Consider this: in Manning’s senior year at Tennessee, the Volunteers were an average SEC defense, allowing 22.7 points per game. Even in their biggest win, they slipped past Auburn in the SEC title game in a shootout, 30-29. The following year, with a much less talented quarterback (Tee Martin), Tennessee not only won the national championship but were in the discussion as the best defensive team in the country, allowing just 14.5 points per game. That team relied on defense as well as a multithreat running game. They were bruising and physical. How could a team be forced to outscore opponents one year and be the nation’s most physical team the next? The most dramatic change was Manning’s departure to the NFL, and a question needs to be asked: Did Phil Fulmer become so obsessed with Manning’s talent that he allowed it to alter the physical nature that Fulmer’s past and future teams possessed?
Consider this: despite having Tony Dungy, one of the NFL’s leading defensive minds, as a head coach for a decade, not one of the Colts’ defenses were ever considered physically elite. From Manning’s rookie year (1998) to the final year he played for the Colts (2010), Indianapolis had a defense ranked in the top ten in yards allowed just twice. In seven of Manning’s Indy years, the Colts’ defense resided in the bottom half of the NFL. It’s even harder to fathom when you consider then-Colts president Bill Polian is one of the league’s shrewdest talent evaluators. Did he have an eye for offensive talent only? How did a six-time league executive of the year not find a way to land more defensive studs?
Toughness and physicality are not built on Sundays. Instead, they’re created during the week, during practice. How can a team possibly develop a physical culture when week-to-week preparation is dominated by mastering Manning’s “Rain Man” aerial wizardry?
Similarly, how can you create a movie around Robin Williams without allowing him to ad lib? Isn’t the organic evolution of his comedic Zen the reason you cast him in the first place?
Transcendent talent comes with baggage. Give, take. Push, pull. You make concessions when you cast Peyton Manning as your quarterback. He’s going to eat a lot of scenery.
Of the top ten quarterbacks of the past forty years, none but Manning was saddled with perennially mediocre defenses. Marino wasn’t. Aikman wasn’t. Elway wasn’t. Brady wasn’t. Bradshaw wasn’t. Montana wasn’t. Manning was—with one of the best defensive minds as a head coach and an equally respected general manager. Was he just the unluckiest great quarterback ever?
Does Peyton bear some responsibility? When your personality and talent is so all-consuming, there has to be some linkage, right?
Bill Polian came on my radio show in 2012, and I cornered him with my theory. I asked him whether Manning’s talent, maybe superior to any quarterback in history, actually worked to the detriment of his team’s defenses.
He smiled at me and said, “Right church, wrong pew.”
Translation: You’re close, but not quite, kid.
Once the Colts landed Manning, Polian told me, they knew they had to build the team a certain way. Manning would not only lead the team to many, many wins, but over the course of those games his team would have some serious leads. Logical, right? The Colts would routinely be ahead in games, and that meant opposing teams would be forced to throw the ball to catch up.
As a result, Polian had a specific emphasis: pass rushers, and linebackers who could run and cover tight ends or backs in the flat.
In essence, Manning’s presence requires his teams to be built a certain way. The defense can’t be overly reliant on stopping the run, and the offense can’t be overly reliant on running the ball.
In the NFL, you can’t be all things to all people. You have to constantly juggle a tight salary cap and a limited roster that is under the constant strain of nonstop injuries. Polian had to make choices. With Manning calling the shots, the choices were simple: pass—and stop the pass—first.
These are the same kinds of choices studios, directors, and writers have to make. Who works well with a particular movie star? How do the bit players make the star better without getting in his way? How much leeway will the megatalent have to ad lib and improvise?
Fans—and probably a vast majority of the media—have been conditioned to believe that unique, transcendent talent is a magic elixir. But talent also creates ancillary problems that ancillary people—studio heads, directors, coaches, general managers—have to solve in order to accommodate the talent.
