First, GREAT montage on a tough subject. Only the seriously good could do Pittsburg State.
Second, who is the Monarch?
Third, Kukla RULES!!!!!!!!!
jaybate 1.0
10346 posts
P.S.: Where is big Landon in all of this scuttle butt. I don't see how Landen's rebounding is not going to be NECESSARY without Cheick clearance.
That's just Tait Bait...chumming responses.
On second thought, Self might start Jam Tray in one of the exhibitions to swell up Hunter's hate gland a little. Self has to start one in one exhibition and another the other, so he can let their performances rationalize who starts the first game of the season. And based on Korea, Self needs Hunter playing HARD and CRAZED, so starting the Jam Tray vs. Pittsburgh should get Hunter juiced for the second exhibition; that will lead to a performance that will justify starting him the first game.
Or so it seems based on Korea.
Laimbeer is hard to explain to persons today. I have tried.
I hated him at the time, because he was not on my team and I was not yet then a Piston fan.
I was steeped in Show Time and Bird and soon MJ's Bulls.
But the Bad Boys of Chuck Daly were VERY tough customers and I have in later years grown to respect them all more than I did at the time. Quiet Joe Dumars, Isaiah, the Microwave, were great talent. Rodman, Salley, Mahorn, Laimbeer, were worse than the playground. They were prison ballers. They were the real life basketball equivalent of the prisoner's football team in The Longest Yard. Salley was a freaking prison warden, not a player. He just kind of toned down the mayhem by keeping the head hunting and cheap shotting of Rodman, Mahorn and Laimbeer to barely within not basketball rules, but the flipping law. Mahorn was the most sociopathic of the bunch and so the easiest to fear. But Laimbeer had the special ability to make opponents hate him, not just fear him. Laim understood buttons better than any of them. And he was like a great character actor that understood how to play a really despicable character. It was a miracle anyone beat them, because it took Herculean concentration not to be taken out of ones game by any one of them, and with all four on the same team that one insane season, it was like trying to concentrate on scoring on inmates of Devil's Island penal colony.
Did I like these guys?
No.
Do I regret that the refs let them play the game as they did?
Yes.
But since the refs decided to let the game mutate that way, they remain the BADDEST of the BAD.
Thx. Not a lot of persons recall what an anti-hero Eliot was early in his recoil from first American culture, and later in his recoil from then contemporary English culture, and finally his recoil from Eastern culture. They understand how committed he was to tradition as the river of literature and the path dependent well spring of the present of poetry, but they forget how deeply he shifted gears on which philosophical and literary traditions he connected back with to deal with the ghastly events of his present--how scathing he was essentially being in his indictments of his own time. After rejecting the American rebellion, he sought out British tradition, but he found it in moral decay, so he turned east. It didn't take. He then had a religious experience--what today might be called being born again--what he called experiencing the still point of the turning world--the time out of time, as he called it, and he embraced the most archaic and by then unconventional and even hostile form of Christianity to the Catholic and Protestant churches of his time--the individual pursuit of sainthood that frankly did more to expose and contrast the flaws of western culture at the time, than had turning to symbolist art and eastern religions. He was IMHO calling the bluff of institutional Christianity by embracing it as the most orthodox Anglican he could possibly manage, and then within that Anglican milieu, insist on a strident pursuit of saintliness.
This is, I believe, why the British came to love and admire him on the one hand and scoff at him as an eccentric colonial wannabe on the other. After being a rebel in their midst for quite some time, he rebelled by taking what they gave him--by his extreme conformity with the letter of their own Anglican Christianity and class system. He seemed to tell them the last third of his life, see, here, you wish to move into a modernity of dehumanizing industrialization and godless empire, but I am going to show you that the life of the saint can be pursued within this as bank clerk with a stick pin and an editor at your very own Faber. Eliot became a supremely Anglican dissident situated in the high culture of Great Britain. As Gandhi rebelled in the face of the British with love and passive resistance, Eliot rebelled in their faces with brilliance and humility and keenly good manners that they could do nothing but snicker at occasionally. But their snickering meant they were snickering at their own highest values--the saintly pursuit of Christian virtue. He was a complicated kid in St. Louis, philosophy student at Harvard, a young avant garde-ist in London before his switch to Anglicanism, and as the astoundingly brilliant poet/editor practicing saintly humility in London after.
The true Eliot is very hard to discover for two reasons.
