Bethlehem Shoals

I wrote a "Staff Pick" for this on The Millions. Please read it, as I think it speaks to what I loved about the book. I won't repeat that review here, because I think it's tacky, but also because I have some more thoughts on the book, thoughts I couldn't really fit into that mini-essay.1. I am not a huge NBA fan, surprisingly enough. I am an enormous and dedicated college basketball fan (So Cuse!), but I have never been able to translate that love into a love for the pro game. I enjoy watching the playoffs, when I get the chance, and if there's a game on and I've got nothing else to do, I'll watch a bit. But the pro game has always seemed a bit too perfect. The shooters are too good, the best players, too dominant. Every possession seems to play out the same way. The point guard brings the ball down court, they run a play to get the ball to the team's best player, and he breaks his man down off the dribble. Rebound, rinse, and repeat. It's a little dull, isn't it? In the end, every game comes down to "If my best player is better than your best player, we're going to win." Look at how LeBron James carried his weak Cleveland team to the brink of a championship. This book actually went a long way to explaining why I feel this way. The theory they put forward is that, as the players get better and better, more able to do whatever they please, the rewards of taking certain risks -- making the daring pass, running on a fast break -- are greatly reduced. If each shot is more and more makeable as each season goes by, the game becomes about minimizing mistakes in order to make sure you take as many shots as possible. This might lead to a more perfect game, but it doesn't make the game more exciting or more watchable. In fact, it basically sucks what I love about basketball -- the joy, the improvisation, the audacity -- out of the game. Not entirely, mind you, but that's how it feels. It's odd, in a way, because I enjoy the cold rationality of baseball -- if my team is better at not making outs, I will beat you. Not making outs isn't sexy, but it's the key to victory in baseball. In basketball, I just want joy. If I were to build my ideal basketball team, it would be a team that looked to run every time it got the ball. It would have a daring point guard who probably takes too many shots but who will drop your jaw once a game, and will make the big shot when it's there, and it would have at least one guy capable of flight. We'd play the kind of rangy and frustrating zone that Syracuse plays, and we'd press from time to time. Lately that sounds more like a college team to me than a pro one.2. One of my favorite parts of the book discusses the mid-to-late 1970s NBA. The league was getting "too black" for most of America, but FreeDarko is able to look at this period and see the beauty of it. There were so many great players from that era that have been nearly forgotten by history: Nate Archibald, George Gervin, Moses Malone, etc. One thing I hadn't considered was what separated players like this from the stars of the 80s, 90s, and 00s. FreeDarko claims it's multi-dimensionality. To become a champion in the post-1970s NBA, you had to be able to do a bunch of different things. You couldn't just be a scorer or a rebounder or a great defender. You had to do it all.3. Bill James has pointed out that baseball has two divergent paths or veins of superstars. There are the popular stars, like Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Wilie Mays, and Ken Griffey Jr., and then there are the unpopular superstars, such as Ty Cobb, Ted Williams, and Barry Bonds. There are a lot of reasons for this -- Ty Cobb was a racist, Ted Williams was an ornery cuss, and Barry Bonds was arrogant. But as Bill James suggests, there isn't really a reason any of these players weren't popular in their day. They were cast that way by the media, to a large degree, and then played that role for the rest of their careers. Much has been made of LeBron James making the switch from popular, white-hat player to unpopular, black-hat player. While I would agree that his popularity has plummeted this year, I'm not sure it's as simple as this. Does a similar history of popular and unpopular players exist in the NBA? I don't really think that it does. Sure, Wilt Chamberlain was frequently cast as the unpopular villain in his battles with Bill Russell's good-guy Celtics, but the league's other great rivalries lack this dichotomy. Bird and Magic were both loved. Michael Jordan might have been a villain in reality, but his branding created a more popular version of himself. Perhaps the Shaq-Kobe rivalry could be counted as a popular vs. unpopular rivalry, but hasn't that faded, as Kobe Bryant's jerseys remain the bestselling in the world. Why is it that basketball lacks this history of villainy? I think it's two things: Since the 70s, so many of the best players in the NBA have been black that the game lacks the racial dynamic that baseball had for much of its history. The game is not only played by African Americans, it is loved by African Americans. Can one consider Allen Iverson a villain? Maybe to a certain part of America, but not to the public at large, or at least, not to the African American portion of it. In fact, as this book points out, he was arguably the most popular player in the league between Jordan and LeBron. The other big difference between the NBA and MLB is the dominance of the sneaker companies, particularly Nike. One of the great chapters in this book deals with the manufacturing of a personality for Penny Hardaway. Nike paired him with a Chris Rock-voiced puppet and made him a star, despite the fact that nobody knew a damn thing about him. I would argue that Nike also made Jordan into a classic hero when he easily could've become a great villain. Jordan was an arrogant, ruthless, cut-throat player with a history of gambling, and Nike turned him into a squeaky-clean superhero. Remarkable.I thoroughly recommend this book to anybody with an interest in the history of the game, but really, anyone with even a passing knowledge of basketball would enjoy it, as the writing is stellar, the illustrations gorgeous, and the depth of thought outstanding.… (altro)

My standard for this kind of book--a book that looks fairly intensely at stats and other aspects of the game to reveal and re-evaluate--is Bill James's Historical Baseball Abstracts.

The FreeDarko collective comes from the world of blogging rather than the world of numbers crunching and historical research. So, in comparison to our Jamesian benchmark, FreeDarko's books are a less insightful and revelatory, but lighter, funnier and far better illustrated.

For the contemporary basketball fan, these would be not at all bad as gifts, but I can't imagine they'd be books to take down from the shelf and revisit.

A couple of small complaints: Coming from what I always thought was a Detroit-centered blog, FreeDarko seems surprisingly to be a bit biased toward the Western Conference. Perhaps the free-flowing style of play is more in keeping with their individualistic/stylistic manifesto with which they begin their Macropehomenal Alamanac.

Also--and here my biases are revealed--there's so little in here about the Sixers. Almost nothing about their fine teams of the 70s. Nothing about the championship team of 83. Very little of interest about the rag-tag team centered on Charles Barkley in 1989, ditto the team built around Allen Iverson in 2001.

I know there were some good stories missed there (Derek Smith, for instance), which leads me to suspect that FreeDarko generally speaking may be a bit *too* dedicated to what's on the surface--style and image. After all we all know these things already, and there's not all that much joy in having richly illustrated books to remind us of what we already know. Or is there?… (altro)

My standard for this kind of book--a book that looks fairly intensely at stats and other aspects of the game to reveal and re-evaluate--is Bill James's Historical Baseball Abstracts.

The FreeDarko collective comes from the world of blogging rather than the world of numbers crunching and historical research. So, in comparison to our Jamesian benchmark, FreeDarko's books are less insightful and revelatory, but lighter, funnier and far better illustrated.

For the contemporary basketball fan, these would be not at all bad as gifts, but I can't imagine they'd be books to take down from the shelf and revisit.

A couple of small complaints: Coming from what I always thought was a Detroit-centered blog, FreeDarko seems surprisingly to be a bit biased toward the Western Conference. Perhaps the free-flowing style of play is more in keeping with their individualistic/stylistic manifesto with which they begin their Macropehomenal Alamanac.

Also--and here my biases are revealed--there's so little in here about the Sixers. Almost nothing about their fine teams of the 70s. Nothing about the championship team of 83. Very little of interest about the rag-tag team centered on Charles Barkley in 1989, ditto the team built around Allen Iverson in 2001.

I know there were some good stories missed there (Derek Smith, for instance), which leads me to suspect that FreeDarko generally speaking may be a bit *too* dedicated to what's on the surface--style and image. After all, we all know these things already, and there's not all that much joy in having richly illustrated books to remind us of what we already know. Or is there?… (altro)