The Golden Triangle—not the opium-saturated international drug hub of Southeast Asia, but Texas’s oil-strafed triumvirate of Port Arthur, Beaumont, and Orange—is known mostly for its celebrities. Janis Joplin was born there, as was Jerry Jones Jimmy Johnson. Two of my friends’ mothers and Robert Rauschenberg hail from the area, too. Even if you’ve had the pleasure of visiting, likely on the way from Houston to New Orleans, it’s hard not to think of it as sinkhole of dysfunction with an unreasonably high batting average.

As is so often the case, it was hip-hop that made a case for the Triangle as more place than placeholder. UGK’s Bun B and Pimp C ceaselessly claimed Port Arthur, even as they were assimilated into Houston’s scene. When Bun B appeared in Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin’” in 1999, or when Houston rap became nationally trendy several years later, Port Arthur came along for the ride.

Continue Reading →

Both Vince Young and Reggie Bush unceremoniously switched teams this week, with neither of them expected to assume a starting role. Young, who provided the Titans with some magnificent comebacks and notable drama, is a noteworthy NFL story run aground. He’ll back up Michael Vick on the Eagles, an understudy to the role he could never fulfill. Bush, as my friend David Roth put it, will continue to be more famous than good. On the Dolphins, he will do the same thing Reggie Bush has always done as a pro, which is an attenuated version the genius wrought at USC.

For anyone who followed the 2005 season, when Young and Bush vied for the Heisman and went head-to-head for the championship in Pasadena, these two athletes will never be ordinary, average, or negligible. Even if you deem them busts—a term that is always relative—it’s hard to ever fully regard them as mortal.

The memory of Young, looking physically very much like today’s Vince Young, knifing through the USC defense for a game-winning touchdown in Pasadena remains vivid because pro failure can only diminish it so much. Against Michigan a year earlier in the same stadium, Young had proven that he and Texas could dominate the college ranks. USC was something else altogether, a slate of future draft picks that brought college football dangerously close to the pro game. Young went off, unquestionably, without blinking. And he did it against future NFL players, mere months away from his own entry into the NFL, looking very much like an NFL player himself. It’s hard to shake that off as juvenelia. Continue Reading →

Maybe don’t take my word for it that Craig Robinson’s Flip Flop Flyball is one hell of a book; I’ve got a few too many connections to it, though not to Mr. Robinson himself. What I’ve found most striking about it, though, is pretty well summed up by the jacket copy: “Baseball, almost from the first moment Robinson saw it, was more than a sport. It was a nearly infinite ocean of information to be organized.” This describes an approach to the game that’s at once pragmatic and whimsical, and in Flip Flop Flyball, this conception of baseball allows infographics to be both cells in a narrative and self-contained worlds. If you want, you can get lost in them without ever quite knowing why.

The information is there; Robinson organizes it, and with that, interprets and encodes it all over again. Broadly speaking, he makes sense of baseball. But baseball already makes sense. It has rules, which aren’t so difficult to grasp, as well as customs that even the most half-hearted fan can pick up on. The action on a baseball field, as in any sport, means something only because of rules. Once they’re set into motion, they work as laws that keep players in line. At some primordial moment—maybe at beginning of each game, maybe when the sport was invented—the sport delineates a space where intelligible competition takes place. Otherwise, men and women looking to get exercise or prove their dominance would be reduced to indiscriminately running, jumping, and punching each other. Continue Reading →

In 1999, David Stern ended the lockout by shattering player unity. He convinced the hard-working vets that the do-nothing superstars did not have their best interests in mind. The NBA’s upper crust (well, at least the ones on the court—really, all players are proles) didn’t want to lose the right to unlimited individual salaries. The other guys, they just wanted to get back to work. Stern, master manipulator that he is, saw a fissure and broke it wide open with a few well-timed remarks and letters. The few lost the support of the many, and for very obvious structural reasons, the NBPA edifice came crashing down.

Yup, that’s how Dave Stern slew the lockout, with a hand that tore the players in two. See the breach, destroy the opponents. The lesson received from the 1999 lockout is in keeping with the most literal interpretation of the old labor axiom: Unity at all costs. That’s why the NFLPA has been able to partner with the Teamsters, and why the NBPA didn’t look patently ridiculous when it came out in support of the protesters in Madison. The NBPA had t-shirts printed, “STAND: THE 2011 NBPA SUMMER MEETING NYC” beating home the message: Stern can’t beat us as long as we stick together.

Continue Reading →

The faces in the studio crew may change, slightly, but the necessary conditions for friction and disdain are always there. It’s become something of a running gag during ESPN’s NBA Draft broadcast, really. The formula goes something like this: Player X, who is neither an experienced American college prospect nor an international guy who has haunted draft boards for years, gets picked. These days, this plays out in the second round, when all that’s left is moral victories and principled stands. Also, by then the talking heads are tired, cranky, increasingly mannered, and likely to fall back on every cliche that’s made them who they are today—even if that means avoiding the draft altogether.

Dick Vitale, with his protectionist view of college athletics, and Jay Bilas, who has coined his own baroque vocabulary to describe exactly the kind of unformed athlete that makes him cringe, have traditionally lead the charge. Fran Fraschilla is there to beat them back for the international players whose names they haven’t bothered to learn; Americans aren’t so lucky. It’s hard to tell who is the heel, the instigator, and who the voice of righteousness. If nothing else, these interludes are a surefire way to pick up the pace, or grab viewers’ attention, over the course of several hours that can tax even the most devoted draft junkie. Last night, the battle lines were drawn late, which meant they were sloppy, ugly, and turned a dramatic trick into outright hypocrisy. Toward the end of the second, this happened:

56. Lakers: Chukwudiebere Maduabum, PF (Nigeria, by way of the USBL’s Bakersfield Jam)

58. Lakers: Ater Majok, PF (Sudan, by way of Australia)

Continue Reading →

In an earlier column, I tried, however clumsily, to remind myself that Dirk Nowitzki was German, and that this was different from simply being white. Or being Larry Bird qua white dude, which is an altogether separate, if equally complicated, topic. Now Dirk is a champion, and his German-ness inescapable.