First, through out his literary career, he embraced a philosophy and aesthetic of the annihilation of the artist to in his art to reveal the work of art as completely as possible. It has roots in the Puritan tradition and it appealed to him in his search of philosophy in college where he found far more sophisticated rationalizations for the annihilation of the artist in his work. Annihilation of the self was a common theme through out his life in which he sought within the various traditions that he explored their views and methods of annihilation of the self. It as some where between his common theme of art and his philosophy of how to break into the feeling of being alive. This left the illusive residual of an artist not seeking to be known himself.
Second, Eliot came a long at a time when America the new world empire was seeking ascendance and primacy and was quite unsutblely asking its scholars to canonize then contemporary American artists into a new murders' row of world art. In short, if America were to go out and take its place of leadership in the world commensurate with its economic power at the time; then it needed great artists to justify its claim of being worthy to rule the world by hegemony and great Navies. So for most of the 20th Century the the American academy was giving him the poetic superstar PR spin and that involved concealing a lot of his warts and imperfections both as a poet and as a person. But he was a great, great poet--one for the ages, though he has entered into the inevitable decline in stature and memory that all great artists pass through before being permanently resurrected for posterity.
So, young Tommie Eliot, who grew up to be Thomas, and then T.S., requires quite a bit of near archaeological digging to recover him from the myths. Where as scholarship on his poetry was usually uncommonly strong, history about him has long been less so.
He is one of the few American poets I can get a great deal from even after many rereads even in the October/November of my life.
Rock Chalk!
It just makes me want to go out on the curling courts. :-)
@drgnslayr said:
Quantity over quality.
All cultures achieve power and prosperity through application of vertical hierarchy and horizontal networking in pursuit of rational net benefit through quantification and control of costs and benefits. How they order vertically and horizontally varies based on context and technology within their grasp to use and develop. The beliefs, values and ideologies they embrace vary also based on the practical evolution of what works in their situation. Beliefs, values and ideologies are wetware, if you will.
But all cultures struggle mightily, and are, I suppose, eventually undone by losing a catalyzing and energizing balance between quantity and quality.
Over time, humans keep getting better at quantity. It maybe slow and it may be paved with phenomenally stupid mistakes, but the road to quantity grows ever more sophisticated and skillful along the time axis.
Alas, quality is a chimera.
Quality is not something humans have ever been able to bring under their control.
The only thing humans have been able to do is quantize quality to create an illusion of quality. When we digitize music and movies we are quantifying the qualities of those entertainment arts. And something is invariably lost under the curve of quantification by the calculus in the migration for original human performance, to the analog recording, to the digital version. It is hard even to specify accurately what is lost. But something IS lost.
We actually know what it is lost from analog to digital, but only in an abstract analog (curve)/digital (square) sense. We lose the are under the curve between the two squares that approximate but do not EQUAL the curve. There is a particular quantity of sound lost.
But now try to characterize what is lost between the human performance an the analog recording. Our language and concepts begin to break down for this loss. One can use quantity to approximate it again, but that is simulation. There is some aspect of quality that resides in experiencing reality itself at no degrees of freedom of removal from it; that is all I can even begin to articulate.
We are in the earliest stage of making yet another attempt at quantifying quality in entertainment with Occulus Rift. We have given up simulating quality outside the brain and delivering it into the brain via human sense organs. Now we are going to try to simulate quality inside the brain directly onto the neural nets. Interestingly, we are still not really finding a way to control quality. We are finding a more effective way to fool our senses with control of quantity. We are controlling quantity with agorithmns directly on the neural nets. By doing so, we are creating quantitative (not qualitative) experiences that we literally cannot distinguish from real, unless we forcibly remember and tell ourselves they are not real. But dazzling as the prospect may be, it is still not controlling quality. It is an order of magnitude increase in the illusion of the control of quality.
Orthodox empiricists insist quality is an illusion, of course. They argue that if you cannot measure and quantify something, it does not exist. I am down with that. That's okay. But then the orthodox empiricists have to be down with the idea that human experience by definition operates ALWAYS without complete ability to measure and quantify every quantity that exists and shapes our experience, and so quality is the concept name we give to all that realm as yet still beyond our abilities to measure and quantify. And any orthodox empiricist HAS to concede that at every moment of human history likely greater quantities of universe--from macro to nano--exist beyond our measure and quantification than within it. So: quality is a very, very, VERY empirical phenomenon by definition of empiricism. Quality is that which we often cannot measure and quantify that can nevertheless shape our experience measurably and in quantity.
You are right that the more suits (and scientists, and tradesmen and priests and illuminati and what have you) try to fix a thing, like basketball, or hunger, or health care, or cars, or clothing, the more they resort to control through quantification and while it produces certain effects, it seems only randomly to achieve the qualities we aspire to.
