Looking for an angry fix

I'm sure many of our three readers are well familiar with The Basketball Jones blog. I'm not so sure how many folks know about the amazing song by Cheech & Chong, though. Pardon the indulgence, but in sixth or seventh grade, I bought Cheech & Chong's Greatest Hit - a collection of skits and songs with meaning I was only beginning to comprehend.* On that wonderful tape was the tune "Basketball Jones." You only need hear it once and every damn time you're jonesing for anything at all, be it 3 am pizza, a cheeseburger during the work day, or the velvety smooth caress of a cold beer, the song will pop into your head loudly and proudly.



The song was released in 1974 along with the short film. In 1974, the Celtics beat the Bucks (back when the Bucks were in the Western Conference). The following year, Rick Barry's Golden State Warriors** swept Wes Unseld's Washington Bullets in the NBA Finals. Regardless, and I know at least one guy will like this, check out the amazing lineup for the song:
Cheech Marin - Tyrone Shoelaces (voice)
Darlene Love - Cheerleader (voice) - Love had a number 1 hit in 1962.
Michelle Phillips - Cheerleader (voice) - uh, you might know her from the Mamas & the Papas.
Ronnie Spector - Cheerleader (voice) - kind of a big deal.
George Harrison - lead guitar - Yes. That George Harrison. Did this just blow your mind?
Klaus Voormann - bass - producer of the song "Da Da Da" from the iconic Volkswagen commercial.
Jim Karstein (often misspelled as Carstein) - drums - played a big show with a dude named Eric Clapton.
Jim Keltner - percussion - you've heard this guy even if you've never heard of him.
Carole King - electric piano - I'm not a fan, but almost every musician I know is.
Nicky Hopkins - piano - post-Zeppelin.
Tom Scott - saxophone - L.A. Express.
Billy Preston - organ - 5th Beatle. No big deal.

Given that this was 1974, this team looks a lot like either the Mavs or the Celtics with a lot of great players a little past their primes. Good luck with the Jones.

* - let's ignore the fact that I was 11 or 12 years old and listening frequently to this album on the way to or from school in my parents' car.
** - Rick Barry, aka the Miami Greyhound, really deserves his own post. I'll get to work on that.
*** - Until tonight, I'd never heard of Earl Foreman. If you've read the absolutely amazing "The Breaks of the Game" by David Halberstam, you know about Kermit Washington and a bit about Swen Nater as buddies in San Diego. They almost played together for the Virginia Squires thanks to Foreman, and thanks to Foreman they didn't.

"An unmistakable whiff of the plantation"

NYT, not able to come up with its own stories, writes about the piece historian Taylor Branch did for the Atlantic, The Shame of College Sports.  Here's the fighting words part which pissed people off:

“We should all recognize that the rules that forbid the athletes from being paid are unfounded and don’t have any basis and are an embarrassment and should be phased out,” Branch said. “They don’t have any force. I think the colleges should be free to give athletes less than a full scholarship, no scholarship and more than a scholarship. And the athletes should be free to bargain.”

Branch wrote that the N.C.A.A. was a “classic cartel” that has never had any real power and that the terms “amateurism” and “student-athlete” were “cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes.”

He also wrote that there “is an unmistakable whiff of the plantation” in the revenue-generating sports of major-college football and men’s basketball. He added, “College sports, as overseen by the N.C.A.A., is a system imposed by well-meaning paternalists and rationalized with hoary sentiments about caring for the well-being of the colonized.”

The NBA Lockout

"It's, uh, a very complicated negotiating process..." - NBAPA President Derek Fisher, demonstrating one small part of why no one cares that the NBA season is all but cancelled.

News today is that the top NBA players, most on the 2008 Olympic Dream team, will be paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to over a million dollars each to participate in a two-week, international exhibition game tour. There are really four takeaways from this:

1. Top NBA players are probably the most comfy with this lockout, more so even than David Stern and the owners, since they still have a lot of ways to make bank; no one is paying for tours of the role-players and bench guys. There are 450 members of the NBAPA, and I count 14-17 of them on the list of the Chosen Few.
2. There may be more demand abroad than at home for the NBA right now. At home, we at least have the start of the NCAA men's and women's basketball seasons to sate our taste for hoops.
3. The top players are hurting the NBAPA's negotiating position by making fans think that all NBA players are greedy bastards and not suffering at all from the lockout. They might not be--more below on that--but that's not the point. The point is that NBAPA President Derek Fisher has no control over messaging, and public sympathy is wearing thin.
4. I really, really have a hard time caring and following the lockout news.

With the NFL lockout but a distant, almost-forgotten bad dream, and the new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between the NFL and NFL Players Association guaranteeing football through 2021, and with that whole "end of the U.S. economy" thing out of the way (until Thanksgiving, at least), basic cable and bloggers can turn their focus to the next example of intractable assholery, the NBA Lockout. But it's taken me nearly two months to write this post, because I just. can't. care. (It's not just me; Beau has been trying to write a post for over a month now, as well.)