At least Germans might want to see it that way. Spiegel Online called him “an indisputable global sports star as popular in America and internationally as he is at home. An admired representative of the new, post-World Cup Germany. A legitimate hero.” Granted, some of that had to do with his having knocked off that mega-fiend LeBron James. In Die Welt, he was heralded for “defeat[ing] ghetto basketball”; Deadspin translated the entire article, which is features garbled versions of the all-too-familiar anti-thug, hip-hop, and gangsta motifs. Die Welt is not exactly a right-wing rag; one wonders if the author just doesn’t understand how offensive this stuff is to (some) Americans, especially when coupled with several mentions of Dirk’s whiteness. Or maybe, the warmer, fuzzier Germany can make exceptions when the subject matter falls outside of the country’s socio-historical purview.

Continue Reading →

Sorry to get all meta so early in this column’s life, but there’s no avoiding it this week. On Wednesday, ESPN trotted out Bill Simmons’s Grantland, a site looking to bring a thoughtful, literate touch back to sports writing, as well as allow its fearless leader to curse as much as possible. Also part of the plan is to cover pop culture, primarily movies and television. In fact, Grantland’s credo is the plain, if definitive, “sports and pop culture.”

(This is not a hit-piece, in case you’re already defensive or rearing for intestines to chew. It’s an examination of a technique that has become central to whatever the “next wave” of sportswriting is.)

Continue Reading →

This week saw the fall of Ohio State’s faux-puritanical Jim Tressel, and accusations of bloody murder, figuratively, within the halls of FIFA. We can decry athletes as thugs and overgrown, spoiled children prone to seeking attention and wearing out sports’ moral fiber. After all, they are the public face of pro leagues, the icons; they entrance and influence fans, and their behavior—whether it’s an ill-timed Miami Heat chest bump or OSU’s Terelle Pryor trading memorabilia for cash and tattoos—is the grist for our national sports conversation. They are the stars, the figures we notice. Unfortunately, they are also largely powerless.

The Heat threatened real structural change, a power grab that made owners uneasy (even as, somehow, much of last summer’s events were seen as a Pat Riley conspiracy). Note the past tense; it’s safe to say that, at least for the time being, there has been no great redistribution of clout in the NBA. The Knicks never had this look of self-determination, and while no one will admit it, preventing another Miami is a part of the owners’ agenda. Pryor has garnered embarrassing headlines, but there’s a reason why Tressel was forced out. Athletes are employees. Real power exists behind the scenes, and there, it’s almost laughable to try ferretting out corruption.

Continue Reading →

Is it okay to recycle material from Twitter? I feel okay stealing other people’s lines, if I positively can’t remember who owns it. There’s a great Coltrane line about tradition as “a big reservoir that we all dip out of.” That’s been reduced to today’s “hive-mind,” and while it makes my skin crawl, it provides all sorts of convenient excuses for an Internet that has gotten almost impossible to track in terms of ownership and originality. Still, I get uneasy at the thought of really using the thing as a notebook, in part because I worry that these days, my web presence amounts largely to Twitter outbursts during NBA playoff games.

However, I’ll break through the pain here, and reiterate this one true thing about Dirk Nowitzki: The Big German, as he’s affectionately known is Dallas, is not Larry Bird.

Continue Reading →

I have an unhealthy obsession with tragic athletes. Left to my own devices, I would probably serve up hard-luck and self-destructive athlete stories here every single week. I’m supposed to be working on a book about them; then I got a concussion of my own, again, and suddenly didn’t feel like thinking about Pete Reiser for a minute. At least I know better than to go all method on this one.

One thing I’ve noticed, though, is what a strong role morality plays in this realm of sports. For one, there are the recurring themes of martyrdom, or injustice. It’s hard to not grant certain players sainthood for their suffering or privation, no matter what kind of person they are (or were). On top of that, it almost doesn’t matter what kept dude out of the game. There are plenty of drug casualties who end up sympathetic figures, even if—and I say this in the most plain terms possible—they fucked themselves.

The one unforgivable offense, however, is just totally shitting on the fans. When an athlete not only scuttles his own career, but does so when a city badly needs him to inspire instead, he’s gone way past the pale. As soon as place enters the picture, we are in scapegoat territory, where coming up short is failure, and fan sentiment, for years afterward, is reserved for righteous indignation. That’s especially true for teams that could really use a hug, or a war cry. I wonder, though: Couldn’t pressure, and the burden of playing local savior, help bring a man down? It’s right there in the wording; all that’s missing is a direct, downward vector.

Continue Reading →

Though there’s a big difference between memory and sentimentality, the two often end up blurred. While sentiment fixes itself on particulars—the place we’ll never see again, the song we could care less about today, the relationship gone by—memory is about echoes. These three pieces, all from the not-so-distant past, are a test.

Ralph Wiley’s Dune-inspired portrait of Tracy McGrady catches the doomed swingman at the height of his powers. It was April 2003, and Orlando was on the verge of knocking the Pistons out of the playoffs. They didn’t, despite T-Mac’s predictions, and the jokes began. In retrospect, Wiley’s piece seems borne out of a particular kind of Afro-futurist hysteria.

Continue Reading →