It is an epistemological gap apparently indicative of a gap in human intelligence. We also can't smell like dogs and see like eagles and hear like bats. We can develop the smell sensors and camera lenses and radar tech boasting the levels of acuity and sensitivity of dogs and eagles and bats, but frankly there are apparently certain neural net burn algorithms missing in human beings to actually make deep, intuitive sense of the world through these adaptations.
We got gaps, as Rocky told Adrian.
The potential beauty and elegance is that if we respect our fellow organisms at all scales and work with them rather than against them, we can to some degree fulfill Rocky's wisdom.
"Yo, Adrian, you got gaps, I got gaps, together we get together and fill some gaps."
We must first make those in the game of basketball AWARE of the gaps in quality issue, before we can hope to get together and fill gaps.
But I believe there is a deep human yearning to fill gaps.
And it is the frustration of that yearning that leads so many to displace that yearning into destruction and simple counting.
PHOF
Serious historians and social commentators on sport in culture that will eventually tell the story of how sport transformed into what it is becoming need to copy and paste your post for inclusion in their research on paleo sport. Yours is the purest explanation of the attraction and meaning of the playground game that I have ever read.
Cultures, as I often remark, have life cycles.
Professor Wylie Sypher, an art historian, who wrote the Four Phases of the Renaissance Style, was one of the great minds of American Arts and Letters. If you want to understand your subculture, you have to understand the culture you and it are subordinated within--not the facts of it, but the historical dynamics of it. Without this knowledge, a person is driving down a dark road with nothing but headlights--with no map of the journey one is embarked upon.
You, @drgnslayr, must read the Four Phases of Renaissance Style. It will be painfully boring to you at times, because you have probably not spent a lot of your time studying the art and literature that he uses as his archaeological subject matter for finding and characterizing the phasing of cultures. The essential importance of his book is that it maps the X and Y and Z axes of a culture in renaissance along a time axis.
Most realms of human ecology (culture) experience millenia of incremental evolution and then a few brief centuries of renaissance. The reasons for it are common sensical and rooted in the accrual of knowledge and experience on the one hand, and on the other hand that accrual over time coming into contact with sharply expanded and sharply different spatial contexts and relationships. Once you read Sypher's book, and learn what to look for as indicators of culture, you can begin to map that culture and locate one's self within its phasing.
Why should the business man with the alias @drgnslayr take time out of gardening and operating his business to learn about the phasing of renaissance culture?
Because @drgnslayr is a person who grew up and matured through a remarkable period of time in sport that both changed culture and that is now being changed by culture.
And he has an insight into what the culture of sport was and awareness of what sport is losing, but not yet a strong sense of what the change really means and where it may be going and why?
But you are very close.
And because of your mixed ethnicity you have a very, very useful point of view from which to tell this story, or history, if you can find yourself and your time on a cultural time axis.
All popular activities that emerge eventually become politicized and weaponized for top down control of the people of a culture by its private oligarchy sooner or later.
It is the Tao of complex culture.
All the redemptive knowledge of history focuses not on how an ordinary person can live through this never ending process of being a target of control as one pursues one's own agenda.
Sport is a popular activity that emerges inevitably in most cultures.
It becomes politicized and weaponized for use on the people sooner or later.
The politicizing and weaponizing of it invariably accelerate during renaissances .
Renaissances evidence certain commonality of life cycle phasing.
Sport is one realm of viewing and knowing a renaissance.
Arts and letters, painting/sculpture, and music and science are not the only realms worth studying.
In certain ways, one can know a culture and map its stage BETTER through sport than the rest of the categories I have just mentioned.
Take a look.
You may have something to explore worth writing down, because of your point of view and your experience and your mixed ethnicity about the sport of our time, particularly basketball.
Sport is in a renaissance.
Renaissances are not simple.
They are not all good.
They are fraught with gain and loss.
They are finite.
To know one's own is to find oneself.
To find one's self is to leave a path for others.
Rock Chalk!
KU has come a long way.
From Linda Lovelace for President.
To Ellen DeGeneres for World Series Royalty.
Thank god for progress.
Ellen baby, I don't care who you fancy.
This is college in America.
A fertility ritual still...no matter how confused the genders are getting.
Wear something you wear when you are getting more comfortable with whomever you get more comfortable with and show the kids how sexy comedians can be.
Amy's got nothing on you but some pounds.
Repeat after me....
