Internet Rabbit Holes: More Steph Curry and Other Gym Rats

I was just listening to the sports podcast The Distraction, which mentioned Tommy Craggs, a writer I like and haven’t bumped into in a long while. Which led me to Craggs’s personal website, which led me to a piece he wrote in 2009 about my hero Steph Curry – a lovely little piece that nicely captures what Steph was at that moment. I don’t remember seeing this at the time it was written.

I wrote recently how remarkable and unlikely it was that Steph Curry fell through the cracks of the recruiting system to wind up at Davidson College in the first place. In 2009, the rules and norms of getting into the NCAA Tournament allowed Steph, a celebrated and charismatic player on a 26-win team, to fall through the cracks and not make it to March Madness. This was bad business all around, and proved to be an intolerable situation. It led Davidson to change its athletic conference. It led the NCAA to adopt its current jerry-rigged 68-team format. 

"Basketball hoop" by Steve A Johnson is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Tommy Craggs aptly describes Steph Curry's special sauce on the cusp of his 21st birthday, blending the humility of an underdog with the knowing swagger of an NBA's player's son. I remembered that Lebron James made a pilgrimage to see Steph in person and size him up. I forgot about the Loyola game, when Loyola double-teamed Steph for 94 feet and he responded by standing in the corner and letting his teammates play 4 on 3. 

What Craggs doesn’t say is that we’ll be seeing Steph Curry in the NBA next year, because at that moment, nobody was sure that we would. (A Deadspin headline at the time: "Is This The End of Stephen Curry?") I for one was relieved when Steph got drafted in the first round in '09 – I was paying close attention, and I wasn’t sure that was going to happen until close to draft day.

Steph is a magician with the ball – a great pure shooter with a great handle. This is a type of player that often doesn’t achieve superstar stature in the NBA. Craggs names several Steph Curry comps. Pete Maravich was the best of the type, and Pete was an All-Star and a scoring champion, but played mostly on losing teams and never sniffed an NBA Finals.

The story of Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, born Chris Jackson, saddens me. His peers speak of Abdul-Rauf with awe, but like Maravich, his teams made only a small dent in the playoffs. His impact was marginal enough that he was vulnerable to getting blackballed for his religion and his politics. Colin Kaepernick could be described in similar terms.

Craggs’s anecdote about Rick Mount at the basketball camp reminded me: At my one basketball camp experience we attended a talk and ball-handling exhibition by Austin Lehmann. He was a former college player, too small for the pros, but for years he scratched out a living putting on clinics like this for kids, often accompanied by his older brother George. Austin Lehmann became an elementary school gym teacher who made the news for sinking (and documenting) 1 million free throws.  

There is a place in basketball for the gym rat, the solitary crank - for kids, be they stubborn or lonely or obsessive, who just like to practice their shooting. 

Steph As Comedian

 

With Steph Curry sidelined due to a hamstring injury, the Golden State Warriors bombed out of the NBA playoffs the other day. Curry being 37 years old, his chances to grab another brass ring may have run out. Patrick Redford took this occasion to publish a lovely piece at Defector about Steph.

Redford points us to a highlight video of Steph dissecting the Houston Rockets in the Warriors’ first-round series. In his signature fashion, Curry mixes impossibly long 3-point jumpers with tantalizing floaters that are enabled by the threat of the long 3’s.

That is rude, ingenious, and above all funny. An important thing about Steph Curry: He is foremost a comedian. His possessions have the structure of a joke, with setups, misdirections, and punchlines. 

This is the beautiful observation I want to bookmark: Steph-as-comedian.

I can add, for anyone who needs reminding, that Steph entered the NBA from Davidson College. Come to think of it, Steph playing his college ball at Davidson is a comical twist in his story. Davidson was not his Plan A, to say the least. It was an absurd collective blunder by all the major college hoops powers to allow Steph to wind up in the Southern Conference hinterlands. Somehow Plan B worked.

It is difficult to describe how Davidson people feel at having Steph Curry come into our lives and being entitled to root for him. We never dreamed our school would produce a world-famous sports star. And then to have him be such a fine person and loyal advocate for the school—it’s too much. We love Steph, and, amazingly, he loves us back, for giving him a longshot chance. Davidson’s love for Steph has the quality of unbidden laughter, of being surprised by joy.

Redford goes on:

As he explained in Court of Gold, Netflix's Olympic basketball documentary, the sense of freedom [Curry] plays with is only possible because he's made his peace with losing. He seems like someone who loves winning more than he hates losing, the opposite of how Michael Jordan and his sour peers ordered things and probably different from how his eternal foil, LeBron James, relates to losing.

Last year I wrote about Jerry West that he was more characterized by the hatred of losing than the love of winning. His playing career resembled a grim crusade, piling wounds upon indignities in pursuit of validation. West finally earned that moment of glory and seeming redemption, but did it truly redeem all the sour years?

Steph is different. He’s been doubted so many times during his career as being too small, too injury-prone, not a true point guard, and more. People seem to have forgotten that he was The Underdog for so long, and the essence of being The Underdog is that the possibility if not likelihood of losing is ever-present. Steph Curry is sublimely conscious of the unlikeliness of his own story--even now, when so many others have forgotten it and treat the Warriors like a presumptive Finals contender. Unburdened by outside expectations (although they are there), Steph is free to accept joy when and where he finds it. It’s all gravy.

 Photo by Keith Allison via Flicker and Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA 4.0

Internet Rabbit Holes: Grudging Respect Edition

Chet Lemon died the other day; he was a very good major league outfielder during my youth and young adulthood, and was the center fielder on the 1984 world champion Detroit Tigers team. I re-read what Bill James said about Lemon in his New Historical Baseball Abstract: a player with some valuable qualities, notably defense and the ability to get on base, along with some flaws. Chet was good enough to hold down a starting job in the American League for 14+ years. This makes him the 48th best center fielder of all time in Bill James's book. 

An aside: A lot gets said and written about multi-championship sports dynasties, the Jordan-era Bulls or the Brady-era Patriots. Some of my favorite sports stories are of teams that hang around on the fringes of greatness for a number of years, and are only able to get it together for one season, break through and win a title. The '84 Tigers are a great example. They were a juggernaut for that one year; I think they started the season 35-5, and their winning the World Series became a default assumption which they made good on. That team had two (borderline) Hall of Fame players, Alan Trammell and Jack Morris. Around these two perennial stars were several other tenured members who were good but flawed: Lance Parrish, Willie Hernandez, Chet Lemon, Kirk Gibson. In 1984, everything went right; the strengths were accented, the flaws were obscured. The team cohered, everyone stayed healthy and sharp, and they steamrolled all comers. That is a more inspiring and relatable story than anything involving the Yankees. Here, incidentally, is a 1985 LA Times column about all the things that went wrong on the field for the Tigers that after-year. We learn that Chet Lemon inspired Lou Whitaker to join the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Anyway, the rabbit hole I followed started with the news about Chet Lemon, then my turning to Bill James to read about him. I then Googled "bill james new historical baseball abstract," I guess in hopes that the full text of it is available online. Answer: no, not for free. The links that popped up included some reviews of the Abstract, including one by Dan McLaughlin, aka The Baseball Crank, with whom I was vaguely familiar: he is a conservative pundit of the type I normally avoid. 

So I investigated Mr. Crank a bit. I was reminded that nerds-writing-about-baseball is a niche populated by quite a few conservative pundits: some decent writers like George Will, some hacks like Rich Lowry and Michael Brendan Dougherty. A vaguely disturbing realization for this nerd-writing-about-baseball. Yet Dan McLaughlin writes clearly and sensibly on aspects of baseball that are right up my alley. I feel I need to bookmark this piece about baseball's winningest pitchers, counting games won in the minor leagues and Negro leagues as well as the AL and NL. I also ran across McLaughlin's recent comment on the newly-elected Pope, an even-handed plea to conservatives, Catholic and otherwise, to give Leo XIV a chance.

Why the conservative-baseball axis? Off the top: Baseball history is steeped in traditionalism and nostalgia and American exceptionalism. It is also a protected space for talking about race. In my brief survey of his work I find McLaughlin making admiring references to Jackie Robinson and Moses Fleetwood Walker, Satchel Paige and Don Newcombe. To say these men were worthy players who faced injustice are broadly uncontroversial positions, yet they are an implied rebuke to the anti-woke philistinism of the Trumpers. Moreover, baseball seems to be an approved lighter-side to break up the relentless culture war fighting and ideological boundary-policing that right-wing punditry requires. If anyone ever needed an afternoon off in the bleachers, it's guys like NRO writers.

Superb Owl

 

It’s been 16 years – time for a Super Bowl post. I don’t watch much football in recent years, but I generally succumb to the NFL conference championships and the Super Bowl.

I also make exceptions for getting together with my father to watch the West Virginia Mountaineers, despite the travesty of WVU joining the Big 12 Conference, which turned out to be one of the early signposts along college sports’ highway to hell.

In 2019 I watched Jalen Hurts, as quarterback at Oklahoma, comprehensively take apart the West Virginia defense. He did it with his legs and he did it with his arm. I gather a big goal of Hurts’s 5^th year season at Oklahoma was to demonstrate that he had the arm to be an NFL quarterback. Goal accomplished. The memory of Hurts’s dominance in that game stayed with me, and I’ve halfway kept an eye on him since. 

Pro football is different than college football, and it doesn’t shock me when a great college football player turns out not to be the right fit for the NFL. But I really enjoy watching a quarterback use his legs. I hate the notion that every team needs a big strong pocket passer – a view that is less universal, but far from dead; a Carson Wentz still gets more love from Mel Kiper and more chances to win a starting job than a Jalen Hurts. Also, it raises my hackles every time a young black QB comes along and has a ton of nay-sayers, including ones who urge a position change, usually to receiver or safety. Hey, the 1960s called and wants its take back.

These things bias me in favor of Lamar Jackson and Jalen Hurts (and now “too skinny” Jayden Daniels. The pundits seemed to be trying to exile him to Canada). I hope each of them gets to lift the Lombardi Trophy before they are done. People sneer a bit at Hurts because he doesn’t throw the artistic deep ball that some other QBs throw. He’s a football player, he wins with his legs and his toughness and his improvisational gifts. He may have trouble making All-Pro rosters or winning MVPs because his individual stats may not dazzle. A QB like that can steal a Super Bowl now and then.

The better NFL teams and, more definitely, the great QBs of my childhood, Stabler and Staubach and Griese and Bradshaw, had distinguishable personalities. The younger crop coming along now have a more pleasing variety than the Tom Brady generation. I am ready to move on from the Mannings, from Roethlisberger, from Brady, from Aaron Rodgers.

So I can’t lose in tonight’s matchup, because Patrick Mahomes is unique and wonderful in his own right. I’ve admired Mahomes, still just age 29, for many of the same reasons I admire Hurts. He was somewhat unsung coming out of college, and he was never a mechanically perfect automaton in the pocket. I love his improvisations, with his legs and with unorthodox throws, backhanded and left-handed and falling down and what have you. I also admire Andy Reid, who’s claimed his due respect later in his career. For the longest time he was viewed as a second-tier head coach, fatally flawed in his game management skills – good enough to get you to the playoffs, maybe even to the Super Bowl, but never good enough to win it.

But I think I’d like to see Hurts take the trophy from Mahomes, and for Nick Sirianni to answer his detractors the way Andy Reid has.

RIP Pete Rose

Pete Rose died yesterday. 

I wrote about Rose in 2004, and that post is a good statement of my "history" with him. He had just published his autobiography titled My Prison Without Bars. I wrote this after I picked the book up, at a library I think, and then put it down in disgust after a chapter or two. I should have known from the book title how self-important and self-serving it would be. 

HBO put out a Pete Rose documentary earlier this year, and I watched most of it. Some gleanings: 

Rose was a really good schoolboy football player, but he was not the college type, to put it lightly, so for him, baseball was where the money was. 

The city of Cincinnati loved him, he was a true child of that place. 

Many of his teammates revere him today, notably Mike Schmidt, a Dayton, OH native who'd grown up loving Pete, and whose playing career took a step forward after Rose joined Schmidt in Philadelphia. 

Some old teammates, like Johnny Bench, do not revere him. 

Watching the film, I became desensitized, almost forgiving, of the gambling charges. Pete refers to them constantly, often jokingly, and after all, pro sports is more and more in bed with online gambling. The film takes a sour turn after a woman makes news with statements that Rose had a sexual relationship with her when she was underage. Rose does not refute the statements, but rationalizes his behavior, said he didn't know her age, she wasn't harmed, and on like that. Pretty much like with the gambling charges.

