Jeremy Lin and Us 02/22/2012
Posted by Vaughn in Basketball, Editorial, Global, Sport Culture.Tags: Jeremy Lin, New York Knicks
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Photo Credit: Getty Images
And a little child shall lead them…
-Isiah 11:6
A Vessel and Looking-Glass for Our Ideals
WATCHING the accidental fortune that found Jeremy Lin’s personal showcase become a harbinger for the New York Knicks’ own serendipity — following a poor start amid lofty pre-season expectations and injuries to the team’s superstars — has proven to be a screed for the narratives concerning the best of our society, and what we desire to be generally true about opportunity and excellence in America, even as we realize in the back of our minds that all we symbolically project onto Lin’s emergence isn’t necessarily true for all. Nonetheless, Lin does represent many of the tenets of our sociopolitical history, and the ideals we tout as central to the American ethic: He is an example of the hard-working underdog story of Horatio Alger and similar tales told over and over; those about a mother and father or grandparents coming from the old country, to find in one generation their child or grandchild to be a wild success. He is ultimately what debates about immigration are about, in some sense, answering the irrationally xenophobic question, “Will they assimilate?”; resoundingly.
In the personal, sporting context, he is an atomization of 2010′s Butler Bulldogs and 2011′s Virginia Commonwealth University Rams, who impelled us to tune in to March Madness in recent springs — as Lin has, this winter — hoping to see that just once more in the smallest slice of time, that the guys or teams least expected to win, actually win. And regardless of Lin’s ancestry, which has undoubtedly fueled some of the novelty, any modicum of sporting success surfacing from obscurity would have engendered great support and produced a frenzy of this level in New York, because it is the central node city for our media, and that we all happen to love underdogs because of how antithetical their stories are to our reality; and that the expected always happening doesn’t allow for the sense of adventure we all need in our lives. Further, without that “vicariousness,” it would imply many of us are doomed to remain “little guys,” as we mostly are, a reality many cannot stomach. (Hence, striving to be “Facebook Famous” or “Tumblr Famous” or the prominent rise of horribly conceived reality-shows.) His surrounding story is made of the same stuff Hollywood produces in bulk, those things which make grown men shed a tear during Rudy: that of a dogged persistence and an iron-will determination to overcome obstacles both real and those created by the perceptions in the hive-mind of a society (e.g. Asian-American kids from Harvard, just don’t excel at professional basketball), and which become real, because of those who are willing to buy them wholesale.
Lin is not just about the Horatio Alger myth, he is also the personification of the ideas of merit, skill and opportunity dancing together; that underlying belief — skill plus opportunity – being so powerful an agent for the most critical management decisions; from who gains the internship that changes a life, to those who move from middle management to the executive boardroom; it enraptures us all, implying that it is not just Lin, but all of us, are just a shot away from our own true greatness. And, of course, he has become the unifying cultural imprint expressed by the many Asian fans of various national backgrounds and is the embodiment of the pan-Asian-American cultural identity that came about as a product of governmental policies in the latter-half of the 20th Century, which included a diverse body of ethnicities into a uniformly protected class. Lin is about all of those things and Asian stereotypes and stereotypes in general, both positive and negative, which rule our brains in ways that they shouldn’t.
Stereotypes and Us
I grew up the only black kid on a block in Southern California in a military town near Los Angeles. And so my world was diverse, even if my block wasn’t. The best basketball player on that predominantly white, middle-class suburban block where every boy played all sports was a Chinese-American kid, four years my senior named Eric. He was my first in-person exposure to the kind of basketball characteristically played by Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas that is politically correctly given the euphemism of “playground ball.” (But is cognitively associated to black style.)
Eric’s game was an outgrowth and expression of a style originated in the black community — and what is so well-chronicled in the famed writer John Edgar Wideman’s memoir Hoop Roots; of a fluid and aggressive, improvisational attacking style recognizable to anyone in basketball culture. Eric didn’t have any favored spots nor a schematic program that he played under, unlike many hyper-coached kids. He simply was versatile and did many different things at once. His jumpshot was a streamlined silhouette with a rainbow arc, and because we generally congregated at a house with an eight and a half-foot breakaway rim attached to a garage, he dunked in various ways off the dribble and with alley-oops: sideways with one hand, reverse with two or over the top, often off a dribble. His was a highly-effective and personally expressive game. So it was never a surprise for me to see a Jeremy Lin or Japan’s Yuta Tabuse, years ago, because my experience in the communities I grew up in, in California, and later on a base in Japan; it just wasn’t odd to find many skilled Asian-American basketball players.
This was the 1990s and basketball was still seen as generally a black and (somewhat) white dominated sport, with very little diversity outside of that binary scheme. (The European invasion had just begun.) And within that bifurcation, it was well in the process of becoming even “blacker” than ever, thanks to perceptions, a cultural legacy that began in the 1950s, the demographic influx of urban kids playing and E.S.P.N. selling and popularizing the street game and playground aesthetic creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. By the time I grew up to become a decent basketball player in 7th grade, I’d begun to notice something, though: some of the Asian kids I played against in elementary had begun to stop playing.
There were still plenty of Asian kids on the basketball courts at lunch in middle school, but not as many as there were during elementary. (And I didn’t count myself or another kid who was also black and Asian, by the name of Soweto, and who was then the best of our middle school bunch.) This was an awakening to my own Asian-mixed heritage being subsumed by my ostensible blackness. I “passed,” as they say in the black community, a term usually reserved for those fairer skinned receiving the social benefits of appearing white or “passing” as fully white, and this gave me an opportunity to see my “blackness” and all the social assumptions that came with it, for once, working as a plus.
I don’t know that it was specifically that the Asian kids I had known from elementary school had lost interest; they were just less inclined to play it seemed, because of the social constructs of the game becoming perhaps optically unwelcoming to them. The overarching culture had begun to tell them they were meant to be something different, and maybe they felt less comfortable in a setting where it was falsely believed that they had some biological disadvantage. They still loved the game, I could see. They still wore the hoops’ sneakers and the Hornets, Bulls, Spurs and Lakers’ branded apparel. They just didn’t play at school during the free periods. Possibly, the preponderance of black kids playing the game began to support a particular pernicious stereotype of young black men, and its corollary that is ascribed to Asian men: that of black men being hyper-masculine and possessed of the physical and less of the brain. And so maybe these Asian boys who grew up in the age of Nike marketing and Michael Jordan, adopted that other side of the coin much like their black male counterparts, and had unknowingly limited their experience because of it.
