Calvin’s Kindle Notes & Highlights for The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy

Whenever I ask my friend Bruce to come to my house to watch football, he always says he has to ask his girlfriend if he has any “cap room.” I suspect all adults have some version of that constraint. Bill does not. Why? Because watching sports is his job. Pause for a moment and wrap your mind around the genius of his position.

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It is hard to know which part of that fact is more awe-inspiring: that he can watch five games simultaneously or that he gets to call the room where he can watch five games simultaneously his “office.”

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The insider, inevitably, starts to play favorites. He shades his criticisms, just a little, because if he doesn’t, well, what if Kobe won’t take his calls anymore? This book is not the work of an insider. It’s the work of someone with five TVs in his “office” who has a reasoned opinion on Game 5 of the 1986 Eastern Conference semifinals because he watched Game 5 of the 1986 Eastern Conference semifinals in 1986, and then—just to make sure his memory wasn’t playing tricks on him—got the tape and rewatched it three times on some random Tuesday morning last spring. You and I cannot do that ...more

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It’s long because it needs to be long—because the goal of this book is to help us understand the connection between things like, say, Elgin Baylor and Michael Jordan, and to do that you have to understand exactly who Baylor was.

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the Celts had gained local momentum because of Havlicek and reigning MVP Dave Cowens, a fiery redhead who clicked with fans in a way Bill Russell never did. After struggling to fill the building during Russell’s astonishing run (eleven titles in thirteen years from 1957 to 1969), the Celtics were suddenly flourishing in a notoriously racist city. Was it happening because their best two players were white?

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Maybe the city would have accepted an African American sports hero in the fifties and sixties—eventually it accepted many of them—but never someone as complex and stubborn as Russell. The man was moody and sullen to reporters, distant and unfriendly to fans, shockingly outspoken about racial issues, defiant about his color and plight. Russell cared only about being a superior teammate and a proud black man, never considering himself an entertainer or an ambassador of the game. If anything, he shunned both of those roles: he wanted to play basketball, to win, to be respected as a player and ...more

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Only years later would fans appreciate a courageous sports figure who advanced the cause of African Americans more than any athlete other than Muhammad Ali. Only years later would we fully empathize with the anguish and confusion of such a transcendent player, someone who was cheered as a basketball star and discriminated against as a human being. Only years later would Russell’s wary, hardened demeanor fully make sense.

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When he stomped to midcourt to jump center with the towering Abdul-Jabbar, his nemesis and the league’s best player at the time, Cowens always looked like a welterweight preparing to trade punches with a heavyweight.

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Cowens lured Kareem away from the basket by draining 18-footers, robbing Milwaukee of its best shot blocker and rebounder.

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You didn’t do these things to Cowens; nobody valued the sanctity of the game more than he did.6 He berated the referee under the basket, didn’t like the guy’s response, screamed some more, then whirled around and spotted Newlin dribbling upcourt. Sufficiently enraged, he charged Newlin from behind at a 45-degree angle, lowered his shoulder like a football safety and sent poor Newlin sprawling into the press table at midcourt. Watching it live (and I happened to be there), it was a relatively terrifying experience, like being ten feet away in Pamplona as a pissed-off bull targets an ...more

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So yeah, Cowens was white and Russell was black. But Cowens would have been worth four bucks a game if he were purple. Same for Havlicek. Because of them, my father stumbled into a Celtics season ticket and never looked back.

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Before games, the Garden’s ushers allowed me to stand behind our basket on the edge of the court, where I’d chase down air balls and toss them back to my heroes. I can still remember standing there, chewing my nails and praying for an air ball or deflected jump shot to come bouncing toward me, just so I could grab it and toss the ball back to a Celtic. When I say this was thrilling for a little kid … I mean, you have no idea. This was like going to Disneyland forty times a year and cutting the line for every ride.

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By the time I turned six, you can guess what happened: I considered myself a member of the Boston Celtics. That spawned my racial identity crisis in the first grade (fully described in my Red Sox book) when I gave myself the Muslim name “Jabaal Abdul-Simmons.”