Aphrodite, goddess of love, sexuality and beauty
The Erotes
Anteros, god of requited love
Eros, god of love and sexual desire
Himeros, god of sexual desire
Hedylogos, god of sweet talk and flattery.
Hermaphroditus, god of hermaphrodites and of effeminate men.
Hymen, god of weddings and wedding songs
Pothos, god of sexual longing, yearning and desire
Ganymede, sometimes identified as the god of homosexual love
Peitho, personification of persuasion and seduction
Pan, god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature, hunting and rustic music, and companion of the nymphs, also associated with sexuality and fertility. Famous for his sexual powers and is often depicted with an erect phallus. Diogenes of Sinope, speaking in jest, related a myth of Pan learning masturbation from his father, Hermes, and teaching the habit to shepherds. Pan's greatest conquest was that of the moon goddess Selene. He accomplished this by wrapping himself in a sheepskin to hide his hairy black goat form, and drew her down from the sky into the forest where he seduced her.
Philotes (mythology), either Goddess of Affection or a Daimon of sexual intercourse.
And then make'em laugh.
Ellen Degeneres: Greek goddess of laughter and forgetting.
Rock Chalk!!!
Diallo? Who is Diallo?
Isn't he some guy that Calipari wanted, so that Cal could get two cleared for the price of one?
Diallo? We don't need no stinking Diallo!!!!!
Ahem...
Cheick Diallo, hear me out.
You are at the University of Kansas.
You are INSIDE Allen Field House.
Amazing things happen in that building.
You are no longer in low-magic places like Africa and New York, or Planet Earth generally.
You are in Basketball Tibet.
Beauty walks a razor's edge 94 feet long.
We are talking about a golden rectangle here.
We are talking about Big Medicine.
You are in the Temple that Indiana Jones went to that George Lucas realized he dare not tell the story of. You are in the Temple where Indy found a chamber under mid court where a knight waits by the basketball holy grail, where Indy said to his poppa, "This place, poppa, it is too perfect to disturb. We must not lead the Nazis, or the Commies here. We must not let the NeoCons and NeoLibs learn of this place. We must let the knight protect the Holy Grail of college basketball in this chamber under the Jayhawk at mid court until the second coming. And so George swapped Lucas Films and ILM and so on for a fat share of Disney precisely in order to make sure that no one ever makes the last installment of Indiana Jones. George Lucas, you see, my dear Cheick, used to drag race out in the Central Valley of California before he went off to USC to become one of the kids with beards that took over the Silver Screen for a time. And he almost killed himself on a flat open stretch outside Modesto, and that near death experience, plus a father who ran an appliance store, plus a timely exchange with Joseffa Campbell gave him uncommon vision for a hot rodder. George knows what to tamper with and what to leave intact. He decided to retire to keep himself from making the last installment and possibly destroying the beauty and goodness of the living myth that is Kansas basketball. And he did this for a reason, my dear Cheick. He did this to make sure that amazing things would continue to happen unabated in that Monarch of the Midlands called Allen Field House. You, Cheick will experience some of those amazing things. Some how, I don't know how, you will wind up on James Naismith Court and be a part of some of the amazing things to come. Trust me. Keep practicing and getting better. It will come to pass.
On another thread we swapped short reminiscences of the playground, something we have done before.
Damn its fun to get old with someone. :-)
Hell, yeah, the playground!!!!
I feel like we are the oldest living survivors of the US Civil War when we write about this now.
I suspect your experience with the playground was much more conventional and so relevant than mine. Mine, like so much of my life, was out of step with my times and idiosyncratic.
Seriously, there ought to be some national monument to playground basketball. I don't really care which part of the country its in, so long as its on, or beside, a real asphalt court with real chain link fence and real metal posts, backboards and chain nets that young men once played for pride on.
One court needs to be preserved intact on the National Register of Historic Places, not for the sake of that particular court, or the greats that played there, but for the sake of all the courts and all the kids that grew up on them, and for the sake of all the adults that saved their sanities and in my case, my life, on them.
As I age, I increasingly think the real seeds of integration were sewn on these courts. These courts were often NOT integrated early on I have heard. They were places where kids of segregated neighborhoods played only against other kids like themselves. But in time, that intrinsic human need to test one self out in the world lead these neighborhood kids to go seek out other tests, other teams to beat, on other playground courts. Early on the kids went to play like kind kids--poor black kids sought out and played poor black kids from other poor black neighborhoods, and poor Irish kids searched out poor Irish kids from other Irish neighborhoods. But then they started searching out Jewish kids, and Italian kids, and Polish kids, and so on. For a long time the suburban kids were afraid to go to the inner cities and play, both for the beating they might take on the court but more for the one they might take to and from the court--afraid for the parentâs car that would be stripped by the time they got back to the car.