That is all supposition, but what comes out as an effect of whats-proper-for-your-group stuff is a sense of ethnic impostors, whether its underrepresented students at elite universities, minority employees in corporate America or young women in engineering departments and historically male-dominated fields; all of whom are often questioned for just being out of the believed respective norm. Honestly, I could never know why some of the Asian kids I knew stopped playing the game at school, it could be that they didn’t want to get dirty playing on the blacktop. But I assume the weight of the culture had pushed some of them to the sidelines; both the arcing culture outside of ethnicity, but also within Asian society and black-dominated urban culture. It is summed up politely in the idea of conventional wisdom (but also a form of prejudice), I believe, as David Stern, commissioner of the N.B.A., talked about the euphemism, “conventional wisdom,” when asked about Jeremy Lin saying:
The conventional wisdom is that you know everyone who’s going to be coming into your league by the time of the McDonald’s High School All-American game. It’s so much fun to see some unpredictability thrown in, and I hasten to add, it’s been five games only. So we’ll see. I think it’s wonderful.
Stern cuts to the very heart of the matter there, that there is a conventional wisdom in basketball and in our lives in general: of what we can and can’t do because society tells us so by the various subcultures we inhabit, the mindsets that have become set in institutionally, and those things are both internalized individually and externally imposed on people and their social group classifications. They are the same things that tell us constantly, but informally, what scientists should look like or C.E.O.s or doctors or lawyers, or N.B.A. ball players.
And it hurts us all, ultimately, because while stereotypes simplify the world and remove some of the complexity from life; which is why stereotypes and even why the Favorite v. Underdog dialectic exists and develops a social reality, through acceptance by those stereotyped groups and the support of those too lazy to not generalize. While it’s true that it seems that girls and minorities who are not Asian tend to not be attracted to the sciences for study, there was also Marie Curie, Florence Sabin, Benjamin Banneker, David Satcher, or Neal deGrass Tyson. All of whom are seen as exceptions to their gender or race, but if we never lived in a world so hasty to presume, they would never be seen as anything other than exceptional, in the most fundamental sense.
Jeremy Lin
All I can think about in watching all of this alternate universe telling of an infinitesimally short career relegated to the scrap heap of basketball history, before it even began, and has now created the Legend of Lin — a kid who went from wondering whether he was going to make it in the league, to a cat now in the midst of straight-up superstar-levels of fandom and similarly stratospheric play — is how he is also symbolic of the guys I play against at the local university or the park. He represents the kids I grew up with and who stuck it out; guys who played organized ball in obscurity in many times Asian leagues — which are probably a bigger deal than those outside of the Asian community know — but yet their skill was honed and tightened by the toughness on the playgrounds against all comers.
And that’s just how it is you come from what they call “nowhere,” as Lin did. It is because when you are a minority in a sport or society; you are at-once part of that specific society, as well as apart from it. But his road and journey is “somewhere,” it just never particularly fit the basketball orthodoxy in much the way the William’s sisters rise from Compton to dominate a white [and monied] sport such as tennis, never fit prescriptions. For Lin and pro-hoops though, it was the exact opposite, where basketball’s proving ground is actually places like Compton and not a high school in Palo Alto, in the shadows of Stanford; in a town more known for Silicon Valley’s computers and the software engineering industry than it is for high-level prep basketball. And his Palo Alto team won its division’s state championship but, nonetheless, that yielded not many offers to play Division I, big-time, college hoops, which left him deciding to play at Harvard, since choices like Berkeley and Stanford, academic and basketball powerhouses, never came a knocking. And because, obviously, getting an education in economics would be paramount, because “real basketball” — the kind not usually played in the Ivies* — seemed out of the question.
And then it’s getting drafted by his hometown team — Lin’s dream — to then only get cut by them, but not before playing for the out of the league, Reno Big Horns. All that time he kept getting better, kept getting up more jumpers on his own and no one was noticing, but he did end up with the Houston Rockets at the beginning of the year, only to get cut again. The Knicks and the City, the only real American city it seems, was his last stop; a place where they say, “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” And because of all of this, and for the fact that I know Lin’s environments more intimately than I could ever know that enclosure and life of prominent A.A.U. squads and high-schools with Nike contracts and life being recruited by elite hoops universities, who have the same level of scrutiny as the Los Angeles Lakers, he truly means something to me for all of those things about our ideals: That value system that tells us about the freedom in America to become something at the hands of our own skill; if the powers that be are willing, in even the slightest.
I can only think that Lin may be the small breakthrough in the minds for my culture/s, on the court and off the court, since basketball culture in the Asian-American society is quite large and there are many skilled people overlooked for myriad reasonings every single day in our world. It’s all so hard to quantify, but I grew up in Asian communities all of my life, within the intersections Lin has fought from, and I have been as much Asian in a black world of basketball and black in an Asian world overseas, or black in a white and Asian world of the academy, and so I feel a robust kinship, and for me and all of those things I’ve been, there has never been a figure that has coalesced those experiences as Jeremy Lin, in his excellence.
* Princeton Basketball, an Ivy League school, perhaps the Ivy League school, has made many notable runs in the N.C.A.A. Tournament and won it all in 1965. Further, it has provided the basketball community with great contributions, such as the vaunted “Princeton Offense.” Most notably, one of the N.B.A.’s best “50 Greatest” was a Princeton Tiger: former senator and New York Knicks’ star, Bill Bradley.
The Fleer Sticker Project 08/01/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Editorial, Random Card Scans, Sport Culture, Youth Culture.Tags: Fleer, Sports Cards, Sports Memorabilia
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Photo Credit: Fleer Sticker Project
ON MY TUMBLR, I used to post scanned basketball cards, and on my even more intermittent basketball blog: Searching for Harold Miner, I would get into the finer points of card collecting; perhaps one of only a few still-somewhat respectable childhood hobbies that you can practice as an adult, if only because of the mortgage-sized sums the pieces of cardboard can fetch and maybe the clientele of sports’ auction warehouses happening to include C.E.O.s and money-raking celebrities. Since my first scans, a number of more dedicated Tumblrs came about to carry the torch and rep those card scan enthusiasts out there like Oakley and Allen, Fat Shawn Kemp and later Factory Set; a torch that I barely even tried to lift. (I actually kinda regret this, really.)
But no one so far has gotten into the most granular aspects, the very atom of collecting: the absolute “nerding-out” on rare items on a regular basis, than a blogspot known as the Fleer Sticker Project. This is because, primarily, (my speculation), all of those Tumblrs’ authors seemed to have grown up in the ’90s amid the marketing explosion for sports and sports memorabilia, and “rarity” then was based mostly on limited edition printing and what not, unlike what it means for the majority of pre-’90s early baseball and football cards and sports sticker collecting discussions that go on at Fleer Sticker Project, where rarity means oddball things and items that have since been mostly disposed of, from a time where collecting wasn’t in vogue.
