by Larry Bird and Earvin Johnson, and marketed to the world by David Stern and Michael Jordan. Haywood played two seasons in Italy, but returned to the NBA and picked up championship rings with the Lakers. Christ or anti-Christ?
Speaking of Christ, as well as “Black Jesus” Monroe, perhaps the greatest unexpected yield from this marvelous production was a thoroughly positive take on Stern, whose avuncular yet czar-like persona I have not at all missed, instead enjoying Adam Silver’s more accessible user-friendly presence as Commissioner.
“Love Story” makes abundantly clear the extent to which Stern’s ambitiously broad vision played an outsize role in making the game what is, not just commercially, but culturally, spreading the game’s essential popularity to women’s basketball and the worldwide stage. In this context, it was a revelation to learn about how legendary coach John McClendon, one of basketball’s early black pioneers, brought the game overseas by sponsoring clinics.
What a ride it’s been over the seven decade life of the NBA: from two bit dance hall league to extraordinary professional organization, promoting a seemingly endless developmental spurt, constantly raising the bar in a majestic parade of the world’s greatest athletes, the DNA of the NBA.
But what’s love got to do with it? Just leave that to Bill Walton. “Love Story”’s marketing reflects Stern’s vision, pithily described as the marriage of sport and entertainment, all the while expanding the big tent to encompass both the women’s and the international game, leading Walton to pronounce–in full hyperbolic mode–that Stern is the greatest man in the history of basketball.
Thanks, Bill. With just a slight shift of focus, a case could be made for you as well: as if to embody that illicit sport-entertainment union, the episode entitled “Glasnost” documents how Walton (whose superior greatness as a player, both at UCLA and as a pro–until tragedy struck–the show beautifully captures) brought in the Grateful Dead to do a benefit concert to raise money for the Lithuanian team to compete in the 1992 Olympics, and even to serve as their formal sponsor.
Expertly marketed, this near-epic marathon production deploys a diverse group of players–mostly young, some women–to introduce its various “episodes.” It duly establishes the primacy of New York in the game’s history [6], including rare footage of Roger Brown, Connie Hawkins, and all-star/fixer Jack Molinas, the important links between greatness, corruption, the point-shaving scandals injustice [7], and playground ball. It painstakingly documents the tragedy of Maurice Stokes, the game’s least known seminal player.
It revisits all aspects of the Hank Gathers hero tale turned catastrophe, and does not shy away from the conspiracy theory surrounding the Knicks’s selection of Patrick Ewing in the initial NBA draft lottery of 1985, the violence and subsequent suspension of Latrell Sprewell, or even Vlade Divac’s Flop Clinic. It makes judicious use of Stephen A. Smith- not an easily accomplished task- letting him spew his personalized brand of bombast on the intersection of race and hypocrisy, which is where he lives.
It also smartly documents the significance of Rick Pitino’s pioneering exploitation of the newly introduced three-point shot in taking Billy Donovan’s 1987 seemingly overmatched Providence Friars to the NCAA Final Four. Not only Donovan but also Jeff Van Gundy are part of the House of Pitino, whose greatness and significance have been tarnished by subsequent recruiting and sexual peccadillos. But like Larry Brown’s, Pitino’s coaching brilliance should not be obscured. I cannot say the same for the violent tantrums of Bobby Knight [8].
Finally, there was Oscar, appearing sporadically, but fittingly anchoring Earl’s production. In his autobiography, Oscar mentions that his paternal grandfather–born a slave–was reputed to have been over 7 feet tall, and to have lived to 116. The one person I recall discussing this with opined that he wasn’t being literal/factual. I find that as hard to fathom as the asserted numbers: Oscar’s reverential and reverie-like tone seems to reflect his retained capacity to revisit the world of his childhood. It was Oscar’s dazzlingly large and bright eyes that most struck me when I saw him warming up in college [9].
The show’s final episode celebrates today’s Warriors, rightly seeing them as the latest development of the game, though some might still argue that rule changes have so radically altered the skill sets required for greatness as to render meaningless our endless our unquenchable thirst for algorithmic comparisons of teams or players from different eras. Would we really prefer to have Steph Curry than Maurice Lucas? Has it come to that?
2. Tomorrow’s Game Today
With the pool of potential superstars, each marketing a nearly unique brand [10], swelling rapidly (“unicorns” Joel Embiid and Anthony Davis cannot be summarily excluded from future GOAT arguments), the desperate scramble for new team configurations [11] underscores how successful the Warriors have been.
Their brand of crisp team basketball is precedented by few teams ever. Prime among them are the 1970 and 1973 Knicks, and Bill Walton’s 1977 Trail Blazers; but also the overlooked 2014 San Antonio Spurs whose NBA Finals Clinic drove Lebron straight back to Cleveland. Did that really happen? Who was that masked man?
