Book of Basketball

by Simmons Bill

  GARY BENDER: Rick, who do you think that guy is over there?

  BARRY (attempting his first joke ever): I don’t know, it looks like some fool over there with that, um, that big watermelon grin there on the left. 58

  (CBS cuts from the picture to a dumbfounded Russell with the words “watermelon grin” still hanging in the air. He glances back and forth between Gary Bender and Barry with a “Did he just say what I think he just said?” look on his face. Three excruciating seconds pass.)

  BENDER (still smiling, although he may have been shitting himself): Who is that guy? (Pause) That’s you, Bill. Don’t you recognize that picture?

  RUSSELL (not smiling): Nope.

  Did it end there? Nooooooooo! Only fifteen seconds later, with Russell still steaming, Barry tried to loosen things up by handing the pictures to Russell on camera. As Barry kept asking over and over again, “You sure you don’t want these?” a seething Russell turned his entire body away from Barry toward Bender, who tried to defuse things by telling Rick, “You might want to leave this one alone.” And Barry still kept going until Russell finally said coldly, “No, I don’t want ’em.”

  Unequivocally the most awkward sports-TV moment that didn’t include Joe Namath and Suzy Kolber. You couldn’t even believe it as it was happening. Needless to say, Barry’s contract was not renewed. And that’s an understatement. (Of course, if this incident happened in today’s overly PC era, Barry would quickly disappear from planet Earth like Michael Richards did.) Barry eventually found a second life on TBS, providing play-by-play for the ’85 Eastern Finals with—you’re not gonna believe this—Bill Russell! Who’s the genius who came up with that idea?

  That was like Mike Tyson getting freed from jail and immediately hosting the 1996 Miss Black Teen USA pageant.

  John Havlicek (’78). A late addition to the Musburger-Barry team for the ’78 Finals, 59 Hondo said absolutely nothing and flatlined for seven games. Was this really a surprise? I loved Hondo, every Boston fan loved Hondo, but he’s not exactly someone you’d want giving the best man’s speech at a wedding. 60 I remember watching one of those Finals games on NBA TV at like three in the morning, seeing Hondo introduced in the beginning, getting excited, then thinking he had gotten sick or something because we didn’t hear him speak for the next forty-five minutes. Nope. He was just sitting there. You can’t even give him a grade other than “incomplete” or “possibly in a coma.”

  Bill Russell (’80–’83). Well received during his first run in the early seventies, Russell was unprepared/uninterested/un-(fill in any other adjective that suggests life) the second time around and couldn’t carry the load himself after Barry was fired. Actually, he sounded like my dad every time he falls asleep during a Red Sox game, wakes up in the late innings and mumbles, “Wait, what happened to Beckett? Did we take him out?” That was Russell for three solid years. Although you can’t blame him because he worked with Barry for one of them. Maybe he was heavily medicated.

  Moses Malone (’86). Okay, we’re cheating here—CBS used Moses as a pregame/halftime/postgame studio guy for Game 4 of the ’86 Finals, an awesome game overshadowed by CBS’ decision that it would be a good idea for Moses to speak extemporaneously on live TV. Teamed with Musburger and Julius Erving (no slouch himself in the Horrible TV Guy department), Doc came off like a cross between Eddie Murphy and abolitionist Frederick Douglass compared to Moses. It’s hard to figure out what CBS was thinking here. I mean, it’s not like Moses was getting more articulate as the years passed—we were only three years removed from his “Fo fo fo” prediction for the ’83 Playoffs and his nickname within the league was “Mumbles” Malone. The more I’m thinking about it, I wonder if someone at CBS

  lost a bet—as in “okay, if you win, I’ll pay for our golf trip to Scotland, but if I win, you have to use Moses Malone as a TV guy for a Finals game.” That had to be what happened, right? Whatever the reason, this was the only NBA telecast ever that needed closed captioning. 61

