You Herd Me!: I'll Say It If Nobody Else Will (11 page)

Robin Williams is in the club within the club, one of those rare entertainers whose audacious talent is viewed reverentially even among other greats. He possesses a brand of comedic skill that can’t be crafted, the kind that makes every jaw in the room drop. In his stand-up acts, he walks a tightrope, always seeming to be seconds away from an ugly fall before he lands on a punch line with precision and balance. Watching his career, especially as a solo act, can be as exhilarating for the fan as it must be exhausting for the man who entered our consciousness as Mork.

However, when working with others, Williams doesn’t always feel so special.

He and Billy Crystal were making the obligatory movie-hype tour one year when I caught them on a few late-night shows. (The movie they were promoting was one I’d jam my fingers into a hot toaster to avoid seeing, but that’s beside the point.) No matter the show, Crystal was suffocated verbally by Williams’s relentless sweat-and-spew comedy barrage. It was uncomfortable to watch.

There’s no dispute that Williams’s career has been remarkable. There’s also no dispute that there are times—such as his promo tour with Crystal—when he becomes a victim of his own talent. He overwhelms a room, making it impossible for even a renowned talent to play the sidekick role. There’s no sharing the stage, there’s only the realization that you need to sit back and allow the hairiest comedian of our generation to erupt. And hope against hope that he lands in a good place.

Peyton Manning always feels the same way to me.

Manning is such an intense, jaw-dropping talent/football
genius/personality/force that sometimes I wonder, is it possible he hinders his success without knowing it?

From college to the pros, coaches have allowed Manning a level of freedom and power they would never otherwise relinquish. Given that, it’s inevitable that any team he quarterbacks becomes an extension of what he—one man, Peyton Manning—needs it to be. And what those teams need to be are passing-centric, which creates finesse football teams that are overly reliant on his game-day brilliance. The Colts used his hurry-up offense almost exclusively, and it was Manning directing all of the traffic. He earned the title “Sheriff”—certainly not because he willingly and easily handed over control.

This formula works in the regular season, when Manning-led teams overwhelm less-talented opponents. But his playoff record? Nine wins, eleven losses. Seven times his team lost its playoff opener. Seven one and dones? Seriously? This is Peyton Freaking Manning we’re talking about. He’s often lost at home, as a favorite, and if you remove the four-game undefeated run to his only Super Bowl win, he’s 5-11 as a starting quarterback in the playoffs.

Nobody would argue that he’s not a first-ballot Hall of Famer. Of course he is.

Nobody would argue that he wins games others couldn’t. Of course he does.

But transcendent talents come with baggage. They aren’t unqualified successes. They aren’t above criticism. It’s not just Manning; Kobe Bryant can take a team to unimagined heights, but he takes so many shots and dominates the ball so thoroughly he can limit the effectiveness of his teammates. Even elite teammates.

Consider this: in Manning’s senior year at Tennessee, the Volunteers were an average SEC defense, allowing 22.7 points per game. Even in their biggest win, they slipped past Auburn in the
SEC title game in a shootout, 30-29. The following year, with a much less talented quarterback (Tee Martin), Tennessee not only won the national championship but were in the discussion as the best defensive team in the country, allowing just 14.5 points per game. That team relied on defense as well as a multithreat running game. They were bruising and physical. How could a team be forced to outscore opponents one year and be the nation’s most physical team the next? The most dramatic change was Manning’s departure to the NFL, and a question needs to be asked: Did Phil Fulmer become so obsessed with Manning’s talent that he allowed it to alter the physical nature that Fulmer’s past and future teams possessed?

Consider this: despite having Tony Dungy, one of the NFL’s leading defensive minds, as a head coach for a decade, not one of the Colts’ defenses were ever considered physically elite. From Manning’s rookie year (1998) to the final year he played for the Colts (2010), Indianapolis had a defense ranked in the top ten in yards allowed just twice. In seven of Manning’s Indy years, the Colts’ defense resided in the bottom half of the NFL. It’s even harder to fathom when you consider then-Colts president Bill Polian is one of the league’s shrewdest talent evaluators. Did he have an eye for offensive talent only? How did a six-time league executive of the year not find a way to land more defensive studs?

Toughness and physicality are not built on Sundays. Instead, they’re created during the week, during practice. How can a team possibly develop a physical culture when week-to-week preparation is dominated by mastering Manning’s “Rain Man” aerial wizardry?

Similarly, how can you create a movie around Robin Williams without allowing him to ad lib? Isn’t the organic evolution of his comedic Zen the reason you cast him in the first place?

Transcendent talent comes with baggage.
Give, take. Push, pull
. You make concessions when you cast Peyton Manning as your quarterback. He’s going to eat a lot of scenery.

Of the top ten quarterbacks of the past forty years, none but Manning was saddled with perennially mediocre defenses. Marino wasn’t. Aikman wasn’t. Elway wasn’t. Brady wasn’t. Bradshaw wasn’t. Montana wasn’t. Manning was—with one of the best defensive minds as a head coach and an equally respected general manager. Was he just the unluckiest great quarterback ever?

Does Peyton bear some responsibility? When your personality and talent is so all-consuming, there has to be some linkage, right?

Bill Polian came on my radio show in 2012, and I cornered him with my theory. I asked him whether Manning’s talent, maybe superior to any quarterback in history, actually worked to the detriment of his team’s defenses.

He smiled at me and said, “Right church, wrong pew.”

Translation: You’re close, but not quite, kid.

Once the Colts landed Manning, Polian told me, they knew they had to build the team a certain way. Manning would not only lead the team to many, many wins, but over the course of those games his team would have some serious leads. Logical, right? The Colts would routinely be ahead in games, and that meant opposing teams would be forced to throw the ball to catch up.

