And so, at a glance, it looks like the Spurs whipping the shit out of some laughable underdog from the East, which has never recovered from the loss of Michael Jordan.
The whole East conference has been like a wasteland since Michael wandered away. It was the end of a glorious era. The East is a minor league now, flashy millionaire losers, roaming from coast to coast like rich gypsies fleecing the witless rubes in one town after another.
But so what? Everything I say or predict tonight could be rendered meaningless by even a single cruel injury to any star on any team. Many will be blown away and doomed, as always, when a major piece of the engine explodes. That is a natural law.
Whoever wins the championship this year will be the team that suffers the fewest injuries in the next 20 games. That is what it will take to survive these play-offs—and that team is probably San Antonio.
So good luck, Bubba. Every game from now on will have huge meaning for the Loser. Huge meaning. Thank you.
—April 30, 2003
Great Fleecing in Woody Creek: Lakers Staggered in Series Opener
I am sitting here with lovely Anita at Midnight on Monday and we are whooping it up in the aftermath of what will go down in the history of rural gambling as the great Woody Creek Fleecing of the 2003 basketball season. We are slapping each other’s thighs with gleeful laughter and also drinking the legendary Highland Park Scotch Whiskey (single malt, 18 years old) from a Tiffany crystal decanter and smoking Jimsonweed, for old times’ sake. It is wonderful.
We all understand what a really first-class Fleecing feels like, for good or ill. And tonight I feel Good. Why not?
Tonight I lured a group of visiting priests into my gambling den and advised them to bet on the Lakers and give me the Spurs plus ten points. It was beautiful. It was a classic of bigtime fleecing. And they loved me for it. Money meant nothing to them. They were messengers from the Vatican City.
A fleecee is one who has just been dramatically fleeced—as in “shearing the sheep of his woolly coat,” according to the Random House Dictionary of the English Language. He/she has been deprived of money or belongings by Fraud, Coma, Hoax, or the like: Swindled and stripped of all human dignity, if only for one long painful moment that will never be gone from his or her memory.
Being fleeced and humiliated right in front of all your friends and peers and loved ones is every gambler’s most horrible fear. It is like being stripped naked on a street not far from the ghastly hole that was once the World Trade Center—and forced to walk, or run or slither or wander, all alone to the far northern tip of Manhattan Island.
That would be somewhere close to the old Harlem River Bridge, as I recall, not far from where my friend William Burroughs was robbed and badly beaten, many years ago, by a gang of paramilitary dope addicts who had never even heard of him.
There is absolutely no end to the list of horrible things that might happen to a person who tries to walk naked from one end of Manhattan Island to the other. Nobody has ever done it. Not even George Washington, who spent a lot of time in New York and could wander around naked wherever he pleased.
But so what, eh? Nobody needs that kind of unnatural nightmare. Most of us have our own problems, and some of them are so depressing that the idea of wandering naked and alone all night to the far reaches of Central Park seem almost like a fun thing to try next weekend.
Which brings us back to the ominous fate that awaits the crippled Los Angeles Lakers tomorrow night in San Antonio. It will be the Alamo in reverse, with Shaquille O’Neal as Davy Crockett.
What? No. That is an unacceptably morbid hallucination. Shaq would never fight to the death for some cheap white man’s rubble like the Alamo. And neither would I, for that matter, just for the record.
The Lakers have lost five straight games to the Spurs, and there is no smart reason to believe they won’t lose three more. But probably not: the TV networks would go crazy if San Antonio swept the series 4–0. It would be a financial disaster, for them and for us. Any 4–0 sweep in any play-off series means a net loss of three spectacular professional basketball games that I will never see. And neither will you. Ho ho.
Anita is doing the math now—and ye gods, the final numbers are more disastrous than I thought. Yes. If every one of these NBA play-off series were a 4–0 sweep, we would lose a grim total of 42 major games before the summer starts.
To me, a professional Addict of the game, that would be worse than having my car stolen, or even than suddenly discovering maggots in my refrigerator. It would be a personal tragedy and very likely a Death Blow to the future of the NBA.
That means we must all pray vigorously for every series to go the full seven (7) games. That is all ye know, and all ye Need to know. Mahalo. Yes. Bring it on, bore it out—three games a night until the Fourth of July. I crave it, and so does Anita.
—May 5, 2003
The Sport of Kings
We are waiting for the Sacramento game to start now, and my phone is ringing incessantly, so I turn down its volume to zero. Fuck that telephone. I always turn it off when the game starts. That is my business.
Today has been a rough one. We had blowouts, many blowouts, one right after the other. I almost blacked out once or twice. My blood pressure ran up to about 225 and I noticed that people were giving me a wide berth.
Hot damn! The Sacramento Kings are leading the Dallas Mavericks 41–32, with four minutes and four seconds to play in the first half.… Mike Bibby has missed 13 out of 14 shots from the field so far, six of them wide-open layups.
Whoops. Doug Christie just stripped the ball away from flashy little Nick Van Exel and loped in for a stylish dunk, and the Kings lead 52–37 at halftime. Which is okay, but I can’t help but remember that last night Dallas was down by 16 in the first quarter—and they still lucked out with a victory in two overtimes. Anita went all to pieces after that one. I had to take her into town and put her in a decompression Chamber.
She didn’t take the scandal about the Kentucky Derby as hard as I did, but so what? I am a natural child of the Dark and Bloody Ground, and she is not.… But the horrible shock of seeing the New York Times go down in a blaze of fraud and treachery was too much for her, and she cracked up.
Jesus babbling Christ! The Kings have gone up 60–42—and now here comes Nick Van Exel. The crowd boos nervously, rumbling with a queer hostility. I am betting Sacramento even, so things are looking “good,” as they used to say in Baghdad. My people are kicking ass and Anita is feeding me grapes. Ye gods, this game is a rout! The Mavericks are bleeding from every orifice. Mahalo.
Why am I still feeling queasy, with a 20-point lead at the end of three quarters? Why am I plagued by memories of false hubris and total collapse? Am I a fool?
Of course not. I am only a gambling person with a “checkered past,” and I have a very keen sense of impending danger—which is what I feel now, with 6:59 left on the clock and Sacramento cruising by 19 or 20. Why am I riddled with angst?
Ah ha! The answer is not hard to see. Yes. I am faking it, trolling for last-minute sucker bets. Ho ho ho. I feel no angst at all, in truth—even though the Kings have missed so many wide-open shots that I fear to even count them. It is far more than 20, for sure; probably about 26. Yet they are still shooting a steady 48 percent from the field. This is not Winning basketball if only because the Mavericks are shooting 38 percent from the field. That is Losing basketball.
Strange, eh? Last night the Kings played winning basketball and lost. Tonight they are playing Losing basketball but winning. What does it all mean, Alfie?
Who cares. Dirk Nowitzki has just been ejected from the game. Dallas is falling apart. Now some jackass named Bell is trying to sock Bobby Jackson in the face. Jackson has a broken jaw and a fractured orbital bone above his eye. Incredible. How low do you have to sink in the slime of human stupidity to deliberately whack one of the classiest players in the league in the face when he has a cracked eye bone and a broken jaw?
That is unaccepta
ble rudeness. Raja Bell is a knee-crawling, backstabbing punk with the soul of a Rat and the heart of a filthy virus. The NBA should have him committed to a state Mental Hospital and locked down with restraints until he gets his entire body dyed bright yellow, which will stay on his skin forever.
Excellent, eh? You bet. There is only One way to deal with a vicious Punk—and that way is viciously. Take my word for it. I know exactly how to deal with human scum.…
MORE THAN FORTY GAMES IN FORTY NIGHTS OF NBA PLAY-OFF BASKETBALL
“No. I am not a whore,” said the bartender. “What do you mean by that?”
“Never mind the small talk,” I said to her. “I came here to suck on your back.”
She cried out with fear and tried to get away, but I slapped some plastic on her, then I locked the door. It was 2:06 a.m., and a freezing rain was falling. Beautiful, I thought. This is my kind of night.
ELSEWHERE IN THE WORLD OF SPORTS …
A gang of vicious fruitbags broke into the mosque yesterday and destroyed everything in it. Who knows what they will destroy tomorrow—maybe You, maybe Me. Something rotten is beginning to happen. I can feel it in my bones. Maybe we should steal a shipment of whiskey, just to be on the safe side.
I agree with you exactly, Mr. Ambassador. They laughed at Napoléon when he “gave away” the whole huge Louisiana Purchase for only fifteen million dollars, or less than six pennies an acre. Wow! Yes sir, we really robbed those French bastards this time. That is what we call an extremely high-yield real estate investment. Ho ho ho. What fools these French turned out to be, eh? Those pompous little suckers. Hell yes! We’ll fleece those shameless perverts every day of the week. We own them.
I couldn’t agree with you more, Mr. President. I have always admired your freewheeling style of doing business. The French suck.
Indeed, the French nation sucks! All of it. Look at all the things we have fleeced them out of: the Statue of Liberty, two-thirds of the western USA, all of what was once “Southeast Asia”—Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, etc. The list is long, if we want to get weird about it: Hitler’s gold, fellatio and cunnilingus, two million magnums of elegant French Champagne, etc., etc.
But wait. There is another way to look at it. The prancing little Emperor got his way in spades, when he dumped that useless untamed wilderness. It meant nothing to him. He was looking at Egypt for his next project, and for that he needed real money immediately, not 200 years later—and 15 million green dollars looked just about right to conquer all of Egypt in those days, the star of the Middle East and all of its ancient treasures: its Mystery; the immediate, in-hand Magic of owning Cairo; the pyramids; the Nile River; and the ghost of sweet Cleopatra. The King, the emperor, the Pharaoh. Yes sir.
It was a big-time dream come true. Who needs some stupid shack in Missouri? Napoléon was looking for instant, massive gratification on a scale of the Gods and Goddesses, and he had it right in front of his own greedy little eyes. Hot damn! Give me that goddam fifteen million dollars right now in a clean brown bag. I will soon be the Champion of Fun. Cazart.
So. What is the outlook for tomorrow, Doctor? What is the gambling Prognosis? What is the score?
Well.… Who knows? Let me think on that, and I’ll give you an answer in the Morning. Ho ho. (Pause here for a spontaneous salute to Meatloaf, who has long been one of my heroes.)
What is happening now is a whole different game than it was yesterday. Both series in the West are tied 2–2, which is wonderful news for all those among us who are certified basketball junkies. We are seeing some strange and powerful games, and we must have every series go the full seven games. That is the law of nature.
I almost panicked last night, after that brutal and totally exhausting two-overtime game between the Kings and the once “unbeatable” brutes from Texas. I was beginning to see the gloomy prospect of an all-Texas Western final.
But no. Things changed, and now I see both series going seven wild games. Last year we had an all-California final. But so what? The mere possibility of Sacramento’s actually winning the NBA championship without Chris Webber is so irresistible that I have to see it coming. That is all I know, and all I need to know. Good luck.
—May 12, 2003
The Good, the Bad, and the Vicious
Wow! This is incredible. We have just witnessed two consecutive good basketball plays in a single NBA Eastern Conference play-off game. It is 10:19 p.m. on a wet Tuesday night in America. The top-seed Detroit Pistons are more or less leading the quasi-dangerous New Jersey Nets, champions of the NBA East. Ho ho.
The score is 78–76, a repulsively low total for any NBA game with two minutes left in the fourth quarter. It is a shameless mockery of what the NBA used to look like at play-off time. These teams Suck. But do we really deserve five more minutes of Overtime in this ratbastard game? This is bad, bad, ugly, ugly basketball. Fuck overtime. We don’t need any more of this brazen chickenshit. Get it over with.
Yes. Thud! There it goes, oozing away in the dimness of itself. The Nets win, by two, 88–86. And good riddance. The NBA East is a low-talent, low-rent tribe of carpetbaggers, and the TV moguls who foist this cheap, phony dung off on any sports-wise TV audience should be killed. Yes, Virginia, there really is no Santa Claus—and things will never really turn out Right in the end.
What? One of these dumb yo-yos on TNT just compared the New Jersey Nets somehow to the showtime LA Lakers of 1985–88, etc. That is ridiculous. Only a fool would say a thing like that. Who was it?
Well, we know it was not Magic, because he was there on the set and laughing the insult off. And we know it was not Charles Barkley, because he is too smart to make such an ass of himself.… So that leaves Kenny Smith and Ernie Johnson, who both jabber and babble too much, so either one of them could have spit out something like that, without even being conscious of it. They are professional jabberers—while Magic and Charles are real-life heroes who are also real-life smart and quick and knowledgeable about the game. And Johnson shoots free throws at half-time.
Right. And so much for that, eh? The only truly shocking game of the play-offs so far was San Antonio’s hopeless collapse against Dallas on Monday night, when the Mavericks came back from 18 points down to win the vitally important first game of the West finals by three little points, after trailing for all but the last seconds of the game. It was a disaster.
The last second was bad enough, but the last-second loss of the favored home team was utterly demoralizing to the proud and prancing Spurs, who self-destructed after Tim Duncan got his fifth foul. It was like watching the tortoise run down the hare, right in front of our eyes. Snap, crackle, POP. Even Jack Nicholson had to feel a twinge of sympathy for a first-class team like the Spurs—brought low by a seed of tragedy in themselves.
Tim Duncan is an agreeable, no-fun kind of guy who scored 40 points in a losing cause against a bone-tired Dallas team that had just finished playing 7 incredibly savage, draining games against Sacramento, obviously the best team in the NBA until they lost the best player, unanimous all-pro Chris Webber, to a season-ending injury about halfway through the playoffs. That was IT, once again, for the snakebitten Kings, who have been the best team in the league for the last two years but got bushwhacked both times by crippling injury or wretched hometown officiating.
I weep for Sacramento, but so what? It was like betting on a three-legged horse. And if San Antonio hadn’t blown that game against Dallas on Monday, they would almost certainly have been the Champions of the NBA this year.
And they may still be—but things are different now, and the Spurs are suddenly looking a little weak, a little more vulnerable than they did after terminating the Lakers.… Hell, all Don Nelson and his conquering thugs had to do was deliberately and continually foul the worst free-throw shooter on San Antonio’s play-off roster every time he touched the ball, and sometimes even sooner.
It was a crude and disgusting way to play the game, but it worked. The Spurs got rattled and taken rudely out of their game.
They lost their rhythm, and that is usually fatal, especially in the play-offs.… Dallas is now the smart-money favorite. Suddenly this looks like a keenly competitive six- or seven-game series.
Good. That is the way it should be, according to my calculations and public predictions—except that I had the Spurs winning, if they could navigate the rest of the play-offs without major injuries.
I did not even think about the chance of one team’s resorting to flat-out public thuggery as a secret winning strategy, and that makes me feel vaguely stupid. How could I have been so silly? So naïve?
Ah, but I am being hard on myself again. My overall predictions are looking pretty suave, so far. I even had Dallas plus nine in game One—which sounds a bit fishy, on the surface.
Indeed. How could any self-respecting gambler give Dallas plus 9, in a play-off game?
The answer is he doesn’t—except maybe for halftime bets, like mine. So take a tip from a shameless hustler, folks. Make your most desperate bets at halftime, when one team is so far ahead that it looks like a certain massive beating. That is the time to pounce. That is the moment to sink your fangs into half-bright fans who are not really paying attention to this onesided farce.
Yes. That is the moment to slip the dagger between their ribs. After that, it is only a matter of time before you will want to twist it. That is what a true gambler loves—the fleecing, the Whipping, the cruelty, the stabbing. They barely even feel it, until money changes hands and there is no escape from the sleazy truth. That is when you can physically feel their pain. That is what makes sports gambling so fun. It is wonderful.
Hey Rube Page 21