  Magic Johnson (’92–’97). NBC signed Magic right after he retired and it seemed like a layup. Nobody was more personable or likable than Magic, right? Then the telecasts started. Magic giggled during plays without provocation, kept interrupting Marv Albert and Mike Fratello, and tied every play or storyline into something that had happened while he was playing for the Lakers. You also couldn’t really understand him because, for whatever reason, it always sounded like he was eating a ham sandwich. Of course, I loved having Magic around because he was like a never-ending SNL skit. The Knicks would take the lead on a Ewing shot, then the Bulls and Jordan would answer with a basket, and suddenly Magic would start screaming, “Patrick was down on his end sayin’, ‘I’m gonna win this game’ and Michael came back down and said, ‘Uh-uh, big fella, you ain’t winnin’ on my court!’” 62 There was something undeniably entertaining about listening to Magic provide color for games, the same way it’s entertaining when you see a pedestrian trip on the sidewalk or a buddy puke all over himself at a bachelor party. When NBC mercifully moved Magic to the studio, it wasn’t the same; he was just annoying and had nothing to say. What’s strange is that Magic went away for a while, returned on TNT and developed into a decent sidekick for Kenny and Charles. I have no rational explanation for this. None.

  Julius Erving (’97). Hands down, the worst studio analyst of all time. And that’s a strong statement. Only two years before, Joe Montana appeared on NBC’s NFL show and may have been dead for all we knew. I remember waiting for Jonathan Silverman and Andrew McCarthy to jump in right before every commercial and wheel Montana’s corpse out of the TV frame. Still, it wasn’t surprising that Montana stank—we didn’t like him for his personality, just for banging hot blondes and winning Super Bowls. It’s not like our expectations were high. But Doc was one of the few NBA stars to successfully strike that delicate balance between “articulate spokesman and ambassador” and “slick dude who lives for dunking on heads.” It was incomprehensible that Doc would suck on TV. Seeing him stammer awkwardly on the air, say nonsensical things like “Great players make great plays” and perform the deer-in-the-headlights routine was a little disarming. Every time the camera homed in on him, you could actually feel the tension in the studio. It was tangible. Before one Houston-Utah playoff game, Doc made history by predicting, “I think the key for Houston will be when Hakeem gets the ball, how fast he decides to either shoot, dribble, or pass.” That’s an actual quote. I remember my old roommate Geoff and I spending the next fifteen minutes trying to determine what other options Hakeem could possibly have had on a basketball court, ultimately deciding on these: (a) turn the ball over, (b) call time out, (c) pass out, (d) shit on himself, or (e) drop dead. It was an unforgettable moment, as evidenced by the fact that I can remember where we were watching the game when it happened. Poor Dr. J. Some people just aren’t meant to be on television. 63

  Isiah Thomas (’98-’00). NBC made a big deal about this hiring because, you know, Isiah was a great player, which means he’ll be a great TV guy, right? (Whoops, I forgot—there’s no correlation whatsoever.) Well, he didn’t have much to say—which didn’t matter much because partner Bob Costas was rusty from a twenty-two-year play-by-play layoff and treated every game like it was a radio telecast 64—and you could barely hear Isiah because his meek, high-pitched voice was drowned out by any semiex-cited crowd. When Detroit canned Doug Collins midway through the season, NBC signed him for a three-man booth (Costas, Collins and Isiah), a problem because Collins was roughly ten thousand times more competent than Isiah (even if he suffered from Rick Barry–itis). Now Isiah couldn’t get a word in edgewise, and even if he did, we couldn’t hear him. By the time the Finals rolled around, you could practically hear the voice of NBC’s producer imploring Collins to keep including Isiah in the broadcast. YouTube 65 the ’98 Finals some time and watch how many times Collins starts a sentence with something like, “And Isiah, you know better than anyone that you can’t pick up your dribble” or “I don’t think the Jazz
can hold Chicago off with Jordan playing like this …” Pause while NBC’s producer screams in Collins’ ear. “… Right, Isiah?” Holy shit, was it awkward. All things considered, that may have been the worst three-man booth ever. NBC moved Isiah to the studio for the next two years, where he had nothing to say and spent most of the time grinning crazily like Gene Hackman’s right-hand man in No Way Out just before he shoots himself. But everything paid off during the postgame celebration for the 2000 Finals: Peter Vecsey capped a classic two-month, I-don’t-give-a-shit-if-you-fire-me run where he took more cheap shots than Claude Lemieux by totally blindsiding poor Isiah, randomly telling him on live TV as they were recapping everything,

  “And I just found out that you’re the next Pacers coach!” Poor Isiah didn’t know what to do; he hadn’t even looked as flustered after Bird stole the ball from him in the ’87 Playoffs. The best part was Vecsey standing there with a defiant smirk while Isiah stuttered and stammered in front of a national TV audience. Phenomenal stuff. It made the entire lousy Isiah-on-TV era worth it. 66

  (Unfortunately, it wised up the network executives for good. Not only did we never see Vecsey on network TV again, we’ve never seen another NBA Legend Turned Horrible TV

  Personality—although there’s always a chance ABC will be dumb enough to hire Shaq when he finally retires. I have my fingers crossed.)

