The Book of Basketball_The NBA According to the Sports Guy

ELEVEN
THE PYRAMID: PANTHEON



12. MOSES MALONE

Resume: 19 years, 13 quality, 12 All-Stars … ’83 Finals MVP … MVP: ’79, ’82, ’83 … Top 5 (’79, ’82, ’83, ’85), Top 10 (’80, ’81, ’84, ’87) … 5-year peak: 26–15, 52% FG … leader: rebounds (6x), minutes (1x) … best player on 1 champ (’83 Sixers) and 1 runner-up (’81 Rockets) … ’81 Playoffs: 27–15, 45.5 MPG (21 G) … ’81 Playoffs: 26–16 (13 G) … Playoffs: 22–14 (100 G) … career: points (6th), rebounds (3rd), games (5th), minutes (4th) … 25K-15K Club
I just spent the last two hours trying to figure out the top twelve modern celebrities who extracted the most success (financial and careerwise) from one gimmick. Important note: this doesn’t necessarily mean that they only had one gimmick, just that they had one ploy that brought them inordinate success. Call it the Buffer List. Here’s the top twelve:
Michael Buffer
Simon Cowell
Tyler Perry
Moses Malone
the Bee Gees
Jeff Foxworthy
Vanna White
Robert Wuhl
Oprah’s friend Gayle
Phil Niekro
Jared from Subway
Monica Lewinsky1
Why Buffer over Simon? Because Buffer’s gimmick worked so well that he spawned a career for his brother, Bruce, who became the Frank Stallone of ringside announcing for the UFC. I don’t know if that’s more of an insult to Bruce or Frank.
Back to Moses and his one gimmick: he crashed the boards. He crashed the living hell out of them. He annihilated them. He left them for dead. And it wasn’t just about numbers—Moses finished as the greatest offensive rebounder ever by any calculation, grabbing a higher percentage of his team’s rebounds in ’79 (38.4 percent) than Russell or Wilt ever did in one season—but about the relentless way he attacked the boards. The best way to describe it: Imagine a quality prison basketball game in the playground where players had to maim someone to draw a foul. Imagine the game included one inordinately good rebounder: perfect instincts, light on his feet, supertough, superphysical, uncanny rejumpability (? Jay Bilas). Imagine this guy had all kinds of positioning tricks and always seemed to know where the ricochets were going (to the point that it always seemed unfair). Imagine this guy loved crashing the boards, lived for it, couldn’t get enough of it. Then imagine the warden told him before an organized playground game against inmates from another prison, “We’re playing four 10-minute quarters. I met a bet with the other warden that you couldn’t grab 40 rebounds in 40 minutes. If you can do it, I’m paroling you. You have my word.”
Now, imagine watching that guy rebound. That was Moses from 1978 to 1983.
Moses was the Marilyn Chambers of rebounding. He was insatiable. He chased them with a zest that we haven’t seen before or since. Rodman’s rebounding barrage made us feel like he was doing it partly for numbers and attention. Moses did it out of pure love. That’s just the way he played. He protected the glass with such ferocity that his Houston teammates incorporated a “play” loosely called “If Moses has position, just throw up a shot and he’ll tip it in if it misses.” Remember the first Clubber-Rocky fight in Rocky III when Rocky returns to his corner after the second round and says in a terrified mumble, “I can’t keep him off me”? Every center who battled Moses had that same look by the fourth quarter. He particularly loved sticking it to Kareem, a finesse center who wanted no part of banging with him. When Houston stunned the ’81 Lakers in their three-game series, Moses finished with 94 points and 53 rebounds, doing everything short of actually marinating Kareem, grilling him and eating him. When Philly swept the ’83 Lakers, Moses averaged a 26–18 and outrebounded Kareem by a 70–30 margin.1 Nobody from Moses’ peak could handle him. What I always found interesting: the same blue-collar themes appeared in every Bird article or feature, but Moses worked equally hard and exacted just as much from a similarly challenged body. His hands were so tiny that he could barely palm a basketball. Listed at six-foot-ten (a stretch) with short arms, Moses was such a string bean during his early years that Houston played him at power forward.3 He wasn’t a good passer, didn’t have any post-up moves, couldn’t shoot from more than 8 feet. None of it mattered. Like Bird, he grew up dirt-poor, fell in love with basketball, succeeded early, kept plugging away and developed a tunnel vision for the sport. Like Bird, he busted his ass and concentrated only on the things he could do. Like Bird, he was blessed with one supernatural quality that set him apart: quick feet for Moses, hand-eye coordination for Bird. And like Bird (with his contagious passing), Moses had one unforgettable trick that transformed his career and hasn’t been duplicated since.
See, Moses figured out a loophole in the rebounding system. Let’s say you’re a big guy and you have a pretty good idea that a shot might be going up soon. And let’s say your guy is positioned right between you and the basket. You have two choices: either try to sneak around him (even though he knows you’re coming) or come at him from behind and shove him off balance without the officials noticing. Moses eschewed both options. He lurked along the baseline on either side of the basket, biding his time, biding his time, letting everyone else get position for a rebound … and then, when he felt like a shot was coming up, he’d slyly sneak under the backboard, start backing up, slam his butt into his opponent to create the extra foot of space he needed, then jump right to where the rebound was headed. There was no way to stop it. Again, you could have position under the basket and he would still get the rebound. Watch Moses on Classic or NBA TV some time—I guarantee he pulls the Ass Attack trick fifteen or twenty times. Moses Malone attacked people with his ass. That’s what he did. Of the hundreds and hundreds of games I watched while researching this book, nothing startled me as much as the Moses Ass Attack. Once you notice it, you can’t stop looking for it.4
And over everything else, that’s how Moses pilfered three MVPs and appeared in two Finals.5 So why not rank him higher? His dominant stretch didn’t last long enough for reasons that remain unclear: Moses peaked from ’79 to ’83, signed the biggest contract in NBA history, won a Finals MVP, and never approached those heights again. (Philly even dumped him in 1986 for Jeff Ruland and Clifford Robinson when Moses was only thirty.) He might be the only player to average a 20–10 with four different teams, but isn’t it strange that three teams gave up on him? He hasn’t endured like other seventies/eighties legends for a relatively unfair reason: his unpolished personality worked against him. As we covered elsewhere in the book, Moses might hold the all-time NBA records for most mumbled answers and uncomfortable interactions. It was all little stuff, like how he dealt with the same Houston beat reporters for years and refused to call them anything more than Post and Chronicle … but at the same time, your legend can’t grow unless media members are talking and writing about you, or teammates and peers are gushing with mythical stories about you. There has to be something there to capture. When SI assigned the great Frank Deford to profile Malone’s rise in 1979, even Deford struggled and announced early in the piece, “Malone is not particularly articulate about all this. Indeed, in his heavy bass voice, speaking in the argot of his impoverished Southern subculture, he sometimes seems obtuse.” Translation: Don’t expect any illuminating moments in this feature, folks!
And that’s how it went for Moses Malone. He stayed out of trouble, showed up on time, cashed his paychecks and always gave a crap.6 Why spend eight thousand words describing him when you could just remember all those backboards he demolished, or all those opposing centers who made Rocky’s “I can’t keep him off me” face. He kicks off the Pantheon for one reason and one reason only: at his peak, Moses guaranteed you a title as long as you surrounded him with a solid supporting cast. There’s something to be said for that.
11. SHAQUILLE O’NEAL

Resume: 17 years, 13 quality, 16 All-Stars … Finals MVP: ’00, ’01, ’02 … ’00 MVP … Runner-up: ’95, ’05 … Simmons MVP: ’05 … six top-5 MVP finishes … ’93 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’98, ’00, ’01, ’02, ’03, ’04, ’05, ’06), Top 10 (’95, ’99), Top 15 (’94, ’96, ’97, ’09) … best or 2nd-best player on 4 champs (’00, ’01, ’02 Lakers, ’06 Heat) and 2 runner-ups (’95 Magic, ’04 Lakers) … league leader: scoring (2x), FG% (9x) … career: FG % (2nd), 24.7 PPG (13th), 11.3 RPG (25th) … 2-year peak: 29–14–4 … 3-year Playoffs peak: 30–14–3, 55% FG (58 G) … swept in Playoffs 6 different times … 25K-10K Club
After I wrote a column about Shaq’s initial quest to enter the Pantheon (May 2000), a reader identified only as Plixx2 emailed to say, “I enjoyed the Pantheon and agree that Shaq is close, but not close enough. I think in 10–15 years people will look at Shaq’s career like they look back at Peter North’s career … dominant, but not the best.”7
Solid analogy at the time, even better now. Dominant, but not the best. Memorable, but not the best. Unstoppable, but not the best. Shaq won three Finals MVP’s in overpowering fashion, but he only took home one regular season MVP. He won four rings and could have won a fifth if Dwyane Wade hadn’t gotten hurt in 2005 … but he somehow got swept out of the playoffs six other times. He became such a singular fantasy advantage that my league forced teams to pay a Shaq Tax for two straight years (pick him and lose a sixth-round pick)8… but his free throw struggles made him such a liability that he was pulled late from a few close playoff battles.9 He only took basketball seriously for one entire season (1999–2000) and intermittently for the other sixteen … and yet, his playoff performances from 2000 to 2002 rank among the all-time greatest. He played for four teams in all (nobody else in the top fifteen played for more than two except Moses) … but made the first three better when he arrived and significantly worse when he left. We have written him off multiple times during his career (either as a potential superstar, a superstar, a super-duper star, a fading superstar or a viable starting center) … but each time, he made everyone eat their words.
On the other hand, Shaq left everyone with superstar blue balls. He became rich and famous before accomplishing anything worthy of those words; midway through his rookie year in Orlando, he’d already signed a seven-year, $40 million contract, starred in Blue Chips, recorded a rap album and become a household name. There were “the next Wilt” flashes for the next three years but never anything too lasting, with resentment building that Shaq personified the dangerous Too Much Too Fast Too Soon era. Orlando shocked Jordan’s Bulls and made the Finals. (Here comes Shaq!) Then Houston swept them as Hakeem administered young Shaq a first-class spanking. (There goes Shaq!) He ditched Orlando for the Lakers and gave them post-Magic relevancy again. (Here comes Shaq!) They did nothing for three years other than get juicy title odds in Vegas and choke every spring. (There goes Shaq!) He matured into a dominant force, won an MVP and rolled to his first title. (Here comes Shaq!) He suffered through four alternately satisfying and frustrating Laker years, feuding with Kobe, battling weight issues, mailing in regular seasons and ultimately kicking ass in the Playoffs for two more rings. (Here/there comes/goes Shaq!) Once he moved to Miami and transformed the Heat, we appreciated him a little more fully—his locker room presence, his passing ability, how teammates had a knack for peaking when they played with him, how he quietly had the most engaging personality of anyone—and I wrote during that season, “Shaq is like DeNiro in the seventies and eighties—everyone in the cast looks a little better when he’s involved.” His fourth title in Miami gave his career some extra weight; his recent resurgence in Phoenix opened the door that he might break some records or come close. Who can predict anything with Shaquille O’Neal? I will never count him out, and I will never count him in. Four things epitomize the Shaq era over everything else:
His per-game averages for the 2000 Finals: 45 minutes, 38 points, 17 rebounds … 38 percent from the line.10 That’s Apex Shaq in a nutshell.
Bill Russell’s teams finished 716–299 in the regular season for an absurd .705 winning percentage. That’s the standard. From 1994 (his second season) to 2006 (his fourteenth), Shaq’s teams finished 654–298 (.687) and never won fewer than 50. But because of his dreadful free throw shooting, Shaq was yanked in and out of the lineup in close playoff games more than any other Pantheon guy. This can’t be forgotten—it was the turd in the punch bowl of Shaq’s career. Kinda like how Pacino was secretly five foot six and they could only cast shorter costars for him. No, really.
In my annual “Who has the highest trade value?” column for 2002, I picked Shaq first with the following explanation: “Seems a little dubious that he’s ranked this high, right? After all, he turned thirty years old this season, he’s always threatening to retire and he was responsible for Kazaam.11 But here’s the thing … If the Lakers ever traded him, Shaq is competitive enough and vindictive enough that he would postpone his eventual retirement plans, then devote the next decade of his life to winning championships, haunting the Lakers and making them rue the day. And the Lakers know this. When motivated and hungry, he’s the most dominant player in the league. Nobody can stop him. Nobody. Not even Duncan. And that’s why the Lakers would never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever trade Shaq, not under any circumstances … which makes him the undisputed number one player on this list.” Of course, they traded him two years later. And he did come back to haunt them. You couldn’t make this stuff up.
All three times upon leaving a team (1996, 2004, 2008), Shaq shrewedly created a controversy to deflect that he was leaving because it was time to go. He blamed Penny Hardaway’s budding hubris for splitting Orlando; really, Shaq just wanted to live in California and play for the Lakers. When they dumped him because of his poor conditioning and because he made it clear that he’d go on cruise control without a mammoth extension, he deflected local blame by declaring war on Kobe (one of his smartest political moves and another reason why Shaq should run for office someday). When Miami dumped him because he looked washed-up and out of shape, he went right after Pat Riley and played the “I’m totally betrayed” card. Much like preelection Obama was a savvier politician than people realized, Shaq was a savvier athlete than people realized. Nobody made more money playing basketball. Ever.12 And no NBA player resonated on so many levels: with teammates, opponents, fans, media members, critics, little kids, you name it. I talk to NBA people all the time; rarely have I ever heard even a seminegative story about Shaq. If anything, you tend to hear more stories that make you say, “Really? That’s awesome!” Like the time Steve Kerr told me that Shaq headed to Wal-Mart after Phoenix home games, spent a ton of money, then hung out by the cash register to pay for other customers. Shaq made me laugh more than any player except McHale or Barkley, coming up with clever nicknames like “Shaqapulco” (his Miami estate) and analogies (like when he compared his three most famous teammates to Corleones, with Wade being Michael, Kobe being Sonny, and Penny being Fredo).13 The league was just more entertaining with him in it.
    One last thought: of any two old-school/new-school players, Shaq and Wilt resemble each other the most. Switch situations for ’59 Wilt and ’92 Shaq and Shaq matches Wilt’s numbers (and possibly exceeds them), while Wilt wouldn’t have topped Shaq’s best work. So why rank Wilt higher? Because Shaq left something on the table. He was given too much too soon: wealth, attention, accolades, everything. He never had a rival center like Russell to push him in his prime. He never had to worry about his next paycheck. He could coast on physical skills and that’s mostly what he did. Shaq turned out to be the least competitive superstar of his era, someone who enjoyed winning but wasn’t destroyed by losing, someone who kept everything in its proper perspective. Chuck Klosterman pointed this out on my podcast once: for whatever reason, we react to every after-the-fact story about Michael Jordan’s “legendary” competitiveness like it’s the coolest thing ever. He pistol-whipped Brad Sellers in the shower once? Awesome! He slipped a roofie into Barkley’s martini before Game 5 of the ’93 Finals? Cunning!14 But really, Jordan’s competitiveness was pathological. He obsessed over winning to the point that it was creepy. He challenged teammates and antagonized them to the point that it became detrimental. Only during his last three Chicago years did he find an acceptable, Russell-like balance as a competitor, teammate and person. But Shaq had that balance all along. He always knew what he was.15
My theory: basketball was never as much fun for Shaq as everything else happening in his life. Officials allowed opponents to defend him differently, shove him out of position and pull his shoulders on dunks. Teams fouled him in key moments and flashed a giant spotlight on his one weakness. The loathsome Hack-a-Shaq tactics were insulting and maybe even a little humiliating. Even when he kicked everyone’s asses (like from 2000 to 2002), he received a decent amount of credit16… but not really. The guy couldn’t win. And so Shaq could have earned a top-five Pyramid spot and multiple MVPs, but he happily settled for no. 11, some top-five records, three Finals MVPs and a fantastically fun ride. It reminds me of a life decision I made in college: instead of killing myself gunning for a 3.5 or higher, I worked for our newspaper and radio station, wrote a weekly sports column, then spent an inordinate amount of time hanging with my friends, partying, procrastinating and creating memories. I graduated with a 3.04 and wouldn’t change a thing. Neither would Shaq, who probably finished with a 3.68 in this analogy. If there’s a difference, it’s that Shaq convinced himself that his 3.68 was really a 4.0. And it wasn’t.
(Important note: Okay, I lied a little. It wasn’t a life decision. I just spent a lot of time procrastinating, hated studying and could always be talked into things like “Want to go outside and play stickball for twelve hours?” or “What if we drunkenly whip a golf ball against the metal door in our hall, then jump out of the way as it comes flying back at us, and the only way you can win is by not getting hit?”17 It’s actually a miracle that I lived through college, much less graduated with a 3.04. I’m done comparing myself to Pyramid guys.)
10. HAKEEM OLAJUWON