But the desire to play, to prove one's self at the game over time overruled the fears. And little by little the kids began to come to the courts where the best players tended to be. And it was really on these courts where the mere possibility of integrating a generation of Americans emerged. People have to want to integrate. There has to be something fun, or exciting, or otherwise worth integrating to do. Music was that way and many went looking for new kinds of music and it helped lay the sound track for a integration. But sports are action, and competition, and not just kissing' and dancing and do-wop harmonizing on a street corner around a barrel of burning trash in February.
Sports are another, a next step that must be taken to meaningful integration. They are not the last step. They are the first one of substance in my opinion. The first one that really lays the foundation for being able to think we can work and make money together, and in competition, and not have to kill each other over the scraps.
People have to interact just enough to know they are the same, only different, not JUST different. They have to say, "it ain't right. I don't understand a lot of their shit, but it ain't right that they can't play. I've played with them. I know what they can do. It ain't right."
It ain't right spoken without first hand experience is a platitude.
It ain't right spoken with experience is a value judgement with a conscience.
It ain't right spoken from experience is one of the most powerful and culture changing phrases that exist.
Children have just as many prejudices and fears as adults, maybe more, but they have less experience that makes them think nothing can change. They also have a great need to prove themselves. They do most things for pride and for fun. Getting paid much is beyond their imaginations most of the time. Their pay is proving they can equal or beat someone, or some team, that people tell them can't be equalled or beaten; that are too good. Oh, yeah? Well, let's go see about that; that is what a kid thinks, at least some of the bold ones.
Of course, a lot of the kids never go past the talking stage. But there are a few young lions that are really looking' to let this life force loose on someone and see who is the best. And there is another group that are just looking for someone to hang with that is as monomaniacal as they are; that care as much about this game as they do. They go figuring they WILL get the snot beaten out of them at first, but they want to be accepted and they want to learn the game from persons that care about it as much as they do.
It was about Love and Pride IMHO.
You loved the game.
And you just wanted to be proud of something--yourself, your pals, your game, where you came from, whatever.
At school they told you you weren't this and you weren't that and you did this wrong and you did that wrong. Eventually they expelled you, or graduated you with such poor grades no one had any hope for you. You weren't good enough to make the team, or you made it but you weren't the star, or you were the star, but you wanted to play the guys who were the real legends of the play grounds cause even the pros talked about them once in a great while in some high low-brow article by Frank Deford, or Rick Telander article buried in the back of SI, if anyone got you to read it.
I was part of the fraidy cats, when I was in high school.
I didn't go to the asphalt courts in the inner city.
Too chicken.
And when my game dead ended after high school, I remember looking around and thinking if I had gone to those playgrounds, I might have made it another level, even just to some crappy small college.
But I didn't.
And so I went to KU and I started playing pickup and intramural ball and I started running into ringers, usually the black teams, and I realized this was a different way of playing and I didn't mind the rule breaking and getting roughed up after awhile.
So I joined a city league team in Lawrence thinking I would be safe enough, and of course I quickly got punched out in a game, and thought about quitting, but then decided, fuck this, I can hit, I grew up fighting my older brother, I can take this, if that's what it takes. And I began to take pride in letting my finger nails grow and scratching the shit out guys, and talking some trash, not much, but a little. I could run and jump a little. Not much but a little. And I could shoot off the forward drive, and I was quick left to baseline off a fake right. And I really liked to body on defense. And I didnât mind squaring off, if it werenât going to be too one sided, or if I wasnât going to get gang banged. And I had played enough football that I didn't mind taking shots...or giving them.
And then I got serious with a girl and serious about school and I stopped going to city league.
And then I really got away from the game.
And then grad school.
And it was a really good one and so I had to work night and day to barely make it through.
No ball.
And then I find myself in my career in Los Angeles with everyone snorting coke and doing the all night floating club circuit in the warehouses south of downtown and after a year of it I look at myself in the mirror and I don't see me anymore. I see a vampire. I see this pale piece of shit that knows every joint and every underground arts and farts music hell hole and that knows all the bartenders with pierced titties and tongues and can get by the bouncers at most of the clubs, but what I really see is what I grew to call the Vampire LeBate.