  1975–76: THE DUNK CONTEST

  Two unforgettable moments stood out during a chaotic season that featured Kareem’s trade to Los Angeles, two commissioner hirings, two NBA high schooler signings, three ABA teams folding, a bitter legal fight between Philly and New York over George McGinnis, and the threat of a merger hanging over everything: the world-renowned triple-OT game (Phoenix-Boston), and a now-legendary ABA Slam Dunk Contest that put David Thompson on the map, turned Doc into a demigod and laid the groundwork for the creation of NBA All-Star Weekend. If you could pick one image that defined each league from 1970 to 1976, you’d pick Cowens skidding across the floor in the ’74 Finals and Doc dunking from the foul line in the Dunk Contest. One league played with passion and did all the little things, while the other league embraced the schoolyard elements of the game, but in either clip you’ll see fans jumping out of their seats. Still, basketball purists discounted the ABA because nobody played defense and everyone went for their own stats, so the fact that the league’s signature moment happened in a Dunk Contest wasn’t helping matters.

  Doc’s foul-line dunk had to be the most exhilarating basketball moment that didn’t happen in an actual game. For one thing, nobody had seen one of these contests before, so they didn’t know what to expect; once the dunks started coming, the fans were like thirteen-year-old boys looking at porn for the first time, almost overwhelmed by the sight of everything. You had the decade’s most memorable player facing off against a precocious upstart, with Thompson going right before Doc, firing up the crowd with a superb double pump, and finishing with an incomprehensible-at-the-time 360, playing the role of the talented young band that’s too good to be a warm-up band. (Think Springsteen opening for the Stones in ’75.) You had Doc dramatically measuring his steps from one basket to another as the crowd shuffled in anticipation and wondered what the heck he was doing, finally realizing, “Wait a second, is he going to dunk from the foul line?” Then you had the dunk itself: Erving loping toward the basket and exploding from the foul line, his oversized hand making the basketball look like a golf ball, carrying and carrying and finally tomahawking the ball through the basket as everyone lost their collective shit. Doc’s dunk stands alone for originality pent-up drama, sheer significance and lasting impact, even if he screwed up by not saving that dunk for last. Right guy, right place, right time, right moment. Basketball was starting to go up—literally—and it wasn’t a bad thing. 67

  SUMMER OF 1976: THE MERGER

  This gets my Greatest Summer Ever vote: our two hundredth Independence Day, the release of Jaws, the Montreal Olympics, the fictional graduation of Randy “Pink” Floyd’s class at Lee High School and the ABA-NBA merger in the span of three months? Come on. The merger process was given a jolt when the ABA hired a dick-swinging antitrust attorney named Fred Fruth, who had some world-class negotiating sessions with the NBA’s bright assistant commissioner—wait for it

  … wait for it—Mr. David Stern! 68 Here’s what they settled, with my comments in parentheses:

  1. Denver, New York, San Antonio and Indiana joined for a cost of $3.2 million per team. Those teams would not receive TV money for three years, could not take part in the ’76

  college draft and would be called “expansion teams,” but they were allowed to keep their players. The Nets also had to pay the Knicks $4.8 million over ten years for violating their territory rights. (My thoughts: A bit of a raping so far, although it’s nice that the Knicks got even more money to throw away at bad players. My biggest issue was the NBA excluding ABA teams from a deep ’76 rookie draft in which Johnny Davis (number twenty-two), Alex English (number twenty-three), Lonnie Shelton (number twenty-five) and Dennis Johnson (number twenty-nine) dropped to Round 2. Shows how little leverage the ABA had at the time.)

  2. Kentucky owner John Y. Brown received $3 million for folding his franchise, then spent half that money to buy Buffalo. So the four ABA teams that joined the NBA got crushed financially, but Brown bought in and pocketed $1.5 million? Huh? Meanwhile, the St. Louis owners struck the greatest mother lode in professional sports history, folding their shitty franchise for $2.2 million and one-seventh of the TV money from the four remaining ABA teams—money they were guaranteed in perpetuity. In other words, they received four-sevenths of a cut of the TV contract every year forever. Through 2009, that cut was worth about $150 million. Just free money falling out of the sky, year after year after year after year. 69(My thoughts: The Nets won two titles with Doc, only the league’s signature player and a big reason for the merger, then got shafted to the degree that they sold Doc before the ’77 season just to keep their franchise afloat. The Spirits had a terrible team that would have folded anyway—no fan support, no assets that remotely compared to Doc, no appeal as an NBA market whatsoever—and they somehow finagled a deal that was a hundred times better than New Jersey’s deal. Go figure.)