When XM/Sirius radio was created, it snagged radio superstar Howard Stern. It was a decision that created a trickle-down effect. Now that we’ve got Howard, should we build our entire brand around him? The danger is obvious: if the superstar leaves, the identity walks out the door with him. It’s a thin and perilous line, one walked by corporations and teams alike.
In the NFL, rosters are smaller than they are in college. Offensive and defensive players are forced to practice together. Isn’t it reasonable to assume that a quarterback as gifted as Manning—running an offense predicated almost entirely on those gifts—would be given uncommon freedom to improvise? Wouldn’t some level of control have to be surrendered to allow uncommon talent to flourish? You would be wasting him otherwise, in much the same way you’d be wasting Robin Williams by forcing him to adhere to someone else’s script.
It’s the paradox of greatness, and it creates the greatest compliment and the rarest criticism:
Dear Peyton and Robin,
Sometimes you were just too talented for your own good.
Love,
Colin
Pace Yourself
There’s no question racism exists in sports. We can talk around it and write around it. We can call it something else and pretend it doesn’t exist. Or, we can take a different approach: call it exactly what it is and deal with it.
The NBA occupies a unique place in the American sports landscape. Its players don’t wear masks or caps or cover their arms with sleeves. Whether they’re playing or sitting on the bench, their proximity to the fans is far closer than any other sport.
This means the crowd—the mostly white, mostly corporate crowd—gets an up-close look at these large, muscular black athletes. They see their faces and their tats and their sweat. Up close. And I think it makes many in the mostly white, mostly corporate crowd uncomfortable.
Race has always been an undercurrent in the NBA, far more than in any other sport. David Stern instituted a dress code in 2005 and it immediately became a racial issue. If Bud Selig or Roger Goodell or the commissioner of the MLS instituted a dress code, race never would have been mentioned. In the NBA, when Stern decided his mostly corporate crowd might be turned off by ’do rags and sunglasses inside and at night, race was front and center.
The NFL is 67 percent African-American; the NBA, 77 percent. It might not seem like a huge difference, until you realize the vast majority of stars in the NBA are black while the biggest names in the NFL, for the most part, are quarterbacks. And quarterbacks are historically white.
But the most illuminating laboratory for the issue of race in the NBA takes us to Indianapolis, where a curious and ongoing experiment seems to be taking place: the Pacers can’t draw fans, despite having an elite team that plays in an elite arena in a city whose sleepiness is so well known it’s nicknamed Naptown.
It’s one of the great mysteries in sports. A team that took Miami to seven games in the Eastern Conference Finals playing the NBA’s best defense and leading the league in rebounding in the self-proclaimed sacred temple of hard-nosed basketball ranked twenty-fifth in attendance. They were outdrawn by the Timberwolves, Cavaliers, and Suns. Seriously, the Suns?
When the ownership group that successfully fought to keep the Kings in Sacramento were in the final stages of negotiations, it agreed to decline the NBA’s revenue-sharing money. Commonly known as the Ailing Team Fund, the revenue sharing is the NBA’s welfare fund, allowing small-money, small-market teams to benefit from the huge profits accumulated by their big-money, big-market brethren.
The decisi
on of the Kings’ owners was followed by a truly astounding revelation. An economist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the NBA, reported that just two teams in the league benefited from the Ailing Team Fund more than the Kings.
One of those teams was the Memphis Grizzlies.
The other was the Indiana Pacers.
On the surface, it seems outrageous. A perennial playoff team in a two-team pro market in the mythical capital of basketball can’t draw flies. In fact, just for fun I checked on Stubhub in the middle of the 2012–13 season for tickets to a Pacers home game against the Clippers. On the day of the game, I discovered I could buy a ticket to the game between two of the best teams in the league for $2.95. That’s less than the cost of most espresso drinks.
Here’s my take: the Pacers are still paying the price for the Malice in the Palace, an incident that took place in 2004 in Detroit. Not Indianapolis—Detroit. That night lingers in Indianapolis like a bad smell, even after nearly a decade and when the Pacers had a roster full of enigmatic players such as Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson.
