The Book of Basketball (55 page)

You can imagine my delight when Auerbach plucked an end-of-the-line
Pistol off waivers during Bird’s rookie season.
We picked up the Pistol for nothing?
I hadn’t seen him in a while, though. Woefully gaunt and out of shape, limping on a bum knee and wearing a godawful perm that made him look like Arnold Horshack, Pistol struggled mightily to blend in with his first good NBA team. The Garden crowd adopted him anyway. Every time he jumped off the bench to enter a game, we roared. Every time he sank a jumper, we went bonkers. When he shared the court with Bird, Cowens, and Archibald—four of my top seventy—there was always a sense that something special could happen.
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But like an abused dog from the pound, there was too much damage and too many bad habits picked up over the years. After Bill Fitch buried him in the ’80 playoffs, Pistol retired the following fall and just missed playing for the ’81 champs. I remember being particularly crushed by the whole thing, like I’d been given an expensive TV for free and it broke down after two months. I never knew that there was substantial evidence that he was a drunk and a loon, one of the first athletes pushed too far by an overbearing father,
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someone who believed in UFOs and couldn’t find peace until he retired and found Christianity in 1982. When he dropped dead at age forty, it was, fittingly, while playing a casual game of pickup hoops.

Even those who loved watching him have trouble putting his career in context. At dinner in Boston two years ago, my father was perplexed about the existence of two Maravich books until we spent the next few minutes remembering him and inadvertently making their case. Dad recalled that there was usually one nationally televised college game a week in the 1960s and “you tuned in every weekend praying LSU was on.” When my wife asked which current player reminded us of Maravich, Dad’s answer was simply, “There will
never
be another Maravich.” We tried but couldn’t
express the experience of watching someone play on a completely different plane from everyone else. He made impossible shots look easy. He saw passing angles his teammates couldn’t even imagine. He was the most entertaining player alive, and the most tortured one as well. You marveled at Pete Maravich, but you worried about him, too.

Stick Pistol in the modern era and he’d become the most polarizing figure in sports, someone who combined T.O.’s insanity, A-Rod’s devotion to statistics and Nash’s flair for delighting the crowds. Skip Bayless would blow a blood vessel on
Cold Pizza
(now called
ESPN First Take)
screaming about Pistol’s ball hogging. The
SportsCenter
guys would create cute catchphrases for his no-looks. Bloggers would chronicle his bizarre comments and ghastly hairdos. Fantasy owners would revere him as if he were LaDainian Tomlinson or Johan Santana. Nike would launch a line of Pistol shoes. He’d be the subject of countless homemade YouTube videos and have a trophy case filled with ESPYs. Yup, it’s safe to say the Pistol was ahead of his time in every respect. And when Hollywood makes a big-budget movie about him someday, I hope they stop at one.

67. EARL MONROE

Resume: 13 years, 7 quality, 4 All-Stars … ’68 Rookie of the Year … top 5 (’69) … 3-year peak: 24–4–5 … 2nd-best player on 1 runner-up (’71 Bullets), started for 1 champ (’73 Knicks) and 1 runner-up (’72 Knicks)

You could make a case for bumping Pearl down to a spot in the mid-eighties. He only made one All-NBA team and four All-Star teams. He got torched by Goodrich in the ’72 Finals and averaged just a 16–3–3 over 16 games in the Playoffs for the ’73 Knicks (his only ring). His knees and hips started going on him within his first few NBA years, transforming him from a gifted all-around player to a scorer and that’s it. But can you blame Pearl that his career started late? After graduating from high school in South Philly and failing to get scholarship offers from any major colleges, Monroe worked as a shipping clerk for a year before making a “comeback” at Winston-Salem College, a tiny black college in North Carolina, spending the next four years ravaging his knees but delighting fans in nontelevised college games and
soon-to-be-legendary summer playground games in Philly and New York. Much like Maravich, the Pearl wasted two potential All-Star years in college because NBA teams were only allowed to draft four-year seniors. By the time he joined the Bullets, the Pearl was twenty-three years old and carrying God knows how much asphalt mileage on his knees.
⁷⁶

