We watch the NBA players on TV, but the experience remains distant. For example, imagine being a fly on the wall in the Dallas locker room after every game of the Mavericks/Golden State Warriors series. Or after the Utah Jazz beat the Houston Rockets in Game 7, witnessing T-Mac at his locker so hurt he couldn’t even speak? How do coaches deal with those situations? How do teams react to tough losses or big wins behind the scenes? Sure we see Dirk embrace Don Nelson before walking off the court, but what happens after that? What transpires during a grueling 82 game season within an NBA family? How hard do NBA coaches really work and prepare for the playoffs? What about the Phoenix Suns? Does Coach D’Antoni just tell everyone to pass the ball to Nash and let Stevie find you? Why is Shawn Marion so miserable he wants to be traded? What went in Raja Bell’s head when he slammed Kobe Bryant to the floor in the playoffs? Or how about the whole story behind Amare Stoudemire’s arthroscopic knee surgery and rehab? Well Jack McCallum’s, :07 Seconds or Less is the open portal we desire.

In the 2005 NBA Playoffs, Amare Stoudemire destroyed the Western Conference. The 21-year-old power forward with Black Jesus tattooed on his neck averaged almost 35 points a game after averaging 26 points during the season. Entering the 2005-2006 season the Phoenix Suns were the darling of the NBA. Steve Nash just captured the 2004 MVP Award while Coach Mike D’Antonio earned the Coach of the Year award with his unorthodox run & gun offense. The Suns shocked the world winning over sixty games, leading the league in scoring. Nash and the gang proved doubters wrong about their style of play, racing all the way to the Western Conference Finals. Even though they lost to the San Antonio Spurs, entering the 2005-2006 season expectation could not have been higher, until…

Fresh off a max contract extension Amare Stoudemire required arthroscopic knee surgery. The same knee surgery that crippled high flying superstars Chris Webber, Anfernee Hardaway, Antonio McDyess, and Kenyon Martin. It became uncertain how long Stoudemire would be out or if he would ever be the same.

Joe Johnson requested management not to match the contract the Atlanta Hawks offered him as a restricted free agent. In return Phoenix received a few draft picks and an unknown Frenchman by the name of Boris Diaw. Combine uncertainty with Amare, Boris Diaw, and a trade that brought veteran Kurt Thomas for Quentin Richardson and you’re in for a roller coaster of a season.

Jack McCallum opens a window into the real world NBA. McCallum travels with the team, sits in on coaches meetings, and views a team the way true fans dream of. McCallum describes how an insecure Shawn Marion sat and moped after a playoff game that he scored 36 points and grabbed 20 rebounds in, because he felt Steve Nash got all the credit. The reader is allowed to sit in on coaches meetings listening to coaches complain about officiating and their “rental� Tim Thomas. We learn about the Phoenix Suns new owner Robert Sarver’s Mark Cuban-esque style. Including his rocky relationship with President Jerry Colangelo after allowing his son Bryan depart becoming GM of the Toronto Raptors. McCallum sits you next to Raja Bell in the locker room fuming about Kobe Bryant and the ever shit talking Eddie House. Between game planning to stop Phil Jackson and Kobe in a Game 7, deciding whether Amare should shut it down for the season, or listening to now head coach of the Grizzlies Mark Iavaroni compare his chalkboard to the Heat’s Stan Van Gundy’s, McCallum takes you on great journey through the 2005-2006 season with the Phoenix Suns.

Side note:

After reading this book, I can’t help but watch the Boston Celtics and hope more books like this are written.

Which makes this process of playing for a scholarship not the black version of the American Dream, as I had thought eight months earlier, but a cruel parody of it. In the classic parable you begin with nothing and slowly accrue your riches through hard work in a system designed to help those who help themselves. Here, at seventeen years of age, you begin with nothing but one narrow, treacherous path and then run a gauntlet of obstacles that merely reminds you of how little you have: recruiters pass themselves off as father figures, standardized tests humiliate you and reveal the wretchedness of your education, the promise of lucrative NBA contracts reminds you of what it feels like to have nothing in this world. Page 227

This is by far my favorite book of all time. I have read The Last Shot by Darcy Frey about four times and enjoy it more with each read. Anyone who loves the game of basketball will share my affection for Frey’s masterpiece. The true story of Stephon Marbuy and his high school teammates depicts their ultimate struggle to succeed in the projects of Coney Island, New York. The summer before my junior year of high school I attended Five-Star Basketball Camp. A speaker told a story about when Stephon Marbury attended the camp and dove for a lose ball on the concrete outdoor basketball court. The moral of the story was Marbury’s determination, already the number one high school player in the country Stephon could miss every shot that week and still gone to any college he chose. The speaker instructed everyone to buy Darcy Frey’s book when they returned home, because it may enlighten everyone about their opportunities, blessings, and much more. And was he ever right…