Resume: 18 years, 14 quality, 12 All-Stars … Finals MVP: ’94, ’95 … ’94 MVP … ’93 runner-up … Top 5 (’87, ’88, ’89, ’93, ’94, ’97), Top 10 (’86, ’90, ’96), Top 15 (’91, ’95, ’99) … All-Defense (9x, five 1st) … Defensive Player of the Year (’93, ’94) … 4-year peak: 27–13–2 … playoff record: most blocks (10) … record: career blocks … season leader: rebounds (2x), blocks (3x) … best player on 2 champs (’94, ’95 Rockets), one runner-up (’86) … ’86 plus ’94–’95 Playoffs: 29–11–4 (65 G) … ’95 Playoffs: 33–10–4.5, 62 blocks (beat Malone, Barkley, Robinson, and Shaq) … Playoffs (145 G): 25.9 PPG (6th), 11.2 RPG … 25K-10K Club
Here’s a new game show for you: See If You Can Replicate Hakeem Olajuwon’s Career!
We have the blueprint. Just go out and find one of the best young athletes in a country that’s obsessed with soccer. (The country doesn’t matter—could be South American, could be European, could be African, whatever.) Has to be someone who spent his childhood dreaming of a professional soccer career and developed world-class balance and footwork at a precocious age. (I’m talking thirteen, fourteen or fifteen, or as those years are sometimes called, “the dawn of masturbating.”) We need to make sure he never considers basketball, not even in passing. (Unofficial odds of this happening now that basketball has gone global: 100 to 1.) We need to hope the kid starts growing, only the growth spurt doesn’t affect his world-class balance and footwork. (Unofficial odds of this happening: 50 to 1 … so just between the last two variables, we are now talking about 50,000-to-1 odds.) We need to make sure an authority figure says, “Wow, this kid was put on earth to play basketball” and pushes him in that direction, then the kid takes to the sport naturally, as if he’s been playing hoops his whole life. (Not as likely as you’d think.) We need to make sure the kid voyages to America, finds the right college, makes all the necessary cultural adjustments, figures out the sport and its nuances on the fly, welcomes the attention and pressure and somehow keeps his “little man trapped in a big man’s body” athletic skills. (Okay odds, not great.) We need to make sure this college resides near an NBA team that features one of the six best centers ever during his zenith, and not just that, but we need to hope this guy is nice enough to play pickup with our kid every summer, take the kid under his wing and teach him every conceivable trick. (Hakeem’s mentor? That’s right, Moses Malone. Are you kidding me?)18 We need to hope our kid emerges as the best young center in basketball and doesn’t handle his chance in America like Borat did. (Definitely unlikely.) We need to make sure the right professional team drafts him and his body slowly fills out without costing him that world-class athleticism. (Unlikely, but not improbable.) We need to hope he develops the best collection of unstoppable low-post moves by anyone not named Kevin McHale. (Now we’re talking lightning in a bottle multiplied by three.) And finally, we need to hope that he has the necessary competitive chops, truly gives a shit, measures himself by his peers and takes great pleasure in destroying them. (Since only fifteen or twenty basketball players have been wired like that over the past seventy-five years, you do the math.)
Add everything up and here are your odds that we’ll see another Hakeem Olajuwon: a kajillionpilliongazillionfrazillionfriggallionmillion to one. You will see fifty reasonably close replicas of Jordan (and we’ve already seen two: Kobe and Wade) before you see another Dream. So go on YouTube, watch his highlights and congratulate yourself for seeing the only Hall of Famer who would have made it had he been anywhere from five foot eleven to six foot ten (his actual height). We knew something special could happen when he was whipping through Kareem and the ’86 Lakers like an Oklahoma twister. Strangely, the soon-to-be-ousted champs couldn’t stop heaping praise on him. Maurice Lucas simply said, “The rebirth of a bigger Moses Malone.”19 Magic decided, “In terms of raw athletic ability, Akeem is the best I’ve ever seen.” Mitch Kupchak summed it up best: “I can compare him to, maybe, Alvin Robertson in terms of being able to do everything. That tells you something, since Robertson is a guard. I’ve never seen anyone that strong, that quick, that relentless and who also happens to be seven feet tall.”
Thank you, Mitch! You just did my job for me. Hakeem finished his coming-out party by averaging a 25–12–3 (blocks) in the ’86 Finals and holding his own against the greatest slew of big men in NBA history. During a must-win Game 5 where tag-team partner Ralph Sampson was ejected for starting a brawl, an inspired Hakeem exploded for 32 points, 14 rebounds and 8 assists. Put it this way: If I did my “Who has the highest trade value?” column that summer, Hakeem would have finished first even after Jordan’s 63-point game in Boston. But that’s when things peaked for a while. A promising Rockets juggernaut quickly self-combusted in a haze of drugs and bad luck, with Sampson getting shipped to Golden State for lemons Sleepy Floyd and Joe Barry Carroll (cleverly nicknamed “Joe Barely Cares” by Peter Vecsey).20 Poor Hakeem wasted his youth toiling away on undermanned teams while submitting dazzling across-the-board numbers and at least three “Holy mother of God!” displays of athleticism per game. We always hear about the lack of support for superstars like KG or Oscar, but jeez, the Rockets baked Hakeem a shit soufflé of teammates for six solid years (1987–1993). He complained for much of that time, explaining to Sports Illustrated in 1991 that it was nothing personal, but “all I was saying was, you don’t build with these guys. I wasn’t criticizing my teammates. I was only saying that it’s O.K. to have one or two guys [like that], but not a whole team of them. After all, my career’s on the line.”21
By this point, Dream’s reputation as a head case was gaining steam. During his first few seasons, he spelled his name “Akeem” and played with a trigger-happy fury, starting multiple fights and near-fights, constantly blowing up at officials, and pacing around like some menacing hothead at a bar.22 He eventually rededicated himself to Islam, found inner peace, started fasting during Ramadan (even though it chewed up a month of every regular season), changed the spelling to “Hakeem” and channeled his hostilities into his play (still superb) … only when he started bitching about his supporting cast, it became difficult to discern whether everything was screwed on correctly. After he battled a mysterious heart ailment during the ’91 season, his stock dropped to the degree that I distinctly remember driving around once and hearing Boston radio host Glenn Ordway—someone whose basketball opinion I had always respected—pooh-pooh a caller’s idea of a Reggie Lewis/Hakeem swap, saying the Celtics would never do it. I loved Reggie as much as anyone, but this was Hakeem Olajuwon! You only had to see him in person once to think, “I will probably not see fifteen better basketball players while I am alive.” When his supporting cast improved for the 1992–93 season—which doubled as a career year for him, not so coincidentally—he broke through during Jordan’s “baseball sabbatical,” winning the 1994 MVP, winning back-to-back Finals MVPs and pillaging Shaq, Robinson and Ewing in the process. At no other point in NBA history has one superstar specifically and undeniably thrashed his three biggest rivals in the span of thirteen months. It remains Hakeem’s greatest feat. He would remain relevant for another five seasons, making All-NBA teams fourteen years apart (second team in ’86, third team in ’99). Now he’s one of the twelve greatest players ever by any calculation. And to think, it all started on a soccer field in Nigeria with somebody saying, “Man, I bet that kid would be good at basketball.”
My one historical nitpick: you could argue that Hakeem’s prime (1992–95) worked so well because he didn’t play with another transcendent guy. Hakeem was something of a ball stopper: he caught the entry pass, thought about it, checked the defense, thought about it some more, made sure he wasn’t getting double-teamed, tried to get a feel for which way his defender was leaning, then picked an In-N-Out Burger move to exploit the situation.23 As weird as this sounds, he was better off playing with a band of three-point shooters and quality role players; he didn’t need help from a second scorer like Dominique or Kobe, nor did he need an elite point guard to keep hooking him up the way Stockton helped Malone. He just needed some dudes to spread the floor and one other rebounder. For a salary cap era that hadn’t even really kicked in yet, Hakeem became the ideal franchise player: a guaranteed 44–49 wins even when flanked by mediocrity, and if you upgraded his supporting cast from crap to decent, you could beat anyone in a playoff series as long as Dream was inspired.24 So he was like Schwarzenegger or Stallone at their peaks—you were having a big opening weekend with Dream regardless of the script or the rest of the cast—and if you had to pick any franchise center to carry a crappy team for a few years, you would have picked Dream over anyone but Kareem. That quality separated him from every nineties contemporary except Jordan; he really was a franchise player. On the other hand, I’m not convinced Dream could have tailored his game to an up-tempo team like the Showtime Lakers, or even a brilliant half-court passing team like the ’86 Celtics. Playing with the likes of Kenny Smith, Sam Cassell, Robert Horry, Mario Elie, Otis Thorpe and aging Clyde Drexler worked perfectly, even if it didn’t totally make sense why. Throw in Jordan’s “sabbatical” and an unlucky career turned into a fairly lucky one, and that’s before we get to the kajillionpilliongazillionfrazillionfriggallionmillion-to-one odds that he made it in the first place.
Now that we have that settled, let’s quickly delve into something that I normally hate: numbers. You always hear about stats with Wilt, Oscar, Bird, Magic and LeBron, but Hakeem never comes up even though he’s the all-time “holy shit” stat guy other than Wilt. He averaged a 20–11 as a rookie and never dipped below a 21–12 for the next twelve years, seemingly peaking in ’89 and ’90 (averaging a 25–14–3 with 2.3 steals and 4.1 blocks), then peaking again from ’92 to ’95 (a 27–11–4 with 3.9 blocks). If we created a stat called “stocks” (just steals plus blocks), Hakeem topped 300-plus stocks with at least 100 blocks/steals in twelve different seasons (nearly double anyone else),25 notched 550 in 1990 (the only time anyone’s ever topped 500) and finished with 1,045 combined in ’89 and ’90 (the only time anyone ever topped 1,000 combined in two years). During his peak, Dream caused five turnovers per game along with countless other layups and runners he probably affected from game to game. (Note: I like “stocks” because it gives you an accurate reflection of his athletic ability and the havoc he wreaked on both ends. No modern center was better offensively and defensively than Dream. I should have come up with “stocks” four hundred pages ago. Crap.) He finished with 5,992 career stocks in 1,238 games (and another 717 stocks in 145 playoff games), coming within 8 stocks of becoming the only living member of the 6,000 Stock Club. As it is, he’ll have to settle for being the only living member of the 5,900 Stock Club. And the 5,500 Stock Club. And the 5,000 Stock Club. And the 4,500 Stock Club. Robinson, Ewing, Kareem, Mutombo, Jordan, and every other post-1974 guy couldn’t come within 70 percent of that 5,992. Seriously. You can look it up.
And then there’s this: During the slow-it-down, overcoached, way-too-physical mid-nineties, he played 197 games in ’94 and ’95 (over 8,000 minutes in twenty months as his team’s only all-around threat) and averaged a 31–10–4 with 53 percent shooting and 218 stocks in 45 Playoffs games against eight opponents with win totals ranging from 47 to 62.26 With the league battling image/style/likability problems during Jordan’s “sabbatical,” that stretch of brilliance never resonated like it should have. Neither did Hakeem’s longevity: he averaged a 21–12 as a rookie, with a 21–13 and 20 stocks in the ’85 Playoffs (5 games); fifteen years later, he averaged a 19–10 (regular season) and a 20–11 with 21 stocks in the ’99 Playoffs (5 games). He made the playoffs every year for his first fifteen except ’92, never winning fewer than 42 games or more than 58, yet he only played with four All-Stars during his career (Sampson, Thorpe, Drexler and Barkley). He led the Rockets to the ’86 Finals and came within a break or two of leading them there eleven years later;27 except for Kareem, no center stayed that good for that long. Fifteen years? Even ER didn’t last as long as Hakeem. When you remember that Hakeem never would have made it without a series of miracles and mini-miracles that could never be replicated, I’m going out on a limb and saying that nobody will ever end up winning the See If You Can Replicate Hakeem’s Career! game show. Not even if they change cloning laws in this country.28
9. OSCAR ROBERTSON

Resume: 14 years, 13 quality, 12 All-Stars … ’64 MVP … ’61 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’61, ’62, ’63, ’64, ’65, ’67, ’68, ’69), Top 10 (’70, ’71) … 3 All-Star MVPs … 5-year peak: 30–10–11 (first 5 seasons) … 2-year Playoffs peak: 31–11–9, 47.2 MPG (22 g’s) … leader: assists (6x), FT% (2x) … career: 25.5 PPG (8th), 9.5 APG (3rd), 7.5 RPG, FT’s (3rd), assists (4th), points (10th) … 2nd-best player on champ (’71 Bucks), starter on runner-up (’74 Bucks) … 25K Point Club
Back in February 2008, I was killing time in an airline club waiting for my delayed flight to board. Sitting only twenty feet away? NBA legend Oscar Robertson. Did I jump at the chance to make small talk with one of the ten greatest players who ever lived? Did I say to myself, “This is a gift from God, I can introduce myself to Oscar, tell him about my book, maybe even have him help me figure some Pyramid stuff out”? Did I even say, “Screw it, I gotta shake his hand”?
Nope. I never approached him.
Had I heard too many stories about Oscar being a miserable crank? Was I still scarred from finishing his 2003 autobiography, The Big O: My Life, My Times, My Game, maybe the angriest, most self-congratulatory basketball book ever written by anyone not named “Wilt?”29 Did I feel bad because Oscar was damaged goods, a profoundly bitter product of everything that happened to him? I don’t know. But he may as well have been wearing a BEWARE OF OSCAR sign. And so we killed time just twenty feet apart for the next three hours. I never said a word to him.
There are few happy Oscar stories. Teammates lived in perpetual fear of letting him down. Coaches struggled to reach him and ultimately left him alone. Referees dreaded calling his games, knowing they couldn’t toss the league’s best all-around player even as he was serenading them with F-bombs. Fans struggled to connect with a prodigy who had little interest in connecting with them. After he finished in the top five for assists and points for nine straight years, made nine straight first-team All-NBA appearances, averaged a triple double for the first five years of his career, won the ’64 MVP with Russell and Wilt in their primes and transformed the role of guards in professional basketball, his team still decided, “We need to get rid of him.” Even his hometown paper (the Cincinnati Enquirer) piled on by writing in February 1970, “For years, Oscar has privately scorned the Royals management; he has ridiculed Cincinnati and its fans; he has knocked other players, both on his team and others; and he has never been willing to pay a compliment. He is, has been and probably will grow old a bitter man, convinced that it was all a plot.” Of course, Oscar included this excerpt in his book thirty years later as proof that the notoriously right-wing newspaper was bigoted. Maybe both sides were right.
If Elgin was profoundly affected by racism, then Oscar was obliterated by it. He grew up like Bizarro Jimmy Chitwood in Bizarro Hoosiers, the never-released movie where a black basketball team prevailed … but not before facing profound prejudice and hostility along the way.30 When Oscar’s Crispus Attucks High School became the first all-black champion in state history in 1955, Indianapolis rerouted its annual championship parade toward the ghetto, with the implication being, We don’t trust the blacks to behave themselves, so let’s keep this self-contained. Oscar never got over it. Nor did he get over Indiana University’s coach, Branch Mc-Cracken, for recruiting him by saying, “I hope you’re not the kind of kid who wants money to go to school.” (Note: If you don’t think Oscar didn’t immediately stand up and walk out of the room, then you don’t know Oscar well enough. Yes, that was a triple negative. I was due.) He chose the University of Cincinnati and had experiences that defy imagination six decades later. This stuff actually happened? His teachers belittled him in class and went out of their way to make him feel dumb. In Dallas, fans greeted him by tossing a black cat into his locker room.31 In Houston, he couldn’t check into his hotel because of a NO BLACKS ALLOWED sign … only his team stayed there anyway, with poor Oscar stuck sleeping in a Texas Southern dorm room. In North Carolina, someone delivered him a pregame letter from the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan that simply read, “Don’t ever come to the South.” In St. Louis, he and a black teammate strolled into a restaurant and were greeted by stony silence, followed by every other customer clearing out within a minute or two. Even in downtown Cincinnati, they had “colored” water fountains and a cinema that wouldn’t allow blacks as patrons … a theater that stood only half a block from where he starred for the Bearcats. Night after night, Oscar was filling a gym with fans and couldn’t even walk down the street to catch a movie.
At some point, the Big O snapped, shut himself off and settled for taking his frustrations out on everyone else. I don’t blame him one iota—even in photos of Oscar from high school to the NBA, you can actually see the grim transformation in his face. Young Oscar is wide-eyed, innocent, grinning happily in every photo. Older Oscar looks like he’s smoldering, like he’s barely happy enough to fake a smile for the photographer. Had Magic or Jordan dealt with everything Oscar dealt with, they would not rank higher than him in this book. There’s no way. So in a Pyramid that hinges on five dynamics—individual brilliance, respect from peers, the statistical fruits/spoils of whatever era, team success and an intangible connection with teammates—Oscar’s career remains the toughest to project. Yes, he was brilliant. Yes, his opponents and teammates revered him. Yes, he took advantage of some undeniable gifts from his particular era. No, his teams didn’t succeed as much as you’d think. No, his teammates didn’t love playing with him (as much as they respected him). His statistics were remarkable, sure, but didn’t we just spend a book that’s now the size of War and Peace proving that basketball is more than just numbers? Shouldn’t it matter that Oscar never made the Finals until his eleventh season, well after his prime, when he rode Kareem’s gangly body to his first title?32 Or that Oscar thrived statistically but missed four postseasons and only won two Playoffs total? Or that three former teammates went on the record with the following quotes (from Tall Tales)?
Jerry Lucas: “Oscar was a perfectionist and he’d yell at you if you messed up. Then you saw that he yelled at everyone, so you learned not to take it personally.”
Zelmo Beaty: “He was such a perfectionist that I never could have lived up to his expectations. The way he’d scream at Wayne Embry: ‘You dummy, catch the ball … I put the ball right in your hands, how could you drop that one?’ I felt sorry for Wayne.”
Wayne Embry: “Oscar was so far ahead of us humans that you could never come up to his level. But because of his greatness and what he meant to the franchise, you hated to fail him. Oscar’s greatness sometimes overwhelmed Adrian Smith. [He’d] tell Oscar, ‘Please, O, you know I’m trying, I really am. You gotta believe me, O.’”
    Oscar’s demanding personality overwhelmed everyone around him. After his playing career ended and CBS jettisoned him in 1975, nobody hired him as a coach, general manager, broadcaster, or adviser for the next thirty-four years (and counting). He resurfaced occasionally as the Grumpy Old Superstar in any story comparing the good old days to whatever was happening in the current era.33 You could always rely on one churlish Oscar quote about how today’s players make too much money; how he never could have palmed the ball so blatantly back in his day; how he would have loved to have played in an era of charter planes, personal trainers and low expectations; how today’s triple doubles didn’t matter because you could get an assist for anything nowadays. Every Oscar quote makes it sound like Dana Carvey should be playing him with Robert Downey Jr.’s Tropic Thunder makeup. Back in my day, I used to get triple doubles playing in bad sneakers with nails sticking out of the floor and fans throwing stuff at me and I loved it! There’s just enough evidence that Oscar was an insufferable curmudgeon that he vacillated as high as no. 6 and as low as no. 12 for my Pantheon over a three-month span, ultimately settling here when I split the difference.
We know this much: every teammate and opponent revered his talents; the consensus seems to be “Jordan before Jordan”; and even West admits that it took him three or four years just to catch up to Oscar’s level. But since every laudatory Oscar story centers around his uncanny consistency and not quotes like “nobody was better when it mattered” and “this guy could turn chicken shit into chicken salad,” how can we reconcile his phenomenal individual success with his undeniable lack of team success? His supporting cast was serviceable from 1961 to 1966 (Lucas, Twyman, Embry, and ’66 All-Star MVP Adrian Smith were his four best teammates); you could argue his teams slightly overachieved by finishing 60 games over .500, going 55–25 in ’64 and dragging two Russell teams to a deciding playoff game. On the flip side, he played with quality players from ’67 to ’70—not just Lucas and Smith, but youngsters who went on to bigger and better things, like Jon McGlocklin, Bob Love, Happy Hairston, and Tom Van Arsdale—and never dominated an increasingly diluted league. Considering Jordan’s supporting cast was equally uninspired and his league was tougher, it’s hard to fathom why Jordan’s teams kept improving while Oscar’s teams wilted over time. Both were famously brutal with teammates, only Jordan’s competitiveness boosted his team’s collective confidence while Oscar chipped away at it. Can you succeed when you’re petrified of letting your best guy down? Beyond that, can you succeed when your best scorer also happens to be the guy running your team? Obviously not. The Royals never won anything … and really, never did anyone else who fit that category.34
The bigger problem is that Oscar’s top-ten resume rests mostly on one thing: his dominance from 1961 to 1965, when he averaged a triple double and unleashed holy hell from the guard position.35 Those numbers make more sense than you’d think. Much like Wilt, Oscar was four or five years ahead of his time from a physical standpoint. There were only four “modern” guards during Oscar’s rookie season; since the other three (Sam Jones, Greer, and West) were shooting guards, Oscar physically overpowered defenders the same way that Wilt boned up on the Darrell Imhoffs and Walt Bellamys. Imagine if 2009 Dwyane Wade played against a steady stream of Jason Tarrys and Steve Blakes every night for 70 games, and for the other 12 he had to play against Kobe and Pierce. Then imagine every power forward was six foot six and under, and imagine there were only seven elite centers in a thirty-team league. Next, imagine he played in a run-and-gun era where there were 80 rebounds and 120 field goal attempts available every game. Would Wade average a 35–10–10 for the season? Of course he would. How is that different from Oscar’s situation as a rookie? There were eight teams and eighty-eight players total, along with an unwritten “don’t have more than two black guys on your roster” rule. So in a peculiar twist, some of Oscar’s early success happened because of racism. Unleashing Oscar on a mostly white NBA in 1960 was like unleashing a horny Madonna on a nightclub filled with good-looking twenty-year-old Hispanic dancers. Check out the cream of the crop for Oscar’s first season.
1961 All-Stars (guards): Oscar and Greer (black); West, Cousy, Tom Gola, Gene Shue, Larry Costello, Hot Rod Hundley, Richie Guerin (white)
1961 assist leaders (guards in top twenty): Oscar, Guy Rodgers (black); West, Cousy, Gola, Shue, Costello, Hundley, Guerin, Johnny McCarthy, Bucky Bockhorn,36 Chuck Noble (white).37
    KC Jones, Al Attles and West were Oscar’s only opponents who could dream of handling him physically. So Oscar used his size with scorching results, backing smaller players down, finding his favorite spots 15 feet from the hoop, then turning around and shooting over whomever. Nobody could stop him. The Big O mastered a deadly high-post game that hadn’t even been invented yet—like watching a Wild West duel where one guy pulls out a revolver and the other guy pulls out an Uzi. Within five years, the color of the league changed, the pace of the games slowed and Oscar lost that Uzi/revolver advantage to some degree.
1966 All-Stars (guards): Oscar, Greer, Rodgers, Sam Jones, Adrian Smith, Eddie Miles (black); West, Ohl (white)
1966 assist leaders (guards in top twenty): Oscar, Rodgers, Jones, Wilkens, Greer, Mahdi Abdul-Rahman, Dick Barnett, Wali Jones, Sam Jones, Adrian Smith (black); West, Guerin, Ohl, Kevin Loughery, Howard Komives, Johnny Egan (white)
Is that why Oscar’s stats dropped slightly (28–6–10 from ’66–’70) when he should have been peaking like West?38 The Royals never won a playoff series after 1965; from 1968 to 1970, they missed the postseason completely as Oscar gained weight and said things like “My primary purpose is to get the team moving, establish community out there and make some money.” There was no magic in his game, just a quality that Frank Deford described in 1968 as “eerily consistent,” adding, “In eight years as a pro he has never averaged less than 28.3 points a game or more than 31.4, and in six of the eight years his average varied less than a point. In assists and free throws he has maintained the same level of consistency. He is like a .333 hitter who arrived at that figure by going 1 for 3 with one walk in every game of the season.”39 Instead of Mr. Clutch, Oscar was Mr. Groundhog Day. That went for his personality, too. He grumbled about being underpaid and marginalized so relentlessly that the Royals swapped him for Gus Johnson, only Oscar pushed for a $700K extension from Baltimore before vetoing the trade. (Before you excuse his behavior by saying, “The guy was frustrated, he just wanted to win,” consider Magic Johnson’s plight late in his career. He was saddled with Kareem’s corpse in ’89, a Mychal Thompson/Vlade Divac center combo in ’90, then a Divac/Sam Perkins combo in ’91. His best teammate was Worthy, an excellent player who couldn’t crack my top forty-five. His second-best teammate was Byron Scott, never an All-Star and a textbook “right time, right place guy.” In a loaded league, did Magic give up, point fingers or demand a trade? Nope. He averaged 59 wins per year and dragged the Lakers to two Finals.)40 When the Royals shipped Oscar to Milwaukee, I know it’s romantic to think, “They just wanted to give him a chance at a ring.” Here’s the reality: Cousy decided Oscar wasn’t worth big money anymore and sent him packing for 40 cents on the dollar, then drafted Tiny Archibald to replace him.41 The following players would never have been traded unless they demanded out: Bird, Magic, Jordan, West, Duncan, Shaq, Hakeem or Russell. In Oscar’s case, the Royals moved in a different direction. Big difference.
Clearly, something was a little off with the Big O. You never heard the word “happy” that often with him, except for that transcendent ’71 season when the Bucks destroyed everyone in their path. He ended up leaving Milwaukee just as unhappily as he’d left Cincinnati, furious that the team lowballed him (in Oscar’s mind) before the ’75 season. Sam Goldpaper’s subsequent New York Times story started, “Pro basketball has lost what once was its greatest and most complete player. Oscar Robertson, after 14 seasons and many contract disputes, announced his retirement last night.” You couldn’t get through the second sentence of Oscar’s basketball obituary without finding something negative. Twenty-eight years later, Jack McCallum’s SI feature wondering why Oscar had effectively disappeared from basketball started, “The Big O is known in basketball circles for being the Big Grind, a hoops curmudgeon who protests that in his day the players were better, the coaches smarter, the ball rounder. The reputation is not entirely undeserved. But today—40 years after a season in which he averaged a triple double in points, rebounds and assists—Oscar Robertson wants you to know that he does not spend his hours stewing in a kettle of his own bile. Well, wants you to know is a little strong because, frankly, he doesn’t much care what you think.”
Again, complimentary … but negative. Nobody sifted through Oscar’s never-ending acrimony well enough to figure him out. Even when he heroically donated a kidney to his ailing daughter in 1997 (saving her life), the moment came and went; you probably didn’t remember until I reminded you. His biggest legacy had nothing to do with talent: Oscar’s ballsy performance as president of the Players Association led to skyrocketing contracts, the ABA/NBA merger, an overhaul of free agency and every eight-figure deal we see today, only he never gets credit because the struggles of NBA players haven’t been romanticized by writers or documentarians. Even stranger, of all the NBA legends who ever lived, only Oscar doesn’t belong to a current franchise because the Royals moved to Kansas City in 1973 (and then Sacramento in 1985). He can’t go back home like Russell/Bird in Boston, or Magic/West/Kareem in Los Angeles, or even Willis/Clyde/Ewing in New York, simply because home doesn’t exist. He’s a historical nomad. He belongs to nobody. And maybe it’s better that way. To this day, Oscar remains damaged goods—a victim of his vile racial climate, someone who battled a rare form of post-traumatic stress disorder that can’t be defined. As his teammate during Oscar’s prime, you would have respected the hell out of him, you would have felt sorry for him, you would have marveled at him … but ultimately, I’m not sure you would have enjoyed playing with him that much. This was a man who decided during the epilogue of his book, “Once I heard someone say that in order to write love songs, you have to have been through some bad times. To write a love song, you had to have your heart broken. If that’s the case, I can state right here and now that I could write the greatest songs in the world.”
Of all the injuries that determined the ninety-six spots of my Pyramid, I can tell you this much: Oscar Robertson’s broken heart resonates the most.
8. JERRY WEST

Resume: 14 years, 12 quality, 14 All-Stars … ’69 Finals MVP … Simmons MVP (70) … MVP runner-up: ’66, ’70, ’71, ’72 … Top 5 (’62, ’63, ’64, ’65, ’66, ’67, ’70, ’71, ’72, ’73), Top-10 (’68, ’69) … All-Defense (4x) … records: FTs, season (840); points, playoff series (46.3) … leader: scoring (1x), assists (1x) … career: 27.0 PPG (5th), 27–7–6, 47% FG, 81% FT … 4-year peak: 30–6–6 … Playoffs (153 G): 29.3 PPG (3rd) … Finals: 30.5 PPG (55 G) … best player on one champ (’72 Lakers), best or 2nd-best player on 8 runner-ups (’62, ’63, ’65, ’66, ’68, ’69, ’70, ’73 Lakers) … averaged a 26–5–10 during L.A.’s 33-game winning streak (’72) … 25K Point Club
“Ahead of Oscar?” you’re saying. “Really? Ahead of Oscar?”
My defense in five parts:
They made the signature West move (going right, leaning forward, ready to make one last high dribble for a pull-up jumper) the league’s logo. It remains the league’s logo to this day. This seems relevant. If the Academy decided that the Oscar trophy should look like Laurence Olivier instead of Marlon Brando fifty years ago, wouldn’t that have meant something?42
The Royals traded Oscar and the Lakers never would have traded West. (During the ’70 season, the Royals floated a West-Oscar or West-Wilt trade out there and the Lakers quickly said no.) Oscar’s first four years were unquestionably better than Jerry’s first four years; during the ’65 season, SI wrote, “[West] is, above all else, an exceptional basketball player of a cut and magnetism comparable (some even say superior) to Oscar Robertson,”43 with Warriors coach Alex Hannum adding, “Oscar does the right thing more often, but in some phases I now believe West is superior to Robertson. He creates many problems for a defense, and he is more exciting because of the increased range of his long shot.” So let’s call it dead even for that year and the next two (West might even get a slight edge). West was undeniably superior for the next five seasons, with SI deciding in 1972, “There has been a groundswell for West the last few seasons, so that now he is often accepted as the equal, or the superior, of Oscar Robertson as the finest guard of all time.”44 As Oscar broke down over the ’72 and ’73 seasons, West submitted two more spectacular years (making first-team All-NBA both times and making two Finals). Why take Oscar over West when the last two-thirds of West’s career was significantly better?
Any player from their generation would have rather dealt with West than Oscar as a teammate and if they say otherwise, they’re lying. West was just an easier guy to exist with. As early as 1965, SI wrote, “There is one intangible that nobody talks much about because it is hard to judge accurately, or even to judge at all. West seems to have a more settling influence on his team; he is not, like Robertson, a complainer. He does not bait officials.” Even opponents loved the Logo. When the Lakers held Jerry West Night in March 1971, Bill Russell paid his own way to be there and said during the ceremony, “Jerry, I once wrote that success is a journey, and that the greatest honor a man can have is the respect and friendship of his peers. You have that more than any man I know. Jerry, you are, in every sense of the word, truly a champion. If I could have one wish granted, it would be that you would always be happy.” Don’t these stories count in the big scheme of things?45
As I keep mentioning, I’m somewhat of an evolutionary snob. To re-borrow the car analogy from much earlier, you’d rather race a 2010 BMW than a 1964 BMW; you’d rather drive cross-country in a 2010 BMW; you’d rather bet your life on getting 250,000 miles out of a 2010 BMW. You just would. It’s the safe pick. They make finer automobiles now—better torque, better engines, better shocks, better balance, better acceleration, better engineering, better everything. With that said, they did make a couple of transcendent cars in the sixties. And you know who was like the ’64 Beemer? The Logo. Moses was the perfect self-made center, Bird the perfect self-made forward, and West the perfect self-made shooting guard—a little undersized (only six foot three, but with an 81-inch wingspan),46 a good athlete (but not great), never dominating (but routinely unstoppable), and someone who willed himself to be better than he should have been. Watching him forty-plus years later is like watching a human basketball camp. Technically, he’s perfect. His jumper is perfect. His defensive technique is perfect. His dribbling is right out of an infomercial. He runs in the most economical way possible. He could go right or left, attack the rim, pull up on a dime, post you up—the man had no holes other than a genetic inability to play above the rim. I watched him enough on tape to make the following proclamation: throw 1966 West in a time machine, insert him into the 2008–9 season and he’d make the All-Star team easy. He had a “modern” game, for lack of a better word. If anything, he may have been born too soon; much like Maravich and DeBusschere, the three-point line would have been an enormous advantage for him. Since they didn’t have it back in the sixties, West worked for the best possible shots much as Oscar did, wrapping around picks for jumpers, backing defenders down to specific spots on the floor, pulling up for 15-footers on fast breaks, or simply beating guys off the dribble and getting to the line.
What bugs me about West is that—the same way Oscar was helped by a triple-double infatuation historically—West’s legacy was wounded by the lack of a three-point line, the lack of All-Defense teams (didn’t start until 1969) and that they didn’t keep track of steals until 1973–74.47
As much as I hate trusting numbers to paint an overall picture, this 13-month stretch that started with the ’65 playoffs and went through the ’66 playoffs does a decent job of describing why the Logo mattered so much:
’66 regular season: 79 games, 3,218 minutes (40.7 MPG) … 31.3 PPG, 7.1 RPG, 6.1 APG … made 818 of 1,731 FGs (47.3%) … made 840 of 977 FTs (86%) … record: 45–35
’65 and ’66 Playoffs: 25 games, 1,089 minutes (43.6 MG) … 37.0 PPG, 6.1 RPG, 5.4 APG … made 340 of 708 FGs (48%)) … made 246 of 279 FTs (88%) … record: 12–13 (lost twice in Finals)
    Some things to keep in mind: First, Elgin blew out his knee in the ’65 playoffs and limped through the ’66 season (even missing 31 games). Considering the Lakers squandered consecutive Finals to Boston teams that featured five Hall of Famers and three top thirty-five Pyramid guys (and nearly stole Game 7 in ’66 to boot), that’s pretty impressive for a team with one great player. (So maybe that player was a little greater than we thought?) Second, those 840 made free throws in ’66? An all-time record. It’s never been topped. Not even by the Dipper. Including those 25 playoff games, imagine the sheer will of a six-foot-three guard getting to the line nearly 1,300 times in 104 games—one-fourth of which were games of the highest possible pressure—during a time when basketball resembled hockey and players were routinely creamed on drives. Along with Mikan, Russell and Jordan, he’s one of the four toughest NBA superstars ever. Third, West finished the ’66 regular season with the following rankings: second in points, fourth in assists, second in field goals made and attempted, tenth in field goal percentage, first in free throws made and attempted, fourth in free throw percentage and seventh in minutes, and if they’d kept track of steals, he would have cracked the top three there. (To put those numbers in perspective, not even Michael Jordan ever finished in the top ten in nine major categories.) Fourth, West set the record for most points per game in a Playoffs (five games or more), averaging 40.6 points during a remarkable ’65 playoffs that included one of the more heroic performances you never knew about: without Elgin, West carried the Lakers by averaging a jaw-dropping 46.3 points in the first round (squeezing them past Baltimore in six). Both of those records (40.6 and 46.3) still stand.
You won’t find a better stretch of all-around basketball. And that was a common theme of West’s career: he always delivered whatever his team needed. They needed him to shut a hot shooter down and he did it.48 They needed him to make a big shot and he did it. They needed him to score points for most of the sixties, so that’s what he did. During the last stage of his career (1969–1973), the Lakers needed West to be more of a ball-handler, so that’s what he did (even cracking the top three in assists in ’71 and ’72). Because of his reckless style, he suffered so many injuries (and played through all of them) that people stopped keeping track: broken noses, busted thumbs, pulled hamstrings, sprained ankles, concussions, you name it. He raised his game so consistently that it earned him the “Mr. Clutch” moniker, delivering a few iconic moments along the way—like his steal and buzzer-beating layup to win Game 3 of the ’62 Finals, or his game-saving 60-footer in Game 3 of the ’70 Finals, or a 53-point, 10-assist explosion in Game 1 of the ’69 Finals that Russell himself blessed as “the greatest clutch performance ever against the Celtics.”
If there was a telling moment from West’s career, it was the way Russell’s Celtics grew to revere him as the years passed. During the ’69 Finals, Larry Siegfried was talking to Deford about the good fortune of West’s hamstring injury—West had scored 197 points in the first five games before pulling his hamstring late in Game 5—and explained, “[West] is the master. They can talk about the others, build them up, but he is the one. He is the only guard …. His tribute is what the players think of him. We’ve played at about the same time but, if we hadn’t, the one player I’d most like to see win a championship is Jerry West.” After the soul-crushing Game 7 defeat, John Havlicek told Terry Pluto, “The guy I felt terrible for in those playoffs was Jerry West. He was so great, and he was absolutely devastated. As we came off the court, I went up to Jerry and told him, ‘I love you and I just hope you get a championship. You deserve it as much as anyone who has ever played this game.’ He was too emotionally spent to say anything, but you could feel his absolute and total dejection over losing.”
And that’s what stands out about West’s career more than anything: he had horrible luck. What happens if Selvy’s shot falls? What happens if Elgin’s body doesn’t break down? What happens if the Lakers don’t stupidly waive Don Nelson, who played such a crucial role for Boston in the ’68 and ’69 Finals? What happens if West doesn’t pull his hamstring at the end of Game 5 in the ’69 Finals, or if Wilt doesn’t milk an injury and enrage his coach during the last five minutes of Game 7? What happens if Wilt and Baylor don’t get hurt during the ’70 regular season, or if Willis never limps onto the court for Game 7 of the Finals and drives the crowd into a frenzy? When everything finally and belatedly fell into place during the ’72 season—a record 69 wins, a 33-game winning streak and his first title—West may have shattered the record for Most Fans with No Discernible Rooting Interest Who Just Felt Overwhelmingly Happy for a Winning Player.49
And so I’m forced to use the If My Life Depended on It Test here. From everything we just covered about West and Oscar, if your life depended on it and you could only pick one franchise player from 1960 to 1974, but you had to win at least three titles during that span, how could you not pick West? Even at his peak, teammates lived in fear of letting Oscar down. They walked on eggshells with him. They struggled to connect with him the same way a group of musicians would struggle to connect with someone who resides on a higher plane and blames them for being inferior. On the flip side, we have copious amounts of evidence to suggest that West elevated his teams—he didn’t just make them better, they wanted to win for him, and not just that, he connected with them in the right way. Jerry West had a better handle on The Secret than Oscar Robertson, and that’s why West was better. By a hair, but still.
7. TIM DUNCAN

Resume: 12 years, 12 quality, 11 All-Stars … Finals MVP: ’99, ’03, ’06 … MVP: ’02, ’03 … Runner-up: ’01, ’04 … ’97 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’98, ’99, ’00, ’01, ’02, ’03, ’04, ’05, ’07), Top 10 (’06, ’08) … All-Defense (12x, 8 1st) … best player on 4 champs (’99, ’03, ’05, ’07 Spurs) … ’03 Playoffs: 24–15–5 (24 G) … 2-year peak: 24–13–4, 51% FG … Playoffs: 23–13–4 (155 G) … career: 22–12, 2.4 BPG, 51% FG
I once asked my father, “Would you read a column about how underrated Tim Duncan is?”
Dad made a face. He played with his hair. He seemed confused. “A whole column on Tim Duncan?”
“You wouldn’t read it?”
“I don’t think so. I’d see the headline, skim the first two paragraphs, and flip to the next article.”
“Seriously? He’s the best player of the past ten years!”
“Nahhhhhhh,” Dad maintained. “Nobody wants to read about Tim Duncan. He’s not that interesting.”
At least that’s what Dad keeps telling himself. Duncan’s prowess had been a sore subject with him (and me) since the 1997 lottery, when the Celtics had a 36 percent chance of landing the first pick and San Antonio plucked it away.50 Our lost savior carried the Spurs to four titles over the next decade, a number that could have stretched to six if not for Fisher’s miracle shot in 2004 and Nowitzki’s heroic three-point play in 2006. What did we miss besides a slew of 58-win seasons and a few titles? For starters, the chance to follow the most consistent superstar in NBA history: just year after year of 23–12’s, 25–13’s and 21–11’s with 50% shooting. He kicked things off by submitting one of the best postmerger debut seasons: 21–12, 271 stocks, 56 wins, first-team All-NBA and Rookie of the Year. He captured a title in his second season, succeeding McHale and Hakeem as the Dude with the Most Low-Post Moves Who Should Be Double-Teamed at All Times. And it went from there. His placid demeanor never wavered, nor did his trademark shot (an old-school banker off the glass). Still chugging along as a top-five player after 1,000-plus regular-season and Playoffs games, he made up for the natural erosion in physical skills with an ever-expanding hoops IQ; he’s been the league’s smartest player for nearly his entire career.51 If there’s a major difference between Young Duncan and Older Duncan, it’s how he kept improving as a help defender and overall communicator. Whenever I watch the Spurs in person, that’s the first thing I always notice: how well they talk on defense. It’s a friendly, competitive chatter, like five buddies maintaining a running dialogue at a blackjack table as they figure out ways to bust the dealer. Duncan remains the hub of it all, the oversize big brother looking out for everyone else, the one who always seems to be throwing an arm around a teammate’s shoulder. He’s their defensive anchor, smartest player, emotional leader, crunch-time scorer and most competitive gamer, one of those rare superstars who can’t be measured by statistics alone. Fifty years from now, some stat geek will crunch numbers from Duncan’s era and come to the conclusion that Duncan wasn’t better than Karl Malone. And he’ll be wrong.
Now, I’m not a fan of the whole overrated/underrated thing. With so many TV and radio shows, columnists, bloggers and educated sports fans around, it’s nearly impossible for anything to be rated improperly anymore. But I say Tim Duncan is underrated. You know what else? I say he’s wildly underrated. Four rings, two MVPs, three Finals MVPs and nine first-team All-NBA nods … and he’s still going strong. Do you realize his best teammates were Robinson (turned thirty-three in Duncan’s rookie year), Ginobili (never a top-fifteen player) and Tony Parker (ditto)? Or that he never played for a dominant team because the Spurs were always trapped atop the standings, relying on failed lottery picks, foreign rookies, journeymen, aging vets and head cases with baggage for “new” blood? Maybe that’s one reason we failed to appreciated him: he never starred for a potential 70-win juggernaut that generated a slew of regular season hype. Another reason: even at his peak, he always had a little too much Pete Sampras in him. He lacked Shaq’s sense of humor, Kobe’s singular intensity, KG’s menacing demeanor, Iverson’s swagger, LeBron’s jaw-dropping athleticism, Wade’s knack for self-promotion, Nash’s fan-friendly skills or even Dirk’s villainous fist pump. The defining Duncan quality? The way he bulged his eyes in disbelief after every dubious call, a grating habit that became old within a few years. His other “problem” was steadfast consistency. If you keep banging out first-class seasons with none standing out more than any other, who’s going to notice after a while?
There’s a precedent: once upon a time, Harrison Ford pumped out monster hits for fifteen solid years before everyone suddenly noticed, “Wait a second—Harrison Ford is unquestionably the biggest movie star of his generation!” From 1977 to 1992, Ford starred in three Star Wars movies, three Indiana Jones movies, Blade Runner, Working Girl, Witness, Presumed Innocent and Patriot Games, but it wasn’t until he carried The Fugitive that everyone realized he was consistently more bankable than Stallone, Reynolds, Eastwood, Cruise, Costner, Schwarzenegger and every other peer. As with Duncan, we knew little about Ford outside of his work.52 As with Duncan, there wasn’t anything inherently compelling about him. Ford only worried about delivering the goods, and we eventually appreciated him for it.
Will the same happen for Duncan someday? It’s not like he lacks numbers or credentials. He closed out a ’99 Lakers sweep against Shaq with a 37–14–4 and a 33–14–4 in Games 3 and 4, averaged a 27–14 in the ’99 Finals, and became the second-youngest player to win Finals MVP. He carried a truly underwhelming supporting cast53 to a high 2002 playoff seed by topping 3,200 minutes, 2,000 points, 1,000 boards, 300 assists, and 200 blocks by season’s end. In the ’02 playoffs, battling the two-time defending champs with a crappy team and Robinson missing the first two games, Duncan averaged a 29–17–5 in a five-game loss to eventual champ L.A. (superior to Shaq’s 21–12–3). During one seven-game stretch against the Lakers and Mavericks in the ’03 Playoffs, he averaged a 31–17–6 (and closed out Shaq’s team with a 37–16–4).54 He cruised to a 2003 Finals MVP by throttling Jersey with a 24–17–5, closing the Nets out with a near quadruple double (a should-have-been-legendary 21–20–10–8) and getting little help from an aging Robinson (playoffs: 7.8 PPG, 6.6 RPG) or anyone else (Parker, Ginobili and Stephen Jackson combined for less than 37 PPG and shot 40 percent combined). After a discouraging summer in 2004 (Fisher’s shocker and a crushing Olympics defeat),55 a visibly worn Duncan adopted Pedro Serrano’s bald/goatee look, fought through nagging injuries and led the Spurs over Detroit in a choppy Finals, winning Finals MVP by default despite Ben Wallace and Rasheed Wallace tag-teaming him for seven games. (Phoenix’s Mike D’Antoni summed it up best: “[Duncan] is the ultimate winner, and that’s why they’re so good…. I hate saying it, but he’s the best player in the game.” Translation: Duncan is so good, I just threw my 2005 MVP under the bus.) When he captured a fourth title with his best Spurs team (2007), he officially grabbed the “greatest power forward ever” belt. For his first twelve years of his career, Duncan was never not one of the league’s top three most untradeable players.56
And yet … you’re not totally sold. You remember Shaq bulldozing everyone for three straight Finals. You remember Hakeem grabbing the center torch in ’94 and ’95. You remember Moses carrying Philly in the “Fo Fo Fo” season, beating up Kareem and putting up that crazy 51–32 game in 1981. You don’t really remember Duncan going Keyser S?ze on anyone. That’s what bothers you. To be ranked this high, you had to kick a little ass, right? (Here’s my counter: Look at his 2003 season again. He left a trail of asses. It’s true.) But really, that’s what made him more special than anything—like Bird, Russell and Magic, he always saved his A-game for when his team desperately needed it. The perfect Duncan game? Twenty-two points, 13 rebounds, 3 blocks, get everyone else involved, anchor the defense, win by 10, everyone goes home. He didn’t give a crap about stats. He really didn’t. Remember when the media stupidly voted Parker the 2007 Finals MVP? Nobody was happier for him than Duncan. That’s what makes Duncan great. If you want to play the “What unique trait will we remember about him?” card, go with this one: he could also play any style. During the deadly slow-it-down, grind-it-out, defense-beats-offense era (1999–2004), Duncan won two titles. During the transition period as everyone adjusted to the new rules (2005–6, when the NBA called hand checking and allowed moving picks), he won a third title. In the drive-and-dish/offense-beats-defense/smallball era, he won a fourth crown and excelled as one of the few big guys polished enough to punish players down low and talented enough to guard quicker players on the other end. For the purposes of this book, he made everyone else better and came through when it mattered. I don’t know what’s left.
You would have wanted to play with Tim Duncan. The man had no holes. Except for the fact that my dad probably skipped this section of the book and went right to Wilt.
6. WILT CHAMBERLAIN

Resume: 14 years, 13 quality, 13 All-Stars … MVP: ’60, ’66, 67, ’68 … runner-up: ’62, ’64 … Finals MVP (’67, ’72) … ’60 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’60, ’61, ’62, ’64, ’66, ’67, ’68), Top-10 (’63, ’65, ’72) … first 3-year peak: 43–24–4 … second 2-year peak: 24–24–8 … 3-year Playoffs peak: 32–27–4 (35 G) … leader: scoring (7x), rebounds (11x), total assists (1x), FG% (9x), minutes (8x) … season records: 50.4 PPG, 27.2 RPG, 72.7% FG … career records: 30.1 PPG, 22.9 RPG, 50-plus games (118), most points (100), most rebounds (55); consecutive scoring titles (7) … career: rebounds (1st), points (4th), minutes (4th) … 30–22 for 10 straight seasons … best player on 1 champ (’67 Sixers) and 1 runner-up (’64 Warriors), 2nd-best player on one champ (’72 Lakers) and 3 runner-ups (’69, ’70, ’73 Lakers) … 30K-20K Club (only member)
We already said more than enough about the Dipper, although his ’67 and ’72 seasons remain a testament to the “Wilt could have been the greatest player ever if he knew what he wanted” argument. Last winter I met a longtime Celtics fan named Paul Kelleher, one of those classic Boston Irish old guys with white hair and a kicking accent. He had been coming to the Garden since the fifties. Of course, I had to ask him about Russell and Chamberlain. His response: “Wilt was the most talented player I ever saw, but Russell just wanted it more.” And I thought, “Great—I wasted a ten-thousand-word chapter explaining what this guy just summed up in one sentence.” But that was a nice way to put it.57
Still, I couldn’t let the book slip away without passing along one dissenting opinion about Wilt, so I enlisted my friend Chuck Klosterman58 and gave him five hundred words. Here’s what he wrote.
Nobody ever rooted for Goliath when he was alive, but I feel for him now that he’s dead. How can you not? Wilt Chamberlain is the archetype of a tragic figure—a widely criticized, universally unappreciated, self-destructive coach-killer who happens to be the greatest tangible basketball player of all time. I can’t think of any other athlete whose reputation is so vastly inferior to his actual achievements. Are there any other two-time NBA champions who are perceived as failures by virtually all basketball historians? I can’t think of one. Is it reasonable for a man to average 50.4 points a game while finishing second in the MVP voting? It is not. But this is Wilt’s legacy (and it always will be).
The problem, of course, is my use of the word “tangible.” Anything described as “tangibly good” is inferred to mean “intangibly flawed.” This is why Chamberlain always loses in any comparison with Bill Russell. Russell possessed intangible greatness, which means sportswriters can make him into whatever metaphor they desire. Russell was the central figure for a superior franchise, so history suggests he was the greater, more meaningful force. His wins validate everything. If you side with Chamberlain, it seems like you’re siding with the absurdity of numbers. But consider this question: In an alternative universe (and with a different attitude), could Chamberlain have been Russell? Probably. Could Russell have been Wilt? Never. No chance. Chamberlain is the only human who could have ever been Chamberlain.
Basketball was a different game in the 1960s, so certain statistical anomalies are irrelevant. But get this: In 1961–62, Chamberlain scored 60 or more points in fifteen different games. Michael Jordan accomplished that five times in his professional life. Since his retirement in 1973, no player’s single-season rebound average has equaled Chamberlain’s clip for the totality of his 1,045-game career (22.9).59 You can come up with these kinds of factoids all night; Wilt’s numerical dominance is so profound that people have stopped thinking about it. And even when they do, it tends to work against him: when writers cite the year Chamberlain led the league in assists, it’s generally used to show how Wilt was confused (he seemed to believe piling up assists proved he was unselfish, which is kind of like claiming you’ve slept with 20,000 women to prove you were interesting). He just didn’t get it. He didn’t understand team dynamics or the reality of perception. But how much does that matter now? If Chamberlain’s personal statistics are moot, so are Russell’s achievements within the context of his team. They’re both historical footnotes. The real question is this: who was better in a vacuum? If we erase the social meaning of their careers—in other words, if we ignore the unsophisticated cliché that suggests the only thing valuable about sports is who wins the last game of the season—which of these two men was better at the game?
It’s possible the answer is still Russell. But everything tangible points to Wilt.60
5. LARRY BIRD

Resume: 13 years, 10 quality, 12 All-Stars … Finals MVP: ’84, ’86 … MVP: ’84, ’85, ’86 … BS MVP (’81) … Runner-up: ’81, ’82, ’83, ’88 … ’80 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’80, ’81, ’82, ’83, ’84, ’85, ’86, ’87, ’88), Top 10 (’90) … All-Defense (2x) … leader: threes (2x), FT% (4x) … 5-year peak: 28–10–7, 51% FG, 90% FT … 4-year Playoffs peak: 27–10–7, 50% FG, 90% FT (84 G) … ’84 Finals: 27–14–3 … ’86 Finals: 24–10–10 … ’87 Playoffs: 27–10–9, 43.9 MPG (23 G) … career: 24–10–6, 50% FG, 88.6% FT (9th) … highest career APG, forwards (6.1) … Playoffs: 24–10–6.5, 89% FT … best player on 3 champs (’81, ’84, ’86 Celts) and two runner-ups (’85, ’87) … member of ’92 Dream Team … 20K Point Club.
And you worried this book would be biased? Hah! The Bird-Magic argument mirrors Oscar-West because we reached a definitive conclusion—Oscar was better than West (1965), Bird was better than Magic (1986)—that shifted improbably over the second half of their careers. Would you rather have nine transcendent seasons from Bird, followed by a four-year stretch where he wasn’t remotely the same (and missed 60 percent of his games), or a twelve-year stretch of A-plus Magic seasons without a dip in impact? I’d rather have those three extra Magic years. And if I get struck by lightning or a telephone pole falls on me, so be it.61
We covered Bird’s brilliance in the prologue but didn’t delve into his numbers enough. Bird filled box scores to the degree that Boston reporters started a fantasy league modeled after Bird’s all-around brilliance in 1984 or 1985; as far as I can discern, it was the first of its kind. They threw in money, drafted teams of players, added up their points, rebounds and assists (the 42 Club premise, basically), and the team with the highest total took the prize. Since Bird was the obvious number one pick, they called it the Larry Bird League. Larry even drew their draft order for the first few years—or so they claimed. When people are creating fantasy leagues and naming them after you, you’re breaking new ground, no? So how do we measure that impact? I created a simple formula that’s the bastard cousin of the 42 Club—add up a player’s final placements in the NBA’s yearly rankings for points, rebounds and assists per game. The lower the number, the better. For instance, Bird ranked second in points, eighth in rebounds and nineteenth in assists in 1985. So … 2 + 8 + 19 = 29.
That’s a better score than you think. If we made 33 the cutoff point, limited the list to players who made the top twenty in all three categories, only counted post-Russell players62 and called it the Legends Club, only eleven post-1969 seasons qualify: 1976 Kareem (18), 1972 Kareem (21), 2003 Garnett (24), 1986 Bird (25), 1974 Kareem (26), 1979 Kareem (26), 1985 Bird (27), 1984 Bird (30), 1970 Billy Cunningham (31), 1981 Bird (32), 1982 Bird (33). That’s it. Magic didn’t make it. Neither did Jordan or LeBron. Bird made it four times and nearly five (with 35 in 1987). He’s also one of three players to crack the top fifty all-time in the three most relevant per-game career categories. As well as the top 75. And the top 100. And the top-125.
Bird: 24.3 PPG (16th), 6.3 APG (41st), 10.0 RPG (46th)
Wilt: 30.1 PPG (2nd), 4.4 APG (126th), 22.9 RPG (1st)
Oscar: 25.7 PPG (9th), 9.5 APG (4th), 7.5 RPG (129th)
Elgin: 27.4 PPG (4th), 13.5 RPG (10th), 4.3 APG (133rd)
Garnett (ongoing): 20.2 PPG (53rd), 11.1 RPG (29th), 4.3 APG (135th)
Cunningham: 21.2 PPG (35th), 10.4 RPG (37th), 4.3 APG (137th)
Magic: 19.5 PPG (63rd), 7.2 RPG (145th), 11.2 APG (1st)
And we didn’t even mention that he’s the ninth-best free throw shooter ever (89 percent), or that he came within a heartbeat of being the only member of the career 50–40–90 Percentage Club (finishing with 50% FG, 38% 3FG, and 89% FT). That’s the crazy thing about Bird: his game was never about stats, but nobody put up numbers quite like his. So there you go. Allow me three lingering Bird-related what-ifs that don’t include the name Len Bias, just for kicks.
No. 1: What if Bird’s back had held up? Five Hall of Famers were fascinating from a “How long could they have kept going at a reasonably high level if they hadn’t been sidetracked or retired prematurely?” standpoint. Stockton and Havlicek could have prospered as role players into their mid-forties; they were physical freaks along the lines of Jaclyn Smith still looking boinkable after she turned sixty. Magic would have reinvented himself as a power forward had HIV not derailed him, and since he loved the limelight too much to walk away, his last few seasons could have been more depressing than Pacino/De Niro in Righteous Kill. McHale’s Panda Express menu could have worked forever had his legs held up; he could have gone on low-post autopilot. And Bird would have happily evolved into an overseer/faciliator (his role on the ’91 and ’92 Celts when he wasn’t in traction), hanging out on the perimeter, launching threes, swinging the ball, feeding big guys and soaking in the “Lar-ree!” chants. Like Matt Bonner on his greatest day ever. This would have kept going until he turned forty-five or became bored, whichever happened first. Ironically, Bird’s skill set lent itself to an unusually long career even though his back believed otherwise.63
No. 2: What if Boston had traded Rick Robey sooner? The only NBA player who routinely shut down Bird was teammate Rick Robey, a backup center who doubled as Bird’s drinking buddy and fellow troublemaker. When the Celtics swapped Robey for Dennis Johnson before the ’84 season, Bird immediately rolled off the best five-year stretch in the history of the forward position. This wasn’t a coincidence. As soon as we master time machine technology, let’s travel back in time and frame Robey for a murder right before the ’82 season. I just want to see what happens.
No. 3: What if Bird had come along ten or fifteen years later? The dirty little secret of Bird’s success: fantastic timing. His heyday (1980–88) coincided with the last generation of all-offense/no-defense forwards (Dantley, English, etc.),64 and that’s not counting all the fringe swingmen (Ernie Grunfeld, Gene Banks, etc.) and clumsy power forwards (Kent Benson, Ben Poquette, etc.) torched by Bird on a routine basis. His toughest defenders were Michael Cooper, Paul Pressey and Robert Reid, lanky athletes who made him work for every shot; nowadays, nine out of ten opponents would do that. By the late eighties, the small forward spot was teeming with athletes like Scottie Pippen, Xavier McDaniel, Dennis Rodman, Detlef Schrempf, Jerome Kersey, Rodney McCray, Gerald Wilkins and James Worthy, while the big forward spot featured the likes of Karl Malone, John Salley, Sam Perkins, Horace Grant, Kevin Willis, Hot Rod Williams and Roy Tarpley. The salad days of Tripucka and Benson were long gone. When Bird floundered in the ’88 Eastern Finals, we assumed he was worn out and ignored a much more logical reason: maybe Rodman just shut his country ass down. Regardless, nobody realized what happened to forwards until the 1989 draft, when Danny Ferry (number two) and Michael Smith (number thirteen) bombed more memorably than Vanilla Ice’s follow-up album. And the thing is, they didn’t do anything wrong! They were just test cases for a totally different league. Had Ferry and Smith entered the NBA in 1975, they might have made multiple All-Star teams in the Don and Dick era. Going against the likes of Pippen, Malone and Rodman every night? Not a chance.65
    You know what the Smith Experience was like, actually? Watching the newspaper industry battle the Internet these past ten years. Sorry, fellas, the old days are over. You’re gonna lose. I wish I had better news for you. So let’s say Bird bridged the gap between newspapers and the Internet for the forward position. If he’d come along ten or fifteen years later, he would have been the New York Times or Wall Street Journal: still successful, still a must-read, but not quite as iconic. On the other hand, he would have adopted the three-point line much more quickly, and he would have developed all the modern conditioning/training/dieting habits, and shit, maybe something as simple as Pilates would have saved his back … (Now I’m talking myself out of this. Let’s just move on)
4. MAGIC JOHNSON

Resume: 13 years, 12 quality, 12 All-Stars … Finals MVP: ’80, ’82, ’87 … MVP: ’87, 89, ’90 … runner-up: ’85, ’91 … Top 5 (’83, ’84, ’85, ’86, ’87, ’88, ’89, ’90, ’91), Top 10 (’82) … leader: assists (4x), steals (2x), FT% (1x) … 3-year peak: 22–7–12 … 2-year Playoff peaks: 19–7–15 (40 G) … ’80 Finals: 22–11–9 … ’87 Finals: 26–8–13, 2.1 TO’s, 54% FG … career: 19.5–7–11.2 (1st), 85% FT, 52% FG … Playoffs: 20–8, 12.5 APG (1st all-time) … best or second-best player on 5 champs (’80, ’82, ’85, ’87, ’88 Lakers) and 4 runner-ups … holds 12 different playoff records (including most assists) … member of ’92 Dream Team … 10K Assist Club
My vote for the most fascinating basketball career of all time. He’s one of the most famous college players and professional players ever. He had an iconic game (Game 6, 1980) and iconic moment (the baby sky hook). He played in ten championship finals over a thirteen-year span, taking home six titles in all. He cocaptained the single greatest basketball team ever assembled (the ’92 Dream Team). He starred in the greatest Finals ever (1984). He had one of the best porn names ever but became so famous so fast that we never realized it.66 He battled Erving, Bird, Moses, Isiah and Jordan in the Finals over the span of twelve years as the league evolved from tape delay to mainstream. He meshed with his city on and off the court like nobody in league history. He was called a savior, a winner, a coach-killer, a choke artist and a loser, and then a winner again … and his prime hadn’t even happened yet. He became the first man to kiss another man in prime time. His game will never be re-created in your lifetime or mine. His first retirement announcement doubled as one of the ten biggest sports moments of all time, one of three JFK-assassination-level moments for Generation X (along with the Challenger exploding and the O.J. car chase) where everyone my age remembers where they heard the news. He became the focal point of the world’s single biggest health crisis in seventy-five years. And all of these things somehow happened between March ’79 and August ’92.
You know how Microsoft keeps releasing Windows with 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, and so on? There have been seven incarnations of Earvin “Magic” Johnson in all. In order:
Magic 1.0. The skinny kid with the big smile and bad facial hair from Michigan State. We hear too much about his NCAA title win and not enough about Magic becoming the first underclassman to get picked first in the NBA draft,67 or what he specifically meant as the second basketball star other than Doc to transcend color; nobody thought of him as black, just charming and genuine. Throw in his infectious smile, unselfish passing, built-in rivalry with Bird and once-in-a-lifetime game (six foot nine, all arms and legs, capable of playing five positions), and Magic’s color never mattered. For a league battling dueling “too black” and “our guys don’t care” syndromes, this was absolutely crucial.
(Postscript: How terrific was Magic in high school and college that he actually got away with the nickname “Magic”? That’s like giving yourself the porn name Long Dong Silver—you better be able to back that up. I always respected Magic for this one.)68
Magic 2.0. He quickly added to his legend by rejuvenating the Lakers and winning the ’80 Finals MVP with a surreal 42–15–8 in Kareem’s place—and then all hell broke loose. He missed 45 games of his second season with a knee injury, returned one month before the playoffs, then complained that his teammates (specifically, Norm Nixon) were jealous during an eventual upset loss to the Rockets in the first round, saying, “I try to give everybody the ball, keep everyone happy, but I guess it’s never enough. I never heard of this kind of situation on a winning team. Everybody can’t get the pub.”69 Hardened by fallout from his record $25 million contract and a nasty (but not undeserved) reputation as a coach-killer, Magic 2.0 peaked in year three when the Lakers rolled through the ’82 Playoffs. Now a devastating all-around player who played four positions and filled any void—a little like Phil Hartman or Will Ferrell on Saturday Night Live in that he could carry the show and serve as a valuable utility guy—Magic thrived defensively on L.A.’s deadly half-court trap and topped 200 steals. We’ve never seen anyone quite like ’82 Magic and the stats back it up: no modern player came closer to averaging a triple double (18.6 PPG, 9.6 RPG, 9.5 APG). But the Lakers still didn’t belong to him because he was splitting point guard duties with Nixon (something that seems incongruous in retrospect)70 and his teammates still bristled about his salary and public image. Even Kareem’s 1983 autobiography dismissed the long-believed assumption that Magic’s enthusiasm rejuvenated his career, griped about the 1980 Finals MVP vote and proclaimed, “We didn’t repeat as champs in 1981 because Earvin got injured, and when he came back he had forgotten what made us and him so successful.” Ouch.
(Postscript: Magic didn’t take those barbs personally because, again, Kareem was a ninny. But you’d think Kareem would have appreciated Magic more after not playing with a single All-Star from 1976 through 1979.)
Magic 3.0. Didn’t emerge until the Lakers got swept in the ’83 Finals, settled their alpha-dog/point-guard issue by swapping Nixon for the rights to Byron Scott (giving Magic the keys to Showtime), then got roughed up by a hungry Boston team that hijacked the ’84 Finals. It was a double whammy for Magic—not only did Bird’s team win, but Magic choked badly in crunch time of Game 2, Game 4 and Game 7. (I mean, badly. Like, everyone rehashed it all summer.) Magic rebounded by leading the Lakers to the ’85 title, winning the climactic Game 6 in Boston and exorcising a kajillion Laker demons. That’s when Magic 3.0 peaked as a point guard extraordinare and the King of Showtime, but someone who still needed an alpha dog (in this case, Kareem) to carry the scoring load for him.
(Postscript: It’s hard to overstate how badly Magic’s reputation suffered after the ’84 Finals, when he mistakenly dribbled out the clock at the end of regulation in Game 2, threw the ball away on another potential game-winning possession in Game 4, bricked two free throws with the score tied and 35 seconds remaining in Game 4, then made consecutive turnovers in the last 80 seconds to squander a winnable Game 7. That August, SI’s Alexander Wolff even wrote an essay titled “Johnson in the Clutch: Don’t Call Him Magic, Just Call Him Unreliable.”71 Even after his ludicrously good performance in the ’85 Finals, the consensus was, “Yeah, but he could never win without Kareem.”)
Magic 4.0. Didn’t emerge until a young Rockets team trounced the ’86 Lakers and Kareem suddenly looked 200 years old. Hardened for a third time, Magic reinvented himself as a crunch-time scorer, pulling the Lakers past Boston with a Pantheonic Finals performance: A 26–8–13 with 54 percent shooting, one remarkably clutch shot (the do-or-die baby sky hook over McHale and Parish in Game 4) and just 13 turnovers. Amazing. Incredible. He captured MVP and Finals MVP, finally grabbing the conch from Bird as the league’s alpha dog. From 1987 to 1991, Magic 4.0 tallied three MVPs and two rings, made the Finals four times, won 60-plus games per year and single-handedly kept the declining Lakers among the NBA’s elite. Off the court, he emulated Jordan’s marketing savvy and reinvented himself as a commercial pitchman and celebrity, even launching a Rat Pack of sorts with Eddie Murphy and Arsenio Hall.72 Suddenly he was the face of Hollywood, the guy who bridged every genre, a legendary performer and partier who knew everyone. You always hear the phrase “larger than life,” but in Magic’s case, he really was.73
Magic 5.0: And just like that, he became the face of HIV: November 7, 1991. I remember feeling like a family member had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. When my college girlfriend called me at our school’s newspaper office to tell me the news, my knees actually went weak. Magic is gonna die? Even when he kept hanging around over the next twelve months—first the ’92 All-Star Game, then the Dream Team, then a brief comeback that fell apart—an unspoken expiration date lingered over everything. Nobody expected him to survive long. Then again, nobody understood the difference between HIV and full-blown AIDS. We needed someone famous like Magic to teach us about it. Which he did.
Magic 6.0. My least favorite version. After riding high for fifteen years and getting the “magic” carpet pulled from under him, poor Earvin spent the next decade hanging around like Wooderson from Dazed and Confused.74 And you know what? That stretch did more damage to the perception of his basketball career than anyone realizes. He wasted a curious amount of time squashing rumors about his sexuality, even releasing a 1993 autobiography colored with tales about his (very hetero!) escapades and shamelessly plowing through the talk show circuit as “the (very hetero!) stud who banged so many chicks that he ended up with HIV, which means this could happen to you as well!” (Important note: This relentless campaign inadvertently hampered the sex lives of all red-blooded American males between the ages of eighteen and forty for the next eight years. For the first four years, everyone was terrified to have unprotected sex unless they were shitfaced drunk. For the next four, the guys weren’t terrified but the girls still were, although it’s possible they were just out of shape and didn’t want us to see them naked. Then the Paris Hilton/Britney Spears era happened, women got in shape and started dressing more provocatively, we figured out that you had a better chance of winning the lottery than getting HIV from conventional sex and it became a sexual free-for-all. Of course, I was married by then. Awesome. Thanks for ruining my twenties, Magic.) Did we really need to know about his elevator trysts, threesomes and foursomes, or bizarre philosophy about cheating on longtime girlfriend Cookie?75 Was Magic educating America’s youth about HIV or affirming and reaffirming his heterosexuality? The lowest point: Magic appeared on Arsenio’s show right after the HIV announcement and was asked about his sexuality. Magic said that he wanted to make it clear, “I am not gay.” The crowd applauded liked this was fantastic news, and even worse, Magic reacted to their homophobia like there was nothing wrong with it. It wasn’t his best hour.
When his post-Dream Team comeback imploded because of HIV in-sensitivities, Magic bombed miserably on NBC, left television to coach the ’94 Lakers, and resigned after sixteen frustrating games because he couldn’t reach younger players. He toured with an exhibition hoops team across Europe—like a washed-up Bono wasting a winter singing karaoke at Irish bars—before becoming a talk show staple, one of those “I was very, very, very available to come on” guests along the lines of Richard Lewis, Teri Garr, and Carrot Top. On the heels of Jordan’s much-ballyhooed return to the Bulls, Magic announced his intentions for another NBA comeback and volunteered his services for the ’96 Olympic team. Nobody cared. Undaunted, he returned after the ’96 All-Star Break and reinvented himself as L.A.’s new power forward for 32 games. This was fun for a week before we realized an older, bulkier Magic couldn’t possibly shed five solid years of basketball rust. Even if his opponents accepted him—an underrated milestone for the acceptance of HIV in this country, by the way—Earvin had turned into Chris Rock’s joke about how “you never want to be the guy who’s just a little too old to be in the club” (think Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) before retiring again that summer.76 He quickly created a syndicated late night show for himself, hoping to revive Arsenio’s successful tactic of “friendly celebrity brings on other celebrities, makes them feel comfortable, kisses butt, and everyone has fun.” The show would have worked if Magic had been remotely capable of hosting it. (Personally, I was devastated when they canceled it—to this day, it’s the only late night show to shatter the Unintentional Comedy Scale. You know how Magic always does his “There will nev-ah, ev-ah, ev-ah be another Larry Bird” routine? Trust me … there will nev-ah, ev-ah, ev-ah be another TV event like The Magic Hour.)77 Even after that latest public failure, you still couldn’t watch a Lakers home game without NBC’s obligatory Magic interview. He inserted himself into every Shaq-Kobe title celebration like Don King after a big fight. He boasted about beating HIV and claimed the virus had been wiped from his body. When the NBA launched a coed three-on-three celebrity game during 2002 All-Star Weekend, a heavier Magic unbelievably showed up as a teammate of Justin Timberlake and Lisa Leslie. As you watched him, you couldn’t help thinking, “Larry never would have lowered himself to this game.” I didn’t like anything about Magic 6.0 other than his durability.
Magic 7.0. This version had a happier ending. At least so far. Magic stepped back from the spotlight, became a visionary businessman, made hundreds of millions and opened a chain of successful movie theaters across the West Coast. His on-air skills improved so dramatically that ABC lured him away from TNT last year. He still spends much of his spare time educating people around the world about AIDS and HIV. And the fact that he’s still alive and healthy, far exceeding everyone’s expectations, might be his greatest accomplishment of all.
From a historical sense, Magic 6.0 cluttered our minds and overshadowed his actual NBA resume. He clearly enjoyed a better playing career than Bird until the Wooderson era destroyed that relatively small gap; now we “remember” them as equals even though Magic’s prime lasted three extra years. Just know that I spent both Reagan terms rooting against Magic, calling him a choker and arguing Bird’s merits until my face was blue … and then Magic captured my eternal respect after the baby sky hook and his December buzzer-beater in the Garden that same year. It wasn’t that Magic made those shots as much as my reaction as he was taking them; my heart sank even as the ball was drifting toward the basket. Not even the biggest Celtics fan on the planet could deny it any longer. Magic Johnson was just as exceptional as Larry Bird. Beyond that, he remains the most breathtaking player who ever ran a fast break—better than Cousy, better than Nash, better than anyone—because his height, huge hands, Gretzky-like vision and sneaky-long arms allowed him to reach the rim faster than opponents anticipated. (I grew up in a sports world that had seven certainties: you weren’t stopping Kareem’s sky hook, you weren’t covering Rice with one guy, you weren’t blocking LT with one guy, you couldn’t let Gretzky hang behind the net on a power play, you weren’t sacking Marino, you weren’t getting Boggs to chase a bad pitch and you weren’t stopping Magic on a three-on-one.) And he’s the single best leader in the history of the sport. Nobody extracted more from teammates, whether it was an All-Star Game, a mundane affair in December or any playoff game.
Digging a little further, only two modern players (Bird and Magic) played with enough unselfishness and intuition that those qualities permeated to everyone else. They lifted their teammates offensively much the way Russell lifted his teammates defensively, a domino effect that can’t be measured by any statistic or formula other than wins. Play with Bird or Magic long enough and you started seeing angles that you’d never ordinarily see … and that went for the fans, too. Jordan may have peaked as the greatest individual player ever, but he never brought everyone else to a different level like Bird and Magic did. If you loved basketball—if you truly loved it—you treasured them both and savored every season, every series, every game, every play, every moment. That’s just the way it was. They brought the game to a better place. Ultimately, it didn’t matter which one of them ranked higher on the Pyramid.
(Or so I keep telling myself.)
3. KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR

Resume: 20 years, 13 quality, 15 All-Stars … Finals MVP: ’71, ’85 … MVP: ’71, ’72, ’74, ’76, ’77, ’80 … Simmons MVP (’73) … ’70 Rookie of the Year … Top 5 (’71, ’72, ’73, ’74, ’76, ’77, ’80, ’81, ’84, ’86), Top 10 (’70, ’78, ’79, ’83, ’85) … All-Defense (1 1x, five 1st) … leader: scoring (2x), rebounds (2x), blocks (4x), FG% (1x), minutes (1x) … career: points (1st), minutes (1st), FGs (1st), 25–11, 55.9% FG (9th) … Playoffs: 24–11–3, 237 games (1st), most FGs … best player on 4 champs (’70 Bucks, ’80 Lakers, ’82 Lakers, ’85 Lakers) and 3 runner-ups … ’71, ’74, ’80 playoffs: 30–15–4 (45 G) … member of 35K-15K Club.78
Nobody in NBA history can approach the next two lines:
Kareem, 1971: 27–19–3, 61% FG, Finals MVP
Kareem, 1985: 26–9–5, 61% FG, Finals MVP
Chew on that one for a second. Kareem took home Finals MVPs fourteen seasons apart—once during year three of the Nixon presidency, once during year five of the Reagan presidency.79 Things that happened between those two trophies: The Godfather and The Godfather Part II; Watergate and Nixon’s resignation; John Belushi’s rise to stardom and subsequent overdose; the Cambodia bombings; Hulkmania and Wrestle-Mania I; the rise and fall of disco; Battle of the Network Stars; The Deer Hunter and Coming Home; John Lennon’s assassination; the Munich Massacre; eleven seasons of M*A*S*H; the apex and descent of John Travolta, Chevy Chase, Farrah Fawcett and Burt Reynolds; Atari and Intellivision; PacMan and Ms. PacMan; Coach’s real-life death on Cheers; Mark Spitz, Bruce Jenner, Nadia Comaneci, Sugar Ray Leonard, Mary Lou Retton and Carl Lewis; “Who shot J.R.?”; the Iran hostage crisis; season one of Miami Vice; Patty Hearst’s abduction; Saturday Night Fever; the creation of home computers, Apple and Microsoft; three Ali-Frazier fights; the first three Rocky and Jaws movies; the birth of rap; U2 and Madonna; the Cambodia bombings; the birth of cable TV, ESPN and MTV. By 1985, Bill Cosby, Eddie Murphy, Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen were the four biggest stars on the planet, the Cold War was at an all-time fervor, and Kareem was still cranking out Finals MVP trophies.
Only Jack Nicklaus can claim such extended athletic superiority, winning the Masters twenty-three years apart (1963 and 1986)—but really, what’s more impressive, peaking over fifteen years in basketball, or peaking over twenty-three years in a sport that can be played with love handles and a potbelly? Kareem made first-team All-NBA’s fifteen seasons apart. From 1971 to 1980, he captured six MVP awards and should have won seven. For the first seven years of his career, he averaged a 30–16–5 with 54 percent shooting. For the first twelve years (1970–1981), he never averaged less than a 24–10. From 1970 to 1986 (an astonishing seventeen-year span), he averaged between 21.5 and 34.5 points and made between 51 percent and 60 percent of his shots. He’s one of the most durable superstars in sports history, missing just 80 of 1640 regular season games, cracking the 80-plus mark eleven times, playing 237 of a possible 238 playoff games and logging over 65,000 minutes in all.80 He played for six championship teams. He reached eleven Finals and fourteen Conference Finals. His teams averaged 56 wins per season, dipped below .500 just twice and finished with a .600-plus winning percentage sixteen times. After his fortieth birthday, the ’87 Lakers called consecutive “we must score or we will lose” plays for him in the last 45 seconds of their biggest game (Game 4 at Boston): a delayed screen /alley-oop that tied it, then a post play in which he drew a foul. In a do-or-die Game 6 of the ’88 Finals, the Lakers called time with 27 seconds to play, trailing by one, and ran their biggest play of the season for their forty-one-year-old center; he drew a foul and nailed both free throws for the eventual victory.
They relied on him at that advanced age for one reason: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was the surest two points in NBA history. Listed at 7-foot-2 but definitely two inches taller—at least81—his unstoppable sky hook remains the only basketball shot that couldn’t be blocked, an artistic achievement because of its consistency and efficiency. Every sky hook looked the same: in one motion, Kareem blocked off the defender with his left arm, swung his right arm over his head, reached as high as he could and flicked the basketball with his right wrist. Swish. Since defenders couldn’t dream of challenging the release, they settled on making him miserable, pounding him like a blocking sled—with tacit approval from the officials, of course82—turning every 9-footer into a 13-footer and living with the odds from there. What else could they do? Kareem never needed a plan B, making him the Groundhog Day of NBA superstars. Fans struggled for ways to connect with him and failed, incapable of being thrilled by someone so predictable and aloof. Maybe it didn’t help that Kareem skipped the ’68 Olympics in protest of America’s racial climate,83 or that he bristled at the public’s uneasiness about his religion and resented everyone’s impossibly high expectations. He handled every interview like he was disarming a hand grenade: too smart for dumb questions, too serious for frivolous jokes, too reserved for any semblance of personal candor. Unlike Chamberlain, he didn’t have a compulsive need to be loved; he just wanted to be left alone. And for the most part, that’s what fans did. When he changed his name a few weeks after Milwaukee won the ’71 title, the NBA’s dominant player was suddenly an introverted, intermittently sullen Muslim who towered over every center except Wilt, abhorred the press, relied on a robotic hook shot and pushed away the general public. You wouldn’t exactly throw in a “Good times!” to end the previous sentence.
(Note that’s too important to be a footnote: I always liked the fact that the best two athletes to adopt Muslim names happened to pick tremendously cool names—Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. According to the website for Muslim names that I just Googled twenty seconds ago, Kareem’s name means “generous, noble, friendly, precious and distinguished.” I will fight off the obligatory dig about the pomposity of that choice because I promised a potshot-free zone. But imagine if he’d picked “Khustar,” which means “surrounded by happiness.” Would Kareem have been as imposing with a name like Khustar Abdul-Jabbar? Probably not. What if he’d gone with Musharraf, which means “one who is honored or exalted”? Musharraf Abdul-Jabaar? I don’t think so. Not to to sound like Colonel James, but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar … that’s a great f*cking name! By the way, my favorite Muslim name on that website: Khasib means “fertile, productive, and profuse.” Should I make the Shawn Kemp joke or do you want to do it? Go ahead. You take it. Let’s move on.)
But that’s how it went through the 1970s. We kept hoping someone would supplant him and nobody did. Kareem’s public stature suffered for four unrelated reasons: the goofy combination of his afro, facial hair and goggles added to his detachment (it almost seemed like a Halloween mask); his trade demands (Milwaukee finally obliged in 1975) made him seem like just another petulant black athlete who wanted his way (the public perception, not the reality); 1977’s sucker punch of Kent Benson went over like a fart in church; and his ongoing battle with migraines made fans wonder if he was looking for excuses not to play. So what if the goggles were a result of his eyes getting poked so many times that doctors worried about permanent damage, that Benson elbowed him first, that Milwaukee had a lousy supporting cast and no Muslim population, that his headaches left him unable to function? Kareem never received the benefit of the doubt—not from anyone, not once, not ever. People grumbled that he didn’t give a crap, mailed in games, played on cruise control, failed to make teammates better and only cared about money. That perception faded once Magic turned the Lakers into the league’s most entertaining team, breathing life into Kareem’s career in the process. Sports Illustrated ran a January 1980 feature with the headline “A Different Drummer” and the subhead “After years of moody introspection, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is coming out of his shell.” He made a well-received cameo in a comedy called Airplane that blew everyone away, playing himself as a pilot with the alias “Roger Murdock.” A young passenger recognizes him and “Roger” denies it, leading to this exchange.84
KID: I think you’re the greatest, but my dad says you don’t work hard enough on defense. And he says that lots of times, you don’t even run down court. And that you don’t really try … except during the Playoffs.
KAREEM: The hell I don’t. Listen, kid, I’ve been hearing that crap ever since I was at UCL.A. I’m out there busting my buns every night. Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes!
    By his last scene, when Kareem was being lugged from the cockpit with his Laker uniform and goggles on, everyone had the same reaction. Kareem has a sense of humor? What? He would have cruised to 1980’s Comeback Personality of the Year Award if his single greatest playing moment—when he sprained an ankle in Game 5 of the ’80 Finals, limped back in with the Lakers trailing, finished off a 40-point performance on one leg and willed them to a crucial victory—hadn’t happened on tape delay and been overshadowed by Magic’s series-clinching 42–15–7 two days later.85 Just like that, Kareem’s likability window had closed. The struggling Association moved forward with Bird and Magic, hitting its stride in the mid-eighties as Kareem settled into a new role as the aging, “How the hell is he still doing it?” superstar. And here’s where memories can be unfair: Kareem’s last six seasons (1984–89) unfortunately doubled as his most-seen stretch because the league’s TV ratings took off. Few remember him demolishing the ’71 Bullets, sinking the season-saving sky hook in double OT of the ’74 Finals or hobbling around to save the ’80 Finals; everyone remembers when he couldn’t rebound, couldn’t keep Moses off the boards (Kareem was thirty-six at the time, by the way), couldn’t protect the rim, slowed L.A.’s fast break, lost his hair and hung around for one awkward season too long. The thing that made him greater than Wilt—his staggering longevity—wounded the perception of his career after the fact. Wilt broke every record. Russell won eleven titles. Jordan dominated the nineties. Kareem? He’s the moody guy who peaked during the NBA’s darkest era and wouldn’t leave when it was time. What’s fun about celebrating that?
Since Kareem was measured against Wilt from the moment he started popping armpit hair, let’s keep the tradition going here. We already debunked the myth about Wilt’s “inferior” supporting cast, but for the record, Wilt played with seven Pyramid guys (Greer, Arizin, West, Baylor, Cunningham, Thurmond and Goodrich) and Kareem played with five (Dandridge, Oscar, Worthy, McAdoo and Magic). Wilt’s supporting cast picked up for the last two-thirds of his career (1965–74); Kareem’s only picked up in the last half (1980–89). And Wilt never dealt with anything approaching Kareem’s shit sandwich in the 1970s, when his only elite teammates were Oscar (’71 and ’72), Dandridge (’71 through ’75) and Jamaal Wilkes (’78 and ’79). From ’73 through ’79, Kareem didn’t play with a single All-Star or elite point guard.86 In twenty seasons, he only played with one power forward who averaged ten rebounds: the immortal Cornell Warner in 1975. When he dragged the ’74 Bucks to the Finals, their fourth and fifth leading “scorers” were Ron Washington and Jon McGlocklin. When the Lakers acquired him in the summer of ’75, they had to give up their best young players (Brian Winters, David Meyers and Junior Bridgeman) and left Kareem without a decent foundation. When he dragged the ’77 Lakers to the Western Finals without Kermit Washington and Lucius Allen (both injured), his crunch-time teammates were four piddling swingmen (Cazzie Russell, Earl Tatum, Don Chaney and Don Ford, with no rebounder or point guard to be seen).87 Um, why is Wilt the one remembered as being “saddled” with a poor supporting cast again? Even Kareem admitted in 1980 to SI, “It’s the misunderstanding most people have about basketball that one man can make a team. One man can be a crucial ingredient on a team, but one man cannot make a team … [and] I have played on only three good teams.”
As for Wilt’s statistical “superiority,” we already established that the Dipper arrived during an optimal time: a mostly white league, no “modern” centers other than Russell, modified offensive goaltending, more possessions, and a less physical game that allowed him to play 48 minutes without any real physical repercussions. Those factors inflated his numbers, whereas Kareem’s only advantage from 1970 to 1976 was dilution/overexpansion. Compare Wilt’s third season (’62, his best statistically) with Kareem’s third season (’72, his best statistically) and Wilt’s season looks significantly better on paper.88


Then you keep digging:
1962 starting centers: Russell (Hall of Famer); Walt Bellamy, Wayne Embry, Johnny Kerr (quality starters); Clyde Lovellette, Darrall Imhoff, Walter Dukes, Ray Felix (stiffs)
1972 starting centers: Chamberlain, Reed, Cowens, Thurmond, Unseld, Lanier, Elvin Hayes, (Hall of Famers); Jim McDaniels, Bellamy, Elmore Smith, Tom Boerwinkle (quality starters); Neal Walk, Jim Fox, Bob Rule, Walt Wesley, Dale Schuleter (stiffs)
Throw in a dearth of athletic power forwards in ’62 and Wilt could run amok like the killer bear from The Edge. Kareem’s pivot opponents were undeniably better, as were the new wave of forwards fighting him for rebounds (Paul Silas, Bill Bridges, Clyde Lee, Happy Hairston, Connie Hawkins, Spencer Haywood, Sidney Wicks, Dave DeBusschere, Jerry Lucas and so on). As for the stylistic changes from 1962 to 1972:


Can you say “statistical inflation”? Look at their percentages of their teams’ averages in the following categories.


To recap: Wilt scored 40 percent of his team’s points; Kareem scored 30 percent but did it more efficiently in a more physical era (57.4 percent shooting compared to Wilt’s 50.6 percent); Kareem grabbed just 2.8 percent less of his team’s available rebounds. Throw in Wilt’s era-specific advantages (covered earlier), all those extra Philly possessions (roughly 23–24 per game) and the difference in wins (63 for Milwaukee, 49 for Philly) and Kareem’s ’72 season may have been more impressive than Wilt’s legendary ’62 season. In fact, Kareem’s 35–17 has only been approached four times since 1972: McAdoo (31–15 in ’74, 34–14 in ’75), Moses (31–15 in ’82) and Shaq (30–14 in ’00). And it’s not like ’72 was a fluke: Kareem averaged at least a 30–16 for three straight years and topped 27 points and 14.5-plus rebounds in the same season six different times. In 97 playoff games from 1970 to 1981, Kareem averaged 29.4 points and 15.2 rebounds.89
So yeah, Wilt’s statistical resume pops your eyes out on paper. But Kareem’s peak was nearly as impressive. He excelled for a longer period of time. His teams performed consistently better and won three times as many titles. He was more reliable in clutch moments and a much safer bet at the free throw line. He had an infinitely better grasp of The Secret. The gap between his first and last Finals MVPs lasted as long as Wilt’s entire career. Even his movie career was more entertaining.90 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar may have been fun to dislike—and believe me, I did—but his greatness cannot be denied. He’s the third-best basketball player of all time. Better than Oscar. Better than Wilt. Better than Magic or Bird. And since we finally have that settled, I will now light myself on fire.
2. BILL RUSSELL

Resume: 13 years, 12 quality, 12 All-Stars … MVP: ’58, ’61, ’62, ’63, ’65 … Simmons MVP (’59) … runner-up: ’59, ’60 … Top 5 (’59, ’63, ’65) … Top 10 (’58, ’60, ’61, ’62, ’64, ’66, ’67, ’68) … 3-year peak: 18–24–4 … 3-year Playoffs peak: 21–27–5 … leader: rebounds (5x) … career: 15.1 PPG, 22.5 RPG (2nd all-time), 4.3 APG … Playoffs: 16.2 PPG, 24.9 RPG (1st), 4.7 APG … record: rebounds, one half (32); rebounds, Finals (40); RPG, Finals (29.5) … best player on 11 champs and 2 runner-ups (’50s, ’60s Celtics) … 10–0 in Game 7’s, 16–2 in do-or-die games … only player-coach to win a title (2x)
Bill Bradley summed up number 6’s career nicely in Life on the Run: “Russell never got as much recognition as he deserved. Race was one reason. During the early sixties no black artist got adequate publicity. Then, too, perhaps pro basketball didn’t have the national following sufficient to merit enormous press attention. Most probably, I think he was overlooked because his greatest accomplishments were in the game’s subtleties and in seeking to guarantee team victory in a society which tends to focus attention on the individual achiever.”
Imagine if I could have been that succinct with the Pyramid; you would have finished this book two weeks ago. But Bradley missed one crucial part of the Russell Experience: Russell was obsessed with winning. A handful of NBA players were wired with overcompetitive DNA,91 but Russell and Jordan stand alone in their singular devotion to prevailing over and over again. The single greatest Russell statistic other than eleven rings? Russell’s teams finished 10–0 in deciding Game 5’s or Game 7’s. The single greatest Jordan statistic? The Bulls lost their first three games of the 1990–91 season, but after that, they never lost three in a row again with Jordan wearing a Chicago uniform.92 Anyone can win two or three titles. Russell and Jordan defended their turf again and again and again, and beyond that, they measured themselves by those defenses. They searched for every possible edge even if they went about it in different ways. Russell embraced his biggest foe, befriended him and allowed him to shine in meaningless moments, even as he was secretly ripping out the guy’s heart without him realizing it. Jordan settled for tearing out hearts and holding them up like the dude from Temple of Doom. He wanted his rivals to know it was happening. That’s what he loved most—not the winning as much as the vanquishing. Russell just loved winning.
The other difference between them: at no point in Russell’s career did a teammate hiss, “I hate that a*shole” or “He cares about himself more than the team.” Russell’s teammates treasured and revered him. They sing his praises to this day. They maintain that you cannot place a statistical value on what he accomplished on a daily basis. Code words like “sacrifice” and “teammate” and “unselfish” pop up every time he’s remembered. He’s the only player who realized every component of basketball as a team game—not just playing, but coming together as a group, respecting one another, and embracing common goals—from the first game of his career through the last. In George Plimpton’s “Sportsman of the Year” piece about Russell in 1968, he passed along a fascinating anecdote from Boston trainer Joe DiLauri that explained Russell to a tee:
The big concern he has is for the Celtics. Nothing else really matters. That’s why he seems so cold often to the press and the fans. They’re not Celtics. After we won the championship last year he kicked everyone who wasn’t a Celtic out of the dressing room—press, photographers, hangers-on, and also this poor guy who was tending a television camera in the locker room who said he had to have permission to leave it untended, pleading to stay, said he was going to lose his job, and it took three or four minutes to get him out. The press was pounding on the door, furious about deadlines and all, and Russell turned around and looked at us and he asked [Bailey] Howell to lead the team in prayer. He knew Bailey was a religious man—it was also his first year on a championship team—and he knew Bailey would appreciate it. Russell’s not a religious man himself. Sam Jones said, “You pray?” And Russell said, “Yeah, Sam.”
You never hear Jordan’s teammates and coaches discuss him that way. Not even now. The most compelling part of his storyline, for years and years, was the collective attempt to channel his competitiveness into the greater good of the team. He needed to “trust” his teammates and “make them better.” We heard this again and again. Then his supporting cast improved and Chicago started winning titles, so we stopped hearing it … even though he was playing the same way he always did.93 Only after his “baseball sabbatical” did Jordan fully embrace the team dynamic, whereas Russell’s sense of team was ingrained. Which brings us to the best part of Russell’s resume, as well as the point that potentially undermines it: his success in tight games. Of Russell’s eleven titles, six hinged on games that could have easily swung against the Celtics.94 Each went in their favor, with only one involving an opponent missing a season-deciding shot (Frank Selvy in 1962). On the face of it, you might say it was luck, something of an Anton Chigurh coin flip that fell his way every time. But with close-knit, unselfish teams and an alpha dog who lives to make everyone else better, how much of it is really luck? In a tight game of teams between equal talents with the pressure mounting, wouldn’t you wager on the close-knit/unselfish team led by the best defensive player ever? Isn’t that what basketball is all about?
Now you’re saying, “Wait a second … so why isn’t Russell no. 1?” Because it’s so difficult to project Russell into today’s game. Athletically, he could have survived. No question. But Russell wasn’t taller or thicker than Kevin Durant. How would he have defended Kareem?95 What about Yao Ming, Rik Smits or Artis Gilmore? What about Shaq in his prime or even young Dwight Howard? And wouldn’t his mediocre shooting become a bigger liability in today’s game? Would Russell be 70 percent as effective now? Eighty percent? Is the number higher or lower? How can we know? Like with Oscar, Pettit, Elgin and Wilt, Russell’s era-specific advantages are hard to ignore. It was easier to block shots when nobody was attacking the rim except for Wilt, just like it was easier to grab rebounds when opposing forwards were six-four and six-three instead of six-eight and six-eleven. Russell also had more value in the sixties: everyone played run-and-gun and every basket only counted for two points, so a rebounder/shot blocker was the biggest commodity you could have. Now it’s a slash-and-kick game driven by perimeter stars; during the ’09 season, when only five players averaged more than 10.0 rebounds and 39 players shot better than 40 percent on threes, you’re better off with a LeBron-like scorer who creates quality shots for himself and his teammates. And with gigantic salaries, salary cap rules and luxury tax hindrances, it’s nearly impossible to assemble an unselfish infrastructure of team-first players and keep it in place—this decade, only the Spurs were able to do it for more than four years—which means Russell would battle 1-in-30 odds just that he’d be landing on the perfect team for him. So let’s split the difference and put him on a modern contender—we’ll switch him with Howard and say Russell averages 16.3 rebounds, 12.7 points and a record-breaking 6.2 blocks a game for the 2009 Magic. Do you feel like we’re guaranteed a title? I don’t feel like we are. We have a good chance … but it’s not a lock. (June ’09 addition: Strangely, I wrote this section two months before Orlando snuck into the finals. Foreshadowing? ESP?)
And that’s what sets the next guy apart. Stick ’92 MJ or ’96 MJ in any era and he immediately becomes the alpha dog. From 1946 to 1965, it would have been unfair and scientists would have tested him in the mistaken belief that he was an alien. From 1965 to 1976, he would have dominated on a higher level than West did … and West only won a title and reached six other Finals. From 1977 to 1983, he would have crushed it. You know everything that happened from 1984 on. Throw in Jordan’s individual and team success, as well as his lack of any conceivable holes—seriously, when we will ever see the league’s best offensive player also make nine All-Defensive teams?—and Bill Russell will have to settle for second place. For once.
1. MICHAEL JORDAN

Resume: 16 years, 12 quality, 16 All-Stars … MVP: ’88, ’91, ’92, ’96, ’98 … Simmons MVP: ’90, ’93, ’97 … runner-up: ’87, ’89, ’97 … ’85 Rookie of the Year … Finals MVP: ’91, ’92, ’93, ’96, ’97, ’98 … Top 5 (’87, ’88, ’89, ’90, ’91, ’92, ’93, ’96, ’97, ’98), Top 10 (’85) … All-Defense (nine 1st) … Defensive Player of the Year (’88) … 30+ PPG 8 times, 34+ PPG in 7 different Playoffs … 4-year peak: 34–6–6, 3.0 SPG, 52% FG … career: 30–6–5, 49.7% FG, 83.5% FT … Playoffs: 33.4 PPG (1st), 6.4 RPG, 5.7 APG (179 G) … Finals: 34–6–6 (35 g’s) … leader: scoring (10x), steals (3x) … records: most scoring titles (10); consecutive scoring titles (7); most Finals MVPs (6); highest points, Finals (41.0 in ’93); most Playoffs points, career; most points, one Playoffs game (63); most points in one half, Finals game (35) … career: points (3rd), steals (2nd) … best player on 6 champs (’91–’93, ’96–’98 Bulls) … 30K Point Club
In my lifetime, only one superstar was routinely described like Hannibal Lecter. Michael is a killer. Michael will rip your heart out. If you give Michael an opening, he will kill you. Michael smells blood. Michael is going for the jugular. Nobody goes for the kill like Michael Jordan. They’re on life support and Michael is pulling the plug. Michael will eat your liver and cap it off with a glass of Chianti. I made up only the last line; everything else was definitely muttered by an announcer between 1988 and 1998. Our society enabled the competitor that Michael Jordan became: we value athletes who treasure winning, maximize their own potential, stay in superior shape, pump their fists, slap asses and would rather maim themselves then lose a game. Ronnie Lott had part of his pinkie amputated in the offseason in order to keep playing in the NFL. We thought this was awesome. We loved Ronnie Lott for this. Now that’s a guy who cares! Tiger won the 2008 U.S. Open playing with a torn ACL. Now that’s a champion! Pete Rose bowled over Ray Fosse to score the winning run in the 1970 All-Star Game, separating Fosse’s shoulder and altering his career. Hey, you don’t block home plate when it’s Pete Rose! We will always love the guys who care just a little more than everyone else, just like we will always hate the ones who don’t. Why? Because we like to think that we’d play that way if we were blessed with those same gifts. Or something.
That’s why we never judged Michael Jordan for his competitive disorder. If anything, we deified it. The man could do anything and it was okay. From 1984 to 1991, by all accounts—magazines, newspapers, books, you name it—Jordan pulled all the same shit that Kobe did this decade, only in a more indefensible and debilitating way. When Sam Smith finally called him out in his turned-out-to-be-totally-accurate 1992 book, The Jordan Rules, everyone reacted like we would now if Perez Hilton started lobbing online grenades at Obama’s daughters. Jordan couldn’t be an a*shole, and even if he was, we didn’t want to know. By the time Kobe rose to prominence, our society had become much more cynical: we gravitated toward tearing people down over building them up, so that’s what we did. Had Jordan come along fifteen years later, the same thing would have happened to him.
Of course, Kobe’s diva routine happened out of weakness: he couldn’t figure out his own identity and settled on a slightly creepy Jordan impression, pursuing that goal by trying to excel on both ends (did it), win a few rings (did it), score as many points as possible (did it), mimic Jordan’s celebratory fist pump (did it) and lead his own team to the title (didn’t do it). Everything about Kobe’s handling of the inevitable transition from “the Robin to Shaq’s Batman” to “Batman” was clumsy.96 Jordan always knew who he was. He had to win at everything. He studied up on opponents and searched for any signs of weakness, even pumping beat writers and broadcasters for insider information. He soaked teammates in poker on team flights so brutally that coaches warned rookies to stay away. He lost in Ping-Pong to teammate Rod Higgins once, bought a table and became the best Ping-Pong player on the team. He dunked on Utah’s John Stockton once, heard Utah owner Larry Miller scream, “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?” then dunked on center Mel Turpin and hissed at Miller afterward, “He big enough for you?” He bribed airport baggage guys to put out his suitcase first once, then wagered teammates that his bag would be the first one on the conveyor belt. He stormed out of a Bulls scrimmage once like a little kid because he thought Doug Collins screwed up the score. When a team of college All-Stars outscored the Dream Team in a half-assed scrimmage and made the mistake of puffing their chests out, Jordan started out the next day’s scrimmage by pointing at Allan Houston and simply saying, “I got him” … and Houston didn’t touch the ball for two hours.97
Jordan measured everything by the result and every teammate by his capacity to care about that result. He tested them constantly and weeded out the ones who folded: Dennis Hopson, Brad Sellers, Will Perdue, Stacey King … it’s a longer list than you think. He punched teammates in practice to reassert his dominance. In the early years, he went too far and his bloodthirsty fire crippled a few of his teams; you never want to affect teammates to the degree that they’re afraid to assert themselves in big games. Craig Hodges told Michael Wilbon about a 1990 incident in which Pippen made the mistake of challenging Jordan in practice, when Michael “proceeded, literally, to score on Scottie at will. It was incredible. I mean, Scottie Pippen even then was one of the best players in the league and Michael just rained points on him. Scottie had to step back and say, ‘Slow up, man.’” For years and years, Jordan couldn’t rein himself in. He cared about winning, but only on his terms—he also wanted to win scoring titles, drop 50 whenever he pleased and treat his teammates like the biggest bully in a prison block—which led Phil Jackson to adopt the triangle offense in a last-ditch effort to prevent Jordan from hogging the ball (and, Jackson hoped, embolden his supporting cast). By the 1991 playoffs, when his teammates had advanced to an acceptable level, Jordan found a workable balance between involving them and taking over big moments. The rest was history.98
You know Jordan’s “best ever” credentials: his playoff chops, individual records and all-around honors surpass those of anyone else who ever played. He owns more iconic moments than anyone: the 63-point game at the Garden, the ’87 Slam Dunk Contest, “the shot” against the ’88 Cavs, the “Ohhhhhh, a spec-tack-ular move!” layup in the ’91 Finals, those 6 threes in the ’92 Finals (along with the shrug—you can’t forget the shrug), 41 points per game in the 1993 Finals, the 72-win team in ’96, the Flu Game in ’97 and The Last Shot in ’98. He demoralized eight memorable teams in eight years—the Bad Boy Pistons, the Showtime Lakers, Riley’s Knicks, Drexler’s Pistons, Barkley’s Suns, Shaq’s Magic, Malone’s Jazz and Miller’s Pacers—and none was ever quite the same.99 He accomplished everything with just two Pyramid teammates (Scottie Pippen and Dennis Rodman) and a bunch of role players and pseudo-scrubs. When he captured that last title in 1998, we all agreed: This is the greatest basketball player we will ever see. That didn’t stop us from looking for the next him. We spent the next eleven years anointing false successors, hyping young stars who weren’t ready and overrating imitators who weren’t really him. We need to stop looking.
My personal belief: Nobody will surpass Jordan. Ever. And I have four reasons why …
Reason no. 1: the four peaks Most basketball players peak once and that’s it (a career year, as we call it). An elite few peak a second time: Hakeem in ’90 and ’94, Barkley in ’90 and ’93, West in ’66 and ’70, and Shaq in ’95 and ’00, to name four. In rare cases, an athlete peaks three different times: Bird (’84, ’86 and ’87), Magic (’82, ’85, ’87), Kareem (’72, ’76, ’80) and Wilt (’62, ’67, ’72) released a 3.0 version that exceeded the 1.0 and 2.0 versions in many respects. Only Jordan peaked four times, and arguably, Jordan 4.0 was better than the other three versions. Here are the models:
MJ 1.0 (’89-?90). His fifth and sixth seasons, normally when a star makes the leap and scratches the ceiling of his talents. Jordan carries a lousy ’89 Bulls team to 47 wins and an Eastern Finals cameo during an extremely competitive year, finishing with the best all-around statistical season since the merger: 32.5 PPG, 8.0 APG, 8.0 RPG 2.9 SPG, 54% FG, 85% FT (regular season), 34.8 PPG, 7.0 RPG, 7.6 APG, 2.5 SPG, 51% FG (Playoffs). The following spring, he enjoys the finest Playoffs of his career (43.0 points, 7.4 assists, 6.6 rebounds and 55 percent shooting against Philly) before falling to Detroit in seven. As a pure athlete and scorer, here’s the stretch when Jordan peaked: matchless athletic ability, maximum speed and explosiveness, Larry /Magic-level respect from officials, extreme durability (played 99 of 99 games despite old-school rules that allowed teams like the Pistons to hammer him on drives) and multiple defenders required to stop him. Unleash ’89 Jordan into the current NBA with no hand checking or hard fouls and it’s all over. He’d score 45 a game.100
MJ 2.0 (spring ’93). He’s mastered everything at this point. A rigorous workout routine sculpts his body and whips him into superior shape, enabling him to absorb hard fouls, stop tiring at the end of games and abuse smaller defenders on the low post. He’s a savvier all-around player, with a better sense of how (to use his teammates) and when (is the right time to take over a game), even defending his teammates (which he did repeatedly against Riley’s Knicks, personified by the memorable “And one!” layup where he stood over Xavier McDaniel and yelped angrily at him) instead of undermining them publicly and privately. Only one problem: the man suddenly has no peers. He’s the only NBA super-duper star without a relative equal driving him to remain on top. That puts him in a no-win situation. Once the media pressure and public attention becomes too much, he makes one of the most curious decisions in NBA history: he walks away at his apex.101
MJ 3.0 (winter ’96). Jordan shakes off the baseball rust,102 rebuilds his body for basketball and and plays more physically on both ends—instead of Barry Sanders, he’s Emmitt Smith, picking his spots, plugging away, moving the chains and punishing defenders for four quarters. MJ 3.0 features descriptions like “extremely resourceful” and “cerebral on the Bird-Magic level,” and as if that’s not enough, his baseball foibles taught him to embrace his teammates, accept their faults and adapt his own considerable skills to complement theirs. He finally understands The Secret.
MJ 4.0 (spring ’98). My favorite version. His hops are pretty much gone, yet he makes up for it with renewed intensity and resiliency. Rarely does Jordan exhibit emotion anymore; even game-winning jumpers are celebrated with a simple fist pump and a relieved smile. Like Ali in the mid-seventies, he relies on guile, experience, memory, and heart and knows every trick (like the Bryon Russell push to win the ’98 Finals).103 Jordan 4.0 demonstrates a (I hate to use this word, but screw it) surreal ability to take command in optimum moments. You could say he evolved from the greatest basketball player ever to the greatest closer ever, and his collection of performances against superior Pacers and Jazz teams—as he fought the effects of his third straight 100-game season, coaxed as much as he could from a thirty-six-year-old body, carried Scottie Pippen’s slack (derailed by a bad back) in the final two games and still managed to carry the Bulls to a title—remains the most extraordinary athletic achievement of my lifetime. Watch Game 6 of the ’98 Finals some time. He wins it by himself. No help. Just him. He scores 41 of Chicago’s first 83 points, biding his time even as he’s manipulating the proceedings. Down by three with 40 seconds to go, he goes for the kill—explodes for a coast-to-coast layup, strips Karl Malone on the other end and drains the game-winner, all in one sequence—without a single teammate touching the ball, a fitting conclusion to the most brilliant basketball game ever played. I know LeBron James is fantastic right now, but if he’s still winning championships by himself at thirty-six on the fourth version of himself, we can start talking about him and Jordan. And only then.
Reason no. 2: pathological competitiveness. I can’t imagine a killer like Jordan happening again, and here’s why: the NBA is too buddy-buddy now. These stars grow up together, befriend one another, hang out during summers, play Team USA together, text and email each other … it’s a big circle jerk. Watch Kobe greet Carmelo after an allegedly hard-fought game; they look like old roommates reconnecting at a college reunion. The greats from Jordan’s era always maintained a respectful distance; even when Magic and Isiah smooched each other, there was a coldness to it.104 When Jordan and Barkley became close, part of me always wondered if Jordan sniffed out Barkley as a potential rival—a little like Russell with Wilt, or even how Natasha Henstridge hunted for a mate in Species—then befriended him as a way to undermine him competitively. You know what moment killed Barkley’s chance to be a Pantheon guy? Game 2 of the 1993 Finals in Phoenix. He played as well as he possibly could (a 42–13 with 16-for-26 shooting), but Jordan exceeded him by tallying a 42–12–9 and destroying Dan Majerle down the stretch. You could see it written on Barkley’s face as he walked off the court: I can’t beat this guy. And he couldn’t.
That goes back to that aforementioned Russell-Jordan gene. Jordan wanted to vanquish and fueled himself by overreacting to every slight (real or manufactured). Rick Pitino questioned the seriousness of his hamstring injury during the ’89 Knicks-Bulls series; Jordan made them pay.105 The Magic knocked an out-of-NBA-shape Jordan out of the ’95 Playoffs; Jordan made them pay. Malone lobbied for the 1997 MVP; Jordan made Utah pay. That’s just how it went. When Bulls GM Jerry Krause—someone whom Jordan openly detested106—glowingly courted European star Toni Kukoc, Jordan and Pippen wrecked Kukoc in the ’92 Olympics with particular fury. Before the 1989 draft, it bothered Jordan that Krause had become infatuated with Majerle’s potential, so he torched Thunder Dan in the ’93 Finals and screamed “F*ck you, Majerle!” as the Bulls celebrated right after Phoenix’s final miss in Game 6. Did Majerle do anything to him? Of course not. Jordan just convinced himself that he did. That’s how the man thought.
The two defining “Jordan was secretly a hypercompetitive lunatic” stories:
Story no. 1: It’s Game 1 of the 1992 NBA Finals and the painfully forced “Drexler or Jordan?” storyline (page 396) is in full swing, as well as Portland’s “we’re gonna make them beat us by shooting threes” plan that they were stupid enough to mention to the press. Clyde Drexler is about to get athletically sodomized by Jordan on national television. We just don’t know it yet. Portland jumps out to a 17–9 lead with six minutes remaining. Chicago’s crowd can’t get into it. Portland is running the floor and gaining confidence. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version of the next 17 minutes of game time: MJ 3 … MJ 2 + 1 … MJ 3 … MJ 3 … MJ 2 … MJ 2 (first quarter ends: 33–30, Blazers, Jordan has 18 and sits down for a breather) … MJ comes back in (45–44, Chicago) … MJ 2 … MJ 3 … MJ steal +2 … MJ 2 … MJ 3 … MJ follow-up dunk for 2 … awkward Drexler air ball 3 … MJ 3 + shrug107… third Portland time-out of quarter … Chicago 66, Portland 49. Jordan scored 33 points in 17 minutes, 35 for the half, outscored Drexler by 27, and broke the record for playoff threes in one half. This actually happened.
Story no. 2: Jordan’s opponents learned to leave him alone by the mid-nineties, leading to a phenomenon unlike anything else we’ve witnessed before or since: Michael became basketball’s version of a sleeping tiger. In a league full of smack-talkers, chest-thumpers and yappers, incredibly, he remained completely off-limits. This was just understood. Implicitly. Even during the summer of 2001, when Jordan was running the Wizards but reportedly mulling a comeback, a slew of NBA teams voyaged to Los Angeles to watch a few California prospects work out. Jordan was there. So was L.A. native Paul Pierce, who spent a little time with Jordan because of his friendship with Chicago native (and then-Pierce teammate) Antoine Walker. At some point, Pierce started talking smack to MJ. You better not come back. This is our league now. We don’t want to embarrass you. That kind of stuff. Jordan nodded happily with one of those “Okay, okay, just wait” faces, finally saying, “When’s our first game against you guys? I’m gonna make it a point to drop 40 on you.” You could almost imagine Jordan pulling out a piece of paper and adding Pierce’s name to the list of Guys Whose Butts Need to Be Kicked. Of course, Pierce’s coach at the time (Jim O’Brien) overheard the running exchange and quickly pulled Pierce away, imploring his star, “Never talk to him. You hear me? That’s the one guy you don’t talk smack to!” And this was when Jordan had been retired for three full years. Three! Even then, at thirty-nine years old, a current NBA coach considered him a viable threat and someone who shouldn’t be angered under any circumstances. Wake me up when this happens again in my lifetime.
Reason no. 3: command of the room. As I mentioned in David Robinson’s section (page 456): Manute, Bird, Robinson and Jordan were the Mount Rushmore of great entrances in the Nancy Parish Memorial Tunnel. Jordan was a walking E. F. Hutton commercial. Remember those dopey ads when somebody said, “My broker is E. F. Hutton and he says …” and everyone else in the room suddenly shut up and leaned in to hear? That was MJ. Seeing him unhinged people like Beatles fans in the mid-sixties. Jordan possessed what a Boston writer named George Frazier once dubbed duende: a charisma, an Eastwoodian swagger, a sense of self-importance that can’t be defined. He swallowed up the room even if 16,000 people were in it. As soon as Jordan entered the building, nobody else mattered. The way people’s expressions instantly changed, the sounds they made … those little moments leave an imprint even fifteen years later.
Those reactions didn’t change when he stopped playing basketball. At a party during the 2006 All-Star Weekend in Houston, Celtics honcho Rich Gotham and I were smoking stogies on a not-so-crowded cigar patio and ensuring bad breath for the rest of the night. Out of nowhere, Charles Oakley sauntered through the doorway108 followed by a human tornado with Jordan and his posse at the epicenter. Here’s what happens when MJ enters a room: it immediately becomes an entourage scene. No matter how you felt about the party leading up to the moment, the party jumps from (fill in whatever grade) to a solid A+. Like MJ’s presence validates the entire night. So Jordan ambled in, glanced around, puffed on a cigar for a few seconds, then traded a few barbs with Oak while pretending there weren’t twenty-five people packed around him snapping cell phone pictures. Ninety seconds later, they’d had enough. Time for a new room. Just like that, they were gone and the patio was mellow again. As Rich said later, it was like a “gust of wind.” MJ was the gust; everyone else was the twigs, leaves, and branches flying around.
When he played, you had a little more time to prepare for that gust. You looked around fifteen minutes before game time and realized that 75 percent of the fans had already arrived; it sounded like the crowd before a Springsteen concert waiting for that moment when the lights turn off. Every male patron with good seats had a glazed, giddy, “I’m important because I’m attending this important game” glow. Every female patron looked like she’d spent an extra ten minutes getting ready. Every little kid looked like he was ready to spontaneously self-combust. Wide-eyed teenagers stood in the first few rows, rocking back and forth, holding pens, pathetically desperate, praying against billion-to-one odds that MJ would inexplicably leave the layup line, vault the press table and glide into the stands to sign autographs. As soon as Jordan made his grand entrance, he stopped the place cold. Every eye shifted to him. Fans started making strange sounds. Squeals and cries mixed with appreciative applause, and then a slow-developing roar emerged, almost like a chain reaction: “hhh-hhrrrrrrrHHHRRRAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!” MJ was in the house. And it’s not like the energy faded from there. When he met the officials before the game, they oversold his jokes and looked like waiters working a customer for a huge tip. When he dispensed advice to a teammate, the other guy nodded intently like some life-altering secret was being revealed. When he strolled toward the scorer’s table for the opening tap, every conversation in the first few rows came to a screeching halt. When he stood on the free throw line for the first time, thousands of camera flashes clicked to capture the moment for posterity. I saw Michael Jordan play. Here he is shooting free throws. People will be impressed by this someday. That’s how you felt.
The moment always felt bigger than you or me, as did the ongoing thrill of witnessing a vintage MJ performance and appreciating all the little things that made him him. He never slacked and always gave a crap. Physically, he controlled himself with a grace that nobody else quite had. Technically, he was perfect in every way—perfect physique, perfect running style, perfect defensive technique, perfect footwork, perfect shooting form—which always made it seem wrong if he dribbled a ball off his foot or threw a pass out of bounds. Spiritually, his teammates reacted to him the same way sitcom kids react to Dad when he comes home from work: everyone killing themselves to please him and hanging on his every word. The little things stood out more than the dunks and the breathtaking drives. The last time Jordan played in Boston as a Bull (December 1997), they were wiping out a young Celtics team and MJ seemed bored by the whole thing. That was always the best time to watch Jordan in person, when he was searching for dumb challenges to keep from coasting. As soon as Jordan and Walker started talking trash, I remember nudging a buddy and telling him, “Watch this, something’s gonna happen.” We followed Jordan and Walker as they jogged back and forth and kept a running dialogue going. After a Boston foul, Walker and Jordan lined up next to each other on the right side of the free throw line. Walker had inside position; Jordan stood to his left and kept talking smack. Walker made the mistake of jawing back. Never a good idea. I remember telling my buddy, “Watch this—Jordan’s telling ’Twan he’s gonna beat him inside and get the rebound. Watch this. Just wait.” Sure enough, as his teammate prepared to launch the second free throw, Jordan’s arms started swaying with his mouth moving the entire time. Walker’s body tensed. The ball went up and MJ somehow leapfrogged past Walker, grabbed the rebound and jumped back up for a layup in one motion.
Who fouled Jordan from behind to prevent the layup? Antoine Walker.
We watched Michael strut and giggle his way to the charity stripe, thoroughly pleased with himself, like he’d just found a $100 bill on the ground. We watched Walker’s head hang like that of a little kid who’d just been scolded by a parent. We watched the JumboTron show a closeup of Jordan lining up his first foul shot, an enormous grin spread across his face. His night had been made. So had ours. But that’s what makes me laugh whenever I hear guys like Wade, Jordan and LeBron compared to him. Nobody had moments like the one I just described. They might be close physically or athletically, but in the “command of the room” sense? No. No way. Not close. Even during Jordan’s injury-plagued comeback with Washington,109 there was one moment during his first Boston return in 2001 when Jordan drained a crunch-time jumper and looked like he might be heating up. He spun around and hopped back to the other end of the court, running with that distinctive gait in which his elbows swung back and forth like someone using a NordicTrack. With the crowd roaring—we loved the Celtics, but really, even the slim possibility of witnessing an ESPN Classic throwback performance trumped everything—Jordan glanced over to everyone in my section at midcourt, his eyebrows raised, and unleashed a defiant grin. And he melted us. He f*cking melted us. Imagine a busty senior cheerleader winking at a school bus filled with ninth-grade boys, triple the reaction, and that was us. We spent the next twenty seconds buzzing and nudging each other. I don’t even remember who won the game. I really don’t. All I remember was this: MJ was back, MJ was on his game, MJ was feeling it … and the possibilities were endless. Some people are just larger than life.
I will believe LeBron has reached MJ status as soon as he owns every set of eyes in a 17,000-seat arena for three straight hours, and as soon as he can liquidate an entire section with one smile. And not a moment before.
Reason no. 4: the Jordan mystique. I’m retelling this story in the present tense because, as far as I’m concerned, it still feels like it happened three hours ago. Come back with me to that same 2006 All-Star Weekend in Houston. I am drinking Bloody Marys on a Saturday afternoon with my buddy Sully and his Boston crew. We’re debating a second round when Oakley saunters into the bar—and that’s the right word, because the dude saunters—with three lady friends, eventually settling at the table right next to us. Oakley orders a round of shots for his table and a martini for himself. We quickly order a second round for ourselves. I mean, where else can you drink five feet away from the real-life Shaft?110
Twenty minutes later, Jordan shows up with two friends and stops the room cold. At first, it seems like he’s just saying hello; then we realize he’s sitting down. His friends move him into the inside booth, then block him with chairs on both sides so nobody can bother him. (Like my “Chair Armada” strategy in strip joints, as mentioned on page 258.) Oakley orders more drinks; we order food and drinks for our table. For all we know, we’re staying all afternoon and evening. People stream over to say hello, pay tribute to Jordan, kiss his ring … he’s like the real-life Michael Corleone (with Oakley as Luca Brasi). At one point, agent David Falk sits about thirty feet away, patiently waiting for an invite, finally giving up and coming over to say hello. (Falk asks MJ, “How late did you stay out last night?” followed by MJ casually saying “ Seven-thirty,” as we nod admiringly)111 The drinks keeps coming and coming. Occasionally Oakley stands up and saunters around just to stretch his legs and look cool while I make comments like, “I wish you could rent Oak for parties.” At one point, Oak thinks about ordering food, stands up, looks over at all of us eating, notices our friend Rich’s cheeseburger, asks if it’s a cheeseburger, asks if it’s good, keeps glancing at it, keeps glancing at it … and I swear, we’re all waiting for Oak to say the words, “Oak wants your cheeseburger, and he wants it now.” But he doesn’t. He ends up ordering one himself. Too bad.112
Two solid hours pass. Everyone at Jordan’s table finishes eating. The cigars come out. And I’m sitting there whispering, “There’s no way that the cards aren’t coming out soon. It’s impossible. MJ has never sat this long in one place without the cards coming out. The man has a competitive disorder. The cards will come out. The cards will definitely come out.”
Almost on cue, the cards emerge. They start playing a game called Bid Wist, a form of spades that’s popular among NBA players.113 Oakley and MJ team up against two of their friends and Jordan comes alive. Of course he does. We witness his legendary competitive streak in action: he’s trash-talking nonstop in a deep voice, snickering sarcastically, cackling with every good card, even badgering one opponent to the point that the guy seems like a threat to start crying like one of Joe Pesci’s minions in Good-fellas. This isn’t Corporate MJ, the one you and I know. This is Urban MJ, the one that comes out for the Black Super Bowl,114 the one that made an entire league cower for most of the nineties. It finally makes sense.
And I’m sitting there dying. I know, I know … I love cards and have a gambling problem. But what would make for a greater story than Sully and me calling winners against Oak and MJ? (Even if there isn’t a chance in hell, it’s fun to imagine and I have about seventeen Bloody Marys in me at that point. Cut me some slack.) Meanwhile, the day keeps getting stranger and stranger. Around six, Shaquille O’Neal shows up with his posse, wearing a three-piece suit with a vest that causes MJ to joke, “I’m glad you’re living up to the responsibility of the dress code.” Everyone laughs a little too loudly, because that’s what you do when Michael Jordan makes a joke: you laugh your f*cking ass off. A little bit later, an NBA assistant coach shows up wearing a red sweatshirt with a giant Jordan logo on it. (Who else runs into a friend randomly wearing their clothing line?) MJ keeps getting louder and louder, and he and Oakley are cleaning up, and everyone in the bar is watching them while pretending not to watch, and then suddenly …
MJ’s wife shows up.
Uh-oh.
Everyone makes room for her. She sits down right next to him. Poor MJ looks like somebody who took a no-hitter into the ninth, then gave up a triple off the left-field wall. The trash-talking stops. He slumps in his seat like a little kid. The cigar goes out. No more hangin’ with the boys. Time to be a husband again.115 Watching the whole thing unfold, I lean over to Sully and say, “Look at that, he’s just like us.”
And he is. Just your average guy getting derailed by his wife. For once in my life, I don’t want to be like Mike.
That story happened more than three years ago and I can still remember where everyone was sitting. Which brings us back to the Jordan mystique. He’s the only celebrity who pulls that story off from beginning to end. His force of personality was that great. So yeah, LeBron might approach him someday, and if not him, someone else. You will instinctively want to pass the torch to that person. That’s just the way this stuff works. Again, we always want the Next One to be greater than the Last One, and it’s impossible for the Last One to keep defending the title once memories start fading. Just remember that Superstar X can’t pass Jordan solely by putting up triple doubles, breaking scoring records and winning multiple titles. They have to beat a force of personality that compares to presidents and tycoons. They have to surpass a competitiveness better suited for a dictator. They have to keep peaking well after we believed they could keep peaking. They have to remain the coolest person in the room long after there’s any tangible reason for them to hold that title. And they have to pull off stories with endings like, “Look at that, he’s just like us.” Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player of all time, as well as the most memorable, and maybe you need to be both.
1. Honorable mention suggestions from my friends: Kim Kardashian, Verne Troyer, Miss Elizabeth, Fluff the Caddy, Kevin Federline, Stuttering John, Gallagher, Michael Myers, Gary Coleman, Dirk Diggler, Buddy Ryan, Carrot Top, J. J. Redick, Spencer and Heidi, Steven Seagal, Red from Shawshank, Shannon Elizabeth, Trig and Bristol Palin, Shannon Whirry, Jon Hein, Bruce Buffer, Adrienne Barbeau, Willard Scott, Morganna, Andrew Dice Clay, John “Motor Mouth” Moschitta, Little Oral Annie, Vanilla Ice, Jerome from The Time, Bruce Vilanch, Cytherea, Kobayashi, Hurley from Lost and Jeffrey Ross, who arguably could have made the top-12 for dominating celebrity roasts MJ-style in the 2000s. Unfortunately, it didn’t translate into financial success or even a sitcom deal. Although he altered my life in a small way by saying about Penny Marshall, “I wouldn’t f*ck her with Bea Arthur’s dick” … with Bea Arthur sitting right there. Third most underrated moment of the new millenium in my opinion, just behind pilot Sully landing on the Hudson River and President Dubya throwing a strike with a bulletproof vest right before Game 3 of the ’01 World Series. By the way, Paris Hilton missed the Buffer List because she didn’t even have a single gimmick. Although maybe that was her gimmick—not having a gimmick. Crap, I need to think about this some more.
2. In Giant Steps, aka “The Revisionist History of My Career,” Kareem never mentioned Moses. Not once. If Moses-Kareem was a Good Will Hunting scene, Moses was Will and Kareem was the ponytailed Harvard douche. Hey, Kareem, do you like apples? Shit, I used that one already? This book needs to end soon.
3. Watching young Moses is like seeing Vince Vaughn in Swingers—he’s so much skinnier that it’s completely disconcerting and you can’t stop thinking about it.
4. Why doesn’t anyone else use this trick? I don’t know. Maybe he was an Ass Attack savant.
5. In 1982, Houston GM Ray Patterson said, “There have been only four dominant players: Wilt, Russell, Abdul-Jabbar, and Mo.” (I would have thrown in Walter Dukes for his legendary B.O., but whatever.) And Patterson said that after he traded him; the Rockets didn’t have a choice because Philly had signed Moses to a $13.2 million offer sheet.
6. Another thing in his favor: he had one of the best athlete names ever. If you were writing a movie about the first player to jump from high school to the pros, wouldn’t you give him a name like Moses Malone? Everything crested when Nike released their “Moses” poster with Malone dressed like the religious Moses, only with NBA shorts and a basketball. It’s proudly framed in my office. As is Nike’s “Supreme Court” poster with eleven early-eighties NBA stars dressed like Supreme Court justices (including Artis Gilmore standing defiantly in the middle). I keep telling you: the eighties were fantastic.
7. The best part of this analogy: North was the master of the money shot; Shaq was the master of the monster “don’t try to dunk this or I will put your arms through the hoop with the ball” dunk. Both moves left their opponents wincing, recoiling backward in fear and then needing two or three seconds to recover. And possibly a towel.
8. We also made him a “6th man” for 2 other years where nobody was allowed to draft him as a center. Any time fantasy leagues change their rules for someone, you know that person is good.
9. The crazy thing about Shaq’s FT shooting: he shoots them like line drives. Imagine you’re trying to throw a rolled-up piece of paper into a garbage can—instinctively, would you throw it with a Nowitzki-like arc, or would you whip it in a straight line at the can? You’d throw it with the arc. So why would Shaq whip straight line drives at the rim for fourteen consecutive years? Have we ever definitively answered this question? And while we’re here, was it my imagination or did Shaq become cross-eyed in close games?
10. Shaq’s scoring/rebounding averages in the Finals: 28–12 (’95), 38–17 (’00), 33–16 (’01), 36–12 (’02), 27–11 (’04). In his first 19 NBA Finals games, he averaged 34.2 PPG. He also averaged a 38–15 in the last 2 games of the ’02 Western Finals (both must-wins) and a 25–18 in the last 2 games of the ’95 Bulls series.
11. In the ’90s. Shaq mistakenly thought he could act and rap. This led to him playing a magical genie in a movie called Kazaam. It wasn’t even awful in a fun way; it was just awful. With that said, I absolutely think he should take over the lead role of CSI when he retires.
12. Through 2009, Shaq had earned over $270 million just in salary. That doesn’t include endorsements or business opportunities. And he did it despite frequently turning off the button in his brain that told him, “You should be lively and interesting during this interview, and you definitely shouldn’t mumble your words.”
13. My single favorite Shaqism. The analogy worked and became eerie when you consider the potential parallels between Sonny’s tollbooth execution and Kobe’s brush with moral death after being accused of rape. Whoops, we’re not supposed to discuss this. My bad.
14. By the way, MJ didn’t do these things.
15. You can’t play the “Wait, why didn’t you give Wilt the same leeway here?” card for this reason: Wilt never knew what the hell he wanted. He was constantly changing his mind, his game, his goals, everything. He talked himself into whatever reality suited him the most at the time (or even after he was finished playing). Shaq never did that.
16. One series never earned him enough credit: his demolition of Philly’s Dikembe Mutombo in the ’01 Finals. Dikembe was considered the best defensive center of his generation and Shaq rolled through him for 44–20, 28–20, 30–12, 34–14 and 29–13 (despite missing 36 FTs).
17. We called this game “Jai Alai.” You could only lose; you couldn’t win.
18. Of all the Pyramid guys, Hakeem was the best example of Gladwell’s Outliers theory—someone who succeeded for reasons that went well beyond pure talent. Hakeem spending the summers learning from Moses was like Bill Gates and Paul Allen going to a high school that just happened to have the most advanced computer programming in the country.
19. Grumpy Old Editor: “That’s a sentence worthy of Moses Malone.” And it is.
20. This one ranks high on the list of trades that were a major news story at the time but seem positively pedestrian now. At the time, it was one of the five biggest NBA trades ever. Nobody thought it was a red flag that Houston was getting guys nicknamed “Sleepy” and “Barely Cares.”
21. I’m almost positive this qualifies as criticizing your teammates. In his defense, Dream’s best teammates from 1988 to 1992 were Sleepy, Carroll, Otis Thorpe, Buck Johnson, Vernon Maxwell, Kenny Smith and Mike Woodson. Hakeem played with one All-Star from ’87 through ’95 (Thorpe in ’92).
22. Dream had such little control over his temper than Kupchak goaded him into a wild fight in Game 5 of the ’86 West Finals (Sampson won it at the buzzer). Shades of the dorky Fast Break backup getting Nevada State’s best player to punch him by dropping an n-bomb. Okay, not really. I just hadn’t referenced Fast Break in a while.
23. If McHale had the Panda Express menu, then Hakeem was In-N-Out—only a few options, but all were otherworldly. The complete list: the up-and-under, the double clutch jump hook, the deadly fall-away, the deadly over-the-backboard fall-away; the fake fall-away, fake up and under, the step-back jumper; and the Dream Shake (which can’t be described—it’s the equivalent of the Animal Burger). My Mount Rushmore of fast-food options: Chick-fil-A, Subway, Panda Express and Arby’s. In-N-Out would have made it if their fries didn’t suck.
24. In Game 6 of the ’87 Playoffs (when Houston got knocked out by Seattle), Hakeem nearly beat Seattle by himself by slapping up a 49–25. A 49–25! What?
25. The complete list since ’74: Hakeem (12x), Robinson (7x), Ben Wallace (4x), Julius Erving (4x, all ABA), Kareem (3x), Ewing (3x), Bobby Jones (3x), Jordan (2x), Josh Smith (2x), Andrei Kirilenko (2x), Pippen (1x). MJ is the only guard on the list.
26. The ’95 Rockets won the title despite never having home-court advantage and winning two deciding games on the road (Utah and Phoenix). During those two title seasons, they won eight do-or-die games (four on the road) with Hakeem averaging a 32–11–6.
27. A bigger deal than you realize. Only Russell and Kareem were the best players on Finals teams at least 12 years apart. As for the worst players, the unofficial record holder is Will Perdue (played for Finals champs nine years apart).
28. And if they do, I hope they start with Paul Mokeski.
29. Oscar wrote this bizarre book himself. He spends 331 pages railing against everyone, spinning stories his way and writing I-was-so-great things like “I ended the night with 43 points, including 21 of 22 free throws. No other Royal had more than 20.” (His way of explaining Cincy’s Game 7 loss to the ’63 Celtics.) I finished the book and thought, “Now there’s someone who didn’t totally get The Secret.” Even his defense of his excruciating announcing career is self-serving—apparently it was CBS’ fault for not working with him, Brent Musburger’s fault for not making him better and the NBA’s fault for not wanting a black announcer to succeed. The Big O’s book explained a lot. Let’s put it that way.
30. Crap, I just gave Disney a crappy idea for a formulaic sports movie. “Think Remember the Titans crossed with Glory Road crossed with Mississippi Burning. If we can get Jon Hamm as the Crispus Attucks coach, we just need a director and we’re good to go!”
31. How much of a closed-minded a*shole did you have to be to say the words “Oscar Robertson’s playing against us tonight—let’s rattle him by sticking a black cat in his locker room”? I mean, the losers who spend an hour making lame signs to hold up during games are bad enough, but imagine making a plan that includes questions like, “When do you want to stop by the pound and pick up the black cat?” and “Should we throw it in there before the game or at halftime? On the short list of the Worst Sports Fans of All Time, the black cat culprits rank up there with the ASU students who chanted “PLO” after Steve Kerr’s father was assassinated in Lebanon. Other candidates: White Sox fans on Disco Demolition Night; everyone who was mean to Jackie Robinson or Larry Doby; William Ligue Sr. and Jr.; and the dude who threw beer at Ron Artest in Detroit.
32. Bill Bradley’s take on Oscar: “Perhaps he doesn’t give lesser players a large enough margin of error, but when they listen to him he makes All-Stars of meager talents. He controls events on the court with aplomb and the authoritarian hand of a symphony conductor.” Sounds like a delight!
33. I only found one Oscar story that made him seem semilikable: In Tall Tales, it’s revealed Oscar called rebounds “ballboards.” The book has a story in which Oscar’s excited about playing with some young teammate, scrimmages with the guy, gets disappointed, and finally screams at him, “Man, get out of here—you can’t grab me no ballboards!” And even that story was angry. Do you think it’s a coincidence that one of the Sesame Street muppets was named Oscar the Grouch?.
34. When the guy running your offense averages 1,700 FG attempts and 900 FT attempts for nine solid years, and his team finishes 2–6 in playoff series over that stretch, haven’t we reestablished the premise that you can’t seriously contend if your PG doubles as your top scoring option? It’s no accident that Oscar finished with the following totals on the ’71 Bucks: 19–6–8, 1193 FGA, 385 FTA (regular season); 18–5–9, 210 FGA, 59 FTA (14 playoff games).
35. Borrowing a premise from Elliott Kalb, Oscar’s PT/REB/ASS averages from his first 5 seasons (30.3, 10.4, 10.6) surpass the best possible one-of-the-first 5-years in each category from Bird (’84: 24.2, 10.1, 6.6); Magic (’82: 18.6, 9.6, 9.5); LeBron (’08: 30.0, 7.9, 7.2); Bryant (’01: 28.5, 5.9, 5.0); and nearly West (’62: 30.8, 7.9, 5.4).
36. I nominate Bucky Bockhorn as the whitest name in the history of professional sports. I picture a flattopped Bucky Bockhorn chain-smoking during halftime while drinking a glass of whole milk.
37. Since the league grew from 17 percent black to 75 percent black from 1960 to 1977, and that percentage stayed consistent ever since, only a fool would argue that a “modern” black player didn’t have an enormous advantage. Even Walt Bellamy kicked ass for a couple of seasons. Ask yourself what would happen to the NBA in 2009 if 55 percent of the league suddenly transformed from black to white. A question that Adam Morrison and J. J. Redick ask themselves often. And I mean often.
38. West peaked statistically in year ten with a 31–5–8 and 50% FG, then 31–4–8 in 18 playoff games.
39. Grumpy Old Editor: “So true—watching any single game was doubly frustrating. He never raised his game to the spectacular moment, ever, and yet at the end of the game, there were those maddening stats in the box score.”
40. This analogy works better than you think: ’89 Magic was the same age as ’68 Oscar, although his sex life was infinitely more exciting.
41. This fascinates me. Cousy played on six champs and understood The Secret as well as everyone, but he decided it made sense to trade Oscar for Flynn Robinson and Charlie Paulk after the Knicks and Lakers turned down every overture. Said Cousy after the trade, “Two superstars don’t always mesh. The onus is on Oscar. If he decides to adjust to Alcindor, he could be terrific.” Even though Oscar adjusted, doesn’t it worry you that Cousy wondered if he could? By the way, Paulk lasted two years. There’s a reason Cousy became an announcer.
42. Jabaal Abdul-Simmons counters, “Of course the NBA modeled the Logo after a white man!”
43. Jabaal counters, “Of course SI said the white man was just as good!”
44. Interesting note that may or may not have been racially motivated: West earned two laudatory SI megafeatures during his career (one in March ’65, the other in February ’72). They never wrote one about Oscar. Maybe that’s because they thought he was a prick. But isn’t it weird that “Jordan before Jordan” couldn’t earn a single SI feature during his apex when West, Russell, Cousy and Wilt earned at least two each?
45. I like the days when the NBA held “(Fill in the Star) Night,” gave them gifts and brought in peers to pay tribute to those guys, only the star was still playing. Can you imagine if a team like San Antonio held Tim Duncan Night if he wasn’t retired? How mortified would Duncan be on a scale of 1 to 10? 15? 22? 27?
46. An 81-inch wingspan? Jay Bilas just hosed himself down.
47. Lenny Wilkens in Tall Tales: “I wish they had kept track of steals when Jerry and I played because we would have been the league leaders. He had hands that were as quick as a snake’s tongue.” West only played two months of the ’74 season before blowing out his knee (ending his career), but in those 31 games, he had 81 steals. And that was at the tail end of his basketball life! Imagine West’s resume if he was averaging 3 steals a game, made 3 three’s a game, shot 40-plus from three and made 13 first-team All-Defenses.
48. Red Auerbach in Tall Tales: “What people don’t realize is that Jerry West is one of the greatest defensive guards ever.” He failed to add, “My only regret is that I never had a chance to coach him!” That was a Red staple for every retired number ceremony from 1980 to 2007; it was more reliable than Michael Buffer screaming, “Let’s get ready to rummmmm-mble!” That’s right, two Buffer footnotes in the Pantheon. And you know what? We might go for three. Don’t put it past me.
49. Even his postplaying career helps the West vs. Oscar argument—nobody wanted to hire Oscar, but West built eight title teams in two distinctly different eras (Shaq/Kobe and Magic/Kareem). He’s the only top 20 Pyramid guy who thrived in basketball after his career ended. Does this mean he was a shrewder player than everyone realized, or was his success running the Lakers just a complete coincidence? I go with the former.
50. Blame me for this. I broke plans to watch the lottery with Dad, choosing to monitor the proceedings at the Cape Cod house of a girlfriend my friends referred to only as “the Lunatic.” Needless to say, we didn’t make it too long. But even as the trip was unfolding, I thought to myself, “This is the wrong move. I’m selling Dad down the river. I don’t even like this girl that much.” But I couldn’t stop myself. The C’s ended up with the third and sixth picks. I set the franchise back five years. Again, I blame me.
51. Beyond the usual “smartest player” instincts, Duncan had a knack for picking his spots and sensing exactly when his team needed him to take over. If they needed a 34–22 from TD in a must-win playoff game, he did it. If they needed an 18-point fourth quarter from TD, he did it. If they only needed him to do dirty work, protect the rim, draw double teams for other guys and make everyone else better, he did it. He could adapt to any game and any situation. That’s what separated him from KG.
52. It struck me as I’m writing this—I don’t even know if Duncan has a wife and kids. Or anything about him. He’s one of those guys who could pop up in Us Weekly dating some one like Eva Mendes and you’d be thoroughly confused, only you wouldn’t be able to figure out why.
53. Bruce Bowen, Antonio Daniels, rookie Tony Parker, Malik Rose, Danny Ferry, Charles Smith, a past-his-prime David Robinson, a pretty-much-past-his-prime Steve Smith and a past-his-being-past-his-prime Terry Porter. And everyone claimed KG didn’t have help?
54. That Lakers series was tied at 2–2 when Duncan put up a 64–30 in the next two wins (16 for 25 in the 29-point blowout that clinched it). Shaq had a 51–22 in those games. Also, Duncan’s ’03 postseason had the highest win share rating ever: 5.98. I’d be more excited if I knew what this means.
55. Duncan never received enough credit here: after playing 275 of a possible 289 games the previous three years, he sucked it up and represented his country while KG passed. Why? Because KG was tired from making it past the second round for the first time. But KG is the “warrior”? Really? Wait, why do I keep ripping a Celtic?
56. In my annual “Who has the highest NBA trade value?” column gimmick that started on my old website in 2001 and continued at ESPN, Duncan finished no. 2, no. 2, no. 3, no. 1, no. 2, no. 1, no. 3, no. 3, and no. 4. Through 2008, San Antonio finished 615–265 with him during the regular season, 91–57 in the Playoffs, won four titles and finished 4–0 in the Finals. Now that’s consistency.
57. Grumpy Old Editor’s grizzled take: “No one coasted more, ever, not even Eddy Curry. Wilt coasted during so many seasons that he should have been named an honorary member of the gag pop group The Coasters. Putting Wilt in the Pantheon? I thought you were a radical.”
58. Please check out any of Chuck’s books. He’s the only sports atheist I know—loves sports, loves following sports, doesn’t root for specific teams. Had we known each other in college, we either would have been best friends or fought to the death. Or maybe both.
59. Chuck’s footnote: “Yes, yes—I realize rebounds were ‘easier to come by’ in the pre-modern era. Everybody concedes that. But it doesn’t matter: If you divide Chamberlain’s lifetime board numbers in half, the quotient (11.45) is still competitive with the full career averages for Barkley, Moses, and Shaq. Or think about it this way: If Chamberlain had never played during the second half of any game in his entire career, he would still have eight more career rebounds than Dennis Rodman.”
60. Forgot to mention: I thought of Chuck for a dissenting Wilt opinion because he’s the only other person I know who read Wilt’s 1973 autobiography. I think we even exchanged “What about that stewardess blowing Wilt!” emails. Do they have lifetime achievement Pulitzers? I really think the committee needs to reexamine Wilt’s body of work.
61. Did you ever try to come up with the dumbest parallel for the Bird-Magic rivalry? I like this one: the two Shannons (Whirry and Tweed) were the Bird and Magic of Cine-max. From 1992 to 1995, Whirry starred in Animal Instincts, Body of Influence, Lady in Waiting, Fatal Pursuit, Animal Instincts II, Private Obsession, Playback and Dangerous Prey, while Tweed carried, from 1992 to 1996, Night Eyes II, Night Eyes III, Indecent Behavior, The Naked Truth, Cold Sweat, Possessed by the Night, Indecent Behavior II, Night Fire, Hard Vice, Indecent Behavior III, Hotline, Body Chemistry 4, Electra, The Dark Dancer and Scorned (probably her epic). What a stretch! And it happened right before Internet porn took off. Just like we’ll never see another Bird and Magic, we will never see anything like the two Shannons.
62. It was just too easy to crack the Legends Club preexpansion: Wilt put up a 7 and three 9’s, Oscar/Elgin did it multiple times, and even the likes of Neil Johnston and Dolph Schayes made it.
63. Considering Bird and Magic became good friends, isn’t it conceivable—repeat: conceivable—that they’d become teammates once in their waning years? Imagine them offering Orlando a package deal for 1994–95: sign us for one year. How fast does Orlando say yes, 0.09 seconds? How weird would it have been to have Magic on the Magic, or Bird wearing that goofy black Orlando uniform and throwing alley-oops for Shaq? And what if MJ returned from his basketball sabbatical for the ’95 playoffs? Bird, Magic, and MJ in one series? Also, I’d be wearing a straitjacket right now.
64. The complete list of all-O/no-D small forwards from 1980–88: Dantley, English, Dominique, Aguirre, Kiki Vandeweghe, John Drew, Tripucka, Chambers, Walter Davis, Scott Wedman, Bernard King, Albert King, Jay Vincent, Purvis Short, Jamaal Wilkes, Thurl Bailey, Marques Johnson, Mike Mitchell, Orlando Woolridge, Dale Ellis, Eddie Johnson … and yes, Doc post-1983. A surprisingly large group for a 21-team league.
65. When Smith struggled as a Celtics rookie, Boston fans quickly arrived at the same conclusion: “There’s nooooooooo way this guy can make it.” He did leave one legacy: He was the single greatest H-O-R-S-E player in the history of the Celtics. Not even Bird could beat him.
66. The Best Porn Name All-Stars: Dick Pound, Pete LaCock, Ken Bone, Misty Hyman, Ben Gay, Magic Johnson, Rich Harden, Dick Trickle, Rusty Kuntz, Billy “the Whopper” Paultz, Butch Huskey, Randy “Big Unit” Johnson, Hot Rod Williams, Dick Pole and Wayne Chism, with Mo Cheeks and Dick Harter as coaches.
67. Magic (’79) and Isiah (’81) weren’t just the first two men to kiss each other in prime time; they were the first underclassmen to get picked first in the NBA draft; from 1946 to 1992, only three others (Chris Washburn, Chris Jackson and Kenny Anderson) were picked in the top 5.
68. Kudos to me for using Magic and Long Dong Silver in an analogy that had nothing to do with sex. I continue to amaze myself.
69. Magic’s performance in a deciding Game 3 was one of the worst ever by a Pyramid guy: he missed 12 of 14 shots, bricked two free throws in the final 30 seconds and air-balled the series-deciding shot.
70. During the same time, the Doobie Brothers had a similar platoon going with Michael McDonald and Patrick Simmons as their lead vocalists. Like Nixon, Simmons had been there first … and like Magic, McDonald was clearly more talented and capable of pushing the band to another level. Mikey Mac left for a hugely successful solo career—twenty-five years later, he’s still cranking out albums and spitting all over microphones. I should also mention that (a) the woman who broke his heart and caused “Minute by Minute,” “What a Fool Believes” and “I Keep Forgetting” must have given him the greatest sex ever, and (b) my buddy Bish and I made a dunk video on a 9-foot rim in 1988 set to Mikey Mac’s “Our Love” that will end my career if it ever lands on YouTube.
71. An excerpt: “Calling on Magic [in the clutch] is like asking Busby Berkeley to step in and direct the climactic scene in an Ingmar Bergman movie.” I was just thinking that! Nobody slammed out awkward pop culture references like SI in the seventies and eighties.
72. Eddie: Sinatra; Magic: Dean; Arsenio: Sammy. I always thought The Black Pack would be a great documentary: they were on top of the world for four years, then Magic got HIV, Eddie’s career went in the tank and Arsenio had financial problems. And that’s just the start of it. I’d say more, but my legal team just electroshocked me.
73. Something rarely mentioned here—the combination of Magic’s HIV, Warren Beatty getting old and Eddie Murphy left a huge void for Hollywood Alpha Dogs getting laid by the elite of the elite. Then Leo DiCaprio and Ben Affleck showed up. Void filled!
74. GQ’s Charlie Pierce believed that Magic and alter ego Earvin battled like Superman and Bizarro Superman. Earvin had a longtime girlfriend named Cookie; Magic cheated on her relentlessly. Earvin had an illegitimate son; Magic carried on like the boy didn’t exist. Earvin was a shrewd investor who tripled his NBA income off the court; Magic behaved like a college kid on spring break. Post-HIV Earvin educated everyone about his virus; post-HIV Magic bragged about his earlier, wilder ways.
75. The philosophy: If his one-night stand didn’t share his bed all night, the event was somehow okay. I wish I had thought of this rule in college. Wait, why am I making fun of this? Can’t the Supreme Court pass this as a law?
76. The All-Depressing Comeback Starting Five: Cousy (re-activated himself as Cincy’s player-coach for seven painful games in ’68) and Jordan (Wizards version, 2001–3) at guard; Cowens (returned as a bench player for the ’83 Bucks) and Magic (’96) at forward; Mikan (post-shot-clock, 1956) at center; Red Holzman (’77 Knicks) as coach; and Jerry West (Grizzlies, 2002–6) as GM.
77. The lowlight happened when Howard Stern appeared as a guest, farted the song “Wipe Out,” and made every inappropriate Magic-related joke possible. Desperate to stem a ratings slide, an overmatched Magic had to smile thinly and absorb the abuse. I can’t remember a time when another celebrity was humiliated that publicly, and for that long, without Corey Haim being involved. The show capsized within eight weeks, costing syndicators more than $10 million.
78. Out of respect for the mission of this book, I will resist all urges to take potshots at my least favorite NBA player for the next 3,000 words. You have my word.
79. Longest runs of excellence: Kareen, Nicklaus, Meryl Streep, Ric Flair, The Simpsons, Don Rickles, Clint Eastwood, Shawn Michaels, Jim Murray, Colonel Sanders, Johnny Carson, Don King, Walter Cronkite, Nina Hartley, Annie Leibovitz, Siegfried & Roy, Marv Albert, M&M’s, Martin Scorsese, Johnny Cash, Converse Chuck Taylors, Michael Buffer (three references in the Pantheon!), Vin Scully, Steven Spielberg, Harrison Ford, Peter North, Roger Angell, U2, composer John Williams, the Rolling Stones and the U.S. Constitution.
80. The secret to Kareem’s success: stretching. Kareem did yoga before anyone even knew what the hell yoga was. I’d make the “yet another reason to hate yoga” joke here but promised you a potshot-free zone. See? I’m a man of my word.
81. Two centers lied about their heights: Kareem and Walton, who claimed to be 6′11″ when he was at least 7′2″. It’s always funny when NBA players lie about their height—it’s not like we can’t see, right?
82. Nobody was a bigger whiner than Kareem except Rick Barry, but I gotta defend him here: opponents were allowed to “bend” the rules to defend him. In Giant Steps, Kareem mentioned that referee Richie Powers allowed Dave Cowens to manhandle him and jump over his back for rebounds in the ’74 Finals. Elliot Kalb looked it up: Powers officiated Games 1, 3, 5 and 7 of the series … all Milwaukee defeats. Hmmmmm.
83. Like Oscar, Kareem had one too many early brushes with racism and never really recovered. When his high school coach tried to motivate him by yelling that he was “playing like a nigger,” Kareem entered what he would call later “my white-hating period.” Can white guys have a white-hating period? I think I had one when I was little.
84. Kareem also appeared in a fight scene in Bruce Lee’s last movie (Game of Death), as well as episodes of Mannix, Emergency!, Man from Atlantis, Tales from the Dark Side, 21 Jump Street and Diff’rent Strokes on the last of which he played Arnold’s substitute teacher, Mr. Wilkes. Couldn’t they have called him Mr. Kabbar?
85. Nobody remembers Kareem averaging a 33–14 with 23 blocks in 5 games, or that he stayed back in L.A. for treatment and didn’t even get to celebrate Game 6 with his team. This might be the best Finals MVP argument ever: Do you reward Kareem for carrying L.A. to 3 wins, or Magic for playing a game that Bob Ryan later called the best he’d ever seen in person? I vote for Kareem because Game 6 wasn’t a must-win—Philly still had to win Game 7 in L.A. Not likely.
86. Lucius Allen “ran” Kareem’s Bucks/Lakers teams from ’75 thru ’77; he was so mediocre that Kareem actually led the ’75 Bucks in assists with a paltry 263.
87. In Round 2, they beat a Warriors team that featured Rick Barry, Gus Williams, Jamaal Wilkes, Phil Smith and a center combo of Clifford Ray and rookie Robert Parish. Kareem averaged 37 points for the series and dropped a 36–26 in Game 7.
88. According to Elliott Kalb, Kareem outscored Wilt 201–70 in five regular season games in ’72, then 202–67 in six playoffs games (although Wilt’s team won the series). In Game 6, with Oscar only able to play 7 minutes with an abdominal strain, Kareem put up a 37–25–8 and Wilt countered with a 22–24. The year before, Wilt outplayed Kareem in the Western Finals even though the Lakers fell in five.
89. Jerry West told SI in 1980, “Kareem is a player. A great, great, great basketball player. My goodness, he does more things than anyone who has ever played this game. Wilt was a force. He could totally dominate a game. Take it. Make it his. People have thought that Kareem should be able to do that too. No. That would not make him a player of this game.” He’s a player. A player!
90. Kareem had Airplane and Game of Death; Wilt had Conan the Destroyer, which should be the first DVD release if Criterion ever makes an Unintentional Comedy Collection. Wilt spends the entire movie riding around on a horse and trying to seem angry; even the horse was a better actor than Wilt. He never made another movie.
91. I vote that we name this gene after them: “Jordruss Gene.” It’s a specific pattern of chromosomes unique to them.
92. Including playoff games and MJ’s 34 postbaseball games in ’95, that’s a 632-game stretch over six-plus seasons. That’s not unfathomable—that’s defathomable.
93. Young MJ was definitely stat-obsessed. During the ’89 season, Jordan became so infatuated with triple doubles that he kept asking the official scorer what he needed during games (two more assists, one more rebound, whatever). The NBA found out and told the scorer that he couldn’t give the info out. Sounds a little Wilt-esque, no?
94. The list: 1957 (Game 7, triple OT); 1962 (Game 7, Philly plus Game 7, L.A.); 1963 (Game 7, Cincy); 1965 (Game 7, Philly); 1968 (Game 7, Philly); 1969 (Games 4 and 7, L.A.).
95. Russell retired four months before Kareem entered the NBA. Put it this way: from what we know about Russell’s competitive fire, am I really supposed to believe that Russ didn’t watch a few UCLA games in ’68 and ’69 and think, “I am getting old, it’s time to get out of Dodge soon”? By the way, why did everyone want to leave Dodge so badly? What was Dodge? Did we ever figure this out? Did that saying start because someone laid a horrendous fart in a Dodge Dart in like 1965?
96. The biggest piece Kobe was/is missing: he just wasn’t that cool. Forget about being the coolest guy in the room; Kobe wasn’t ever the coolest guy on his team. Like A-Rod, Kobe always seems to be playing the part … and you’re either cool or you’re not. This will make sense in a few more pages.
97. The most famous of the stories: The time LaBradford Smith lit him up, strutted too much, and got outscored 47–0 by MJ the next night. This one is slightly apocryphal: Smith outscored MJ 37 to 25 on March 19, 1993. The next night, a pissed-off MJ scored 36 by halftime and finished with a 47–8–8 … but Smith did score 15. Chicago won both games.
98. After getting swept by the ’91 Bulls, Detroit assistant Brendan Suhr said, “I think [MJ] finally realized that one player can’t win at this level, that the farther you get in the playoffs, teams can always stop one man. He finally sees that.” Sure. But you can’t “see it” if your teammates suck.
99. Jordan’s averages in his six Finals: 31–7–11, 36–5–6, 41–9–6, 27–5–4, 32–7–6, 34–4–2. That’s four 42 Club appearances, by the way.
100. True MJ facts: Scored 40-plus thirty-seven times in the ’87 season; first with back-to-back 50-point Playoffs games (’88); by the end of the ’91 season, he had the NBA’s highest scoring average in the regular season, Playoffs and All-Star Game (and still does); he scored 60-plus five times (once in the playoffs) and 50-plus another thirty-four times (seven in playoffs); holds the record for consecutive games scoring double figures (866); only player to score 20-plus points in every Finals game (minimum: ten).
101. Well, unless Stern suspended him and told him to play baseball for 18 months. I didn’t want to spoil the story.
102. It can’t be forgotten that Jordan left the NBA for 21 months and rebuilt his body for baseball—stronger legs, thicker physique—didn’t play competitively at all, then hopped right back into the NBA schedule with five weeks to play in March ’95, and within five games, he’d already made a game-winner in Atlanta and scored 55 at MSG.
103. Here’s how great Jordan was: for his single greatest moment, he blatantly cheated … and nobody gave a shit. If anything, we applauded him for his ingenuity. Imagine if Kobe won the NBA title with a shove like that. We’d be bitching about it all summer. By the way, I always thought it was poetic that MJ pushed off a guy named Russell to swish the shot that clinched his status as the best ever.
104. There’s an extended moment after the ’88 Eastern Finals ended when we see McHale give inspired advice to Isiah, followed by Isiah thanking him and slapping his hand. I remember screaming at the TV, “What the hell? Don’t talk to him! What are you doing?” That’s just the way it worked back then.
105. Pitino angered Jordan with his comments after Game 3. MJ’s next three games: 47–11–6, 38–8–10, 40–5–10. Pitino signed with the University of Kentucky a few weeks later. I’m sure it was a coincidence.
106. Jordan frequently razzed Krause for his slovenly looks and generally unattractive appearance, as well as Krause’s penchant for taking too much credit for the success of the Jordan era. And really, MJ was right. Saying Jerry Krause built the six-time champion Chicago Bulls is like calling Lord of the Rings a Sean Astin flick.
107. I always thought Magic’s presence at courtside as an NBC announcer (as well as Bird’s inevitable retirement) played a big part in this game: For the first time, the league belonged to Jordan and Jordan alone. Drexler was in the way. He had to be wiped out. And if Magic got to witness it from midcourt, even better.
108. This was a bigger moment than it might seem. See, Oakley is the real-life Shaft. You know those bar fight scenes in Road House when Swayze stands there motionless, with just a thin smile on his face, as ten drunk guys are brawling a few feet away? That’s Oakley. You could hire extras to play gang members at a party, then have them fire blanks at each other ten feet away from Oakley and I’m not sure he’d flinch. My favorite Oakley fact: he served as MJ’s enforcer in Chicago, now they’re both retired … and from what I can tell, he’s still Jordan’s enforcer. Could there be a better tribute in life to someone’s kickassability than MJ himself deciding, “You know what? I need to make sure he’s still on my side. I don’t care if we’re in our forties.” Personally, I think Oak should have become the next great action hero. He’s got the looks, the size, the swagger … at the very least, he could mumble through his lines and become the black Steven Seagal. We know everyone in the NBA was afraid of him, personified by the famous story of Oak slapping Barkley hard across the face during a ’99 lockout players-only meeting. I once asked a relatively famous current player, “What makes Oakley more intimidating than everyone else?” His answer: “There’s a lotta tough guys in the league, but Oak don’t give a f*ck.” Well, then.
109. This comeback didn’t turn out so well: Jordan overdid his preseason conditioning and battled a variety of nagging knee and ligament issues for two years. Even worse, he was still running the team and built it around his strengths and weaknesses, hiring a yes-man coach (Doug Collins), slowing them down stylistically and making a horrible trade (Rip Hamilton for Jerry Stackhouse). They missed the playoffs both years. Even the signature book written about the comeback sucked. I now pretend this comeback never happened, and frankly, so should you.
110. Oak had two legendary NBA feuds: One with Tyrone Hill (who reportedly welched on a poker debt), the other with Jeff McInnis (origins unclear but it definitely involved a woman). I have heard various accounts of the resolutions of these feuds, but each involved Oak laying the smack down like Marcellus Wallace seeking revenge on Zed and the Gimp. By the way, any time you hear about two NBA players who have a longstanding beef, there is a 100 percent chance that the beef started because someone owed money from a card game or someone boinked someone else’s girlfriend or steady hookup. With no exceptions.
111. This is an underrated part of the story—not the 7:30 part, but that Falk was afraid to come over and he was only Jordan’s agent at the time.
112. I wanted my son to have the initials B.O.S. for obvious reasons. The O candidates were awful: Oliver, Oscar, Omaha and so on. Then I noticed Oakley and liked the sound of it (strong name) and the thought of my son sharing the name of the single coolest person alive. Will you grow up to be a p-ssy with a middle name like Oakley? No way. And since my wife had just pumped a nine-pound fetus out of her body, was doped up on pain meds and had stitches in a place where you definitely wouldn’t want to have stitches, she readily agreed. Would we have come up with that middle name if this 2006 Four Seasons story hadn’t happen? Probably not. See, everything happens for a reason.
113. I’m almost positive that it’s illegal for white people to play Bid Wist.
114. That’s a nickname for All-Star Weekend that I used as the headline for my 2006 All-Star Weekend column after my friend J. A. Adande emailed me, “Have fun at the Black Super Bowl.” College basketball’s Final Four is the Caucasian Super Bowl (just 80,000 middle-aged white guys wearing warmup suits), the women’s Final Four is the Lesbian Super Bowl (they cater some of the events toward a gay audience now), the Daytona 500 is the White Trash Super Bowl, and the Super Bowl is the Super Bowl.
115. But not for much longer—she filed for divorce a couple of months later. The good news is that Juanita Jordan will always live on for this story, as well as for one of the most awkward TV moments ever: when MJ was celebrating his first title in the locker room, they threw it to Bob Costas, who mistakenly introduced Juanita as Michael’s mother, followed by Michael coldly saying, “That’s my wife.” This clip is on YouTube and I’ve watched it 10,543 times. It never stops being funny. Not ever.