Doesn’t matter. We’re invoking the Walton Corollary here: even if a guy peaked for just two or three years as a truly great player, that’s more appealing than someone who never peaked at all. You know someone was great when he had two playground nicknames (Black Jesus and Magic)
and
a mainstream nickname (Earl the Pearl); moved Woody Allen to write a famous magazine profile about hanging out with him; invented a specific signature move (the spin move);
⁷⁷
became immortalized in
He Got Game
even though the movie was released twenty-five years after his prime; and owned such an unconventional offensive game based on spins and herky-jerky hesitation moves that nobody has replicated it since.
⁷⁸
Ask any over-forty-five NBA junkie about Pearl and they practically have a John-Madden-raving-about-Brett-Favre-level orgasm about him, as well as the famous Pearl/Clyde duels that forced the Knicks to say, “Screw it, we can’t stop this guy, let’s trade for him.” So maybe his career wasn’t much different statistically from those of Hudson, Jo Jo, Jeff Malone, Rolando Blackmon, Calvin Murphy or Randy Smith. But none of those guys had their improvisational skills compared to a jazz musician’s—the most frequent analogy used to describe Pearl’s style—or inspired stories like the one David Halberstam captured in
Breaks
through the eyes of Maurice Lucas.

One day Earl Monroe, then at the peak of his fame as the star of the Baltimore Bullets (and before Julius Erving had replaced him, a special kind of hero to black fans and players since he could do what
no one else
could do), showed up. The word had been out for several days that Monroe would play and the crowd was much bigger than usual. When Monroe missed the start of play the disappointment among the other players and the crowd was tangible. Then, ten minutes into the game, a huge beautiful car, half the length of the street, had shown up—it was a Rolls, Luke had known instinctively—and out had come Earl Monroe. He was wearing the most ragged shorts imaginable, terrible ratty sneakers and an absolutely beautiful Panama hat. That, Luke knew immediately, was true style, the hat and the shorts and the Rolls. The crowd had begun to shout
Magic, Magic, Magic
(his playground nickname, different than his white media nickname which, given the nature of sportswriters who like things to rhyme, was the Pearl). Monroe had put on a show that day, dancing, whirling, faking, spinning, orchestrating his moves as he wished, never any move repeated twice, as if to repeat was somehow a betrayal of his people. Luke had watched him, taking his eyes off Monroe only long enough to watch the crowd watching him. The Black Jesus, he had thought, that’s what he is—the Black Jesus.

(That’s right, Daddy. Earl Monroe was pretty good.)

66. ADRIAN DANTLEY

Resume: 15 years, 12 quality, six All-Stars … 1977 Rookie of the Year … top 10 (’81, ’84) … leader: scoring (2x), minutes (1x) … career: made FT (6th) … 30-plus PPG (4x) … 2-year Playoffs peak: 28–8–3 (21 G) … career: 54% FG (20th), 6,382 FT made (6th) … traded five times … 20K Point Club

65. ALEX ENGLISH

Resume: 15 years, 9 quality, 8 All-Stars … top 10 (’82, ’83, ’84) … 3-year peak: 29–5–4 … 2-year Playoffs peak: 29–8–3 (21 G) … leader:
scoring (1x), FG (3x) … 3 teams before prime
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… won just 2 Playoffs in his prime … eight 2K-point seasons … 25K Point Club

There was common ground here beyond the whole “scoring forwards with androgynous first names” thing. Dantley and English entered the league in 1976, bounced around early in their careers, peaked on Western contenders that could never get over the hump, gave up almost as many points as they scored and can’t be compared to any current players. Dantley was a six-foot-three low-post guy (number of guys fitting that description today: zero) who reached the free throw line so frequently, Bob Ryan decided after one particularly goofy Dantley game that any weird box score line should just be called a “Dantley.”
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Few were more efficient offensively, as evidenced by Dantley retiring with the highest field goal percentage (54 percent) of any noncenter. And English was a lanky forward who never seemed to get hot—he’d score 7–8 points per quarter and end up around 30 every game, only you barely noticed him except for the fact that he never seemed to miss. We’ll probably see twenty more Englishes before we see another Dantley, only because Dantley’s physical, unorthodox style isn’t something taught at basketball camps and AAU scrimmages, where every quirk and idiosyncracy get banged out of every player by the time he turns fifteen.