It doesn’t matter that the current version of the Pacers bears no resemblance to that one. It doesn’t matter that the brawl happened nine years ago or that it was a Pistons home game. It doesn’t matter that Ron Artest is not only long gone but has a whole new name. Three of them, to be exact.
Let’s call this a case of residual racism. Not necessarily overt racism, but racism that drifted through the franchise like a virus in the arena’s circulation system. Many people swore off the NBA and the Pacers after the Malice in the Palace. We can see the lingering effects to this day, in the poor attendance and surprisingly bad business fortunes of one of the most entertaining, successful franchises in the NBA.
This metaphorical virus was contracted and spread by a very small number of black athletes. In the NBA, unlike any other professional American sport, the actions of a few speak loudly for all the players. They all get lumped together, no matter how unfair or downright stupid it might seem.
During roughly the same time span since the Malice at the Palace, the Indianapolis Colts had twenty-three arrests. Doesn’t matter—people still pay big money to fill Lucas Oil Stadium every time the Colts play. It didn’t hurt that their star of stars, Peyton Manning, was a white quarterback who looked like he could have lived down the block from a large majority of the season-ticket holders. The Colts, however, were in the upper echelon of NFL teams when it came to arrests during the 2000s. There’re no long-term repercussions, though. There aren’t even short-term repercussions—it’s the NFL, not the NBA. Fans don’t see the faces or the tats or sit close enough to feel the heat coming off their bodies. The NFL is detached, impersonal, a bunch of pads running into each other for entertainment and gambling purposes.
Here’s another stat: the NFL had twenty-seven arrests in twenty-three weeks—twenty-three weeks—in the off-season following the 2012–13 season. That’s more than an arrest a week. But it doesn’t stick to the NFL. They don’t lose advertisers, we don’t judge them, we don’t refuse to show up to local games. Nobody in Indianapolis seems to say, “I’m not going to watch the Colts this weekend because several published reports have linked Marvin Harrison to the 2008 murder of a man named Dwight Dixon in Philadelphia.” No, because what’s happening with the Pacers is almost unheard of in American sports. They’re winning in a boring two-team-market town and nobody is going to the games.
Outdrawn by the T-Wolves.
Outdrawn by the Suns.
The Suns?
Yes, the Suns.
Have you seen the Suns?
Permit me this tangent: a study of 3,500 NBA players showed that each one plays for 2.5 teams over the course of his career. Players who average more than thirty minutes per game during their careers—star or high-end players—play for an average of 2.99 teams. Even star players like Patrick Ewing and Karl Malone and Michael Jordan don’t end their careers in the same uniform they wore their rookie years. Everybody gets traded in the NBA, but it’s rarely on players’ terms.
With this routine changing of uniforms, why were so many people outraged by LeBron James leaving Cleveland? Was it because a black player—on his terms—chose his destination? The words of Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert were telling. He called it “cowardly betrayal,” “selfish,” a “shocking act of disloyalty,” a “heartless and callous action.” It reads like a vicious, crazed Zagat entry.
But before we crucify LeBron, can it be duly noted that in seven years in Cleveland they—meaning Gilbert—didn’t provide him with another all-star–caliber player? And can it be noted, for the record, that James was … you know … a free agent?
I believe part of the backlash against LeBron relates to the aftereffects from the Malice in the Palace. It’s the fear of the threatening black man. LeBron is big, he’s strong, he’s got tats, he scowls. I’m not saying that’s all of it, but that’s part of it. I’m not saying we love all white athletes. I’m not saying we dislike or fear all black athletes. But when you look at Dan Gilbert and you look at the Indiana Pacers and you look at the way we hold NBA players accountable for off-field indiscretions, the conclusion is indisputable: it’s a much, much harsher standard than you find anywhere else. If Charlie Sheen acts like a douche bag, it doesn’t speak for all Caucasians. When Josh Brent got a DUI and killed his friend, it didn’t speak for every NFL player. Hell, it didn’t even speak for every Dallas Cowboy. It simply doesn’t stick. But if Latrell Sprewell chokes a coach, or Ron Artest throws a punch, it seems to speak in some broad sense for all African-American NBA players.