Yes, there is STILL an NBA Lockout, 111 days old and looking uglier than ever. There's no hope in sight, with David Stern having already cancelled the first two weeks of the season, and the NBA deciding that the best way to deal with the Players Association's lawsuit alleging unfair labor practices is... their own lawsuit alleging unfair labor practices!


Unlike NFL Players, NBA Players really are (mostly) rich. You might remember that I kept beating the dead horse to get the word out that NFL players actually make an equivalent lifetime average salary of $89,000/year, but in practice probably less than that, not to mention their much-higher-than-average medical costs. Not so for for NBA players.

• Average NBA player salary: $5.8 million
• Median NBA player salary: $3.1 million
• Average NBA career length: 4.8 years
• Equiv. 30-year career avg. salary: $496,000/year

It is pretty well-known that NBA players, as a group, are the best paid in professional sports, in the world. Even considering how short the average career is, they are still earning the equivalent of the top 2% of American income earners. This is for a variety of reasons, including the fact that there are many fewer players per team.

So, on average, it's not quite fair to call them The 1%, but they're pretty damn close. Given everything that's going on in the country and the world, that makes it pretty hard to care about a lost 2011-2012 season.

I'd rather spend my time thinking about how the Niners are 5-1. Seriously, 5-1, on track to a possible first-round bye?!? I can hardly sleep.

LBJ gets dunked on by Taiwanese kid

via Angry No further comment needed.

"Sight Of Matt Millen On TV Simply Too Much For Nation’s Unemployed To Handle"

Must read sign-of-the-times from America's Finest News Source:

In May 2009, a month in which the economy shed 345,00 jobs, ESPN announced it would be hiring [former Detriot Lions CEO Matt] Millen as a football analyst.

"I can't believe this guy got an interview, let alone got hired," said Bainridge, WA textile designer Cynthia Anderson, whose fabrics were considered among the field's best before the collapse of the domestic apparel industry in 2010. "What motivation do I have to go out there and apply for work while this dipshit is on national television?"

When approached for details, ESPN initially refused to comment on its hiring practices or reasons for employing Millen, who was a catastrophic failure at every level of football that did not involve tackling and is perhaps the man most synonymous with football-related ignorance in living memory. Sources at the network also refused to comment on the wisdom of showing the flagrantly employed Millen during broadcasts watched by many of the nation's jobless.

By the way, how nuts is it that both the Lions and the Niners are 5-1 and considered two of the best teams in the nation? Pretty nuts. Like, ESPN-hiring-Matt-Millen nuts.

Yanking Hank

In a statement shorter than a pay-by-the-word roommate ad, ESPN officially parted ways with Hank Williams, Jr. today in response to nonsensical political comments made by the performer on Fox & Friends Monday morning. I think the real hero here is the Huffington Post for finding a fabulous photo to complement this announcement.

ESPN pulled the Hank Williams, Jr. song from their Monday Night Football intro this week due to the comments, prompting Williams to make an apology nearly as nonsensical as his original comment comparing a golf game between Barack Obama and John Boehner to Adolf Hitler playing golf with the current Israeli Prime Minister who had not been born, nor was Israel in existence at the time Hitler would have been hitting the links.

"I have always been very passionate about Politics and Sports and this time it got the Best or Worst of me. The thought of the Leaders of both Parties Jukin and High Fiven on a Golf course, while so many Families are Struggling to get by simply made me Boil over and make a Dumb statement and I am very Sorry if it Offended anyone. I would like to Thank all my supporters. This was Not written by some Publicist."

If HWJ has a publicist, one has to assume that they insisted upon that last sentence for clarification. I think it's pretty obvious it was not written by a publicist since clearly it was written by an 8th grader. Although to be fair, those two things may not be mutually exclusive in the south.

It is not my intention to defend Bocephus, but the big question is: Really?!? If ESPN had not pulled the song Monday night, would anyone have even made the connection between the performer and cable sports network? Would there have been a public outcry about this? I don't think so. The comments made on the Fox News Network were too bizarre to be considered incendiary. And let's consider the source. Are the comments more offensive than some of his song lyrics?

"If the south woulda won we woulda had it made.

I'd make my supreme court down in Texas and we wouldn't have no killers getting off free.

If they were proven guilty then they would swing quickly,

instead of writin' books and smilin' on T.V."

[-from If the South Would Have Won]

I can't help but wonder if ESPN was just tired of the song that they inherited when they took over Monday Night Football and took this opportunity to finally get rid of it for good. Like an employee who gets on your nerves and you just wait for him to finally screw up badly enough for you to fire him. In the end, I don't know that there was widespread outrage about the comments, and I don't think that there will be much outrage that the song is finally retired. But let's not be self-righteous about it and just admit that the song is just a little played out.

You know who I wish would go off and offend someone and get pulled off the air? That fucking transformer robot on Fox Football. Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly need to book that robot post haste and get him on the record with some objectional remarks because if any NFL icon has grown tiresome and needs a final nail in it's coffin, it is that damn robot.

NBA Lockout Continues

There is only one thing I look forward to if this NBA season is partially canceled: amazing commercials.



That, or trying to learn why Euroball has a trapezoidal paint.