Book of Basketball
Page 88
1. For the paperback, I’m expanding the Pyramid to 13 and sticking Kobe at No. 8. And you know what? Duncan’s No. 7 spot isn’t safe. Let’s see how the next few years play out. 2. Kobe’s numbers jumped from 21.9 FGA and 5.0 APG in the ’08 Finals to 27.0 FGA and 7.4
APG in ’09. The Magic didn’t have a traditional 2-guard to stop him; ’08 Celtics were superior defensively and handled him straight up.
3. The Cavs could have dealt Wally Szezcerbiak’s expiring contract for Shaq, Antwan Jamison or Vince Carter and stupidly opted to do nothing. After Orlando shocked them in the Eastern Finals, they traded for Shaq four weeks later. This was like a family buying homeowner’s insurance four weeks after robbers cleaned out their house.
4. Thanks to the ’09 Finals, Luke and Bill became the third father-son combo to win an NBA title along with the Barrys (Rick and Jon) and Goukases (Matt and Matt). I wanted to make a Nick/Teresa Weatherspoon joke here—badly—but they aren’t related.
5. In my column the following day, I called it the “Phil Jackson ‘Should I point out that MJ would have absolutely passed there? Nahhhhhhh’ Face.”
6. Russell and Auerbach were the Cleavers. Havlicek and Heinsohn were the Bunkers. Magic and Riley were the Huxtables. Jordan and Jackson were the Simpsons. Duncan and Popovich were the Barones. Phil and Kobe? They were definitely the Sopranos. And I don’t need to tell you who was Tony.
7. Bird even blessed Kobe publicly as his favorite active player. I will now peel the skin off my body.
8. Not even 36 hours after I visited Walton, the Lakers allowed Ariza to sign with Houston and replaced him with Ron Artest, a loose cannon and attention hog with a penchant for taking bad shots at the wrong times. This won’t end well.
9. Walton believes basketball’s highest level comes down to one question: “Can you make the choice that your happiness can come from someone else’s success?” He then added, “My favorite part of the game was starting the fast break.” That’s the closest he’d come to saying that his way was the best way.
10. You know you’ve been watching too much soccer when you stop noticing how funny Kaka’s name is. At this point, I don’t even blink when I hear announcers yell things like “Here comes the great Kaka!”
11. I brought two ’86 Celtics DVDs to watch with Walton: the third quarter of Game 5 vs. Atlanta, and the fourth quarter of Game 4 in Milwaukee. They never came out of my bag. Obviously. 12. A better comparison: Springsteen, who openly relished performing with others much like Walton did. Imagine Bruce only appearing on stage for 517 concerts spread over 15 years. Imagine him wistfully remembering those few times he leaned into Little Stevie’s microphone and happily spat all over it, wondering why he couldn’t have played 5,000 concerts instead of 517. Depressing, right?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was a labor of love and could not have been executed correctly without the unyielding support of John Skipper, John Walsh, Gary Hoenig, Gary Belsky and Rob King from ESPN. They believed in this project and afforded me the scheduling flexibility to pull it off. Thanks to all. Special thanks to Hoenig for being the greatest Grumpiest Old Editor ever. His enthusiasm and savvy helped me through some dark times.
Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell for the foreword and for his advice, friendship and feedback. He’s one of my top 700 favorite biracial Canadians. Thanks to William Goldman and Chuck Klosterman for making crucial cameos in the book. (I will always remember when Goldman read me a rough draft of what he had written over the phone. One of the true highlights of my career.)
Thanks to Isiah Thomas, Steve Kerr and especially Bill Walton for making this book better.
Thanks a thousand times over to Paul Hirschheimer of NBA Entertainment, a good friend who attached himself to my book from the beginning and made it 9.33 percent better. Thanks as well to David Stern, Adam Silver, Matt Bourne, John Hareas and David Zubrzycki.
Thanks to Hirschy and my buddy Joe House for their early feedback on chapters and Pyramid rankings. House deserves special commendation for twenty-one years of NBA conversations that shaped this book to some degree. Also, thanks to Wally and Gus Ramsey for three decades of friendship, including that fortuitous day when we created the Pyramid while driving to Shea.
Thanks to a remarkable group of friends (a few made cameos in this book) for making me funnier by osmosis. In particular, John O’Connell, Kevin Wildes, Dave Jacoby, Connor Schell, Jamie Horowitz and House had valuable suggestions every time I emailed them footnote-related questions like “Who were the worst celebrity dads ever?” Thanks to my old boss, Jimmy Kimmel, for seven years of friendship and career advice, as well as Shawn Sullivan (the MVP of my wedding) and Rob Strikwerda for their friendship and help with the Celtics/Clippers. Thanks to my friend Russell Sherman for coming up with this book’s title. And thanks to every reader who ever took time to email me, especially the ones who appeared in this book.
Thanks to Neil Fine, Kevin Jackson, David Schoenfield, Michael Philbrick, Michael Knisley, Jay Lovinger and Mark Giles for their editing expertise from 2001–2009. And thanks to Gary Sulentic, Bob Holmes and John Wilpers for giving me chances all those years ago.
Thanks to Random House’s Mark Tavani for his help and for convincing me that this book wouldn’t get screwed up like my first one did. Thanks to everyone else at Random House, as well as Steve Wulf, Sandy DeShong and everyone at ESPN Books. Thanks to my agent, the legendary James “Baby Doll” Dixon, someone who should have become my teammate before 2009. Thanks to Lewis Kay, Dan Klores and Ellie Seifert for everything they’re about to do. Thanks to every writer and teacher who inspired me (too many to list). And thanks to Bill Russell, Larry Bird, Bob Ryan and the late David Halberstam for teaching me Basketball 101 once upon a time.
Thanks to my parents, stepparents and extended family for their unwavering support. You already know how my father affected this book, but my poor mother didn’t get enough credit for giving me the writing gene and for being my single biggest fan.
Thanks to my wonderful wife, Kari, for putting up with me these last three years. Her take: “Thank God life is back to normal. If you ever start another seven-hundred-page book, I’m going to murder you in your sleep. Either way, I wish I had married Zack Galifianakis.” Good to know.
Thanks to Ben for everything that’s about to happen. He’s my best-friend-in-training.
Finally, thanks to Zoe. I could have turned into Jack Nicholson in The Shining these past three years if not for my beautiful daughter cheering me up, making me laugh and constantly putting a smile on my face. She won’t remember this a few years from now, so I wanted to mention it here. I wish I knew her secret.
Bill Simmons
July 4, 2009
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I plowed through nearly one hundred books that helped me write this one. Here’s how they broke down by category and influence on my book.
INFLUENTIAL MUST-READS: Life on the Run (Bill Bradley) … The Season (Kenny Dryden)
… Wait ’Til Next Year (William Goldman and Mike Lupica) … The Breaks of the Game; Playing for Keeps (David Halberstam) … 24 Seconds to Shoot (Leonard Koppett) … Unfinished Business (Jack MacCallum) … Loose Balls; Tall Tales (Terry Pluto) … Second Wind (Bill Russell and Taylor Branch) … The Franchise (Cameron Stauth)
VERY HELPFUL AND HIGHLY ENJOYABLE: The City Game (by Pete Axthelm) … Wilt (Wilt Chamberlain and David Shaw) … Hang Time (Bob Greene) … Sacred Hoops (Phil Jackson) …
Wilt, 1962 (Gary Pomerantz) … The Jordan Rules (Sam Smith) … Foul (David Wolf)
EXTREMELY USEFUL: Who’s Better, Who’s Best in Basketball? (Elliott Kalb) … Showtime (Pat Riley) … The Big O (Oscar Robertson) … The NBA’s Top 50 (Ken Shouler) … The Golden Boys (Cameron Stauth) … The Official 2008–09 NBA Register … The Official 2008–09 NBA Guide
ENJOYABLE BOOKS THAT HELPED A LITTLE: The Fab Five (Mitch Albom) … Everything They Had (David Halberstam) … The Best American Sports Writing of the Century (edited by David Halbersta
m) … Fathers Playing Catch with Sons (Donald Hall) … The Last Season (Phil Jackson with Charley Rosen) … Pistol (Mark Kriegel) … Best Seat in the House (Spike Lee and Ralph Wiley) … 07 Seconds or Less (Jack McCallum) … The Franchise (Michael McCambridge)