(It’s interesting to note that Kevin Durant—marketed across the country as nonthreatening and friendly and likable, for good reason—has a ton of tats. The difference? He’s placed them strategically inside his uniform shell. They’re there, but you just don’t see them, therefore he’s palatable to the ticket-buying segment of corporate white America.)
I’ve been talking about sports professionally for more than twenty years, and the word thug on my Twitter account and e-mails—especially e-mails—gets used routinely to label NBA players. The occurrence of this one word in reference to NBA players far exceeds that of any other sport. It’s not even close. Former NBA star and current ESPN commentator Jalen Rose once told me that players always laugh at NBA fights. He told me, “Man, we don’t wear hats and we don’t wear helmets. Our face is our moneymaker. Nobody wants to take a punch in the NBA.” If you watch most NBA “fights,” you can see Rose’s words in action. Guys square off and wait for someone to pull them apart. And yet, somehow, no sport has more athletes called thug.
Can we be honest? It’s racial coding.
John Daly, with a private life that would singe Keith Richards’s eyebrows, is a good ol’ boy.
Allen Iverson? Thug.
And the Pacers are still paying the price for the actions of a few black athletes. With a winning team in one of the less energized cities in America—Naptown, remember—they simply can’t draw.
I present, as a counterpoint, the city of Portland, Oregon. The Blazers sell out, even though they play in a worse arena with a worse team. The Blazers sell out, even though Portland is the No. 1 cycling city in the country, is an exceptional culinary town, is located one hour from the beach, and is one of the few U.S. cities close to year-round mountain skiing. The Blazers sell out, even though a far higher portion of the Portland population is earthy and eccentric, two qualities that aren’t automatically associated with rabid sports fans. The Blazers sell out, even though the franchise went through the better part of a decade being called “The Jail Blazers” because of the criminal behavior of several of its players—behavior far worse than anything the Pacers did in Detroit.
I can hear you out there: Colin, it’s the economy. Really? Is that why Portland is in the top ten in NBA attendance and home television ratings? Is it the economy? As of December 2012, Indiana had 8 percent unemployment. Oregon? Eight percent unemployment. The economy argument do
esn’t hold water.
Maybe voting patterns provide a more incisive look. Portland is progressive, tolerant, tech-embracing. Indianapolis is the most conservative city in America with a population above 500,000. There has to be something, right? Because on the surface, it makes no sense. The Pacers, tops in the league in rebounding, defense, and effort, are the perfect team for Hoosierville. And yet …
There’s more empirical evidence, courtesy of the Harris poll. According to them, the NFL is much bigger than college football, the NHL is much bigger than college hockey, and MLB is much bigger than college baseball. But the difference between the NBA and college basketball? Slim. Considering the quality of play in college basketball has been gradually sliding for years, why is college basketball almost as popular as the NBA?
Part of it is simply this: the NBA is the league with black stars. It doesn’t do well in TV ratings in rural communities. It does well in ethnic communities: Atlanta, Houston, New York, Miami, Chicago, Dallas. Race plays a role. The evidence is undeniable.
Mike Lupica once wrote that the NBA is the only sport where the fans don’t really like the players. Buzz Bissinger, noted author of Friday Night Lights, created a minor shitstorm at the NBA All Star Weekend in Los Angeles in 2010 when he attributed the NBA’s lack of popularity to a dearth of American-born white stars.
Was Bissinger just stirring up trouble? Looking for attention? I’m not so sure. On my flight home from that All Star Weekend in Los Angeles, I sat next to the marketing director for an NBA franchise. I asked him about the team’s first-round pick in the previous year’s draft. He grimaced and shook his head. This man who is in charge of selling his team to its fan base said he wished his team had picked a certain college guard instead.
You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will Page 8