Up to the last few years, Rose had a lawyer meeting with Major League Baseball, trying to get his eligibility restored. Which is not only a matter of reputation, but of income earning potential. It says a lot, though, about the size of his achievements and his personality that the case was always open for debate. He never exhausted his appeals.

Pete made a tidy sum of money traveling to card shows and signing autographs. Was it as sumptuous a lifestyle as he could have lived if he'd made the Hall of Fame and was not persona non grata with official baseball? No. Then again, Pete Rose was not the retiring, dignified-old-age type. He hustled.

Jerry West: Not A Plumber

Born in 1938, Jerry West grew up in Chelyan, West Virginia, in a dysfunctional family within a hard-bitten coal mining community. Young Jerry developed a knack and a liking for basketball. He received encouragement and good instruction and began climbing a ladder. West's high school team were state champions. Many colleges recruited him, and he elected to stay in-state and attend West Virginia University. He became the biggest star before or since in a then-rising WVU program. In West's junior year the Mountaineers were NCAA runners-up, probably the biggest sports achievement in the school's or state's history. West won a gold medal with USA Basketball at the 1960 Olympic Games, then went on to a long and celebrated career in the NBA. He didn't completely leave West Virginia behind--he kept a summer home there and did a lot behind the scenes to support WVU--but that bouncing ball led him around the world and to levels of success that boy in Chelyan couldn't have imagined. 

Being born and raised in West Virginia has never been the easiest thing, but there were rays of hope in the post-WW2 years. The U.S. economy was riding high, the coal industry was fueling it, and the labor movement gave coal miners more power and agency, a better claim to middle-class status and the American dream, than at any other time. Jerry West represents that post-war moment. (Even though he left the state to pursue success; many others did too.) My father, born in 1939 and raised in somewhat similar circumstances, who attended WVU one year behind Jerry, utterly revered him. My whole family, and the whole state as far as I can tell, felt much the same; I never remember hearing anyone speak a word against Jerry West. 

Drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers in 1960, West entered the NBA at the same time as his great rival Oscar Robertson. The two of them changed the sport dramatically. No one playing the guard position had ever scored like them, either in sheer number of points or in efficiency. West and Robertson made great advances in the mid-range game, in the ways for a player to create his own shot within the flow of play.

In his playing career West was frustrated for many years, coming close to a league championship but repeatedly falling just short. He's more associated with losing in the Finals six times than with finally winning in 1972. That's unfortunate, but it fits West's personality--he dreaded failure even more than he hungered for success. The 1972 Lakers team was one of the very greatest ever. Assembled through trades, it was a brilliant job of blending star players and their egos. 

Along the way West became not only a brilliant practitioner of the NBA game but a brilliant student and observer of it, including the psychology, the care and feeding of egos. After retiring as a player, West took a short unhappy turn as the Lakers' head coach before finding a niche as a front-office executive, where he would engineer great trades and win many more titles. All told, he would spend 40 years associated with the Lakers.

In the end, a rift grew between West and the Laker organization. One thing about Jerry West: he never forgot a defeat or a slight. The last couple of years of his life were marked by his protests against media portrayals of himself or public comments about his generation of ballplayers. (On his podcast a while back, J.J. Redick dismissed early NBA players, of West's era and before, as "cabdrivers and plumbers." Some of those old-timers did have day jobs, of course, in the offseason, by financial necessity, in the long collective effort of building the NBA into the juggernaut that now pays J.J. Redick so handsomely. Here is West venting his fury on Redick as well as a piece of gum .) 

A digression: In my family's lore there is an episode in which my father introduced my mother to Jerry West, and I've spent a little time trying to nail it down. I assumed this happened on WVU campus while Mom and Dad were dating, but instead it was 10 years into their marriage. It was at an NBA game in 1973, the Lakers visiting the Baltimore Bullets. Apparently my eight-year-old self was there, but I have no memory of it, certainly not of meeting Jerry West. All Mom remembers is being star-struck; it sounds like an occasion for Dad to flex a little bit, to impress his girl by rubbing shoulders with a star. 

Jerry West died on June 12. Twelve days later, amid some controversy, J.J. Redick was named the head coach of the Lakers. 

Wikipedia Rabbit Holes: Psychedelic Spooks Edition

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