Category Archives: Scottie Pippen

Kentucky Wildcats, Larry Bird, LeBron James, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, NBA, Rick Pitino, Scottie Pippen, Walter McCarty

The "It" Factor and LeBron James

“They are who we want to be, but can’t be because they can do things, or at least have the ability to do things, we couldn’t. We idolize them, though we shouldn’t, because it’s what we want.”
This was a statement made by a friend at the conclusion of a nearly four hour conversation around sports, athletes, our reality, their reality and what it all means. Some alcohol may have been involved.
It all centered around LeBron James and his play, not just in the NBA Finals, but the nonsensical idea of debating a 26-year-old’s legacy when he is not even halfway through his career.
My stance is and remains simple: I’ve accepted James for who he is. He is a hybrid version of Scottie Pippen and Magic Johnson, two of the greatest basketball players I have ever seen. Noticed I said two of the greatest, not the greatest. James is not in the same league or category as Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant. And not just because of the rings. It is because he is a completely different kind of player.
My friend’s stance is and remains just as simple: As a former athlete, like myself, he can never understand why James has all the physical tools, but none of the mental makeup of the all time greats. To him – and even a James defender like me – we cannot understand how he has shied away from the leadership, the hunger and desire required to be in the realm of Jordan, Bird, Magic, Kobe and Bill Russell.
“We had that desire and 10 percent of the talent,” my friend says, voice raised and fists clutched. “I can’t root for a guy like that – it’s wrong against every notion of what sports are supposed to be about.”
And then he dropped the quote on me that led this blog.
Is that why we watch sports? Move beyond the entertainment and escape from our everyday lives, and ask yourself why you watch sports. We have a vested interest in teams and players we know nothing about. We loathe them and love them at the same time. We bemoan their salaries and then turn around and buy their jerseys.
For me, I do it because I am a history guy. I majored in it in college and love the stories. That’s really all history is, somebody’s story or interpretation of what happened. Their reality becomes ours.
So for someone like me, sports are a big part of my life so that one day I can tell people, we were there when “it” happened. I do not often recall games from 10 years ago, but I can tell you who won and the interactions I had with the people in the room. I know where I was for the 2004 American League Championship Series, when the Boston Red Sox became the first team in baseball history to come back from a three game hole and win a seven game series.
I can tell you where I was when the Indiana Pacers and Detroit Pistons had their brawl. I can tell you about being in Yankee Stadium, as a Red Sox fan, with my dad, a Yankee fan, on September 11, 2008 – when the emotion of the seventh anniversary of 9/11 and the eighth-to-last game ever to be played in the “House That Ruth Built” had grown men in the Brox bleachers in uncontrollable, sobbing tears.
Basically, whatever “it” is, it was great and you should have been there.
But do we really want to be the people we watch? Do we wish we had their talents and their reality?
The only way I can explain it is this: our reverence fades and we try to replace it, but never can. I have a personal example with this.
In 1996, the University of Kentucky won the NCAA men’s basketball championship. I watched the game with my family as a high school sophomore on Spring Break in Sanibel Island, Florida.
The team was loaded with NBA talent: Tony Delk hit seven threes in the game, Walter McCarty was an athletic freak who ran, dunked, slashed and defended. Antoine Walker was too big a star to be in college. Jeff Sheppard was a pogo stick with deadly range. Ron Mercer was a sensational freshman destined to led the team the following year. Not to be listed as footnotes: Derek Anderson, Nazr Mohammed, Wayne Turner and coach Rick Pitino.
They were called “The Untouchables” because they were so good, no one could hang with them. Nine players ended up in the NBA from that team.
Two months after they won the title, I found myself in a Lexington dorm room at Rick Pitino’s basketball camp. One of my good friends was a huge Kentucky fan and had talked me into going with him for a couple of years. It was always enjoyable and you picked up some good drills, plus, every now and then, some of the players would be around and you could watch them play pickup ball in the evenings after dinner.