I don't see the kid I was. I don't see the young go getter I was as a Yuppie. I don't see the ambitious brainiac some called me. I don't see the love of anything, or the pride. I see a day time life of learning high stakes bidness in the fast lane and a night time of Le Bateâthe Vampire. I am in my late 20s. In the day time I meet famous actors. I meet famous painters. I meet business big shots. I sit in Chavez Ravine in box seats two boxes away from a white haired Cary Grant in thick, black Foster Grants and a fat Elizabeth Taylor. But at night I am the Vampire LeBate. I live LA what Anne Rice fantasized in New Orleans. There was no there there. There was LA LA Land day and LA LA Land night. I didn't even know any real multi-generation Los Angelenos. I didn't even know a real Californian when I met them. It was just bidness day, and the living dead at night and Melrose Avenue or the Strip in between.
Basketball saved me from a lot of trouble when I was a kid, even if I were one of the fraidy cats. It kept me from drugs and it kept me from petty theft and it kept me from disappearing at an early age up the snatch of the first sunrise I met.
But basketball saved my life when I was in my late 20s. The Vampire LeBate was facing the precipice: he was ripe for a designer drug, he had money, he had access, he had the pad, he had the women, he had the wheels, he had emptiness, the hollow, the sense of accomplishment of things he did not love, of things that killed more and more of him, of things that regenerated only bigger and bigger emptiness.
The Vampire LeBate looked in the mirror one morning in the City of Angels. He fallen into an apartment in the Miracle Mile off La Brea. He was afraid he would never feel anything again, never love anything again, not in that simple pure way of love. Not the way he loved the frozen net in his family's backyard court on a January Saturday morning in Kansas City, when he threw a hand painted, crimson and blue Wilson rubber basketball underhand up through the glistening frozen net and watched the ball push it upwards through the orange rim and it stayed standing inverted, in perfect, joyful gravity defying absurdity, until the kid that the Vampire LeBate once was caught the ball, stepped back several steps and launched a set shot that banked off the back board, and knocked the icy net back down through the rim to normal. And he played till his hands were too cold to feel the ball anymore and he came in and got his hot chocolate from his mom, who was not yet addicted to valium.
That's what I remembered looking in that mirror in the Miracle Mile. I didn't remember any awards. I didn't remember any degrees. I didn't remember any lays. I didn't even remember any friends or family. I didn't remember Kennedy being assassinated. Or Bobby. Or King. I didn't remember a movie. Or Bob Dylan. Or Marvin Gaye. Or Springsteen. Or the Beatles. Or John Prine. I didn't remember a teacher, or a professor. I remembered that frozen net on the snowy morning.
And at that moment I knew I either had to go play basketball, or that frozen net was going to become my Rosebud. You remember Rosebud from Citizen Kane; Rosebud was Charles Foster Kane's snow sled from his childhood that he loved more than anything and that he kept among the things his great wealth had allowed him to collect but that he never used again. As he is dying, he whispers Rosebud and the whole movie is about a reporter trying to figure out among other things who or what Rosebud was. Kane was unloved. He spent his whole life trying to make people love him. But he failed. Orson Welles and Herman Mankiewicz were careful to leave why he failed open ended--to let each of us decide why he failed despite all his wealth to find happiness.
I had studied the movie some time before, when I was trying to learn to write screen plays (something I failed at by the way) in my spare time as the Vampire LeBate. I was quite certain that Kane failed to find happiness because, after not being loved by his family, he never learned how to love himself. How could he? He had no model. He learned instead how to be narcissistic--to be always pushing himself front and center into the void of his feeling and to further accomplishments. He was a talented person and so he could accomplish a lot. But if he didn't love himself enough to go do what he loved, well, then he was doomed never to find happiness of any lasting kind.
As the Vampire LeBate looked into the mirror in the Miracle Mile, it became strikingly clear. Either he had to go play basketball that moment, or he was going to never find happiness. It was that simple. Play or die unhappy.
I had not played basketball for many years at that time. I did not even know where to go really to find a game. I was jogging some then and I had jogged past a YMCA a few times and I recalled they had an indoor court, but when I went there the court was closed.
Next, I recalled that I had played paddle ball on an outdoor court--a wall with a couple side walls really--south of the Santa Monica freeway. South of the Ten as we used to call it, where things got poor and a little rough in a hurry. I had gone there with women I had gotten to know in the clubs--you know the type, black everything, a few tats, lived somewhere out between Venice and Culver City east of the 405 now, a weird pair of chicks that had wanted to play paddle ball for kicks late at night when they were out of their minds on whatever they were on. The Vampire LeBate was not even trying for a threesome. He was just lonely. This court that I had been to many months before was somewhere south of the 10 and so I drove there in shorts, a t-shirt and some jogging shoes. I didn't even have a ball. It was a Saturday morning--one of those awesomely beautiful crisp Saturdays in what passes for winter in LA where you can see the San Gabriels when you are up on the 10 and practically count pine needles on trees on the peaks beyond the downtown skyline from 30 miles away. Awesome morning! Maybe the most beautiful morning of my life. I got to the court I remembered. It was part of a school yard and there was graffiti everywhere. Chain link fencing. Poor neighborhoods are different in LA. They don't look so intimidating as in the Midwest and East, even though in some ways they are more dangerous because the police are never near to anything and its flat and hard to run and hide anywhere.
