Book 3, The Book of Basketball

With Brandon Jennings and Andrew Bogut getting me all excited about basketball again this year I was able to kill this 736 page brick of a book with relative ease. Simmons reminded me what I loved about watching the NBA in the 90s and sent me scrambling to Youtube to check out classic bits of Larry Bird and Magic and Isiah. The anecdotes of players smoking and drinking before and after games in the 50s and 60s kept the sections on players I was ignorant of interesting, although it did sometimes feel like reading a book report.

Maybe 736 pages is too much Simmons to take in a short period of time, but his pop culture references and jokes got repetitive and tired real quick (especially for someone who reads his columns regularly where the same analogies and jokes are repeated). Every other player reminds him of a porn star or a scene in Boogie Nights or about a female celebrity who is a slut or a drug-addict or married a crazy dude. Most of my complaints are echoed here, but I gotta point out an analogy that made me scratch my head both times it came up -

If playing point guard is like mastering Grand Theft Auto, then the final mission should include the following things: your handle is so superior that opponents would never even think of pressuring you full-court; you can dribble to any spot on the floor at any time of the game, and if you need to do it, you can always get to the rim and/or draw a foul if your team needs a hoop; no teammate would dare bring it upcourt if you’re on the floor; every teammate who grabs a defensive rebound immediately looks for you; and defenders play four feet off you at all times because they don’t want to have their ankles broken, which means you’re starting the offense between the foul line and the top of the key on every possession.

and

June 2008.I hate comparing anyone to Jordan, but what Kobe has shown over the past four months has been Jordanesque—not just his ability to raise his game in big moments (which he always had), but the way he picks his spots, keeps teammates involved and then arbitrarily takes over games and puts them away. If being an NBA superstar was like playing Grand Theft Auto, then that would be the final mission, right?

I think I beat GTA3 when it first came out, but I cannot connect the dots between the gameplay of GTA and being an NBA point guard or NBA superstar. I can't imagine Simmons not being able to come up with a better analogy than this, and I don't know why he liked it so much he repeated it twice. Just thinking it over for a minute I think I could come up with something more fitting using a Simmons template. Like, "Being an NBA superstar is like being a great director like PT Anderson or Quentin Tarantino. Fading superstars want to play with you (Reynolds, Travolta), you know who your best scorer is and keep feeding them the ball (Wahlberg, Jackson), you make normally one-note or untalented players seem better by giving them the ball where they can succeed (Rhames, Heather Graham), and you can always step up your own game to put the game away (the scene with the gimp, the drug dealer scene with Alfred Molina). You could even extend the analogy to bad point guards/directors - you'll never be considered the best and even be ripped apart if you're too flashy and distracting from the game/film (Iverson, Michael Bay). You'll gain the respect of people in the know if you stay out of the way and don't draw attention to yourself, but you'll need the aid of a great team/cast/script to win anything (Stockton(?), name an indie film(?))." I don't know, it could use work. But I still think that GTA comparison sucks.

Simmons is also guilty of one of my biggest pet peeves - the sportswriter who says he hates numbers and stats while using numbers and stats to form the basis of his arguments. Ahhh, whatever. This paragraph also really bugged me -

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? 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.

I don't consider myself all that politically correct, but, christ, after 600 pages of stripper jokes, porno jokes, fat girl jokes, ugly girl jokes, and hooker jokes (not to mention the accompanying theories behind fat girls and ugly girls) and I started to feel slightly embarrassed I was reading the book. But then Simmons finishes it off with an epilogue about Bill Walton that was really great, reminded me that I like Simmons and I finished off the book feeling okay.

But, oh yeah, he focuses an entire chapter on the hypothetical of what team would we want to field in a winner-takes-all game against Earth-destroying Martians and doesn't bring up Space Jam once! That's inexcusable, because then the answer answers itself, Earth's team would consist of Michael Jordan, Bill Murray, and the Looney Tunes, and that's a winning team.