That year was different. We’d be watching the players of the current reigning National Champions. That week was different, too. Every player was there – and they were acting as camp instructors and coaches.
As luck would have it, I ended up on Walter McCarty’s team.
The week was a blur. McCarty was on cloud nine after winning the title and, as a senior, he was headed to the NBA Draft, so he was in a great mood and fun loving. The seven of us chosen to play on his team felt like his buddies, members of a special posse for the man they called “Ice”.
We had a pregame chant (we played twice a day in between drills and stations and McCarty was with us at least 12 hours a day):
McCarty: “Who you with?”
Us “”Ice!”
McCarty: “Who you with?”
Us: “ICE!”
McCarty: “What time is it?”
Us: “Game time!”
McCarty: “What time is it?”
Us: “GAME TIME!”
It’s been 15 years and I still have that etched in my brain. McCarty laid down a nickname for me – “Flyin’ Brian” – for the way I hustled and flew all over the court. He nicknamed everyone on the team. We had pizza and video game parties in his room several times and he’d point at us during the player scrimmages when we did something. We’d all yell out “Ice!!!” in unison.
We were hooked. It was surreal. At 16, I spent a week hanging out with a future NBA player who was riding a wave of good reviews following the NCAA Tournament. In two weeks, he’d be picked 19th overall in the first round by the New York Knicks.
Throughout the week, I felt terrible for my friend. He was the Kentucky fan, but not as lucky with his assigned coach. Each night, I’d relay to him in graphic detail the events of the day, from what shoes McCarty had on to how funny his jokes were. It was a simultaneous feeling of guilt and joy. I could not contain the joy of having hung out with McCarty all day, but telling him made me feel like he was dying a little on the inside.
I left that camp the biggest Walter McCarty fan on the planet. For his first year in the NBA, I followed his box score every day, hoping to see how well he did. It was personal. I had shared experiences with him and we were buds.
Except we really were not. I suppose it’s the same feeling someone gets from a fantasy camp, those guys that spend $50,000 to go and play with Michael Jordan at his camp for a day. You want to share that floor, that moment, with them.
Over the years, I lost track of McCarty’s career and certainly didn’t follow him as closely as I did as an impressionable teenager. And like many fans, you follow a player you like and then you move on – always looking for the next one, the next superstar, the next thrilling moment, the next time you’ll be sharing real time and hard reality with them.
And so it is with LeBron. He’s dealing with an entire generation of media and fans that grew up with Jordan, Magic and Bird, Pippen and Kobe. We’ve seen greatness and we want it again. We just want it to be better than it was before, we want LeBron to be better than anything we’ve ever seen, mainly just so we can say we saw it and we were there.
But it can’t be better, because nothing can ever be replicated. Take my week hanging out with Walter McCarty. I will absolutely not have another experience with an athlete as cool as that. Too many mitigating factors at play: my age, my peak interest in basketball, McCarty’s rise to mid-level celebrity, Kentucky on the heels of a title, Pitino the hottest coach in basketball, possibly playing some of my best ball and growing into my own as a shooter that summer and the hype of “The Untouchables.”
It was unexpected and could not be compared. Jordan wasn’t expected to win six rings. At 28, when we won his first one, we just hoped he’d win a couple and be in the conversation. James is 26. Every game his legacy is dissected, every game our opinion of him moves.
And yes, some of it is deserved. When you preen and dance and take the mantle of King or Chosen One and join up with two of the top 10 players in the league, you’re going to be despised. That’s a whole other discussion, frankly.
Just for now, we have to stop doing a disservice by comparing James to Jordan and the other greats. Not for James’ sake – but for our own. Because no matter how good or how bad, he’s never going to be good enough for us.
Remember, we can’t make them be what we want as people or athletes. And even if we could, we wouldn’t really want it that way because it wouldn’t feel real. But it does not stop us from wanting that of athletes and of sports. 

We still want to be there when it happens.
Whatever “it” is.
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Dwayne Wade, Eric Spoelstra, LeBron James, Miami Heat, Phil Jackson, Scottie Pippen

The Heat’s Dis-Factor

Discombobulated. Disjointed. Disgusting.
Those are just a few of the words that were thrown around last night by NBA pundits and analysts after the LeBron James, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, the Miami Heat’s “Big Three,” lost their opener against the Boston Celtics, 88-80, on Tuesday night.
And anytime you’re “dis-“ anything, it’s not good. In fact, with all the dis-ing of the Heat, I have expected the old “Oregon Trail” game to pop up and alert us of someone succumbing to dysentery on the wagon trail.
Let’s not overreact here. It was one game. The trio played a grand total of three minutes together in preseason. As Heat head coach Eric Spoelstra said, it’s going to take time to work out the kinks.
“In practice, it looked a lot different than this,” Spoelstra said. “There is going to be a process with this. There’s a lot of expectations and a lot of pressure out there, but we have our own timetable, and we knew this wasn’t going to be easy.”
Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it.
James noted that it was like they were trying to be too unselfish, which was a concern last July when “The Decision” was announced – who’s going to defer, who’s the alpha dog, what are their roles?  For one night, there was no alpha dog, just an ugly display of three guys who used to be “The Man” on their respective teams trying to figure out their spots, find their rhythm and when they should attack or defer.
Before we write it off as a massive failure, as some are trying to do, let’s give it time. For example, James did take over the game for a stretch in the third quarter with both Paul Pierce (who was hurt momentarily, as he always is in a nationally televised game) and Wade out. He ended with 31 points. During that time, it was obvious – at least to me – that he was playing the Scottie Pippen role perfectly.
If that came off as an backhanded compliment, well, it was.
Pippen used to do that perfectly. Defer to Jordan, create for Jordan, himself and others, then when Jordan was resting, take over for stretches. That’s James true calling now. Play the point-forward, create, slash, post-up. In fact, he’s better, talent-wise, in that role than Pippen. Essentially, however, that’s what James is going to have to be to make it work in Miami.
People forget how good Pippen was. During the year Jordan was out in 1993-94, Pippen was an MVP candidate that led the Bulls to a 30-5 record at the All-Star break. He averaged 22 points, 9 rebounds, 6 assists and 3 steals per game. He was the All-Star MVP and though everyone remembers him that season for the freak-out during the Eastern Conference semifinals, when Pippen refused to play when Phil Jackson drew up a play for Toni Kukoc for the game winner, Pippen was basically what LeBron James was in Cleveland.
(Side note: Jackson doesn’t get enough blame for that issue. Pippen waited for years to be “The Man” and all that came with it, including plays for game winners in the playoffs draw up for him. Jackson slapped him in the face with the Kukoc play. Did Pippen overreact? Absolutely. Did Kukoc hit the shot, making Pippen look enough more foolish? Of course. But Jackson’s gotten a pass on the way he handled the situation for way too long.)
So we get it. It’s a work in progress. It will take time. As Wade said post-game, “Sorry if everyone thought we were going 82-0. It wasn’t going to happen.” His sarcasm aside, Wade is right.
Then why are people so…annoyed?
Perhaps it’s because we expected more from James. We are all witnesses, right? He’s the Chosen One. The King. And he chose to play with the best instead of beat the best. James is entitled to do what he wants, listen to whomever he wants and play wherever he wants. It’s his life, not ours.
Yet when you take on the role of Chosen One and tell people you’ve spoiled them with your play, you’re going to get backlash. When you host a special called “The Decision” and spurn Cleveland for the beaches and bright lights of Miami, you’re making those people recall all the hurt and pain of losing big games and championship and years of futility. To make matters worse, it was a stone’s throw from your hometown of Akron.
Is it partly our fault? Fine, we’ll take some of the blame for it. We want athletes to act a certain way and do certain things and they don’t, so we get mad and turn on them. We can say that we would have done differently, but maybe that’s just because none of us have the option, so it’s easy to say how professional and classy we would have been.
I can tell you right now, without hesitation, if three or four of my friends and I played in the NBA and had a chance to join the same team, I would do it in a second. I play in a Y-League each winter with five good friends, who all played college ball, and we never had the opportunity to play real games together, due to the high schools or colleges we went to or our ages. It’s small potatoes compared to this, but we’ve won by 30 or more every time we step on the court. It’s really not fair, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun.
Though the talent difference and situation are not relatable, the feeling completely is. When you break it down like that, I’m not only a witness, but probably a hypocrite. We want to see Magic vs. Bird, Jordan vs. Magic, etc. We don’t want James and Wade against Kobe. It just doesn’t seem like a real slugfest, superstar vs. superstar, so therefore we feel cheated. And that makes us not like James very much right now.
That’s silly, I admit. The man can do what he wants. And our selfish reasons for wanting true greatness and the next Jordan are a part of this animosity and venom we have for James.
But there’s another part, the part where James isn’t helping himself. The latest Nike ad, for example. Is it cool? Oh yeah – a minute and a half of pure retaliation to all the haters. Eating a donut, winking and saying, “Hi Chuck” – and obvious nod to Charles Barkley, who called “The Decision” a punk move. It’s basically a sarcastic “What Should I Have Done Differently?” to the masses and for a little while, you kind of feel sorry for what James has gone through.
Then you remember: he brought this on himself. Though the whole process, the recruitment, the comments, “The Decision” and even what could be termed “The Unveiling,” when Wade, James and Bosh all donned Heat uniforms, posed, high-fived Miami fans and did a little press junket in July – James has gulped up and enjoyed nearly everything until “The Backlash.”
James has selfish reasons too. And he’s allowed. Just remember, the more he plays into it and continues to even respond, the longer it will take for people to get over it and just watch this team mesh in a possibly better overall version of Jordan, Pippen and Rodman. It won’t be easy, as Spoelstra said. It shouldn’t be easy, championships are supposed to be hard. And that was our original problem with James taking the easy way out.
We wanted to witness the struggle and the resolve to win a title as an alpha dog. But that’s our problem. 
James’ and his cohorts problem will be to not play this up as something larger or more challenging than it is. They can’t make this seem like some great struggle to gel together, find their roles and win. It may take some time, but it shouldn’t take until February. We’ll deal with this “poor us, we have to learn to play together” attitude, but only for a short time. The Heat really should be good and fun to watch. Watching James become the greatest distributor and creator in a hybrid Pippen/Magic Johnson role should be fun. The joy is in watching that transition.
If we can’t enjoy watching all of that happen with James and the Heat and all we’re waiting for is a train wreck because we want to witness the downfall, well, at that point, there’s another “dis-“ word in mind.
Disinterested.
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