The Vampire LeBate didn't care that morning. He needed to play a game of ball to save his life. Maybe not even play a game. Just shoot some buckets. In LA south of the 10 it was just the very edge of the bad neighborhoods that then got drastically worse for 20-30 miles of South Central and Baldwin Park (the Park was an island of sorts where the beginnings of a Black middle class was emerging). There were never big crowds playing in the transitional areas, just a few. The big crowds of kids playing were deep in South Central I had heard, and there were in door courts that were supposed to be crowded in those days, too. Boys clubs where guys like Jim Brown walked around in African garb and tried to talk kids out of gang life dramatized in movies like Dennis Hopperâs âColors.â Yeah, Dennis was from Dodge. But the Vampire LeBate had no intention of going down there and getting his ass kicked somewhere before he even got to iron and chain net.
In the transitional neighborhoods, there were always a few kids on the playground courts shooting around. I had noticed that much in my driving around LA that previous year. That was all the Vampire LeBate wanted, or needed. Just someone to be there with a ball willing to let a vampire shoot a couple, so as not to die whispering "basketball." My ambition was very circumscribed. I was looking to save myself, nothing more.
When I walked out on the court there were just two kids and two adults. Each pair were on opposite ends. One pairâthe kidsâwas Hispanic. One pairâthe adultsâwas black. I had dated a Hispanic woman recently for a few weeks, which was the Vampire LeBate's idea of a long term relationship at the time. I opted for the Hispanic kids, who seemed more likely to stick me with a knife, but less likely to want to than the big black dudes. i had learned in the clubs that a lot of black men at that time were armed, or kept heat in the car for special occasions. I could run from a knife, not a bullet.
âHola!â
It is strange how one thinks at times like these.
So: I walked up and rebounded a few and passed them the ball so they could shoot without retrieving their own rebounds. They eyed me suspiciously for a time, then suspicion yielded to some taunting ridicule in Spanish I did not understand. But based on my interactions with my Hispanic girl friend of two weeks I decided these were ordinary taunts and not menacing.
I was touching a ball. I was under metal nets. I was on an asphalt court. Not only was I not dead, I could feel something.
Shortly a couple white guys showed up. These were guys somewhat like me. They were not vampires, but they were Yuppies as we were called in those days trying to shake off the hangover and office cubicle numbness of a week of pushing paper by breaking a sweat on a Saturday morning. I could relate to them, but felt a strange rush of wishing they weren't there. The Vampire LeBate felt more in common with the Hispanic kids who probably had never seen the inside of a cubicle except maybe at a police station. They were there for the same reason the Vampire LeBate was there; they had no where else to go and nothing else to do. They were there, because it felt good and because it wasn't home. They were there because they liked to shoot around. One had a wonky shot that would have made Cole Aldrichâs J look like Jerry Westâs, while the other had decent form. Obviously neither one had ever played organized ball. They had the untamed, idiosyncratic movements of a playground player. One had a crucifix on a neck chain hanging outside his strapped t-shirt. The other had a t-shirt with some logo I didn't recognize--the kind you pick up cheap in a thrift store and don't care what the logo is. This kid also had a goatee and a faded pork pie hat and sun glasses. The only thing I knew for sure was they weren't pro baseball caps, which in those days was a signal of gang membership. KC Royals caps equalled Killer Crypts, etc. Neither were the black adults at the other end of the court. The level of racial diversity on the court I guessed was typical for this transitional neighborhood at that time.
Hispanic guys, even kids, at least in those days, had a different way of testing you, of making you feel like you might not be good enough. They were always smiling at you. At first it seemed friendly; then you realized they were actually laughing at you politely. It was the Hispanic equivalent of a black guy looking at you cool and shaking his head, or kind of looking past you and indicating you ain't shit.
