by Shea Serrano
REMBERT BROWNE, ON CHUCK PERSON: A great thing about growing up in the ’90s was the sheer number of VHS box sets dedicated to players and games that happened only 3 to 5 years earlier. Quite often, you were watching classic games featuring players that were still in the league. One of the most memorable was this tape I had about Larry Bird. And the standout was a game in which he got absolutely torched by The Rifleman, Chuck Person of the Indiana Pacers.
There’s something absolutely gorgeous about a basketball player who thinks he’s the best player in NBA history when he’s on the court with multiple future Hall of Famers. In Game 2 of the first round of the1991 playoffs, Person was that person, scoring 39 points in the upset, including 7 threes, many in the grill of the soon-to-be-concussed Larry Bird.
I think about Chuck Person when I need to be great, in the midst of greats. He’s heroic, down to that rhombus landing strip of a coiffure he called a haircut. God Bless Chuck Person, the original Dion Waiters, my first Barack Obama.
1. One time, one of my sons told me that he thought a gallon of milk cost $40 and that a new car also cost $40.
2. The other most notable one is Chris Mullin. Mullin, I came to find out later, was actually super fucking good (best stat: during Mullin’s five-year peak, only Michael Jordan, Dominique Wilkins, and Karl Malone bested his 25.8 points per game). I mostly liked him, though, because he had a flat top, and for some reason I have always been fascinated by white men with flat tops. When I was plotting out all of the art that I wanted in this book, the only thing I knew for certain was that I definitely wanted a picture of Mullin, as a barber, holding court with other famous white men with flat tops. It’s on the next page.
3. Incorrect. It was Shaquille O’Neal.
4. Incorrect. It was Dikembe Mutombo.
5. Incorrect. It was Scottie Pippen.
6. Incorrect. It was John Stockton.
7. Incorrect. It was Dikembe Mutombo.
8. To be sure, there are actually three players in this chapter who were picked as memory heroes who were truly incredible basketball players. Maurice Cheeks is one of them. Patrick Ewing is the second. And Grant Hill, the player Kristen Ledlow wrote about, is the third.
9. Told ya.
WHICH NBA PLAYER’S GROUP ARE YOU JOINING IF THE PURGE BEGINS TONIGHT?
The Purge is a movie that came out in 2013. The foundation of its premise is as follows: In response to a crippling economic collapse, America creates “the purge,” a once-a-year event where, from 7 P.M. to 7 A.M., all crimes are legal, including murder. (The killing helps to eradicate the nation’s criminals and unemployed, we’re told, as poor people and homeless people become the main cohorts of hunted humans.) They say things in The Purge like, “We can afford protection, so we’ll be fine,” so I suspect the movie wanted to be taken seriously on a level higher than the action horror genre it marketed itself as—something about classism or the privilege of catharsis as virtue or the amorality of wealth, or whatever, I’m sure. Mostly, though, it was just a thing that you watched and when you were done you said something like, “That was probably a better idea for a movie than it was an actual movie.”1
But so what this thing is, the NBA Player Purge question—it’s not some sort of clever play on how the NBA is, in a manner of speaking, like The Purge. It’s not an extended analogy or euphemism or metaphor or anything like that because those things inevitably get clumsy and clunky after long enough. No, this ain’t that. This is the real, actual, literal thing.2 If America today adopted the purge and it was happening tonight and you had to join up with a squad led by an NBA player, current or retired, alive or dead, who’s the player you’re following?
I re-watched all three of The Purge movies before writing this. There were, by my measurement, approximately four kinds of people in them, so we’ll separate a bunch of recognizable NBA players into one of those four categories. And for those categories, let’s put in place that (a) any player you pick, you’ll receive him when he was at his strongest, and (b) only players from 1980 and forward are eligible.3
Additionally, there are three stats we’ll use to try and frame out each of the groups as a way to keep things at least semi-organized.
• ESTIMATED PERSONAL SURVIVAL TIME: It’s exactly what it sounds like it is: the estimated amount of time a person would survive during the purge. The stronger and more capable and more rugged and more dependable a person is, the longer you'll make it through the night following him. The weaker and less capable and less rugged and less dependable a person is . . . well . . . *does that thing where you drag your index finger across your throat*
• ESTIMATED SQUAD MEMBER SURVIVAL RATE: This refers to how many members of the group a player is leading would survive through the entire night under his watch. As a matter of consistency, let’s pretend like each group consists of (a) one NBA player and (b) six regular people following him.