  3. Players from folded ABA franchises would be auctioned off in a dispersal draft, with price tags assigned to each player and Chicago guaranteed the first pick (so they could take Artis Gilmore). The remaining picks were made in reverse order of finish during the ’76 season, with Atlanta trading the number two pick to Portland for Geoff Petrie, then Portland landing the two biggest prizes (Maurice Lucas at number two and Moses at number five).70

  Also, Detroit paid a whopping $500,000 for Marvin Barnes in an apparent attempt to get Bob Lanier to hang himself. (My thoughts: In the Things That Would Have Been Much More Fun if They Happened Now department, can’t you see ESPN televising the ABA dispersal draft at like 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday afternoon as Ric Bucher breaks the Portland/Atlanta trade, Chad Ford laments the lack of European players and Jay Bilas spends ten minutes raving about Malone’s rebounding skills and “second jump-ability”?

  Alas.)

  4. The NBA agreed to abolish the reserve clause and allow free agency for any veteran player with an expiring contract. This was the single biggest sticking point—the owners wanted compensation, the players did not—and it could have dragged on for another few years if not for a brainstorm by NBA Players Association head Jeff Mullins: give the owners compensation for four years because that’s how long it would have taken for the case to reach the Supreme Court, anyway. Everyone agreed and that was that. Compensation would be awarded by O’Brien’s office as long as the two teams involved didn’t agree first.(My thoughts: This was the single biggest NBA moment since the shot clock. Everything about the way players were paid and contenders were built was about to change. For good and bad. And for the first few years, it was mostly bad.)

  What ensued was the single zaniest summer of player movement
in NBA history. Chicago and Houston reinvented themselves with franchise centers (Gilmore and Malone). Portland landed a rebounding sidekick for Walton. The Nets sold Doc to Philly for $3 million and traded Brian Taylor with two number one picks for Tiny Archibald.71 Philly suddenly had the ’75 ABA co-MVPs (Doc and McGinnis) on the same team. Moses bounced around twice before landing in Houston. Portland stupidly traded Moses to Buffalo for a number one pick; Buffalo rerouted him to Houston for two first-rounders just six days later. The Knicks bought McAdoo from Buffalo and lavished him with a five-year, $2.5 million deal, killing his incentive to give a shit until 1982. Gail Goodrich became the Jackie Robinson of free agency, inadvertently murdering professional basketball in New Orleans for two solid decades (hold that thought). Red Auerbach refused to pay Paul Silas market value, shipped him to Denver for Curtis Rowe, then bought Sidney Wicks from Portland (and murdered Celtic Pride in the process). None of the top five teams from ’76 (Golden State, Phoenix, Boston, L.A., Cleveland) improved itself in any conceivable way. Throw in the rise of cocaine, free agency, and escalating salaries and you need to get emotionally prepared for the weirdest three-year stretch in NBA history.

  1976–77: THE CANNONBALL

  Brace yourself: this might be the only time in sports history that a professional sports league didn’t expand enough. The NBA jumped from eighteen franchises to twenty-two but added twenty-eight quality players to its talent pool, including four franchise guys (Erving, Gervin, Gilmore and Thompson) and a potential franchise guy (Moses). 72 Throw in a loaded draft class (John Lucas, Dantley, English, DJ, Parish, Mitch Kupchak, Walter Davis…) and there were two quality newcomers for every franchise. Suddenly we had teams struggling with alpha dog battles (McAdoo-Haywood, Erving-McGinnis, Barnes-Lanier) and contrasting styles (old-school versus playground), certain teams quickly gelling into contenders (Portland, Denver) or falling off (Boston, Phoenix, Cleveland, G-State), and fans alternately delighted by the ABA’s infusion of athleticism and appalled by high-priced guys playing so selfishly. And if that’s not enough, cocaine and freebasing were taking the league by storm. Again, silliest year ever—like mixing up everyone’s Madden rosters, restarting a franchise season and randomly giving drug problems to 25