The Vampire LeBate strangely liked this. He liked that no one was being totally disingenuous, as they routinely were at work. Nor were they totally living out fantasy lives in the night, as they were in the clubs. Out on the asphalt, it was vaguely like it had been when the Vampire LeBate had still been alive and gone hunting with his father and his friends. There was unprocessed manhood out here on the asphalt among the Hispanic kids, who had thin beards, but were not men, just machismitos, or whatever the Spanish diminutive was.
And when the brothers were finally engaged by the two white professionals to play a little game, and the brothers got done shakin' their heads and smiling like they were gonna mop the pencil necks and get back to shooting around, a couple more Hispanic guys showed up and said, "Hey, why don't we have a real game here?" So: the Vampire LeBate quickly finds himself on Club Taco playing Team Salt and Pepper with two black men that seemed to know how to play and two pencil necks that had great cardio but were not going to be hard to guard, even as long as I had been away from the game.
Out on the asphalt, no one asks how long its been since you picked up a basketball in the sense of wanting to know,only as a taunt. I was the tallest on my team, so I got the taller of the two black guys. The guy outweighed me by 40 pounds. He looked kind of like Snacks after a week or so on Jenny Craig, not six months. The mofo backed me down like I was a feather stuck to his boxers and jumped a little and shot it in. He rolled his eyes and we ran to the other end. I realized I was in serious oxygen starvation the first trip.
On offense, the Hispanic guys whipped the ball around without really making inroads to the basket. There is a lot of posturing with their game, as there is with everyone's on a playground, but they differ from white and black players, or at least did back then, because their sense of machismo almost made the posturing and taunting more important than trying to beat you for a bucket. Now, I know, these guys were just grab ass guys, not the kind that were good that I played later on in my stint on the playgrounds, but there is some of this even in great Hispanic players. I believe it derives from the Catholicism of their culture. Catholicism is all inclusive. No matter what you do, no matter how you sin, you still have to go to communion and be apart of the order. No one is ever really outside of a Catholic culture, they are just higher or lower on the social pecking order. Even the government is under the Catholic church in Latin Catholic cultures, even if not officially. The Catholic Church is forever, so progress does not mean what it means to more protestant, or Judaic ordered cultures. In any case, my guys on Team Taco liked to jitter bug and talk to their opponent, as much as they liked to put it on the deck and go. Team Salt and Pepper had to beat them bad a few times before they got serious. So: the net effect of this Machismo was to spot the other team a couple basket lead. Back down the court, and Snacks Lite is backing me down again, only this time he is positioning me to go through me, not over me. So: as he starts his drop step into me leading with a shoulder and forearm I knock the ball loose and dribble it the length of the court and lay it up and listen to the chains. I am feeling ALIVE! We come down the court, the brother clocks me with an elbow as he passes it to his long pal who dunks. Now I mean a real elbow in the nose. I mean eyes watering, stem wound, and, you know, the white guys, they can't stand their noses being pasted kind of elbow. Back down the court again, one of the Hispanic guys drives on Snacks Lite's face and hook passes to his pal who elevates in the weirdest, most contorted jump the Vampire LeBate has ever seen and he rattles a hard layup in. Back at the other end, the tall black guy dribbles at the Hispanic guy encouraging him out, and then blows by him and flushes one that leaves the rim vibrating and the backboard wavering, before the ball practically embeds in the asphalt.
I am in awe.
I am in awe maybe for the first time in years.
Movie stars and $50 Million dollar developments did not leave me in awe. Meeting rockers in clubs did not leave me in awe. That f-ing dunk left me in awe.
Not just jaw dropping awe at some LA tail that is XTremely well tended and giving off heat radiation like the waves coming off a hot desert road on the way to Palm Springs, but real awe to the core in the moment that I am participating in, not just wishing I could have some of.
In that moment, the Vampire LeBate left and never returned.
In that moment, I became a basketball fan again, and I played basketball, and I thought about the game I loved, and I talked the game again, and though I only played regularly another two years, I never stopped talking about the game and watching and learning it and knowing that it was part of the elixir of life that made me alive.
T.S. Eliot has a great line in The Waste Land. Whatever else it is about, its about a guy, sometimes Eliot, sometimes Tiresias, sometimes god only knows who, stuck in rising cultural wasteland of London with a crazy woman, and a lot of crazy characters, trying to make sense of life after the carnage of the Great War.
"If there were water, and no rock..." Eliot writes.
He keeps repeating variations of the line.
It conveys his thirst and the hardness of a world where there is not water, nothing regenerative, just crazy women and crazy characters and a culture torn asunder--wreckage one is futilely trying to transform into shelter, food, and some sex. Remember: T.S. was a good midwestern kid from St. