I'll never do this

I started a book yesterday, Crashing the Borders: How Basketball Won the World and Lost its Soul at Home by New York Times sports columnist Harvey Araton. The book is well-written, intelligent and everything else you'd expect of a veteran NBA reporter. That's what I don't like about it.

Old-school sports journalists like the Boston Globe's Bob Ryan and Chicago Tribune's Sam Smith seem to look at the game and wish for the golden years of Larry and Magic. Let's pause a moment to note some of the rest of the deadwood that drifted into the league back then -- Jack Sikma, Tom Boerwinkle, Larue Martin, Scott Wedman (he made an All-Star team!), Brad Sellers, Dave Corzine. Yes! Give me more of that.

And was it better before then? Not unless you yearn to watch "Chocolate Thunder" Darryl Dawkins attacking the rim in a cocaine-induced fury. Actually, that sounds pretty good to me.

Here's an excerpt of Araton's first paragraph: "If you have ever loved basketball, then you had to hate November 19, 2004. ... your senses came under assault by what you saw that night at The Palace of Auburn Hills in suburban Detroit. And the more times you watched the most frightening eruption of sustained violence ever in the American sports arena, the more you saw the replaying of a troubled young man named Ron Artest bold trom his reclining press-table position, across your television screen, and into everlasting infamy, the more angry you were and the more you hurt for the game that had brought so much joy into your life."

Uhh, no. I have loved basketball since I was about 10 years old. In college, my personal record for consecutive days playing was 92. I only stopped because of injuries. And when I watched the Pacers brawl with the Pistons fans, I felt surprised, excited, entertained -- pretty much anything but appalled. The night of the brawl, I talked to some other players on our college traveling team, other guys who had played and loved the sport since an early age. They all had the same reaction I did: "That was nuts! Play it again!"

So Araton is wrong from the beginning. Grandstanding reporters who feel the need to protect the game and dispense morality hated that moment. So did millions of fans, I'm sure. No thanks, Harvey. When I'm in the mood for morals I'll read the Bible.

There were others, probably many others like myself and my friends, avid basketball fans and players who grew up watching basketball in the 1990s and like the NBA in its present incarnation. We weren't and aren't willing to see this brawl as the end of the great game of basketball. And if I'm writing about basketball in 30 years, when the game is ruled by 8-footers from China who're afraid to dunk the ball, I will never play Nostradamus and spit doomsday prophecies for the game. I'll never be the old man wishing that every team was like my favorite team from when I was a child. I'll never try to argue that Wu ChangXi wasn't as good as Xavier McDaniel just because I used to love the X-Man.

In paragraph two of Harvey's book, he slides in some references to his hardscrabble upbringing on Staten Island in New York City. Fans of basketball non-fiction will recognize this ploy. "Hey, I'm from New York, and I grew up in a neighborhood that's kind of crappy now, so take me seriously. I knew some guys who made the NBA! I'm a real basketball lifer."

Araton slides in all the important cues -- "West Brighton Houses," the name of the housing project in which he was raised; it was a "working-class" neighborhood; he loved the game while playing and even just watching "the kids with size and skills;" a local kid made it to Columbia, and would bring future pro Jim McMillian back to Araton's "unevenly paved oasis insite one of the Island's few pockets of relative poverty."

Can't you just see Araton and his friends running around in white undershirts and Converse Chuck Taylors, drinking soda pop and shooting baskets all day long? Getting into good-natured scuffles with each other and playing pranks on the local icey vendor? What a dignified, working-class upbringing. I just don't understand why this makes a writer any more of an expert in basketball than someone else.

Almost everyone who was raised in New York and was involved in sports knew or played with somebody who made it to the NBA. Can all of us have book contracts? Mel Brooks went to Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island, same as Stephon Marbury and Sebastian Telfair. Does Mel Brooks get automatic street and basketball credibility? Do Starbury and Bassy pound him up when they see each other at alumni day? Do they offer to take his yarmulke to Jacob Jeweler and have it iced out with diamonds? My guess is no.

New York City changes really fast. My mother and I were victims of a semi-violent robbery outside my apartment when I was a child; my father used to carry a military baton to protect himself when he returned from work late at night. Now, there are more bankers, lawyers and wealthy entertainers on my block than anything else. So whenever a lifelong New Yorker starts squawking about his or her rough upbringing, take it with a grain of salt. And again, I hope I'll never use the neighborhood I grew up in as a way to nudge readers into thinking I'm a street-tough New Yorker.

Here's where I grew up. Respect me immediately and give me a book deal.

Araton mentions how he lived in Brownsville, Brooklyn until he was seven years old. There are two ways to look at this. A) He comes from the same place as playground legend Fly Williams former heavyweight champions Mike Tyson and Riddick Bowe. He's really cool and streetwise. B) White flight. If the old, Jewish/Italian/Irish immigrants of Brownsville hadn't jumped ship at the first whiff of black people, maybe it wouldn't be a segregated pit today.

I'm oversimplifying things here because it's hard not to. It's not Araton's fault his family moved. He was seven at that time, and I'm sure the family had its own reasons. White flight is too broad an explanation to understand what drives families to move. Likewise, having once lived in Brownsville or any other well-known rough neighborhood does not automatically make someone an authority on basketball or New York. Mr. Araton is authoritative in both areas, but it's because he's been reporting on them for almost 30 years.

The Grinch who stole basketball.

Interestingly, Araton's in-depth analysis of the Pistons-Pacers brawl considers a lot of racial ambiguities that lesser columnists never bothered to mention last year. Araton writes insightfully about the behavioral double standards NBA athletes face as employees of a league that relies on a black, urban image for marketing purposes but needs well-heeled gentlemen on its benches to appease the corporate types who can still afford tickets to live games. But it's almost too late. The title of the book states that basketball has lost its soul, and the first paragraph tells us it's been hijacked by a band of tattooed thugs led by Ron Artest.

I disagree. It's a great game, as it has been and always will be, whether dominated by lanky white guys wearing short shorts, muscular black guys wearing long shorts, Bunyan-esque Chinese guys or the Monstars from Space Jam. The soul of the game comes from trying to shoot the ball into the basket and trying to stop another player from doing it, not from whoever's playing it.