… A Sense of Where You Are (John McPhee) … The Short Season (John Powers) … Sports Guy (Charles P. Pierce) … The Twentieth Century Treasury of Sports (edited by Al and Brian Silverman) … Classic Wiley (Ralph Wiley)
HELPFUL, NOT A TOTAL WASTE OF TIME: Giant Steps (Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) … Drive (Larry Bird and Bob Ryan) … Tip Off (Filip Bondy) … The Perfect Team (Foreword by Chuck Daly) … The Inside Game (Waybe Embry with Mary Schmidt Boyer) … Maravich (Wayne Federman and Marshall Terrell) … Hondo (John Havlicek with Bob Ryan) … Give ’Em the Hook (Tommy Heinsohn and Joe Fitzgerald) … More Than a Game (Phil Jackson with Charley Rosen)
… Sacred Hoops (Phil Jackson with Hugh Delancy) … My Life (Magic Johnson and Bill Novak)
… Goliath (Bill Libby) … Only the Strong Survive (Larry Platt) … Red and Me (Bill Russell with Alan Steinberg) … 48 Minutes (Bob Ryan and Terry Pluto) … Calling the Shots (Earl Strom) …
The Rivalry (John Taylor)
NOT PARTICULARLY HELPFUL: The Long Season (Rick Adelman and Dwight Jaynes) …
Auerbach on Auerbach; On and Off the Court; Red Auerbach (Red Auerbach with Joe Fitzgerald)
… Confessions of a Basketball Gypsy (Rick Barry and David Wolf) … Out of Bounds (Jeff Benedict) … The Last Loud Roar (Bob Cousy) … Covert: My Years Infiltrating the Mob (Bob Delaney) … The Punch (John Feinstein) … Champions Remembered (Ray Fitzgerald) …
Rebound (Bob Greene) … The Jump (Ian O’Connor) … When Nothing Else Matters (Michael Leahy) … The Big Three; The Last Banner (Peter May) … The Drive Within Me (Bob Pettit with Bob Wolff) … Falling from Grace (Terry Pluto) … But They Can’t Beat Us (Randy Roberts) …
The Pro Game (Bob Ryan) … Black Planet (David Shields) … Can I Keep My Jersey? (Paul Shirley) … Second Coming (Sam Smith) … Evergreen; Seeing Red (Dan Shaughnessy) …
Basketball My Way (Jerry West and Bill Libby) … Mr. Clutch (Jerry West)
Also, I plowed through every relevant NBA feature from 1954 through 2000 in Sports Illustrated, as well as countless pieces from The New York Times and The Boston Globe spanning that same time frame. All can be found on-line at the Times/Globe websites or www.SIVault.com. Old issues of Inside Sports from 1980–84 were particularly helpful. Basketballreference.com and ESPN.com couldn’t have been more helpful. For visual references, I burned over three hundred classic games to DVD from NBA TV or ESPN Classic from 2002 to 2007, traded for a few others on-line and eagerly devoured nearly one hundred rarely seen games that NBA Entertainment was gracious enough to send me. Shows like Greatest NBA Games (ESPN 2), NBA Vault (ESPN), SportsCentury (ESPN Classic) and Beyond the Glory (Fox Sports Net) also filled in a few holes. Another unbelievable help: The treasure chest of interviews, highlights and uncut games on YouTube. It would have been nearly impossible to write this particular book as recently as five years ago. So thanks to all.
Last note: Before the release of my book, I am hoping to compile an interactive section of links and YouTube clips that will correspond to the pages and chapters of this book at
www.thebookofbasketball.com.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BILL SIMMONS writes the “Sports Guy” column for ESPN.com’s Page 2 and ESPN: The Magazine. He is the author of Now I Can Die in Peace, founded the award-winning bostonsportsguy.com website and was a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live. He commutes between his home in Los Angeles and Fenway Park.
Copyright © 2009 by Bill Simmons
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by ESPN Books, an imprint of ESPN, Inc., New York, and Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. The ESPN
Books name and logo are registered trademarks of ESPN, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to HarperCollins Publishers for permission to reprint an excerpt from The Franchise by Cameron Stauth.
Copyright © 1990 by Cameron Stauth. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simmons, Bill.
The book of basketball : the NBA according to the sports guy / Bill Simmons. p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-345-51311-3
1. Basketball. . National Basketball Association. . Title.
GV885.1.S46 2009
796.323.′640973—dc22 009036006
www.ballantinebooks.com
www.espnbooks.com
v3.0