Sports Biblio Digest, 9.25.16: Farewell to Kevin Garnett
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: The Quick Fall of Robert Swift; The Revival of Theo Epstein; William Hill Longlist; Remembering Ed Temple
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This is Digest issue No. 56, published Sept. 25, 2016. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website, which is updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. To view this newsletter in a browser, please click here. Click here to view this newsletter in a browser.
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When Kevin Garnett jumped from high school straight to the National Basketball Association in 1995, he was the first prep star to be drafted directly into the league in 20 years.
At the time, basketball officials, educators and journalists were having a serious debate about what such a trend might portkend, given the salary riches of a league made bountiful by Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, Magic Johnson and others who didn’t finish their college careers.
But at least they had college careers, a little seasoning before entering the unforgiving world of the pros.
Garnett grew up poor and in a broken home in rural South Carolina, and got in some racial trouble (he was charged with second-degree lynching!) that prompted a move to a prep academy in Chicago for his final year of high school.
A year later, Kobe Bryant made the same leap. The son of former NBA star Joe “Jellybean” Bryant, the younger Bryant grew up in a solid family in suburban Philadelphia. The hand-wringers were even more concerned.
Just a few months after Bryant’s farewell tour this season, Garnett has called time on his NBA career. In 21 seasons, he scored 26,071 points, pulled down 14,662 rebounds, was a nine-time All-NBA selection and earned MVP honors once.
On Friday, a season after returning to the team that drafted him, the Minnesota Timberwolves, the 40-year-old Garnett announced he would accept a buyout and retire. While he embodied the big-money culture of the NBA—his $126 million extension in 1997, at the age of 21, contributed to an eventual lockout a year later—Garnett also leaves an on-court legacy as one of the best pure post defenders in the game’s history.
At ESPN, J.A. Adande called Garnett “the most influential player of his generation,” the Gen-X group that included recent Basketball Hall of Fame inductee Allen Iverson, players who came of age in the age of hip-hop, as that culture became immersed in NBA culture.
The financial influence of Garnett, Adande adds, “paved the way for the formation of superteams in the free-agency era.” Garnett followed that path in leaving the Timberwolves to win his only NBA championship, with Paul Pierce, Ray Allen and the Boston Celtics in 2008.
In his 2016 book “Boys Among Men,” Jonathan Abrams chronicles the developments and impact of Garnett, Bryant, LeBron James and Dwight Howard. It also tells the tales of the fallen figures of the prep-to-pro momevent, including Korleone Young. For all of the triumphs of Garnett, Bryant and more recently James, there are too many tales like Young, as two other stories this week about former NBA players demonstrate.
At Sports Illustrated, Chris Ballard dropped this harrowing piece on Robert Swift, a high NBA draft pick who crashed spectacularly due to a heroin addiction, and how he’s trying to salvage the rest of his life at 27.
Darius Miles enjoyed several good seasons in the NBA and his $9 million contract is modest compared to Garnett. But as the Belleville News-Democrat (Ill.) reported last week, the 34-year-old Miles is bankrupt, after years of struggling off the court, and not just financially.
The story fleshes out an alarming stat: an estimated 60 percent of ex-NBA players file for bankruptcy within five years after leaving the game. Former NBA player Adonal Foyle, who served as an official in the players’ union, wonders if Miles might have benefitted from a couple years of preparation in college:
“My parents asked me when I was still playing what I wanted to do after this was over, and it got me thinking about it. Players need to ask themselves, ‘What’s the next step?’ ”
Baseball Card Obsessions
At Slate, David Roth writes about his secret life as a writer of minutiae for baseball cards and the unglamorous work that punctured a boyhood myth: Cards “are created by ordinary men and women who are generally unawed by their proximity to a central part of American boyhood;”
For those collectors who can’t get enough of the famed T206 baseball card set, there is a new website devoted specifically to the topic: The T206 Insider, created by Scot Reader. Rich Mueller has more at Sports Collectors Daily.
Sports on the Screen
LeBron James skipped the Olympics, but has been busy during the summer building his media empire. Shadow and Act reports James has sold a comedy series to NBC, “There Goes the Neighborhood,” about a white family moving into a gentrified black Cleveland community;
Discovery Communications is aiming to become the “Netflix of Sports” with plans for its Eurosport unit to begin a live streaming service and debuting with the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.
