A few weeks back DT and I had the pleasure of talking to John Salley, NBA Champion turned media assassin, at some length about his dietary habits and his love of The Bay (more on this in future posts). I’m happy to report that Salley is a good cat and one of the more interesting personalities that we’ve interviewed for FTB. The man can spin a decent yarn. I say this as a disclaimer of sorts for what you’re about to read because it does involve some PG-13 content. This is a story that I first read on Deadspin last week and that they excerpted from Salley’s podcast The Spider and The Henchman. So, it’s not breaking news like Turman’s Cougar story, but still a good read.

Before we jump to the story, I want to mention that I have a keen interest in the subject of quotidien life BC (Before Cell Phones) and BI (Before Internet). Even though I experienced a sliver of my adult life without these technologies, I can’t, as hard as I try, imagine how I got through a single day without either. I don’t know how I ever functioned. That’s one of the reasons I love this story. Because now I know what NBA players did in BC times (as opposed to now when these dudes are attached to their cell phones like it was an extra appendage). As an example, if you were wrongfully placed on injured reserve and your team is traveling without you, you might just cat the hell off for a weekend. Why not? Who’s gonna know? Ain’t nobody there to snap a picture of you coming out the club on their iPhone. So, without giving away the rest of the story, I’ll let Salley tell it like it was (Oh, and there’s a little insight here on just the kind of guy Isiah was and later turned out to be so publicly). Enjoy.

M. Meschery

It’s February 1989. I get injured, and then the Pistons trade Adrian Dantley for Mark Aguirre, and I’m pissed off. I’m really crying. A.D. was The Teacher. Not long after that, Chuck Daly puts me on injured reserve. So I’m out 15 games with a stress fracture that no one gave a fuck about until they brought Mark Aguirre in and needed to give him a lot of playing time. So they put Salley on injured reserve and say to Mark, You step in, learn the offense, get used to everything.

All right, cool.

After five days, I’m fine. The stress fracture has healed, and I’ve got new orthotics and everything. But I’ve got 10 days of not playing. Well, the team goes on a roadtrip, and I’m like, fuck it, I’m getting on a plane and going to Atlanta. I’m gonna hang out with Moms and get some food, yadda yadda yadda. [Ed. note: At this point in the story, Salley makes the kind of slapping sound that suggests he hung out with women in Atlanta who were not Moms.] I need to go down and relax. By the time they come back from the trip, I’ll be back for practice.

The team leaves for the airport. (An aside: Whenever we flew out, we’d always go to this place called the Landing Strip, which is a strip joint, obviously. We’d be there all afternoon until 20 minutes before our flight was scheduled to leave, and then you’d see every car zipping into the airport, and Chuck would be like, “Ten minutes, and we would’ve left without you.”)

Anyway, the team leaves for the airport, and I go to rehab and tell the guy: “Yo, man, I’m not gonna be in. I’m healed. You know I’m healed. I’ll be back when the team is back.” I go the airport, and I get on my Delta flight, and I fly out.

Meanwhile, something happens to the team’s private jet. The flight’s canceled, and those guys have to fly commercial. Now, Detroit is the size of a postage stamp. As soon as I got on that plane, word got out that I was leaving town. So now my teammates know. But I ain’t got no cell; nobody’s calling me. I don’t know that they know.

So after the trip, I rejoin the team, and Isiah comes up to me.

“You see the game, Sal?”

“Yeah,” I say. “You guys put it down.”

“Sal, you watch the game?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I know what y’all did.”

He goes, “Did you watch the game?”

Now, this is before DIRECTV, ladies and gentlemen. This is before Time Warner Cable. If you’re in Atlanta, you’re not watching the Pistons play Milwaukee.

I say, “Man, fuck, you know I don’t like watching the games.”

He goes, “Well, why didn’t you watch the game?”

“Why do I have to watch the game?” I say. Everyone’s giving me the stare. I’m thinking,These motherfuckers know.

Isiah says, “Sal, when we’re out there playing, you can’t —”

“Zeke,” I say, “you put me on injured reserve so Mark can get 25 minutes a game. What difference does it make if I watch you motherfuckers play Milwaukee, when all you really care about is Mark getting 25 minutes a game? I’m on injured reserve. I’m not even supposed to be on injured reserve.”

But no one steps up for me. They’re all taking Isiah’s side. Even Dennis Rodman didn’t tell me what the deal was. This was when I really started falling out with this motherfucker. I’m like, “How do you not give me the heads-up?” He says, “Man, Sal, you’re supposed to be a teammate.”

Fine. OK, I went to Atlanta. Fuck y’all, I didn’t watch the game. There’s nothing they can do about it.

Flash to my last year with the Pistons. Isiah gets hit in the eye by Karl Malone, and he’s bleeding. Isiah goes to the motherfucking Bahamas for a week and sits in the sun. When he gets back, I go up to him.

“Hey, motherfucker, did you watch the game?”

He says: “Nah, Sal. I had my shades on, man. Plus, you know I had to take care of [Ed. note: There's a mildly suspicious edit in the podcast here.]”

So I get bitched at for going to Atlanta and getting some pussy. He goes to the Bahamas with his wife to get some color. Ain’t that some bullshit?

The above is adapted from the “Spider Stories” segment on the Spider and the Henchman podcast. Follow John and his podcast on Twitter: @thejohnsalley and@spiderandhench.

I am all for giving underdog countries a chance to go against the big dogs. And I would certainly never hate on Angola. But I do have a beef with FIBA, the international basketball governing body. Your tournament is too big. Too many bad teams. Make the tournament smaller. Harder to get into. Tougher to advance to the knockout round. And more watchable.

Remember the original Dream Team when they played Angola? That was only made moderately entertaining because of the “what was he thinking?” moment we got when Charles Barkley decided to bully some unfortunate super-skinny Angolan dude for the hell of it. I can’t say I watched this one in its entirety, but seriously, I don’t see the entertainment value in 55-point wins. And what are we doing for international diplomacy by even playing Iran? I swear Hilary herself must’ve called Coach K to get him to keep the score down in the name of helping limit nuclear proliferation.

Anyway, that about does it from this desk. Fewer games. Better games. Because if Steph Curry blows out a knee against Angola playing in garbage time with the US up by 48, my head will explode.

Turman

There is no doubt about it. Rick Barry was one of the greatest basketball players in history. There is also no doubt that he was one of the most disliked basketball players in history. This 1983 Sports Illustrated profile of Barry in exile is a fascinating study. Memo to self: stop making irritated faces and standing with hands on hips.

Here’s a chunk of the article. Bonus: quotes from FTB Meschery’s pops throughout. I can totally picture Tom trying to shake a rookie Rick Barry while out on the town. Classic. Click the link after the excerpt if you want the read the rest.

April 25, 1983
A Voice Crying In The Wilderness
Rick Barry has a problem. He would like people to regard him with love and affection, as they do Jerry West and John Havlicek. They do not.

Tony Kornheiser

“The way I looked alienated a lot of people,” Barry says. “I’ve seen films of myself and seen the faces I made. I looked terrible.” He closes his eyes to the memory and shakes his head. “I acted like, a jerk. Did a lot of stupid things. Opened my big mouth and said a lot of things that upset and hurt people. I was an easy person to hate. And I can understand that. I tell kids, There’s nothing wrong with playing the way Rick Barry played, but don’t act the way Rick Barry acted.’ I tell my own kids, ‘Do as I say, not as I did.’ ”

What bothers him isn’t that he’s not beloved.

“It bothers me,” Barry says, “that I’m not even liked.”

Supposedly, the higher you climb, the harder it gets. Not so for Barry. At every rung things got easier for him. College basketball was easier than high school. Pro basketball was so much easier than college that it shocked him. In 1966-67, his second pro season, he led the NBA in scoring with a 35.6-points-per-game average—only Wilt Chamberlain and Elgin Baylor have ever done better.

Barry’s game was founded on quickness. “He ran as fast in the mind as he did in the feet,” says Phil Jackson, who, as a member of the New York Knicks, played against Barry. He darted around the court like a hummingbird and with the single-mindedness of a missile. “And that was before he developed his jump shot,” says Tom Meschery, who played with Barry on the San Francisco Warriors from 1965 to 1967. “I can’t imagine what he’d have been like if he could shoot.”

Barry averaged 30 or more points a game in four different seasons; only Chamberlain, Jerry West, Oscar Robertson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar attained that plateau. He was the best foul shooter in the history of the NBA, with a lifetime percentage of .900. No true forward ever had more assists. “He was Larry Bird before there was a Larry Bird,” says Al Menendez, director of player personnel for the New Jersey Nets. “He was a great artist. A Mozart. A Picasso. A Caruso,” says Lou Carnesecca, who coached Barry for two seasons on the Nets. “I’d diagram a play, and Rick would instinctively see four or five options that I’d never even imagined. In 35 years of coaching I’ve never had another guy like that.”

In sum, Barry was so good that he awed people. But he was so uncompromising that he antagonized them, too. He couldn’t understand why the game didn’t come as easily to others as it did to him. And for 15 years, in the NBA, the ABA, and on CBS he told them so—in private, in public and in no uncertain terms. He had no patience for mistakes, no tolerance for mediocrity. “He was such a perfectionist,” says Butch Beard, who played with and against Barry. “He wanted the game to be perfect. And when it wasn’t, he would jump all over you. He didn’t mean it maliciously, but it could be very intimidating.” Barry excused his behavior by telling teammates that as hard as he was on them, he was harder still on himself, but some didn’t buy it. “He had a bad attitude. He was always looking down at you,” says the Celtics’ Robert Parish, an erstwhile Warrior teammate of Barry’s. “He was the same on TV,” says the Sonics’ Phil Smith, another former Warrior. “He was so critical of everyone. Like he was Mr. Perfect.”

Instead of being cheered by his peers as the pioneer whose jump from the NBA to the ABA in 1967 precipitated the salary explosion, Barry has been roundly decried for being self-absorbed and petulant. Yet no one who followed his lead—most notably the sainted Julius Erving, who attempted to jump to the NBA Atlanta Hawks in 1972 while still under contract to the ABA Virginia Squires—received anything but the mildest public reproach. And Barry, who many experts think is one of the two best forwards in NBA history—the other being Baylor—hasn’t gotten full credit because of his abrasive behavior.

In the 1974-75 season, when he led the Golden State Warriors to the NBA championship, Barry averaged 30.6 points per game, led the league in free-throw percentage and steals and was sixth in assists, the only forward in the Top 10. Yet in the voting for MVP—a vote by players—Barry finished fourth. “A joke,” says Clifford Ray, Barry’s best friend on that team. “The man had the greatest season I’d ever seen. That vote was just a joke.” There were whispers that Barry was a victim of race discrimination. Ray, a black man, demurs, “You won’t get no black guys to say Rick wasn’t bad. When it came to the hoop he was serious. The brothers might not have liked his style, but they knew the white boy could play some basketball.”

Fact is, Barry was a victim of face discrimination. There was something about him that was hard to like, something that manifested itself on his face in the form of a sneer. Its origins may have stemmed from his adolescence, when Barry’s permanent teeth came in so crookedly that he was ashamed to smile. The teeth have long since been fixed, but the self-consciousness has lingered. “He still doesn’t smile much,” says Bill King, the Warriors’ broadcaster and a friend of Barry’s. “It gives people the impression he’s closing them off and sets up an immediate barrier that is very hard to break down.”

Read the rest here. Hat tip to Ball Don’t Lie for reminding me of this one.

Happy Labor Day everyone. Now get out there and smile at somebody!

Turman

Lately, I’ve been obsessed with the concept of personal craftsmanship. You know, taking whatever it is that you do because you like it and really turning it into art. And then letting that art allow you the headspace to find some measure of personal freedom from the world around you. In a perfect scenario, there is a sort of merger between artist, subject, and output.

This is a perfect example. The next time I am invited to give any type of talk about what it means to be a creative person, I might just shut up for the first five minutes and show this video. Shinya Kimura becomes his motorcycles. No formal training. No fancy-pants engineering degree. Just a purity of purpose and a dedication to craftsmanship that is so personal it is difficult to distinguish man from bike.

ありがとうございます。

Turman

PS. Hat tip to Jen Spectacular for today’s inspiration.
PPS. Make sure to go wide screen for this high-def goodness. And crank up the sound while you’re at it.

The show Shaq Vs is starting to become an accident that I can’t look away from. Charles Barkley said it should be called “Shaq Loses” and then went out and lost to Shaq on the links. But last night: Bieber. Dance off.

The announcing is virtually unlistenable. The setups are strange, where Shaq gets these big handicaps. And last night was no exception. Moreover, the entire concept was kinda sorta lifted from Steve Nash and/or Dahani Jones. But Shaq has that Shaq Appeal. You could drop the dude into the most awkward circumstance on earth and somehow the Big Chameleon just flips a switch and does unexpected stuff. He should be a diplomat. I could totally see him chopping it up with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over a game of high-stakes chess. I’m just not sure that nuclear proliferation should rest on the outcome. But still. I’m just sayin’. The dude has a gift.

And honestly, Shaq is easily the best seven-foot tall pop locker in the world. Beiber, to his credit, showed some equally improbable hoops prowess in quick pickup game, which his team actually won. He’s little, but (and I can’t believe I’m saying this) his game was almost kinda lightweight nice. Best of all every episode is a “jump the shark” episode. Now, that’s television.

Okay.

I think I need to get out more,

Turman

PS. Given Shaq’s shark jumping, along with my own cougar jumping, and the esteemed commentary from Buzzy Jackson earlier in the week, I am retroactively declaring this an FTB Jump the Shark Week. Where are my water skis at!

Dateline: Berkeley, California; 4:40am

Having lived in the Tenderloin for a number of years, when I awake to the sound of large arms fire, I do what any sensible human being would. Wait until the bang bang stops and then go investigate. In the official uniform of such investigations, hoop shorts and house shoes. And so it was that I crept out into the cool night. What I found? A phalanx of Berkeley Police officers and a single, very large, and very dead mountain lion.

Now, I do not live in what you would call nature. There are trees, but this is an urbanized area. We’re talking one block from one of Berkeley’s most prominent thoroughfares in Shattuck Avenue. But apparently, this mountain lion had pretty evolved tastes. Roaming only two and a half blocks from Chez Panisse, he or she was apparently drawn to the area by the promise of an exalted hunt: tender, young returning students and slow-moving, California Cuisine-fed, neo-hippies.

Jokes! It’s a blog! Okay, seriously, that was a joke, but this was a big-ass cat. I saw it. Officers were still treating the area as a crime scene so I wasn’t allowed to fulfill my journalistic promise and break the story with photos and proper interviews. However, officers I spoke with indicated that they had first attempted to drive the animal back toward the hills. When that failed and the beast was heading for a late dinner in the Gourmet Ghetto, they said that they had no choice to put it down. I do not dispute this.

The weapons of record were shotgun and AR-15 assault rifle. The location: Walnut Street between Cedar and Virginia, for those of you Google Mapping at home. For me, that’s directly on the other side of the building behind my bedroom window. A mountain lion. And assault-rifle fire.

Okay, that’s about all from here. Mornings on 2 can pick up the story soon enough. I just figured that since I’d be up for a while I might as well break some news for once. To recap: police make a sensible decision to kill a mountain lion roaming a densely populated, urbanized portion of North Berkeley at approximately 3:30 Tuesday morning.

Turman Approved

Update. After breaking the story. Mainstream media wanted some of the Turman Magic. Probably not my finest media moment, but I managed two thirds of the traditional-media trifecta with a TV appearance and a quote in the SF Chronicle/SFGate. I am totally adding “Cougar Expert” to my resume.

Vogue magazine features women of color in its pages so rarely that, whenever they do it, it must be a good thing… right? So how should we feel about the fact that Serena Williams, the greatest women’s tennis player of all time, is featured in Vogue’s August issue – giving a manicure?

First, try to ignore the lame and oh-so-tired title of the article (“She’s Got Game”) and focus instead on the setup: Serena Williams, athlete of the century, doing the nails of a Manhattan socialite with a name only a WASP with a hereditary yacht club membership could come up with: Marina Rust. To her credit, even Rust admits the assignment is “weird”; her “incredulous” husband expresses what everyone outside the vacuum-sealed editorial offices of Vogue is thinking: “You’re meeting Serena Williams and she’s going to do your nails?”

Yes, she’s going to do her nails. Turns out Williams is working toward her Florida state certification as a nail technician. She plans to offer nail polish line as part of her fashion line. It’s a fashion story: we get it! Of course, Serena Williams is entitled to love all the girly things she wants– it was Florence Griffith “FloJo” Joyner’s manicure that first inspired her, after all – heck, she can retire and become a stay-at-home mom if she wants to. Feminism is all about a woman’s right to make her own decisions. It wouldn’t be that big a deal were it not for the fact that you almost never see black women in Vogue. When you do, you don’t necessarily want to see them servicing the Ladies Who Lunch.

But is the joke on us? The biggest issue of the year, the September Vogue, features Halle Berry on the cover. Of the seven women of color who have appeared on the magazine’s cover in its 118-year history, Berry is only the second to appear on the all-important September doorstopper.

Of course, LeBron James did make it onto the front of the April 2008 Vogue.

Buzzy Jackson

Editor’s Note: FTB welcomes back esteemed contributor Buzzy Jackson, author of the recently published Shaking the Family Tree.

Okay folks. Everybody needs to chill! Here is your conclusive, rumor-squashing evidence that Baron Davis doesn’t weigh no 260 pounds. Which, earlier today, an ESPN Insider report from Chris Broussard speculated loudly.

Midsummer reports weren’t good, as sources said the 6-3 point guard was up to 260 pounds, 45 pounds above his listed playing weight.

Where Broussard got his info, I don’t know. What he means by midsummer? Who cares? Where I got mine? This photo of the ever-dapper Mr. Meschery, Baron, and myself was shot 10 days ago at his charity event. While the two of us not named Baron would graciously request that you accept the self-definition of our physiques as “wiry strong,” there is no possible way that BD outweighs either of us by 85-90 pounds.

Matthew O’Brien of SB Nation was next to speculate, offering up a river of old quotes and random detritus to try to get his piece some extra traffic. Nice, but emblematic of an (er) “growing” problem with new media. Controversy gets the hits. That’s why no link for you, bro. So, once O’Brien’s post started getting retweeted all over the place, even a few Baron-hating mainstream journalists wanted to jump in and crack wise on Twitter. (Yes, I’m talking to you Tim Kawakami.) Sure, everyone talks smack on Twitter, but seriously, it’s sports media that is morbidly obese. Bloated by bloggers eager to break a story and mainstream-media types trying to keep their bona fides correct in the digital world, we’ve become a nation of sports-info fatties. Consuming every rumor 100 times before anything legit is ever revealed.

While none of us watched a weigh in a week ago Saturday, sometimes a picture speaks a thousand words. Yes, Baron could post either of us up. No, he doesn’t weigh a JaMarcus-like 260. And c’mon son, do some diligence. Pictures of Baron are everywhere. His workout partner was one of the first to publicly respond. Do some damn reporting. Don’t just slag on people for traffic. Weak sauce.

And camera don’t lie,

Turman

PS. In full disclosure, we have done some actual work for Baron in capacities unrelated to our universally regarded and 100% objective journalism here at Fear the Beard. It doesn’t matter. Start hating when you know what you’re talking about. Keep it movin’ if you want to read Kawakami’s attempt at a joke and BD’s responses.

Via Twitter:

Kawakami:
Gotta get back to my vacation, but: Chris Broussard reports that Baron Davis now weighs 260? Apparently turning into Nellie, day by day.

Baron Davis:
260 lbs. < - faulty insider info... Hi hatersss! Lol

Baron_Davis

#Thankyousocialmedia for the ability to respond… LOL

What he said.

You know at the Emeryville Public Market where fools will give you a little sample of what they’re serving up as you stroll through. That’s what this is. A little taste of Curry to tide you over until you get the full plate in October. In Exhibit A we see Ricky Rubio get shook. Shook hard. I don’t think Spanish ankles have been broken this badly since the Running of the Bulls a month ago. Speaking of ankles, it’s nice to see that Curry’s are holding up nicely. Let’s hope he stays away from some kind of moped-on-cobblestone tour of Istanbul.

So, if you’re a Curry Head, or just someone who’s tired of Spain dominating the world like it’s 1587, you will surely appreciate this. Happy Monday!

M. Meschery

I once heard an interview with Nile Rogers from Chic about how they came to write the disco classic “Le Freak.” When the band was first starting out in NY, one night they tried to go to Studio 54 and the doorman wouldn’t let them in. So, they went back to their practice space and wrote this song that went, “Aaaaaah F**k You.” Of course, their label wouldn’t let them release a jam with the F-Bomb in it no matter how funky it was, so they changed it to “Freak out.”

This is one of those TGFI moments, “Thank God for the Internet.” I’m sure 74% of all musicians have written at least one “F-You” song in their lifetimes. Now, with the Internet as the primary channel to distribute and promote music, musicians can finally give commercial radio, the major labels and the FCC, the “Big F-You.”

M. Meschery