What were the deciding factors for English getting the nod? Dantley was a pain in the bum, wearing out his welcome with five teams (all of which accepted 30 to 80 cents on the dollar to get rid of him).
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Everyone loved English. That’s the biggest reason. If you’re looking for a dumb but karmic reason, neither guy played for a champion, but English filmed a
hauntingly bad movie called
Amazing Grace and Chuck
in which his character “starred” for the ’86 Celtics.
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For one “game” scene in that movie, English donned a Boston uniform and played 20 minutes with Bird, Parish, McHale and DJ in an exhibition game at the Garden. This actually happened! That’s right, five of the top sixty-four guys on this list played in a legally sanctioned NBA contest together, and not just that, but English’s cameo happened with one of the greatest teams ever. Top that one, Adrian Dantley. My favorite part of this story: the NBA allowing an All-Star player to play significant minutes for another team—kind of a big deal, when you think about it—just to accommodate one of the twenty worst sports movies ever made. Didn’t anyone in Stern’s office read the script? Or the scripts for
Celtic Pride, Eddie
, and
Like Mike
, for that matter? I always pictured Stern seeing
Chuck
, then immediately firing everyone involved in the English decision.

Anyway, there are two types of great players: guys we’ll see again, and guys we’ll never see again. Any rational fan would agree that Jordan was the greatest basketball player ever. (Crap, I just spoiled the ending to Chapter 10. Oh, well.) But we’ll see another Jordan again. Why do I say this with such confidence?
Because we’ve seen variations of Jordan already.
Jordan was an evolutionary version of Thompson (his hero, by the way), and Kobe and Wade have re-created Jordan’s game reasonably well. We’ll see a few more superathletic, hypercompetitive shooting guards who are built like wide receivers, jump like kangaroos and possess the innate ability to control their bodies in midair. We won’t see another Jordan, but we will see someone every ten years who brings many of his best qualities to the table. Okay, so when will we see another Dantley? Really, a six-foot-three post-up player
⁸³
with a hundred different upfakes and herky-jerky moves who creates wiggle room in the paint with his abnormally gigantic ass? He was the J-Lo of NBA players. I’m seeing that again in my lifetime? There might be another Jordan, but there will never, ever, ever, ever,
ever be
another Dantley.
In his honor, here’s an All-Star team of players from the post-Russell era whose like will never be seen again, for genetic or physical reasons.

Starters:
Kareem, Bird, Barkley, Magic, Gervin

Sixth man:
McHale

Bench:
Dantley, Maravich, Iverson/DJ,
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Manute Bol, Spud Webb, Paul

Mokeski Injured List: Darko Milicic, Kurt Nimphius, Ken Bannister

Since the first ten players cracked the Pyramid and earned love in this section, we’ll concentrate on the last six guys and why they made it.

Manute.
Let’s just say there haven’t been too many seven-foot-six, 200-pound Sudanese centers from the University of Bridgeport with tribal scars on their foreheads. You’ll think I’ve been drinking again, but the facts back me up: Manute happened to be an underrated backup, getting decent minutes for five different playoff teams, averaging 5 blocks as a rookie, cracking 300 blocks three times and contributing significantly (20 minutes a game, 5.8 rebounds, 4.3 blocks) for the TMC Warriors that made the second round of the ’89 Playoffs. More importantly, of all the players I watched walk by me in the Boston Garden tunnel, only four stood out: Michael Jordan (because he was so overwhelmingly famous), David Robinson (we’ll get to why later), Larry Bird (ditto) and Manute. He was breathtaking in person, and not just because of his surreal height and skin so dark that it made him seem purple.
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When Manute emerged from the tunnel, we’d stop talking and gawk with our mouths agape, like everyone watching the aliens emerge from the
Close Encounters
UFO. It was incredible. I would have bought a ticket just to watch Manute Bol stroll by me.