What is particularly special about the blog is the writer’s ability to find entire sets or companions of things, and fully give readers the history behind them, and then those stories behind the story. This is a place where talk of proof sheets, card variations — Billy Ripken’s “fuck face” bat card anyone? — and the spotting of the art departments’ foul-ups and adjustments are given center stage. But there is also the dissection of serendipitous treasures like, say, the first picture of Reggie Jackson in an Orieols’ uni. It’s really not just about the content here, it’s about the actual dig to get to the content, exposing the history behind the pictures, promo items, autographs and errors; and it is why I am reading.
Check the Fleer Sticker Project [Here]
Reflecting on the ‘Magic Man’ 04/25/2011
Posted by Vaughn in Basketball, Editorial, Global.add a comment
Photo Credit: The Grand Archives
I ONCE wrote about Magic Johnson here discussing that day, now two decades ago, when he became the A.I.D.S. struggle’s most well-known face. In that post, I talked about the enormity of his “reveal,” though I failed to use that very Hollywood term. And the (pseudo) writer in me, having already made the connection between Magic and the quintessentially Los Angeles’ lifestyle he had led and its consequences, is now filled with a bit of lament about it. Because “reveal” is perfectly suited to a guy who’s named “Magic” and the term works in a couple of ways; weaving itself between being a connective metaphor for Magic’s given nom de guerre, but also his ostensible connection to Hollywood and movie-making, playing in a city where even the movie stars were fans of his and Johnson’s life played out like one of their scripts.
And the term is also, fittingly, a descriptive, for the specific moment in a screenplay when a crucial point in the plot is uncovered. It just also happens to be exquisitely indicative of the way he played, like an illusionist holding cards close to his vest and then with a poof of smoke and some sleight-of-hand, he did something astounding; like surfacing the full potential of an unassuming teammate like Kurt Rambis, or becoming a dominant scorer in his own right, as he did in 1986-87, when he averaged 23.9 points per game. Really, was there ever a nickname as great as Magic’s? It just seems so natural, when one looks at his charmed life, even when in basketball crisis or personal crisis, he found his way out of the rough patches with unmatched élan. He was a perfectly crafted Hollywood protagonist: part Golden Boy and part redemptive fallen hero.
That “reveal” of his two decades ago was, just like in a movie, the moment where things really, truly, took off for him personally and unexpectedly. From out of a virtual death sentence, came a new man. He’d become an ambassador for A.I.D.S. education because of it and a community leader for Los Angeles, not to mention, later fashioning himself into an even more remarkable businessman, teaming with Corporate America to re-vitalize the “hood.” And he somehow retained nearly the same media profile as he had when he was basketball’s young High Priest of elegance. Magic after his playing days, has had probably the best life any athlete could dream of, circumventing the traditional arc of superstar athletes, who live out their young days in glory and by the time they arrive at middle-aged adulthood, are mostly forgotten.
His Secondary Peak 07/22/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Basketball, Editorial, Kobe, Lakers.add a comment
Photo Credit: SLAM, February 2002
HONESTLY, even though I am a fan, I am surprised that he is here now: on top winning, the way he is. The rocky mid-career controversies that he was saddled with by vocal fans and the media, and those controversies that he created for himself in the court of public opinion, have disappeared into the dark of night. Or they have been eradicated by the sunshine of his winning; and winning big. It’s just so “counter-factual” that he got here, back to the very top, and through that “problem” that I can’t bear to speak of, because of its ugly implications and the tragedy already visited on both parties; and re-visited if the allegation was ever found to be true. ”Colorado, summer 2003,” just seems so far from now. So removed. That string of words reads like a release date for some big movie event, except that it marks a blemish on the memory and dulls his luster, and if you are of a cynical mind or of the “Kobe Haters” phalanx that has cleaved basketball fans down the middle, perhaps it represents a time when a man who you believe is guilty of an unspeakable act was left unscathed by the law. (But even I don’t believe that a measurable amount of people, who despise him, believe this.)
And regardless of your feelings toward him: good, bad or indifferent, considering all which washes over the Kobe Bryant legacy, marketing reputation and name, are you not also surprised about his rehabilitated stature now? Because, there were times at the middle of his career that it was palpable, that hate: people were wishing for him to fail. People were wishing for no clear, justified reason, other than what they deemed to be his “arrogance,” far before Colorado even happened and stirred the pot, and then more so after. It was so thick in the air that it has taken time to even slightly subside; to the point that arguments continue to abound about where he stands in the current league, in the past decade and alongside the current generation of under-30 players and the history of the game. It’s a special form of diminution, saying, no matter what, he will not be given his due. He just can’t be at the very top, uncontested. Despite his longevity and in spite of all his winning.
Still he finds a way to slog through it, and he continues to perform at an extraordinary level knowing that “history will judge him kindly,” to borrow a philosophical line from the last Bush presidency. There are still caveats placed upon his accolades and his portfolio of accomplishments: “he had Shaq,” “he still isn’t shooting 50 percent from the field,” and so on. Writers dissect everything from his coach’s demeanor towards him in a crucial play, to how his teammates react to his displays of emotion. “That’s not how I remember Number-23 in red, doing it,” is actually the yardstick for him now. Yet people fail to see that the comparison and that shadow casted over him, actually means that he’s right there with “Him,” the other guy. They are comparing “like” things, because they want to divine a difference. And the differences are wide, supposedly. But are they, really? Has anyone else on the perimeter remained as consistently good as he has for this long, other than “23,” in recent memory? Kobe only gets better as a basketball player, even with the long minutes he’s logged. (Almost more than Michael Jordan at 40-years-old.)
The first crop of generational talents that he was placed in the context of and competed against — his cohort of Vince Carter, Tracy McGrady and Allen Iverson — the contemporaries whom he was originally compared to, have all fallen. At one point, all of those players were in the discussion of “being better than Kobe Bryant.” But their impact has been limited in the last four years, and his game still rises. Bryant just improves, outside of the statistical. His I.Q. goes up over those same years, his post-game becomes an absolute terror (though he doesn’t exploit it enough), he inexplicably becomes even more clutch and he manages the games far better than before. He is the standard-bearer for the young guys, now, whom people swiftly look to use to bury him, prematurely: “Durant is coming,” “LeBron is better,” “Wade is better,” but they’ve been saying this for years, that his demise is impending. In the spring, when he was hobbled by a knee that required an operation, a now-permanently busted index finger on his right shooting hand and he was struggling to play to his level, in the midst of another deep playoff run, critics were saying that his decline had finally come. And with all of that, he still wins it all? He found a new way to shoot, mid-season, with that tore-up finger and his percentages ticked back up, and he found a way to get lift from a knee that wasn’t providing any flexion. He just used his guile to stay the course.