I don’t take too seriously the personality stuff, increasingly prevalent, as the kindergardenization of the NBA enters its fourth decade. Team-oriented, and with superior talent, Golden State should be able to turn it on as needed, but, along with recent antics, their swagger (among their Big Four only Klay Thompson remains pure) has turned into arrogance: preening, posing, and shimmying to the high decibel delight of their triumphalist fan base, they are losing their hold on real fans of the game.
Could these wealth-fueled posturings be seeds of destruction planted subtly, as the game’s boundless athleticism and twin emphasis on bombastic dunks and long bombs continues to evolve, and as rule changes encourage ever higher scoring totals?
3. Take The Money and Snort: Spencer Haywood Redux
As for this guy Durant, he is Spencer Haywood (whose long-standing scoring marks he surpassed in Seattle) in modern dress, with technology and being loved as his cocaine.
In the heat of the NBA’s ascent into full celebrity mode, who remembers the precious childlike innocence that Durant projected in his early pro career? Drafted second in 2007, behind 7’ Greg Oden, KD, as he is now known in the Bay Area, became in instant hero in Oklahoma City, appreciatively embraced the region’s small market feel, and quickly signed a long term contract, while betraying not a trace of interest in swimming in a larger pond.
The 2011-12 season brought him face to face with LeBron James in a title match-up that was to be reprised several times in the next phase of his career, and, two years later, he was the first player to intrude upon Lebron James’s apparent monopolization of the regular season MVP award. In his final year with OKC, he combined so effectively with Russell Westbrook as to propel OKC to a 3-1 lead over the defending champion Warriors, until he- not Westbrook–reverted to playing hero ball and let the Warriors escape from their 3-1 deficit.
Though Durant’s betrayal of Westbrook has been discussed ad infinitum in terms of his leaving, the specific significance of Durant’s performance in the critical game Six (the last one at home, and up 3-2) has been underappreciated. But not by Russ!
Now, there is talk of wanderlust, selfishness. Durant can blend in anywhere at all (Who else blends unicorn talent so well with high level small player skills?), but why should he leave his plush situation, where he doesn’t have to carry a Lebron size load? He’ll always, like Haywood and Bob McAdoo before him, be welcome in L.A. when that time comes. Like Haywood before him, he has a million suitors. He gets to make nasty remarks about Lebron. In the Bay Area, that’s considered cute.
Those unicorns can shoot, handle, flat out ball. They’re what I want to watch, because their three point game may ultimately, and paradoxically, drive the small man out. Unless they enlarge the court [12], the Curry of a decade from now won’t be able to back up so easy without stepping out of bounds.
…. Unless they build that wall.
NOTES
1 Freud once remarked that every finding of an object was in reality a re-finding. Applied to my situation, this fantasy revisits my losing a host of early work in a house fire a quarter century ago.
2 An explanation more credible from the lips of Adam Silver than from David Stern’s.
3 Among the show’s intriguing commentators is music critic Nelson George, whose “Elevating The Game: Black Men and Basketball” brilliantly traces between the parallel evolutions of playground basketball style and black musical genres.
4 In five seasons with Seattle (the initial one abbreviated by the pending lawsuit), Haywood averaged 24.9 points and 12.1 rebounds. He was selected First Team All-NBA in 1972 and 1973, and Second Team in 1974 and 1975. His 29.2 point average in 1972–73 was not exceeded until Kevin Durant broke it, and his 13.4 rebound average remains a team record.
5 These were pre salary cap days, and the Sonics needed money as badly as the Knocks needed Haywood. Plus, Haywood’ s coach at Seattle was Bill Russell, a decidedly more disciplined player and man, who had soured on Haywood’s future prospects. Not surprisingly, Russell was shrewdly accurate. Only the Knicks would have failed to grasp the clue.
6 But why then does Earl, a transplanted Philadelphian, but Gotham’s own for many decades, give such short shrift to the great 76’er teams of 1967 and 1983?
7 It would have been apt, in this context, to mention Long Island University’s ill-fated Sherman White.
8 It has been pointed out that Knight receives more sympathy than Latrell Sprewell, for their respective brands of egregious behavior. Sprewell literally choked his coach, Pete Carlessimo. Knight threw chairs and regularly abused players.
9 “I’d rather watch Oscar warm up than most games. I wonder if anyone nowadays could hold my attention during warmups.”-Henry Resnick.
10 as if ready to take basketball to an inter-planetary level
11 What can the perspective of monopoly capitalism add here? It’s time to re-read Marx.
12 The only real way to save the little man, but anathema to those in high-paying seats!