• LIKELIHOOD HE’LL MURDER YOU: With this one we’re talking about what chance there is that the leader you’ve chosen ends up killing you for whatever reason he deems necessary.
Remember, the groupings aren’t rooted in any sort of basketball skill level or anything like that. That’s why someone like, say, the superstar debutante Steph Curry ends up way lower than someone like, say, 1994 Anthony Mason. I trust Steph Curry to destroy everyone on a basketball court. Off the court, I trust him to destroy a cashmere turtleneck or a suede long coat and that’s about it. Give me Anthony Mason to get me through the night if our lives are on the line.
This whole thing is already ridiculous.
GROUP 4: THE ANARCHISTS
SYMBOLIC FIGURE: Vernon Maxwell // 13 years in the league // Countless in-game fights and confrontations // During a game against the Trail Blazers in 1995, he walked into the stands and punched a fan in the face because the fan was making fun of him for playing poorly that evening.
These guys don’t get any of the stats I mentioned because this group is made up of players who are proactively engaging in Purge Night. They ain’t trying to save anyone. Matter of fact, it’s the exact opposite: These guys are the hunters. They don’t care too much about anything beyond watching you and all your friends bleed and cry.
There are a ton of players who’d be good in this role. My number-one guy is Matt Barnes, who has a whole fight highlight reel on YouTube, which is a thing a UFC fighter should have, not an NBA player. The most insane Matt Barnes story is him driving 95 miles to fight Derek Fisher, a former teammate of his (by then the coach of the Knicks), because Fisher and Barnes’s estranged wife were in a relationship.4 Do you even know how fucking crazy you have to be to do some shit like that? I mean, I understand getting real worked up over something, but you have to figure by, like, mile 15 or something of the drive, a normal person would’ve calmed down or chilled out. Not Barnes, though. He held tough. He got to mile 85 and was like, “Just 10 miles more to go before I get to fuck this guy up.” That’s the level of determination that keeps a guy who averages eight points per game in the league for more than a dozen years. He’d have a really great and productive night of purging, I’m sure of it.
More guys in this group: Anyone from the Bad Boys Era Pistons (not John Salley, though); nearly everyone from the Riley Era Knicks;5 Latrell Sprewell (duh); anyone who shot over 50 percent from three point range for an entire season;6 Arvydas Sabonis (he for some reason always looked like he was really into pile drivers); Kevin McHale; anyone from the 72–10 Bulls; anyone from the 2001 Lakers; and Bruce Bowen (he was running around legit kicking people during his career, so he’s here, too). (Quick sidebar: Bruce Bowen’s most egregious kicks, ranked: 4. Bruce Bowen kicks Amar’e Stoudemire in the Achilles during a game against the Suns in 2007; 3. Bruce Bowen kicks Ray Allen in the back during a game against the Sonics in 2006; 2. Bruce Bowen kicks Chris Paul in the chest after Paul falls down during a game against the Hornets in 2008; 1. Bruce Bowen kicks Wally Szczerbiak in the face during a game against the Timberwolves in 2002. IN THE ACTUAL FUCKING F
ACE, haha.)
More guys in this group: Metta World Peace (imagine how embarrassing it’d be to show up in heaven and have to tell people you were killed by someone with the last name World Peace); Kevin Garnett; Reggie Evans (anyone who’s grabbed Chris Kaman by the dick is good to go here); Chris Kaman (anyone who’s been grabbed by the dick by Reggie Evans is good to go here); Kendrick Perkins (I’m fairly confident Kendrick Perkins thought The Purge was a documentary); Art Long (he allegedly punched a horse in the face in 1995 four times during a traffic stop7); DeMarcus Cousins (he is killing SO MANY white people); George Gervin; Charles Shack-leford;8 Vernon Maxwell (I’m mentioning him again because I want to tell you about the time in 1994 when he waved an unregistered gun around during an argument in a Luby’s parking lot in Houston, which seems like the exact kind of thing somebody who’d be really good at purging would do); anybody from the Jail Blazers Era of the Trail Blazers; Brad Miller; Danny Ainge (quietly a real killer); and Jerry Stackhouse.9
GROUP 3: THE “MAKE SURE YOUR FINAL WISHES ARE IN ORDER” GROUP
SYMBOLIC FIGURE: Steph Curry // 8 years in the league10 // Endorsement deal with Express.