Bryant is still more feared than any of those other contemporary guys he is measured against. A decade after a visible contingent dedicated to his discounting, five years after they’d begun to say, “He’s no LeBron James,” or “Nash was clearly the M.V.P that season”; the year when Kobe Bryant put up historical numbers the entire 2005-2006 campaign, but the award was still given to Nash. It’s a bit funny to me now that his résumé and longevity is beginning to create a special kind of begrudging respect. I don’t know of another player of his caliber in the history of basketball that has had to earn so much from so many, for things that are perceived about him. And to have to do so with such a high level of performance. Bryant wasn’t ever mediocre in the game, he’s always performed to the level of a top-three player in the league for the past ten years, but his doubters’ opinions were stronger than his accomplishments.
His beefing with a universally loved center in Los Angeles years ago, and a coach who had to earn the respect and trust of that center, is partly to blame; due to that coach’s method of publicly enlisting the media to meet his ends (unwittingly) with frequent excoriations of Bryant’s play, even though it was individually spectacular. Shaquille O’ Neal wasn’t exactly the best teammate, it turns out now, and the many problems he’s had co-existing with other superstar guards or just with the franchises themselves, clears Bryant’s name a bit, but back then it all fell on his doorstep. Then there is the criticism he took for not playing team ball, which is ludicrous when placed under the microscope. At which point, was he guilty of this? Was it some time during the Lakers’ run to numerous playoffs and N.B.A. Finals appearances and the three straight championships, that he failed to play “team ball”? It seems to me to be a non-sequitur, when you compare his team’s winning percentages through those years and that criticism of him. He literally had the ball in his hands the majority of that time in the early 2000s, as the orchestrator of the offense and the go-to-guy for three Lakers’ championship rosters. So it’s safe to assume that if he wasn’t playing team ball, then those teams wouldn’t have won so much. Unless those teams won in spite of Kobe, which I find hard to believe.
Look at that picture, far above, with Bryant lording over those three trophies. It was taken in 2002, with Kobe heading into the 2002-2003 season. He was then looking to help the Lakers win a fourth straight championship. He failed, they failed, and that terrible summer would become the confirmation for the “haters” as the events in Colorado would happen. When the news broke, I was beyond shocked, but I suspended judgement. At my university, the politics of it had even played out in a sociology classroom, with the female professor making frequent mentions of it and filtering the news story through a kind of Jim Rome listener way, only a bit more erudite. (She was an admitted Jim Rome listener.) And for all of her lefty, crunchy, granola leanings, I could hear her bias against him. That professor was and is a person I respect, and so I felt that if she could automatically feel a certain way about him — placing the years of her study of male-female dynamics onto the Kobe Template — then the young man would be damned to eternity, whether he was guilty or not. “That’s just how the mind works,” I thought. It will just develop a narrative or adopt one, and from that point it takes a conscious effort to remove the narrative or re-write it.
And so forgive me, if I’m the only one who is surprised of his steady comeback and that he has five championships now and is soon going for a sixth, especially when it seemed that he was going to burnout as the sole star on a team which couldn’t even make the playoffs, and all that he lost in marketability during those tumultuous years has been seized again. I was aware of how very good he was during those hyper-scrutinized years, so very good, but I also knew that in the media landscape it is perception that becomes reality, not truth, and certainly not rational analysis. He has revised his story better than anyone I know. Under great fire he somehow became the epitome of what you want in a player in the media’s eye: hard-working, dedicated to his craft, with an indomitable will.
He shot a putrid percentage in Game 7 of the 2010 N.B.A. Finals and his team still won, because in a tough, deciding game where almost everyone shot poorly, he knew that more possessions would be key. And so Kobe Bryant would run down from his position on the perimeter and fight in the paint to get rebounds: 15 rebounds, almost a team’s worth. But that was and is always Kobe Bryant, an inveterate believer of his ability and himself, with a desire to meet his destiny to be “great.” It shines through his story, looking at those rocky years that he had endured, and when he was vilified, that he is a testament to the kind of traits you’d want in anyone in any role: survivability, intestinal fortitude, tenacity, perseverance and a single-minded tunnel-vision focus to reach their goals. Here’s to the power of Bryant’s unyielding spirit within tremendous adversity, and a congratulations on his continuing fight to win. Championship number six may just be on the way, providing a new bullet point for a résumé that will, ironically, resoundingly vindicate an already magnificent career.
‘Sports as a Distraction in a Democracy’ 06/14/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Editorial, Global, Journalism, Politics, Sport Culture.comments closed
If the Cameron government is bad news for those seeking radical change, the World Cup is even worse. It reminds us of what is still likely to hold back such change long after the coalition is dead. If every rightwing thinktank came up with a scheme to distract the populace from political injustice and compensate them for lives of hard labour, the solution in each case would be the same: football. No finer way of resolving the problems of capitalism has been dreamed up, bar socialism. And in the tussle between them, football is several light years ahead.
Modern societies deny men and women the experience of solidarity, which football provides to the point of collective delirium. Most car mechanics and shop assistants feel shut out by high culture; but once a week they bear witness to displays of sublime artistry by men for whom the word genius is sometimes no mere hype. Like a jazz band or drama company, football blends dazzling individual talent with selfless teamwork, thus solving a problem over which sociologists have long agonised. Co-operation and competition are cunningly balanced. Blind loyalty and internecine rivalry gratify some of our most powerful evolutionary instincts.
I HAVE an undying love for sports and sports’ culture: One look at this blogs many entries on the subject (or even the entry just below on Bo Jackson), is positive proof of this. But as the spectacle of the World Cup is upon us and much of the world is focusing their minds on the global event — while almost every region’s market and government is in some level of nearing-epic economic disarray, or slogging through a perpetually moribund state since the global financial crisis hit in 2008, and most often both — I’d like to shift some of my focus and attention to a recent The Guardian blog piece by famed British literary critic, Terry Eagleton, that posits a theory similar to one I had first heard Noam Chomsky espouse in the documentary companion to his Manufacturing Consent.
Chomsky, one of the most influential and dissenting public intellectuals of our time, is a man who originally boldly outlined a theory that sport is a national obsession in many nations, precisely because it both creates solidarity and commonality among people (and nationalism), but it also provides a tremendous distraction — read: cover — from the things that truly matter, e.g. the daily minutia of governing, a government’s misdeeds and so on, and it therefore assists the “powers-that-be” to proceed in their dominance and exploitation of the locked-out many. The sheer amount of coverage given to sports and its almost universal following, and the very way in which it constantly creeps into the culture and our daily lives, versus the dying newspaper culture and un-biased* and “unopinionated” news outlets in general (online, over the airwaves and in print), is not exactly refuting this idea of genuine civic engagement being trounced by the spectacle of sport, and the media’s undue importance placed upon it.
Men and women whose jobs make no intellectual demands can display astonishing erudition when recalling the game’s history or dissecting individual skills. Learned disputes worthy of the ancient Greek forum fill the stands and pubs. Like Bertolt Brecht‘s theatre, the game turns ordinary people into experts.
This vivid sense of tradition contrasts with the historical amnesia of postmodern culture, for which everything that happened up to 10 minutes ago is to be junked as antique. There is even a judicious spot of gender-bending, as players combine the power of a wrestler with the grace of a ballet dancer. Football offers its followers beauty, drama, conflict, liturgy, carnival and the odd spot of tragedy, not to mention a chance to travel to Africa and back while permanently legless. Like some austere religious faith, the game determines what you wear, whom you associate with, what anthems you sing and what shrine of transcendent truth you worship at. Along with television, it is the supreme solution to that age-old dilemma of our political masters: what should we do with them when they’re not working?
While I have no reason to believe that there is some nefarious movement in the darkened sectors of the society or the world to say, use football and other sports in America, or soccer throughout the world, as a detour from politics, in order to fill attention spans and distract the society from the fact that they have no jobs or are saddled with dysfunctional political systems; one should ask, if we could just make our election days as important as the Super Bowl, with perhaps wall-to-wall commercials encouraging people to vote and even create an eventful feel, if not an actual national holiday — to relieve the many people who are working of navigating the logistics and scheduling issues in voting — would we be a bit better off politically and as a result economically? Since there would maybe be a better informed populace, as a result, if more attention was paid by everyone and voting and participation became as ubiquitous as that seen in sports culture, during an election cycle? [...] Would we be a better watchdog against government malfeasance?
Were we all too distracted from the discourse of politics and its intertwine with capitalism, to see that the top one and two percent were robbing the till everywhere over a number of decades, as we focused on whatever sporting season it was, our favorite teams/clubs and a generally disposable popular culture, just a bit too much and not holding our politicians accountable, and not forcing them to truly look at economic policy outside of the cursory, soundbite way? What if we all spent just a fraction of the money we have spent or will spend on our fan gear and tickets on campaign donations? Or donations to non-profits, or to public broadcasting; in order to journalistically cover our governments better? Here’s what Chomsky had to say on the matter of sport and democracy, that is following a similar path of logic as Terry Eagleton’s sports-and-capitalism thesis:
I understand that in many ways that this is a false dilemma, since regardless of every nation’s sporting culture obsessions from: the N.F.L. on Sundays to baseball and the Red Sox vs. Yankees rivalry and LeBron and Kobe, in America; to Manchester United v. Chelsea and soccer’s megawatt stars: Rooney, Beckham, Ronaldo and Henry, in Europe, to whatever it is on the sports’ radar in any neck of the woods in the global village; there are still many more choices for distraction than just sport.
However, sports is so overwhelming, so abundant, so passionately invested in and covered, just so utterly ubiquitous, that its closest analogue is truly politics and, again, therefore economics: A place where almost all nations are currently failing, because of the fact that the masses are pacified and satiated by their entertainment of choice so much, that their desire for more from their governments is often blunted, if not made nonexistent. With entertainment such as sports filling so much of their life and cognitive investment, they needn’t truly think, become informed or regularly question the legislative actions that determine their fate, and then politics becomes only a place for the manipulating powerful, the intellectuals, the pseudo-intellectuals, the extremists and the blowhards.
Read Eagleton’s “Football a Dear Friend to Capitalism” at The Guardian [Here]
*“Un-biased” news is a general term for outlets which differ from the sideshow of “opinion-news,” since I believe that news cannot truly be “un-biased,” nor should it.
Memories of a Childhood Gone By, Part 4 06/05/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Baseball, Journal, Memories of a Childhood, Sport Culture.add a comment
Photo Credit: Lenny Ignelzi, Associated Press/ HW&W Recordings
I SAW Bo Jackson play baseball live once, as a kid. It was an exhibition at Angel Stadium, in the preseason, I believe. He was still with the Kansas City Royals at that time (the team that you actually wanted to see him with), back when his strength was the epitome of the idiom, “a bull in a china shop,” except that he was far more graceful. His power was beyond legendary, but there was also his sports car speed. He was the stuff of Greek myth. Even his aura and body were like that of Zeus. When Jackson struck a baseball it was like a shock of lightning and the sound of thunder cracking through frightened sky were personally summoned by him on the ground, by the act, and then that bolt of lightning was shot into the heavens like an angry, retaliatory missile strike.
Jackson was still his modern-day John Henry, self, back then. He was not yet affected by the chronic hip problem that would rob him and fans of precious time together, after it was damaged in a playoff football game when he was with the Raiders. His injury led to a blood-flow problem and complications in his left leg that then developed into avascular nercosis; a death in the bone at the cellular level, which forced him to replace the hip entirely and give up football for good.
He’d still play professional baseball for another couple of years after that, but it was obvious; he just wasn’t the same. The injury and its surgery adversely affected Jackson’s baseball career, only it took longer to do so than it did for football. Its effect was dragged out. He played well enough to win Major League Baseball’s “Comeback Player of the Year” award, at one point, though, years after he suffered his devastating football injury and the on-again-off-again issues with his hip that first troubled his post-hip-replacement baseball career. Jackson even batted a career high .279 for the California Angels in 1994, with 13 home-runs, just before the baseball strike.
It’s reported that just after that tackle which left him crumpled on the ground and forever changed, a baseball teammate of his, the great Royals’ player, George Brett, who had come to watch Jackson play in the Raider’s football playoff, said Jackson told the trainer that he put his own hip back into place after it felt like it was dislodged from its socket. What’s amazing is that same trainer told George Brett, disbelieving, “that’s just impossible, no one’s that strong.” He was still amazed by Jackson and his strength, even after regularly working with him, and especially in Bo’s moment of physical vulnerability.
While I didn’t initially want to go to the baseball game, which elicited the overheard conversation between my parents the night before, where my father said: “When I was his age, I would have loved to go to any baseball game”; I did ponder the possible tragedy in the missed opportunity of seeing Bo Jackson, a real-world titan. As an admonition: I wasn’t really into baseball growing up, I played it and had an affinity for some players and a love for the Dodgers, but I was more about basketball. My greater appreciation for baseball only came later in retrospect, as I suspect it does for many boys who first played the game, because of what it ultimately teaches one about the necessary simplicity of a boy’s childhood and the importance of having heroes who help them dream.
I was also reticent about attending the game, because the tickets were part of some package deal for veterans, veterans’ families and the currently serving members of the Armed Services and their families; and so this outing was planned with my dad’s unit. I was afraid of the potential awkwardness of being with other kids who would have their brothers and sisters at the game, and I’d have to be alone in that pack, as an only child left to try and make friends. I also never, ever socialized with other military kids stateside, which meant that I was going to ride on a bus for 40 minutes with a bunch of kids who probably knew each other, had inside jokes and were already, fully, cliqued-off. In the end, I reluctantly went with my father and the members of his squadron, and their sons. I doubt now, if any daughters went. I don’t even remember if there were wives who went.
I was with the other black kids for most of the day, I don’t know why that particularly matters, or if it matters at all, since it was a diverse bunch, and whether or not it was because my pop was talking with their fathers. I don’t ever imagine that the white kids who were all clustered together ever thought: “I was with the other white kids.” They were just there. And I don’t really remember if I asked if my friends whose parents weren’t in the military could attend, or if they had all declined, but because they were all Little League baseball studs, I’d find that hard to imagine now.
When we arrived at Angel Stadium, things settled in fine. I was taking it all in. We arrived somewhat early and the field was nearly-empty. It was just a couple of players and our group that was visible in the stadium, plus a handful of other fans in the stands, all of us seemingly temporarily occupying random seats in relatively the assigned ticket areas, or like me and the bunch I was with, getting as close as humanly possible to the railing next to the baseball diamond, to watch who was on the field: number “16″ in powder blue.
Watching Bo Jackson taking batting practice, made me reconsider my not initially wanting to go being categorized as “stupid.” This was an obvious moment. The bats were essentially matchsticks to him, he was so big. They swung from his hands, in two, like some kind of low-resistance pendulum, or a mid-tier carnival ride. And if it was a baseball being slung at one of those matchstick-bats he held and dwarfed, it might as well have been a dirt clog versus a flame thrower, because it was going to be torched. I don’t remember if he got hot and tagged anything into the upper decks — you would think I would — or how many he hit and for how long. And I honestly don’t even remember the game, at all.
What I pulled from the experience and what stays with me to this day, though, was Jackson’s enormous power, and my sense of the engine he must’ve had inside of him along with a sample of his enormous will, later, to reach such a peak of athletic perfection, and then battle an injury that would have ended a career for any in most sports. Jackson was simply a thoroughbred. I’ve seen plenty of athletes up close and I’ve watched them move at every level and Jackson’s presence, even from a distance, was stronger than all of theirs. I got the feeling from just watching him that his tree trunk arms could rip out a telephone pole and use it as a bat, if he chose to.
I wasn’t unaware of Bo and his legend. I had a few of his cards; I knew of his tendency to effortlessly “No.2 pencil break” his bats over the knee, shoulders and helmet, when he was frustrated and struck out, like he was Paul Bunyan in the forest pulling fire wood or something. It was done with such frightening efficiency, that if one didn’t know his personality, they would be justifiably scared at the sight of a man who, if he had a hair-trigger temper, would be very dangerous.
But Jackson wasn’t that guy. That’s another trait that I liked about him, and now how I think of him. He was just a genuinely good, tough dude, with a tremendous mental fortitude, (how many times did we see him carry his huge body on a bum wheel with the White Sox?), and he is probably the best all-around athlete we’ve ever seen, to the point that he is the first and only face of Nike’s cross-training line, for God sakes.
He was literally good at every sport, or so his marketing implied. Hence the “Bo Knows” tag line. He knew them all. He even played semi-professional basketball in Los Angeles at one point, and he had qualified to run track and field back at Auburn. Jackson also pondered joining the U.S.A. Olympic Track and Field team. But in spite of all of that: the athletic strengths, the skills and the overbearing physicality, it was his toughness upstairs that mattered most and which kept him coming back, trying to recapture his two-sport, professional athlete days, where he was unfairly cut short by circumstance, but which he was never was bitter.
A Sporting Numerology of No. 44, Part 2 02/18/2010
Posted by Vaughn in Basketball, Politics, Sport Culture.comments closed
Photo Credit: The Grand Archives
THE rumor is that he was a showman, an individualistic talent. He reportedly could handle a basketball with flair, shot fairly well, and it is said that he could get to the rim quite easily, but that he also had problems with his coach. Wait, what’s that? His coach? Wasn’t his coach his father? Press Maravich, the former Naval Aviator turned basketball drill-sergeant for his son, Pete? Yeah, if we’re talking about “Pistol” Pete. But, I’m talking about President Obama. You see, when I started my “A Sporting Numerology of No. 44″ during the end of 2008′s presidential election, I only thought of President Obama — an avid sports fan who has even been critiqued for taking time away from serious matters at hand to fill-out N.C.A.A. brackets and who is a basketball credentialed leader, fully earning stripes on Chicago’s south-side — in the mold of a Jerry West: A clutch sharpshooter, able to pull-out victories from impossible scenarios of defeat, and forgetting about this “No. 44,” Pete Maravich, who wore several numbers throughout his career from the number “23″ in college to the number “7,” during his middle years, with the New Orleans Jazz. (Obama also wore “23″ in high school, so the threads between them are rather deep.)
Pete Maravich is probably every gunner of President Obama’s generation’s favorite, since he had the most flamboyant playing style and outright ability to collect points, during that basketball epoch. He practically took the college level of that time into warp-speed with his game and counter-culture style; sporting floppy, loose socks, and a long bowl cut. “Pistol Pete,” as he was known, was also probably the greatest, refined, individual, offensive-skilled player we’ve ever seen in basketball. At any level. As much as I love Kobe Bryant, and fly his banner, I assert that Pete Maravich is almost equal to him at every individual offensive element I’ve used as a measure to put forth my usual: “Kobe Bryant is the best offensive talent ever…Better than Jordan,” argument. But Maravich loses out to Bryant, simply because of his lack of overall prolific production in the N.B.A., and that so much of the Pete Maravich basketball legacy is based wholly on his utterly dominant showing at the college level, where he booked a better than 40 points per game average, his entire college career. And I’m not talking just barely eclipsing 40 points, as if that would be bad, I’m talking about Maravich inking the record books to the tune of a 44.2 points per game career average, a measure that tends to lower a player’s actual performance “snapshot,” which means that a hot night was probably marking 50 in the box-score, and that his “zone” moments were regularly in the 60s, just for him to maintain such an average.
However, Maravich only averaged better than 25 or more points per game — the general mark of an elite scorer — for four seasons out of his 12 in the N.B.A. And he did so for a generally obscure, largely irrelevant team. But Pete did shoot the long-ball as well as Kobe Bryant at both levels. But there wasn’t the three-point shot yet for most of his pro career, so tracking both his percentage and his points, during this time, is a bit misleading, since his averages at both the collegiate level and professional level would ultimately be more stout as a result of the three-point shot, not to mention, it would have possibly made him more deadly, forcing teams to guard him much farther out and opening up his game even more for assists and expanded mid-range possibilities. Maravich also handled the ball better than Bryant, passed better than him and was at times, just as tireless an offensive force, as Bryant is today. Maravich just wasn’t as prolific as Kobe-Bean or placed in as many pressure-cooker scenarios. (Though he did play a limited role on the Bird-led Celtics team.) As previously mentioned, Maravich had done much of his damage in the number “44,” the very number that marks Obama’s presidency. And in some way, I believe that Obama’s game according to reports, was probably a bit more like Pete’s than it is the West model I had long thought of.
But, sadly, unlike our president, it seems that the “Pistol” — who gained the fire-brand type of a nickname from the way he seemed to shoot the basketball from his hip — never found peace. He always seemed to want something different, something more than the game of basketball to devote his life to, after he left the game professionally; and not on his own terms, suffering an injury that had him departing the league at the end of the 1979-80 season at 33-years-old. While he played basketball to the very end of his life, even dying on a basketball court in a Pasadena gym at the age of 40-years-old, Maravich, spent almost all of his off-court time searching for some illusory fulfillment equal to that of the game. He dabbled in Hinduism, veganism, UFOlogy, and he even became an evangelical Christian. He was searching for something, anything, to make his known once-dependence on a bottle of booze lessened, I gather. He just couldn’t find “it” however, and he would leave doing that one thing that he did find, as a heart attack that was the result of a congenital defect that made his ill-equipped and overcompensating heart give; took him away.
When I was first learning to play ball, the stories of Pete Maravich began to drive me to not only develop a similar playing style, being a natural point-guard, at every level I have played, but to be as adept as he was with the ball. To “carry it on a string” as they say. And so I did all the drills he did, cribbed from my Michael Jordan: Come Fly with Me tape. In that cult-loved hoops’ V.H.S. there is a scene where Jordan performs (it starts at around :30 seconds of the clip) some of the same drills which became standard for all players starting out, but are known as “Pistol Pete drills”; that I could perform in a less-sweltering garage, rather than the 100 degree weather outside in mid-summer California at 4:00 p.m. So there I stood with the sun light breaking through the side door’s glass, looping the ball through my legs as fast as I could without dribbling, and then around my head, back and waist for minutes at a time.
At dusk and on weekends, it would continue, as I would dribble up and down my block, as my parents went for their walk. As Pete had done with his father. Or I would pass the ball off of the concrete wall next to my drive way, placing myself in fake transition-game scenarios; executing bounce-passes with one-hand from 25-feet-out, only to catch the ricocheting ball for a lay-up, and killing two birds with one practice one stone. Though, I never could regularly dribble with only my knee caps or up the stairs for very long, like Maravich reportedly could do. For me, that is Pete’s legacy: commitment and practice. And I think as fellow hooper and an extraordinary student, our president appreciates his numeric connection to this legacy; of drilled, deliberate practice, and devotion to becoming something closer to perfection, something greater than the rough lump of coal you once were.
Barack is “No. 44″
A Picture of Him as a Young Turk 12/26/2009
Posted by Vaughn in Bulls, Hip-Hop, Jordan, Journal, Random Card Scans.comments closed
Card Vitals:
Michael Jordan
1993-94 Topps Archives
THIS is the second “Random Card Scans” of him in just a small span of time here. But I feel that I have to pay homage, since in all of my Air Jordan XI Retro “Space Jam” hysteria over the Christmas shopping frenzy — camping out for them, no less, like a 15-year-old, and even being denied the coveted “sneak” once during that period — I got to thinking about the guy who started it all: Fresh as morning dew, super-duper green, operating with a smaller ego than the one rapper Chamillionaire mentions. This Mike: with the gold chains and the flash, with less marketing, was the first hip-hop athlete, in full.
Some say Muhammad Ali was the first hip-hop athlete, which is true: he did take to rhyming his smack-talk before we ever heard such practices put to record, but this Jordan; this young-gun, a challenger to the old-world, on-the-ground, team-first basketball way, was hip-hop all the way, in the way that we know “hip-hop” today. (Well, minus his tastes. Jordan was admittedly not very hip-hop in his musical selections, preferring Anita Baker to Rakim.)
I don’t know much about the card’s pic other than it is from the 1985 N.B.A. Slam-Dunk contest in Indianapolis, and that Jordan had rubbed a few veteran players the wrong way that weekend after he wore an “Air Jordan” sweatsuit earlier in the competition. It is said, that it was felt by some of those veteran players, that Jordan was attempting to upstage them due to his choice of garb during those early rounds of that dunk contest, and that he was potentially frozen-out during the All-Star game the next night for his perceived bad form. (Some say that certain players, namely: Isiah Thomas, Magic Johnson [aware of the "freeze"] and others, had conspired to not pass the ball to him.) Essentially, they were reportedly hating that he was “stylin’ on them.”
The N.B.A.’s Balloon Head Effect 11/26/2009
Posted by Vaughn in Global Street Culture, Journalism, Memories of a Childhood, Profiles, Sport Culture, Youth Culture.comments closed
Editor’s Note:
LAST season, when the Los Angeles Lakers won the league championship — one of my yet talked about on this blog, personally momentous (!), moments of 2009 — the team, the N.B.A. and I guess, its marketing arm, partly celebrated the win with a nostalgic piece of fashion; once thought relegated to the ’80s and the last time the franchise had won championships in such a dominating way in a decade span. The Adidas branded caricature T-shirts festooned upon most Laker players — not named Kobe Bryant, for contractual reasons No. 24 could not wear the Adidas logo-ed piece — with a portrait of all the team’s players and coach Phil Jackson, all drawn in caricature, worn during the championship parade, was a positively maudlin trip back to the “golden” days of the Great Western Forum.
For most current Lakers’ fans, however, the time in which the tees rocked by the new Lakers, pulls their spirit from, is only partially remembered. That time is buried in the heady fog of their nascent childhood, and which is mostly clouding that time in the ’80s, for many like me: when Southern California’s fathers taught their sons to hate the Celtics, to the benefit of Worthy, Rambis, “Coop,” B.Scott, Cap and Magic. And yet, I still remember the spirit that is intentionally evoked by the new design fondly.
By the late ’80s and early ’90s, I was wearing similar shirts. I even remember a kid on my block specifically wearing the “Motown Meets Showtown” (it might’ve said “Showtime”), Salem caricature tee, to commemorate the 1989 N.B.A. Finals and the Pistons-Lakers collision, to play summer baseball in the street. And I, myself, had several of the Chicago Bulls pieces’ that commemorated their first Three-Peat championships, with their heads all hot-air ballooned. And then, after years and years and drab N.B.A. championship shirts, I had forgotten all about them. What follows is an article written for print that marks when I first remembered again, fondly, those shirts of yesteryear after I had scooped one up on eBay, and pitched an idea to write about them to my editor only to find out that a colleague still had such shirts in his possession.
Photo Credit: Sports Design Blog
The N.B.A.’s Balloon Head Effect
IF you remember De La Soul’s “Buhloone Mind State” (Balloon Mind State) record and the internal artwork with Pos’, Trugoy’s and Maseo’s heads tied together and floating in blank space like balloons, and the song aptly titled “Ego Trippin ‘ ” on that record, then I am going to let you in on something that I just realized I have never told anyone is a little observation of mine: I love how that song, album title and artwork all logically and synchronously link together.
In the 1980s and 1990s the N.B.A. released a line of signature caricature tees that hold a soft- spot in the corner of my heart, which held a similar (but unintended) synchronicity for me. Growing up as a fan of the N.B.A. in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the one thing that I always noticed was the effect of a star — a “justified ego.” In the N.B.A., more so than in any other professional team sports league, one greatly skilled player with an off the wall, “No one is beating me or my team today!” mentality can change the course of a game or series. It was almost necessary to have a big head to compete in the league, where every team seemed to have two to three magnificent talents. An inflated ego was the dividing line between All-Stars and those that would be “the greats.” It was all about mentality.
That’s why I believe that ego is not a bad thing, if it is warranted and necessary in a profession. Honestly, Larry Bird’s trash-talking, Isiah’s smirk, ‘Nique’s style and Michael’s acrobatic flash, all implied ego, strut and “swag.” Hell, the Iceberg Slim-style mink coat that Magic wore in the tunnels prior to the 1988 N.B.A. All-Star game in Chicago, screamed ego. It is the kind of mentality that manifests as the result of being “the first option” on a relevant team in the world’s most popular sports league.
It is so very fitting then that my youth was marked by Salem’s signature N.B.A. player “Big Head” tees that caricatured stars into images of ballooned heads and popsicle stick bodies, that later reminded you of their 16-bit versions in the early ‘90s button-mashing video game classic: NBA Jam. That is if you were savvy enough to use the code in the arcade or at home to trigger their heads to be swollen, and that you could hold the joystick up whilst pressing the turbo and steal button, until the tip-off. The image of those Salem N.B.A. shirts are so ingrained in all of us who grew up during that gilded N.B.A. era that seeing an original now, a decade and change later, by even those who never wore them or paid much attention to the N.B.A. would have you say: “Oh, yeah! Yo, I remember those.”
So when hip-hop oriented hoops companies like Undr Crwn and boutiques like Undefeated (UNDFTD) pulled similar designs from out of the dust bin of time in tribute, you realize that the tees really meant something to a generation of young men. Every boy from So. Cal knows how important the uniform of shorts and the basic screened tee are to the utility of being a kid in a region with a never ceasing amount of sun. And amongst most of my friends growing up, it was the N.B.A. tee that ruled over all. And lucky enough for us our colleague at PreQuel, Nate Martel, casually broached the subject and mentioned that he still had a couple of the tees lying dormant in storage, and thus a necessary photographic walk down memory lane was in order. The shirts are a look back to a time when the N.B.A., probably meant everything to you and Ron Harper was still a Jordan-lite star for the Clippers and Michael Cooper’s name brought about mental images of high-socks, alley-oops from Magic and his oppressive defense, where John Salley wasn’t just a comedian, and Dennis Rodman had yet to be found by Madonna. Man, I miss those days, don’t you?
Jordan’s Skyline Story 10/16/2009
Posted by Vaughn in Basketball, Bulls, Jordan, Journal, Random Card Scans.comments closed
Card Vitals:
Michael Jordan
1991-92 SkyBox, “SkyMaster,” # 253
I was in love with this card from the moment I saw it. It was just so Jordan, so very much how he played, above the skyline and player crowd; above the fray of mortal, earth-bound men. It was the perfect synchronization of the shared early-Jordan experience and the understanding he had with his fans: He was to be a Concorde or a classic fighter jet, cutting through the sky, and in return, his fans would champion him, even as he was struggling to find his way to a championship. (Pardon the corny pun.) What’s important is that the photograph isn’t even of him stuffing a shot down the cup after a whirl of zig-zags, and his barreling down the lane. And I actually believe I recognize the play in this photograph: it was an in-bounds save, I think. I can even see the frame’s following sequences: of his giant hand actually stopping the ball’s rotation mid-flight, with his legs churning for a second, for him to extract just a couple more milliseconds of hang-time, then spot a receiver and deliver the subsequent pass.
This is the effect of watching so many games, checking the press clippings the next day from all the various newspapers and then later, catching either the W.G.N. highlights packages on the Chicagoland 10 p.m. broadcast, which aired at 8 p.m. for me since I lived in California, watching Sports Center and reading the Sports Illustrated, The Sporting News or Sport magazine’s of the month. When one gets into a pattern of that kind of barrage of information, they start to see that the same shots from the same people tend to be sourced, whether by N.B.A. Entertainment — who would use full-video of the same play — and/or a recycled still image from one of those print outlets.
And so many times for me, the images became recognizable, and were tracked to individual games. Those images still stay with me now, from video of his hanging turnaround fall-aways with him landing out-of-bounds after being raked across the arms — and this is far before he became known for the fall-away that became his pièce de résistance late-game weapon — to just the less-memorable lay- ins. These still images always seem to match to the video of the moment in the mind’s eye and or the corollary: the video assisting me to help remember the image and the memory attached to it. Media exposure reinforcement. (My term.)
I also just happen to love this card’s front image, because it was Jordan in the white home jersey, which was still somewhat rare in his cards from the early ’90s. The traditional Bulls’ red road uniform is how most remember Jordan personally, and it has been transferred to most of his hoops media fare. While I watched many a Bulls’ game either on the-then enormously packed-to-the-gills C.B.S., N.B.C., T.N.T. and T.B.S. N.B.A. schedule, it seemed that the real totemic Bulls’ fan cathode ray tube experience was W.G.N.’s home games with that raucous Chicago Stadium crowd chanting and gasping, yelling “threeeee!” as Jordan or Pippen drove and kicked to Hodges, Armstrong or Paxson in the corners or at the top of the key, and Bulls color man, Johnny Kerr, being such an unabashed “homer.” (Kerr was such a home team guy that even Johnny Most would probably be embarrassed with “Red” Kerr’s unseemly rooting for them Chicago boys.)
Also, there was this kind of complimentary piece that I attached this card to. It was a poster of Michael in the Chicago sky at night, with the original image of the “canvas rotated” 90 degrees — to borrow an Adobe Creative Suite term — to make Jordan appear to be flying horizontal like Superman. It just seemed to be from the same school of thought, and even graphic designer. The poster’s publisher, Costacos Brothers, even printed that poster during roughly the same year, just eight or nine months later. When I used to burn notebook and blank-white computer paper with my mechanical pencil drawings, with no regard for our rain forests, I would often try to draw the above image of Jordan from the backside of the card: with him hanging almost near-sideways attempting to get that jumper off.