As a result, Polian had a specific emphasis: pass rushers, and linebackers who could run and cover tight ends or backs in the flat.

In essence, Manning’s presence requires his teams to be built a certain way. The defense can’t be overly reliant on stopping the run, and the offense can’t be overly reliant on running the ball.

In the NFL, you can’t be all things to all people. You have
to constantly juggle a tight salary cap and a limited roster that is under the constant strain of nonstop injuries. Polian had to make choices. With Manning calling the shots, the choices were simple: pass—and stop the pass—first.

These are the same kinds of choices studios, directors, and writers have to make. Who works well with a particular movie star? How do the bit players make the star better without getting in his way? How much leeway will the megatalent have to ad lib and improvise?

Fans—and probably a vast majority of the media—have been conditioned to believe that unique, transcendent talent is a magic elixir. But talent also creates ancillary problems that ancillary people—studio heads, directors, coaches, general managers—have to solve in order to accommodate the talent.

When XM/Sirius radio was created, it snagged radio superstar Howard Stern. It was a decision that created a trickle-down effect. Now that we’ve got Howard, should we build our entire brand around him? The danger is obvious: if the superstar leaves, the identity walks out the door with him. It’s a thin and perilous line, one walked by corporations and teams alike.

In the NFL, rosters are smaller than they are in college. Offensive and defensive players are forced to practice together. Isn’t it reasonable to assume that a quarterback as gifted as Manning—running an offense predicated almost entirely on those gifts—would be given uncommon freedom to improvise? Wouldn’t some level of control have to be surrendered to allow uncommon talent to flourish? You would be wasting him otherwise, in much the same way you’d be wasting Robin Williams by forcing him to adhere to someone else’s script.

It’s the paradox of greatness, and it creates the greatest compliment and the rarest criticism:

There’s no question racism exists in sports. We can talk around it and write around it. We can call it something else and pretend it doesn’t exist. Or, we can take a different approach: call it exactly what it is and deal with it.

The NBA occupies a unique place in the American sports landscape. Its players don’t wear masks or caps or cover their arms with sleeves. Whether they’re playing or sitting on the bench, their proximity to the fans is far closer than any other sport.

This means the crowd—the mostly white, mostly corporate crowd—gets an up-close look at these large, muscular black athletes. They see their faces and their tats and their sweat. Up close. And I think it makes many in the mostly white, mostly corporate crowd uncomfortable.

Race has always been an undercurrent in the NBA, far more than in any other sport. David Stern instituted a dress code in 2005 and it immediately became a racial issue. If Bud Selig or Roger Goodell or the commissioner of the MLS instituted a dress code, race never would have been mentioned. In the NBA, when Stern decided his mostly corporate crowd might be turned off by ’do rags and sunglasses inside and at night, race was front and center.

The NFL is 67 percent African-American; the NBA, 77 percent. It might not seem like a huge difference, until you realize the vast majority of stars in the NBA are black while the biggest names in the NFL, for the most part, are quarterbacks. And quarterbacks are historically white.

But the most illuminating laboratory for the issue of race in the NBA takes us to Indianapolis, where a curious and ongoing experiment seems to be taking place: the Pacers can’t draw fans,
despite having an elite team that plays in an elite arena in a city whose sleepiness is so well known it’s nicknamed Naptown.

It’s one of the great mysteries in sports. A team that took Miami to seven games in the Eastern Conference Finals playing the NBA’s best defense and leading the league in rebounding in the self-proclaimed sacred temple of hard-nosed basketball ranked twenty-fifth in attendance. They were outdrawn by the Timberwolves, Cavaliers, and Suns. Seriously, the
Suns
?

When the ownership group that successfully fought to keep the Kings in Sacramento were in the final stages of negotiations, it agreed to decline the NBA’s revenue-sharing money. Commonly known as the Ailing Team Fund, the revenue sharing is the NBA’s welfare fund, allowing small-money, small-market teams to benefit from the huge profits accumulated by their big-money, big-market brethren.

The decision of the Kings’ owners was followed by a truly astounding revelation. An economist at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the NBA, reported that just two teams in the league benefited from the Ailing Team Fund more than the Kings.

One of those teams was the Memphis Grizzlies.

The other was the Indiana Pacers.

On the surface, it seems outrageous. A perennial playoff team in a two-team pro market in the mythical capital of basketball can’t draw flies. In fact, just for fun I checked on Stubhub in the middle of the 2012–13 season for tickets to a Pacers home game against the Clippers. On the day of the game, I discovered I could buy a ticket to the game between two of the best teams in the league for $2.95. That’s less than the cost of most espresso drinks.

Here’s my take: the Pacers are still paying the price for the Malice in the Palace, an incident that took place in 2004 in Detroit.
Not Indianapolis—Detroit. That night lingers in Indianapolis like a bad smell, even after nearly a decade and when the Pacers had a roster full of enigmatic players such as Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson.

It doesn’t matter that the current version of the Pacers bears no resemblance to that one. It doesn’t matter that the brawl happened nine years ago or that it was
a Pistons home game
. It doesn’t matter that Ron Artest is not only long gone but has a whole new name. Three of them, to be exact.

Let’s call this a case of residual racism. Not necessarily overt racism, but racism that drifted through the franchise like a virus in the arena’s circulation system. Many people swore off the NBA and the Pacers after the Malice in the Palace. We can see the lingering effects to this day, in the poor attendance and surprisingly bad business fortunes of one of the most entertaining, successful franchises in the NBA.