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the Celtics and most NBA players were black. Besides, I had more in common with them—my favorite sport was black, my favorite player (Charlie Scott) was black, my favorite comedians (Flip Wilson, Jimmie Walker, and Redd Foxx) were black, most of my favorite TV shows (Sanford and Son, The Jeffersons, Good Times, The Mod Squad) starred blacks, and I even made my mother take me to Roxbury in 1975 to see Keith Wilkes’ one and only movie, Cornbread, Earl and Me.8 It pissed me off that I was white.

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At halftime, Barry (a notorious prick) watched the tape and realized his own teammates hadn’t leaped in to save him. Fuming, he spitefully refused to shoot for most of the second half—no lie, he refused to shoot—playing hot potato anytime someone passed him the ball. And that’s how a 42–40 Suns team advanced to the Finals, upsetting the defending champs on their home floor as their best player played an elaborate game of “eff you” with his teammates.

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Each league offered what the other was lacking: a regimented, physical style highlighted by the selflessness of its players (the NBA) versus a freewheeling, unpredictable style that celebrated individual expression (the ABA).

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The ’76 Celtics were too old and slow to make it after the merger, but we didn’t realize that yet. We also didn’t realize that white guys like Nelson had a better chance of eating the shot clock, digesting it, and crapping it out than guarding the likes of Erving and Thompson. The game was changing, only nobody could see it yet.

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Game 5 started at nine o’clock to accommodate the wishes of CBS, a network that didn’t totally care about the league and had no problem tape-delaying playoff games or moving them to wacky times. Know what happens when you start that late for a crowd of loony Boston fans during a time when anyone could afford a ticket to the NBA Finals? You end up with the rowdiest, craziest, drunkest Boston crowd of all time. With four full hours to get plastered before the game and another three during the game itself, not only will the collective blood alcohol level of the crowd never be topped, neither will ...more

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Even though I slept through some of the best parts, Jabaal Abdul-Simmons became the coolest kid in school the following day—not just because I attended the most famous basketball game ever played, but because my parents allowed me to stay awake until one-thirty to see it.

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Within two years we devolved into one of the league’s most hapless teams, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for the Simmons family: not only could Dad (barely) afford a second ticket by then, but thanks to a fleeing base of paying customers, they upgraded our seat location to midcourt, right alongside the Nancy Parish Memorial Tunnel (I’ll explain later), where players, coaches, and referees entered and exited the arena.

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Every few minutes, after a good Celtics play, he’d nod at me with one of those “What it is, Tiny White Dude!” smiles on his face. And since I wasn’t over my racial identity issues yet, I spent the entire time marveling at his coat and hoping he’d legally adopt me. Didn’t happen.

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We had become just another struggling team in a struggling league, a desperate franchise making desperate moves and searching for an identity. Then, just as quickly, everything changed. Auerbach won the power struggle with John Y.,16 drafted Larry Bird as a junior eligible in 1978 and had the foresight to wait a year for Bird to graduate from Indiana State.17

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basketball because my father bought a single season ticket only after my mother vetoed his motorcycle career. After catching two titles in our first three years, a calamitous chain of events crippled the franchise and frightened off so many fans that my dad and I leapfrogged into the best possible seats in the best basketball arena in the world, and as if that weren’t enough, our seats got upgraded right before one of the five greatest players ever joined the team. This wasn’t just a lucky chain of events; this was like winning the lottery three different times, or better yet, like Justin ...more

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It was like watching a group of relatively humorless guys spend time with an inordinately funny guy; invariably the inordinately funny guy raises everyone else’s comedy IQ.19 When you watched Bird long enough, you started to see the angles he was seeing; instead of reacting to what had just happened, you reacted to the play as it was happening. There’s McHale cutting to the basket, I see him, get him the ball, there it is … Layup! Bird gave us a collective sixth sense, a more sophisticated way of appreciating the sport. It was a gift. That’s what it was.

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I grew up watching basketball played the right way. Guys looking for the open man. Guys making the extra pass. Guys giving their best and coming through in big moments. By the time Bird retired, I had earned my Ph.D. in hoops. When your favorite team lands a transcendent player in your formative years—Magic on the Lakers, MJ on the Bulls, Elway on the Broncos, Gretzky on the Oilers, or whomever—it really is like winning the lottery. Even twenty years later, I can rattle off classic Bird moments like I’m rattling off moments from my own life.

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Painfully shy with the press, noticeably unsettled by prolonged ovations, Bird carried himself like a savant of sorts, someone blessed with prodigious gifts for basketball and little else. This was a man who didn’t mind that one of his nicknames was “the Hick from French Lick.” We assumed that he was dumb, that he couldn’t express himself, that he didn’t really care about the fans, that he just wanted to be left alone. This changed near the end of Game 7 of the Eastern Finals, the final act of a remarkable comeback trilogy against Philly.

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Bird never acknowledged the crowd; this was the first hint of emotion from him. He finally threw us a bone. We went absolutely ballistic and roared through the entire time-out, drowning out the organ music and cheering ourselves hoarse when the horn signaled the players to return to the floor.

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We wanted Bird to be the next Russell, the next Orr, the next Havlicek. For the first time, it looked like he might get there.

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Everything crested during a home playoff game against the ’91 Pistons, when a struggling Bird couldn’t get anything going, then an actual bird flew out of the rafters and halted play by parking itself defiantly at midcourt. The crowd recognized the irony and immediately starting chanting, “Lar-ree! Lar-ree! Lar-ree!” For the only time in the entire series, our crippled hero came alive. He started hitting jumpers, a bunch of them, and the Celtics pulled away for a crucial victory. As we joyously filed out of the Garden, my father asked me, “Did that really just happen?” It did. I think. When ...more

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He walked away and stayed away. The Celtics never recovered. Actually, that’s an understatement. Bias had gotten the ball rolling, but when Bird retired, the Celtics passed away and became something else. Then Reggie Lewis dropped dead, and McHale retired, and the Garden got knocked down, and M. L. Carr screwed things up, and we lost the Duncan lottery, and Rick Pitino screwed things up, and Chris Wallace screwed things up, and Danny Ainge screwed things up, and somewhere during that torturous stretch the Celtics stopped being the Celtics. Three different times after Bird hung up his Converse ...more

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Shit, even Auerbach landed Bird because of luck. Five teams could have drafted him before Boston and all five passed. That’s the NBA. You need to be smart and lucky. When Lewis passed away seven summers after Bias’ tragic death, the Celtics stopped being lucky and definitely stopped being smart. That didn’t stop my father from steadfastly renewing those tickets every summer with his fingers crossed, hoping things would somehow revert to the way they were.

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As strange as this sounds, it’s more painful to live the high life as a basketball fan and lose it than to never live that high life at all. Imagine a basketball team as an airplane—if you never flew first class, you wouldn’t know what you were missing every time you crammed yourself into coach. But what if you spent a few years traveling first class, reclining your seat all the way, relishing the leg room, sipping complimentary high-end drinks, eating steak and warm chocolate chip cookies, sitting near celebrities and trophy wives and feeling like a prince? Head back to coach after that and ...more

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Even if it meant paying first-class prices for coach seats every year, my father didn’t care. He was ready to get invited to the front of the plane again. He would always be ready. The decision was made: Every spring, he would keep paying that bill. No matter what.

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spell “Havlicek”? Which begs the question: does greatness have a shelf life?

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how he coldly destroyed Drexler in the ’92 Finals, how he prevailed against the rugby tactics of Riley’s Knicks, how he stole Game 7 against the ’98 Pacers by repeatedly getting to the line, how he ended his Chicago career with the incredible layup-steal-jumper sequence in Utah—and regretting that, like nearly everyone else, I had fallen into the “let’s degrade the old guy to coronate the new guy” trap. I had always sworn never to do that.

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According to Goldman, great athletes fade from memory not because they’re surpassed by better ones, but because we forget about them or our memories are tainted by things that have nothing to do with their career (like Bill Russell being a lousy announcer or O.J. being a lousy ex-husband). Here’s the killer excerpt: “The greatest struggle an athlete undergoes is the battle for our memories. It’s gradual. It begins before you’re aware that it’s begun, and it ends with a terrible fall from grace. It really is a battle to the death.”

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As recently as 1998, we collectively agreed Jordan was the greatest player we would ever see. That didn’t stop us from quickly trying to replace him with Grant Hill (didn’t take), Kobe Bryant (didn’t take), LeBron James (taking), and Kobe again (sporadically taking). Everyone’s willingness to dump Jordan for LeBron in 2007 was genuinely perplexing. Yeah, the “48 Special” was a magnificent sporting event, but it paled in comparison with a twenty-year-old Magic jumping center in Philly in place of an injured Kareem, playing five positions, slapping up a 42–15–7 and willing the Lakers to the 1980 ...more

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Goldman believed that every era is “so arrogant [and] so dismissive,” and again he was right, although that arrogance/dismissiveness isn’t entirely intentional. We’d like to believe that our current stars are better than the guys we once watched. Why? Because the single best thing about sports is the unknown. It’s more fun to think about what could happen than what already happened.

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So it’s not that we want LeBron to be just as good as MJ; we need him to be better than MJ. We already did the MJ thing. Who wants to rent the same movie twice? We want LeBron to take us to a place we haven’t been.

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There’s a simpler reason why we’re incapable of appreciating the past.

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it’s easy to forget anything if you stop thinking about it long enough,

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But that’s the funny thing about noise: eventually it stops. So that’s what this book is about: capturing that noise, sorting through all the bullshit and figuring out which players and teams and stories should live on.

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It’s way too ambitious and I probably should have stuck to an outline, but screw it—by the end of the book, it will all make sense. I swear. Just know that I’m getting older and the depreciation of sports memories bothers me more than I ever thought it would … especially in basketball, a sport that cannot be grasped through statistics alone. I wanted to write down my memories, thoughts and opinions before I forget them. Or before I get killed by a T-shirt cannon during a Clippers game. Whatever comes first.

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After a while, we started expecting him to come through, and when he still came through, that’s when we were hooked for good. I know this was the case because I lived through his prime—whether I have developed enough credibility in your eyes as a basketball thinker is up to you36—but I’m telling you, that’s how Boston fans felt in the spring of 1987.

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of my Donaghy-level gambling problem. I needed permission from my pregnant wife, who was perpetually ornery from (a) carrying our second child during the hot weather months in California and (b) being knocked up because I pulled the goalie on her back in February.

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For the first three hours, none of the sunbathers was willing to pull a Jackie Robinson and break the topless barrier, so we decided the Wynn should hire six strippers to go topless every day at noon (just to break the ice) and have their DJ play techno songs with titles like “Take Your Tops Off,” “Come On, Nobody’s Looking,” “We’re All Friends Here,” “Unleash the Hounds” and “What Do You Have to Lose? You’re Already Divorced.” By midafternoon, as soon as everyone had a few drinks in them, the ladies started flinging their tops off like Frisbees.

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ten weeks of entertainment and comedy were jam-packed into eight hours. Things peaked around 6:00 p.m. when an attractive blonde wearing a bikini joined our table, complained to the dealer, “I haven’t had a blackjack in three days,” then told us confidently, “If I get a blackjack, I’m going topless.” The pit boss declared that she couldn’t go topless, so they negotiated for a little bit, ultimately deciding that she could flash everyone instead.

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When she finally nailed her blackjack, our side of the blackjack section erupted like Fenway after the Roberts steal.

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She followed through with her vow, departed a few minutes later, and left us spending the rest of the night wondering how I could write about that entire sequence for ESPN The Magazine without coming off like a pig. Well, you know what? These are the things that happen in Vegas. I’m not condoning them, defending them or judging them. Just understand that we don’t keep going because some bimbo might flash everyone at her blackjack table; we keep going for the twenty minutes afterward, when we’re rehashing the story and making every possible joke.

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just as I was ready to make Gus announce a few of my blackjack hands (“Here’s the double-down card … Ohhhhhhhh! it’s a ten!”), he implored me to come over and meet his buddy Isiah Thomas. Gulp. Of any sports figure that I could have possibly met at any time in my life, getting introduced to Isiah that summer would have been my number one draft pick for the Holy Shit, Is This Gonna Be Awkward draft.

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Preview — The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons