A target demo office-dweller with appreciation for the written word, sports, great music and unnecessary - yet undeniably awesome - technology.
Great stuff on Marshon Brooks and why he maintained such a low level of attention throughout 2010-11
It’s a whirlwind, a deluge of smoke and lights: spinning, twisting, squirming around defenders like a cat, he scores in every way imaginable, stuff of science fiction, his arms more like two ropes attached to his shoulders than a pair of human limbs, giving him a release where it looks as though he’s trying to put the ball down the back of his shirt.
Jeff MacGregor went about his “everyday life” today and absolutely owned LeBron James. Or what we though was LeBron James…
Turns out Mr. James doesn’t exist. He is a construct of the hyena media. A hypothetical. A mystic figment. An incantation. He is an empty vessel into which Nike and the networks and sports writers high and low pour our nonsense and our curses and our syrup. And has been since middle school.
He is a scarecrow stuffed with sticks and feathers and money. He is a phantasm, a distraction, an undigested bit of corporate drama.
So…about the next Pistons coach…
Isiah Thomas is an unlikable twerp with an almost unsurpassed record of abject failure in everything he has attempted since he hung up his playing shoes and his artificial public-relations grin. Allowing this unemployable gossoon anywhere near anything having to do with any basketball team anywhere is precisely the same thing as hiring Anthony Weiner to be a guidance counselor.
I hate to see Shaquille O’Neal retire, but it has been amazing for journalism.
[S]winging around the NBA every season, a rolling carnival show. When Shaquille O’Neal retires Friday at the age of 39, he will leave a void almost as oversized as he was, in every way.
After all, who can be like Shaq? Dwight Howard tries, but he is neither as good nor as funny nor as complicated, which were the pillars of The Big Aristotle’s appeal. No big man has ever been more comfortable in his own skin, or had so effortless a grasp of the reality of celebrity, or had the common touch that Shaq enjoyed. There are still pictures of Shaq, who broke in with the Magic in 1992, plastered to the walls of various Orlando burger shacks and burrito joints, smiling with the owner, making funny faces. They still love him, after all these years.
[I’ve] never met an athlete so comfortable in his own skin, in being the person Whoever created him to be. Anyone who follows basketball is familiar with The Unhappiness of the Bigs. They are grumpy. They’d rather be anywhere else, as long as it was at a lower personal altitude than the one with which they’d been cursed. They’d all rather be two-guards. (See “Sampson, Ralph” for details.) This was not the case with Shaquille O’Neal. He revelled in who he was. He had an instinctive sense for the limits of the absurdity that is the professional athlete’s life. “They’re gonna make a cartoon out of you anyway,” he once told me. “The important thing is to make sure you control the cartoons.” The barstools in the Unfulfilled Potential Lounge are full of people who lost control of their cartoons. He never did.
He grabbed the side of the lectern as if it were a life preserver. He shouted and gestured like someone thrashing in deep water. […]
From Zen to zealous, from meditation to perspiration, the Lakers have gone from the son of a preacher to, well, a preacher himself.
Bill Plaschke on new Lakers coach Mike Brown
One of the better Shaq tributes I’ve read in the last 20 or so hours:
Shaq won’t disappear. He can’t, and not because he’s so massive, but because of his personality. Like Charles Barkley, Shaq isn’t going to recede into nothingness. Some TV set is waiting for him, whether we’re talking reality or basketball. (Reality seems more his venue.) Bad enough for those of us of a certain age that basketball seems to have lost the old-fashioned pivot man, what with Yao Ming’s status so uncertain. There are only a handful of men now who continue the lineage.Mike Wilbon
And with all due respect to the Magic’s Howard, a likeable fellow with a big game, the league has nobody like Shaq. Kobe gave us some of what we missed when Jordan left, and LeBron gives us some of Magic’s flair. But there’s no facsimile of Shaq, no big, young, prodigiously talented youngster who rattles rims and flattens 7-footers with his rump backing into the basket. Nineteen years is a long, long time to do anything that requires that much physicality, and Shaq’s time as a player of consequence has been done for a minute or two.
Spo’s not exactly living the life, but he’s three wins from the LOB
[Eric] Spoelstra is the Heat’s Dungeonmaster. He rarely sees the Miami sunlight and will sometimes go days without visiting the inside of his Miami Beach studio — a converted hotel room — because he overnights in The Dungeon. There, he breaks down game tape, evaluates players, figures out where the pick-and-roll defense is failing and which offensive sets are producing results.
Sometimes Spoelstra’s late-night findings after a game need to reach the Heat while they’re traveling. Since the main FedEx office in Miami closes early, Spoelstra hops into his old Toyota station wagon it the middle of the night and drives out to the cargo terminal at Miami airport.
Excellent stuff from Kevin Arnovitz
The die has been cast.
This is America: Winning! is proof beyond reproof, rendering moot all evidence and argument to the contrary. If the bastard wins the NBA title, then he chose rightly, suffered unfairly for doing so, and surmounted his travails as a hero.