I love Steph. I truly do. He plays basketball in a way that feels less like he’s a basketball player and more like he’s a classically trained pianist. It’s beautiful and it’s transcendent. During a crucial part of a gigantic game, I trust him completely and entirely. But during a Purge Night, man, I don’t know. Maybe it’s because of his soft eyes or his pouty lips. Maybe it’s because he flutters around the court like a butterfly. Maybe it’s because he did a water-filter commercial (killers don’t care about mineral filtration). I just find it real hard to say that Purge Night ends any other way than with the insides of his body on the outside of his body, you know what I’m saying. Bad news for anyone in his group.
• ESTIMATED PERSONAL SURVIVAL TIME: Less than two hours.
• ESTIMATED SQUAD MEMBER SURVIVAL RATE: Zero of the six people in his group are surviving the night.
• LIKELIHOOD HE’LL MURDER YOU: It’s low. You’re looking at a 5 to 10 percent chance, but it won’t be an on-purpose kill. If it happens, it’ll be completely by accident, like maybe you two are in a dark hallway and you call his name and he gets startled and accidentally shoots you in the chest.
Some other guys in this group: Vince Carter (half-man, half-purged); Gilbert Arenas (smh11); Patrick Ewing (in all likelihood, Ewing belongs in Group 2, but I saw him at a Best Buy in 2005 a few days before Christmas and I waved hello to him and he ignored me so I’m putting him here because that hurt my feelings12); the guys from Space Jam who had their talents stolen by the aliens; 13 Smush Parker (poor Smush14); the 1994 version of the Sonics; anyone who had a cocaine problem in the 1980s;15 Ricky Davis (Is there a way to get a triple-double while you’re getting purged?); everyone who was on the 2002 Sacramento Kings except for Mike Bibby16 and Bobby Jackson;17 Tracy McGrady (he probably wouldn’t even make it out of the first round of the purge); Rik Smits (I could be argued the other way on this pick); Bryon Russell and Craig Ehlo (it seems like a good rule is: Anyone who was on the wrong end of an iconic play automatically gets a Group 3 designation); Wally Szczerbiak (You’re seriously going to trust your life to someone named “Wally”?); Luke Ridnour (He’s like if you were able to siphon all of the grit away from Kirk Hinrich); Penny Hardaway (a more handsome Tracy McGrady); Manute Bol (a less handsome Hasheem Thabeet); Amar’e Stoudemire; Mark Madsen (surprise landing here for the Mad Dog); Emeka Okafor; Kerry Kittles; Kris Humphries (He couldn’t handle a Kardashian, how’s he going to handle the purge?); Larry Hughes; Bob Sura; Andris Biedrins; Clyde Drexler;18 Nick Anderson; Charles Smith; the 2007 version of the Dallas Mavericks; and Adam Morrison.
GROUP 2: THE “IT’S A TOSS-UP” GROUP
SYMBOLIC FIGURE: James Harden // 8 years in the league19// Can be absolutely devastating at times, but can also be a bit of a toad at other times.
The thing about Group 2 is that there are two versions of guys who fall into this category. They are:
1. The guys who would earnestly work their very hardest to keep everyone in their groups alive and they’d mostly be successful but sometimes they wouldn’t be, and a good example here would be someone like Chauncey Billups or maybe Antonio McDyess.20 Then there are . . .
2. The guys who, if they applied all of their effort and energy to keeping everyone in their groups alive then they absolutely could, but they’ll never do that so they’ll end up losing a portion of the people they’re supposed to be protecting, and for this group a good and obvious example is someone like James Harden. Anyone he keeps alive during Purge Night is always going to only ever be the supplemental result of him trying to keep himself alive.
• ESTIMATED PERSONAL SURVIVAL TIME: Six to eight hours, possibly the entire night if Harden gets lucky.
• ESTIMATED SQUAD MEMBER SURVIVAL RATE: Half of the six people in his group are surviving the night and the other half are dying, due to either inability or neglect on the leader’s part.
• LIKELIHOOD HE MURDERS YOU: There’s a 60 percent chance that James Harden (or anyone in his subcategory) murders you in an attempt to save himself. There’s a zero percent chance any of the guys from the other subcategory here murder you.
Some other Guys in Group 2, designated by whether they’re a Good Group 2 Guy or a Bad Group 2 Guy: Karl Malone (bad); Rafer Alston (good); Antoine Walker (good, but bad with money); Jason Kidd (good, but bad with hair dye); Dwight Howard (bad); Chris Childs (good—I am forever in debt to Chris Childs for punching Kobe Bryant, so even if I knew I was going to die joining up with him, I’d still do it out of respect); Stephon Marbury (bad, but good with eyebrows); Shawn Kemp (bad, and worse with condoms); Matt Geiger (good); Isaiah “J.R.” Rider (good); Chris Duhon (good); Doug Christie (good—Doug Christie one time punched Rick Fox so, same as Chris Childs, I would follow him right the fuck off a cliff if he asked me to); Fred Hoiberg (good); Cuttino Mobley (good); Rajon Rondo (good, but maybe bad, I’m not sure because sometimes he seems like the type of guy who would give his life to save a teammate’s life and other times he seems like the type of guy who would sell one of his teammates to human traffickers if the opportunity arose); Tyson Chandler (good); Jamaal Tinsley (good21); Bonzi Wells (bad); Shareef Abdur-Rahim (good); Rip Hamilton (good); Dominique Wilkins (good); and Chris Dudley (good).
GROUP 1: THE “REST EASY, MY FRIEND” GROUP
SYMBOLIC FIGURE: Ben Wallace // 16 years in the league // Had a body like it’d been carved out of the side of a mountain, except the mountain wasn’t a normal mountain, it was a mountain made of Ford F-250s // Was somehow the most important player on a team that won a championship despite not being able to shoot from more than 2 feet away from the rim.22
You’re surviving the night.
• ESTIMATED PERSONAL SURVIVAL TIME: At least 11 hours, though likely the entire purge.
• ESTIMATED SQUAD MEMBER SURVIVAL RATE: All six of the people in his group are surviving.
• LIKELIHOOD HE MURDERS YOU: There’s a 3 percent chance he ends up being the one who murders you, though if he does it’ll be because it was the one and only way to make sure that everyone else he was in charge of lived. In that sense, it’d be one of those honor killings, really.
Some other Guys in Group 1: Xavier McDaniel (he got into a fight with Charles Oakley and did not lose any of his arms or any of his legs, which is basically the same as them dropping the Hulk tens of thousands of feet to his death in The Avengers and him just shaking it off); Allen Iverson (all the tiny players in the league—Muggsy, Nate Robinson, Spud Webb, J.J. Barea, Isaiah Thomas, Earl Boykins,23 etc.—are Group 1 guys); Gary Payton (he tried to bust Vernon Maxwell’s head open with a 10-pound weight during a locker-room fight WHILE THEY WERE ON THE SAME TEAM); John Stockton (like if a rattlesnake was a human); Delonte West (was one time arrested while driving a three-wheel motorcycle on a freeway in possession of two handguns, one shotgun, a knife, and 100 shotgun rounds,
so yeah, I think he’d keep you safe); Alonzo Mourning; Udonis Haslem (I trust Udonis Haslem so fucking much and I’m not all the way certain why); Kenyon Martin; Steve Nash (it could be argued he’s a Group 2 guy); Larry Bird; Tim Duncan (duh); Ray Allen; Pistol Pete and Andrei “AK-47” Kirilenko (any players who have gun-based nicknames are surviving); Dikembe Mutombo (anyone whose nickname is a landform is surviving); and Baron Davis.
Let’s do some more, because I want you to have options: David Robinson (you’re talking a 7-foot-tall hunk of muscle that’s been trained by the military); Sam Cassell; Bobby Jackson; Chris Mullin; Young Charles Barkley; Stephen Jackson (the two things I will always remember Stephen Jackson for are (1) the regularity with which he delivered needlessly no-look passes to teammates and (2) charging into the stands to help Ron Artest fight someone who’d thrown a cup at him during a break in play); Larry Johnson (good with disguises); Thabo Sefolosha (not going to lie: I trust him a whole, whole bunch because I think he’s very handsome); Steve Blake (another guy I trust and I’m not certain why); Jason Collins; Mario Elie; Theo Ratliff and LaPhonso Ellis (for some reason, these two guys exist in my head as the same person); Jermaine O’Neal; Kevin Duckworth; Dale Davis and Antonio Davis (they come as a 2-for-1 special); Scott Skiles (secretly one of the 15 toughest guys in the history of the NBA); Corliss Williamson; and Paul Pierce.