A Few Good Reads
The Vin Scully tributes continue as the legendary Dodgers announcer heads into the final week of his 67-year career: Joe Posnanski; Jayson Stark; and at GQ, Keith Olbermann, on how Scully shouldn’t be regarded so saintly: “He’s not as good as everybody’s making him out to be—he’s better;”
Wright Thompson goes long at ESPN The Magazine on Chicago Cubs president Theo Epstein, who’s crafted a roster with the best record in baseball in short order. All that’s left is ending a 108-year World Series drought;
Ryan O’Hanlon calls Kevin De Bruyne, the emerging Manchester City star, the best soccer player in the world not named Leo Messi. Good story, but I think that claim is quite a stretch;
At Red Bulletin, Raphael Honigstein offers a stark reminder in this age of chic soccer fan culture and Messi/Ronaldo that we “seem to have forgotten about the game’s strong capacity for still being shit;”
Ryan Ferguson on a novel early 20th-century baseball team, the House of David, whose members were part of an Adventist cult that banned alcohol, sex and shaving, but went on barnstorming tours around America;
Stanford’s Christian McCaffrey is a leading candidate for college football’s Heisman Trophy, and at times, his All-American persona seems to be too good to be true. At The Players’ Tribune, he writes about why “I play football for the love of the game;”
Georgia’s Nick Chubb might have been on the Heisman short list to start the season if not for a horrific knee injury he suffered against Tennessee a year ago. ESPN’s Mark Schlabach (a former colleague of mine at the Atlanta J-C) writes about Chubb’s excruciating rehab; it’s a great insight into what so many athletes in so many sports have to go through just to get back into the game. Thus far in 2016, he’s playing worthy of some early Heisman mentions;
At Vocativ, Joe Lemire unmasks a secret we sportswriters have been coy about revealing for years, our single greatest love: Marriott points. It’s avarice, really, for anyone who’s been on an expense account. Sadly, I haven’t known that feeling for about a decade or so, and have only enough points left for a two-night stay at the Fairfield Inn near the Wichita airport.
News About Sports Books
The longlist for the 2016 William Hill Sports Books of the Year awards have been issued in the U.K., and it’s a stellar 17-book collection that includes “Barbarian Days,” the Emil Zatopek biographies “Today We Die A Little” and “Endurance” and the Eric Liddell biography “For the Glory.”
Another William Hill finalist is “No Nonsense,” a memoir by the fiery English soccer midfielder Joey Barton, now playing at Rangers at age 34. Donald McRae writes at The Guardian that the once-banished player is unflinchingly honest about his turbulent life and career that has included prison and seeing his brother get a long sentence for a racially-motivated murder. Barton is equally withering in his condemnation of what he calls an “immoral” football industry;
At Only A Game, Bill Littlefield talks to Tom Stanton, author of the newly published “Terror in the City of Champions,” about Detroit sports and a bizarre criminal element in the city during the Depression;
At The Wall Street Journal, Gregg Easterbrook raves over “Lost Champions,” a new book about the first players to integrate the NFL, especially Kenny Washington, who played for the Rams a year before Jackie Robinson first put on a Brooklyn Dodgers uniform.
Passings
Ed Temple, who turned 89 on Tuesday, two days before his death, was a women’s sports pioneer. He coached the Tennessee A & I (now Tennessee State) Tiger Belles track and field team before women’s college athletics was formally organized. Several of his best sprinters there won Olympic gold medals under his tutelage in Rome 1960 and Tokyo 1964—most notably Wilma Rudolph and Wyomia Tyus. They were the toast of America, and even in the segregated South as the Civil Rights era dawned.
Off the Sporting Green
For 15 intense years, Andrew Sullivan, the former editor of The New Republic, lived “in the web” as a blogger extraordinaire, becoming a successful proprietor of his own site before crashing out in 2014. Now writing occasionally at New York, he goes long on his Internet addictions, and how the distractions of multi-tasking and smartphones pushed him to attend a Buddhist retreat, where he relearned the art of tactile human connection:
“By rapidly substituting virtual reality for reality, we are diminishing the scope of this interaction even as we multiply the number of people with whom we interact. We remove or drastically filter all the information we might get by being with another person. We reduce them to some outlines — a Facebook ‘friend,’ an Instagram photo, a text message — in a controlled and sequestered world that exists largely free of the sudden eruptions or encumbrances of actual human interaction. We become each other’s ‘contacts,’ efficient shadows of ourselves.”