In Memoriam

Other people have done a far better job of eulogizing the genius of Ray Charles far better than I could, which is why I haven't added anything in this space. Of far less national note will be the death Sunday night of Ralph Wiley, 52. Mr. Wiley was a sportswriter, for many years of Sports Illustrated, in the last several years for ESPN.com's Page 2. Mr. Wiley happened to be one of my two favorite sports columnists (with Page 2's Bill Simmons) and one of my five favorite columnists in any discipline.

I admired his keen observations on sport, the way I admire in any sportswriter the elusive ability to see things mere mortals can't, the sorts of things that coaches and scouts are payed handsomely to see; I admired the way he saw things correctly more often than not, which isn't quite the same thing. The aspect I admire about Page 2 as a sportswriting venture in general is the way it acknowledges in its functioning the way sport intertwines with the rest of everyday life, which makes it particularly appealing to myself as a semi-casual fan (after basketball, I am at best an infrequent watcher of tennis and football). What the best sportswriting captures to me isn't merely that particular vision, but the intuition of what that vision says about the human, what we can learn - not in a soppy way, but in an observational one - from these men, who push one aspect of the human endeavor to its bleeding edge. The example I return to trying to explain this to people is from last year's NBA playoffs, when in the first game of the Sixers-Hornets series, Allen Iverson scored 55 points. His face, contorted in joy and exhaustion and pain and defiance, said something to me, about the way all those emotions could concentrate in one moment of hard-won victory. Ralph Wiley was excellent at communicating just this sort of information - not pure brain information, see, but human information, the way a kid's demanding father and the hitch in his backswing all intuit something about his person, the way you can see in a man's eyes if he will stand up or lie down, and what he believes about his ability to do so. The look in a man's eyes when he realizes he has done a thing he said he could do, but didn't actually beleive that he could.

Most of all, I respected and admired Mr. Wiley's way with words, his casual eloquence, above all the way he spoke in his own language without hesitation, used personal phrases and slang in such a way that they seemed obvious elements of the lexicon. He did coin "BillyBall", for one.

His last column, a typically broad endeavor that ostensibly dealt with the NBA Finals but which roamed off to topics of coaching and race in America, had an opening sentence that seems a particularly fitting thing to say on the occasion of his early death.

"All a man's got is the integrity of his work."

RIP, Ralph Wiley

Blogging the Finals

In retrospect, my hesitance seems foolish, because I knew that the Lakers had been lucky to win Game 2 - the Lakers haven't played better basketball than the Pistons in any of the four outings so far. I was unable to watch Game 3, but while it convinced me that the Pistons might well win the series, I didn't take it to be saying much about the Lakers because anyone can get blown out on an off night. But this evening, a close game exposed the Lakers in all sorts of ways that made them seem small and sad.

(1) Shaquille O'Neal played a brilliant game and his team lost. The one thing he did wrong was miss free throws, but you know that's going to happen. What his team did wrong is not let him play an even more monstrous game. If he's going off, why not just give him the ball on every play? If he's able to set up in the paint, he's either scoring or going to the free throw line. That's automatic; watching Ben Wallace defend Shaq deep under the basket is like watching a video game (like, say, NBA Live - he just unwillingly glides backwards and gives up the dunk. Nothing to be done. And why the hell can't Shaq's teammates realize that he's the one unstoppable option they have, and why the hell don't they do anything about their habit of forgetting about him for five minutes at a time? If Shaq gets 50, maybe the Lakers won tonight.

(2) There's not really much room to fault Kobe; he needs perhaps a more finely tuned sense of when to force it and when to give it up; the key being that he give it up to Shaq, since none of his teammates can make baskets. This doesn't take away from the brilliance of Kobe's game; I wonder what Jordan would've looked like if he got triple-teamed every time he drove and didn't have a real teammate to pass to.

(3) Gary Payton's first quarter showed that he hasn't devolved nearly so much as everyone thought. Yes, he's no kind of Glove anymore, but he can dish the ball out and he's still a fine scoring guard when posting up and slashing to the basket. But he doesn't want to disrupt the structure of the Lakers offense, which is not remotely designed for a player with Payton's strengths, and so for the most part he struggles, regardless of whether he's playing the 1 or the 2.

(4) Phil Jackson was exposed perhaps most of all. It's often been said that he's more a manager of talent than a coach and to a certain extent I bought into the hype, but the fact is that Jackson has always used, highly effectively, a potent offensive system. The Triangle, a halfcourt offensive set so complicated that Jackson and Charley Rosen have authored a book on it (which I haven't read, though I'm curious) is extremely effective when it is supplied with intelligent, versatile, and skilled offensive players; one of its tenets is the idea that anyone can play any spot in the Triangle. But on these Lakers, there aren't many guys who are familiar enough - or, frankly, skilled and confident enough - to actually play the Triangle effectively. What confuses me about Jackson is that he's kept his lineup the same and kept his offense the same. Now it's certainly commonplace that a coach should stick with the players and plays that got him to the championship round, even if they're struggling, but Jackson's starting five and the Triangle aren't responsible for the Lakers being in the 2004 finals. Gary Payton ran the team as its only constant during the regular season, playing effectively in an offensive scheme that compromised the Triangle with his personal preferences, and the playoffs have been entirely about Shaq, Kobe, and Karl Malone's defense. With Malone so hampered as to be useless, I don't understand why Jackson doesn't run with Shaq and a small rest-of-team, relying on Fisher, Payton, Kobe, and George as his main unit; these are the Lakers best players (well, George is questionable, but there's also Walton and Medvedenko for when Devean doesn't want to drive the ball). And why on earth doesn't Jackson loosen up his offense? It hasn't worked so far; the only consistent offensive success the Lakers have had derives from pounding the ball into Shaq and letting him fly solo. Switch over to a more meat-and-potatoes offense, let Payton and Kobe work of screens and postups, and I think the Lakers have a better shot of taking a game here and there. That doesn't change the fact that the Pistons are better coached, more athletic, longer, deeper, more versatile, and (most shockingly) more unflappable and confident. I thought that tonight at last the Lakers would flip their switch and bring it, but Shaq (and Kobe, to an extent) were the only men on the floor for the Lakers tonight.

(5) I love Rasheed Wallace's turnaround jumper, always have. I love the way his spin is so quick and his fadeaway so profound that at the moment of release his body is at a 50 degree angle to the ground and it seems like he should fall over, but he doesn't. The ball leaves his hands so smoothly it's like he barely moved his wrists, he just willed it to fly straight and true. I also loved that Sheed got passionate tonight and played a monster game and went the last quarter and a half sans headband. He looked naked without it, but it made him seem even more intense and focused on the game.

It's Been Like Blao

On Saturday the Virginian graduated from the University of Chicago; on Sunday morning I helped him load his things into a van and then bade him a good trip to his home. Congratulations; I'm going to miss you, but I look forward to keeping in touch, both here and (hopefully) in more informal fora.

It's an odd thing to have spent this past year living with two people who became so quickly some of the most important people in my life, and certainly gave me the best living situation I've had in college; and now I'm not going to be living with either of them, presumably ever again. Although strange things do happen. One of my new roommates is a good friend, and the other fellow seems nice enough, but I'm going to miss the dynamic of this past year. It was probably my healthiest socially - in some very odd ways - and probably my least fulfilling academically, at least in terms of feeling like I was honing in on some goal of study. I'm doubting whether I ought to be a philosophy major, not out of distrust of the discipline but for more pedestrian concerns. I ought to make use of my advisor, but I seem resistant for some reason.

I'm very much looking forward to this Wednesday-Sunday, during which time I will be camping in the far reaches of Wisconsin with a most lovely companion. On my return I will undoubtedly undertake yet again the notion that I can reinvent and reorient my life during the summer. It hasn't happened yet.