The Last Shot is the journey of four young men attending the famed Lincoln High School of Coney Island, New York and their pursuit of a better life through basketball. Entering the 1991-92 school year Russell Thomas, Corey Johnson, Tchaka Shipp, and Stephon Marbury are the core of Coach Bob Harstein’s Lincoln Rail Splitters basketball team. Senior players Thomas, Johnson, and Shipp are joined by freshman sensation Marbury through a long season where their goal is capturing the city title earning Division I basketball scholarships in the process. Darcy Frey’s responsibility is to follow the young men during the school year documenting their experiences with the ills of recruiting, violence and drugs in their community, passing the SATs, and the pressure of making it out of the Coney Island Projects by way of an athletic scholarship that many feel is their “last shot.�

The book is an open window into the lives of the four boys attempting to escape poverty. The young men accept for Tchaka Shipp live in the projects of Coney Island, standing in the middle of the projects is the “Garden,� a basketball court where players hone their skills without interruption from drug dealers, violence, or vandalism. The inner city version of Madison Square Gardens holds the respect of the entire community. Equipped with lights and break away rims “The Garden� is filled with the hope that basketball can be a portal out of the projects. Easily talented enough not all four boys have the high hopes of becoming NBA superstars. You cannot help, but be drawn to Russell Thomas, working hard on his game in hopes of becoming a registered nurse after his college education moving his family out of the projects never to return. We follow Russell through the stress of passing the SATs and the headache of being recruited. Tchaka Shipp on the other hand is one of the top post players in the country determining which Division I school will give him the opportunity to grow into the NBA player he dreams to become. Frey takes the reader on trips inside Shipp’s recruiting visits through the Big East as Tchaka listens to pitches from coaches such as P.J. Carlesimio and Rick Barnes giving best effort to sell the senior their University. He receives letters from the likes of Jim Bohiem of Syracuse ensuring him not to worry about NCAA sanctions against his program for giving players money pushing Shipp to become an Orangeman. Corey Johnson is a head in the clouds young man who is athletically gifted, but does not love the game. His love is his poetry. Oh yeah and there is Stephon Marbury…

The story of Stephon Marbury is an interesting one. Juvenile Starbury is the youngest of four boys. Eric, Donnie, and Norman were all basketball stars at Lincoln High School, but were not rewarded with Division I basketball scholarships and rich NBA contracts so many young men dream of. The weight of the families last shot is on the freshman point guard’s shoulders and he knows it. Memorizing the exact number of seats in Madison Square Garden, dreaming of “milky� Nissan Sentras colleges will give him, and how much Kenny Anderson’s new contract is worth, Marbury allows Frey to bring us along for a ride with the #1 player in his class since he was 10.

Darcy’s book has you forget your reading visualizing Lincoln practices, summer league games, and recruiting visits. You feel you’re are sitting in the car with the boys discussing their parents frustrated mind frames of never escaping the Coney Island Projects along with their own hopes, dreams, and sorrows. A friend of mine has two boys who play high school football and basketball, I shared with him Frey’s book, and now his kids are reading the book. I strongly suggest you pick up this book too.

I am finally understanding the danger that represents in Coney Island. If Corey lived anywhere else- certainly if he had grown up twenty-five miles north, in one of the New York’s white suburbs- he would play the offbeat writer whose poor grades and popularity with girls earn him a four-year sentence at a midlevel school like Colgate, to be served while his classmates all go Ivy. In the movie version, Corey would be played with dashing ennui by Matt Dillion or Keanu Reeves, and he would end up in the climactic scene getting the girl and a job after he learned to stop slacking off. But Corey fools around in an arena where there is, of course, no such thing as a safety school- nor, for that matter, safety nets of any kind- and where the credits usually roll on far less sanguine endings… In Coney Island, however, you deviate from the one and only path to college at extreme personal risk- scholarships for athletes being significantly easier to come by than those for underachievers or ghetto poets. Page 197

David Zirin’s new book, Welcome to the Terrordome: The Pain, Politics and Promise of Sports touches almost every sport genre. It does not matter what sport you follow for this book to be enjoyable. If you are a basketball fan Zirin has a chapter entitled, “The NBA and the Two Souls of Hip Hop.� International soccer fan? “Soccer: The Perilous Practice of Political Projection.� And one of my favorite chapters for you baseball fans out there obsessed with steroids, “Barry Bonds Gonna Git Your Mama: When Steroids Attack!�

Zirin looks beyond sports in his book and dives into the social aspect these “games� have on our lives, nations, and communities. I learned about a Hispanic civil rights activist named Roberto Clemente who happened to play baseball. Clemente fought has hard as any African American against the laws of Jim Crow. When told by a waitress, “We don’t serve Negroes,� he responded, “That’s okay. I don’t eat Negroes.� Clemente helped sponsor the Black Panther morning breakfast program and probably did as much for baseball as the storied Jackie Robinson. Zirin praises Clemente for everything he accomplished on and off the field before his untimely death.

Want to know why the MLB is about 40% Hispanic? In the chapter titled, “Beisbol: How the Major Leagues Eat Their Young,� you will find out. Zirin informed us about the horrible baseball farms the MLB uses in Central and South America exploiting impoverish young kids dreams strictly for financial gain.

Unleashing the power of the World Cup, Zirin attempts to unveil meaning behind sports and how it feels to represent your country. To the United States soccer is David Beckman, Posh Spice, and Fifa 2008 on Xbox 360, but to the world soccer is a political stage. Zirin dives into the 2006 World Cup recalling what the games meant to different countries. He explains why people of color are seldom seen in the stands for fear of safety.

In the chapter, “The Olympics: Gold, Guns, and Graft,� it was interesting to see how the Olympics coincide with social change. How an eighteen year old Cassis Clay gave his 1960 Olympic boxing gold medal a home at the bottom of the Ohio River after being turned away from a whites-only restaurant in his hometown of Louisville. Zirin writes how track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos changed the world view of American segregation with their proud fists raised high in the 1968 games. Zirin explains hosting the Olympics can cripple a city’s economy as it did Greece in 2004 and how the Olympics caused social backlash by the way the cities less fortunate are violently shoved to the side in tragic story of Tlatelolco, Mexico. Zirin also introduces us to the racist Avery Brundage, former president of the International Olympic Committee.

Whether it is Don Imus, John Amechi, Pat Tillman, Sheryl Swoopes, Jim Brown, Lance Armstrong, or Etan Thomas, Zirin leaves no stone unturned in his book. If you couldn’t already tell by name, he also touches on Katrina and the Superdome. This book is a great read and if that’s not enough to convince you… The foreword is written by Chuck D. I rest my case.

Welcome to the dog days of summer! The world is without NFL and NBA action for the next few months so I find myself reading about them educating myself in the world of sports and how it interacts with society. For the next few weeks MindRite will be letting you know what sports books to read while you’re on the bus, metro, or subway in transit from work or in the car or plane in between vacation, or when your significant other makes you sleep on the couch and have nothing better to do.

Black Planet; Facing Race During an NBA Season, written by David Shields is an interesting book as the author follows the 1994-95 season of the Seattle SuperSonics. Shield attends every home game, watches every road game, and listens to every Sonics sports talk radio show. The book is written in diary form throughout the duration of the season making the book easy to follow. The reason this book is so intriguing is the brutal honesty in which the author writes. Shields does a great job of “saying it how he sees it.� Throughout the book Shields discusses how he views race and cultural on the NBA landscape. The book is about cultural interaction having basketball as a backdrop. Because you do not have to be a basketball fan to enjoy this book, I recommend to any sports fan or anyone interested in race or class.

Shields lets you see deep into the mind of a middle aged white man who is an obsessive Seattle SuperSonics fan bored with everyday life. Throughout the book Shields notices racism within the NBA and in his own life and shares his prospective with us. My description cannot do the book justice, so I have including the, “Author’s Note,� along with a few passages, enjoy!

“During the 1994-95 NBA season, I attended nearly all of the Seattle SuperSonics’ home games; watched on TV nearly all their away games; listened to countless pre- and post-game interviews and call-in shows on the radio; talked to or tried to talk to players, coaches, agents, journalists, fans, my wife; corresponded with members of the Sonics newsgroup on the Internet; read articles and articles and articles. Although I’m a passionate basketball fan and Sonics fan, when I was writing the book I wasn’t interested in the game per se-who won, who lost, the minutiae of strategy. I was interested in how the game gets discussed. By the end of the season, I’d accumulated hundreds of pages of often illegible notes, the roughest of rough drafts. Over the last three years, I transformed those notes into this book- a daily dairy which runs the length of one team’s long forgotten season and which is now focused, to the point of obsession, on how white people (including especially myself) think about and talk about black heroes, black scapegoats, black bodies
What John Edgar Wideman calls “our country’s love/hate affair with the black body� can be seen nowhere more clearly than in the National Basketball Association, which is a photo negative of American race relations: strong young black men have some of the power, much of the money, and all of the fun. The NBA is a place where, without ever acknowledging it- and because it’s never acknowledged, it’s that much more potent and telling- white fans and black players enact and quietly explode virtually every racial issue and tension in the culture at large. Race, the league’s taboo, is the league’s biggest subject.
Listen:
Auother’s Note

“Virtually every NBA team has a white coach and (out of three assistant coaches) one black assistant coach, who acts as mediator between players and coach. Paul, my friend and former graduate student, calls these black assistant coaches “lawn jockeys.� The Sonics’ new black assistant coach, Dwayne Casey, “who got hired to baby-sit Kemp,� recruited Kemp to the University of Kentucky for a brief time Kemp was there before leaving� Everything Else Is They (p31).

“Kemp and New Jersey’s Derrick Coleman are remarkably deferential to each other, talking, laughing, kidding each other, helping each other up, barely playing defense against each other. They played together in Toronto this summer on Dream Team II. Fans want to think it’s us against them (Seattle vs. New Jersey, say) and that the players on “our� team are in cahoots with us, in some difficult-to-define way- difficult to define, since their contempt for us is so manifest. One of the things I’ve felt at the games so far is how bound together the five Sonics on the floor are with the five players on the floor for the other team, like boxers, and how the opposition is really the noise of the everything else- coaches, refs, cameras, commercials, mascots, especially fans. The players are the ones sharing the jokes together at the foul line. Fans always want to ask Player X what he was saying out there on the court to Player Y. Player X always deflects the question, since it is, in a sense rude to question. It’s tantamount to asking lovers the content of their pillow talk: it’s our camaraderie, not yours� Everyone Else Is They (p36).

“11.24.94- Robert Parish, a former Boston Celtic playing this year with Charlotte- asked by reporters what he meant in a Boston Globe article last week that quoted him as saying, “Boston is a white town; they like white heroes�- replies, “I said this town is a white town that appreciates their white players. It caters to their white heroes. It has nothing to do with race. I don’t want to get into that racial thing. It’s not about race. It’s just a fact.� What interests me is not what Parish says, which is a bromide- working-class Irish Catholics don’t embrace black athletes- but that he feels compelled to pretend to undo what he’s saying even as he’s saying it, thus enacting the weird code in which this discussion almost always gets encrypted.� Everyone Else Is They (p41).

“Laurie and I and our friends Karen and Ross go see Pulp Fiction, which Laurie and Karen and Ross like a lot more than I do. To me, Pulp Fiction just comes down to Tarantino’s getting to play the only white character in the history of the movies who is cool enough to say “nigger� to a black man and use it- mean it- as black vernacular.� Proof Of My Own Racism (p57).

“12.8.94- On the George Karl Show, a caller asks about the progress of a rookie with the perfect name of Dontonio Wingfield (Cf. Angela Davis: “I think we can have an obsession with naming ourselves because for so much of our history we were named by someone else.�) Karl replies, “Well, it’s kind of unfortunate, because with a coach and a rookie in the NBA a lot of negativity tends to build up, and so he becomes sort of a whipping boy.� He immediately corrects this. “A whipping post. But Dontonio is coming along.� Karl’s enlightened enough to know that he shouldn’t say “whipping boy,� but not so enlightened that the phrase didn’t come, unbidden, from his mouth.� Proof Of My Own Racism (p61).

“In the NBA, as nowhere else in America, white people are utterly beholden to black people, and they’re not about to let us off that easily; it is kind of very mild payback for the last five hundred years.� The Beautiful and the Useful (p91).

“1.7.95- Driving home from work, a white female colleague in the English department picks up a black male hitch hiker in order to prove to herself that she is not racist. She tells the hitch hiker, “I picked you up to prove to myself I’m not racist.�
The hitch hiker says, “You’re a fool. I could have killed you.�
Converting our Self-Loathing to Hatred (p103).

“Payton hits a 3-pointer, and as he runs back down the court along the sideline, a fan offers him a high-five, which Payton quite pointedly refuses; then, just as pointedly, he high-fives Kemp. I ain’t your fuckin’ plaything, I feel Gary telling the fan, I ain’t your buddy, you don’t know me, don’t think you can slap my palm.� An Agony of Enthralldom (p149.)

“Apropos of the NCAA Final Four college basketball tournament, which is being held in Seattle in a few days, a white fan calls Rob Tepper (T-Man) on KJR and says about North Carolina’s Rasheed Wallace, “The boy can play ball�
T-Man is very quick to say, “Refer to him as a man. He’s a man.�
Fan: “He’s a man.�
T-Man: “He is THE man.�
Fan: “He’s THE man.�
This is all very sentimental and easy. What’s interesting is the next thing T-Man says: “He refers to you as boy.� Can you feel now what power feels like?� Can You Feel What Power Feels Like? (p163.)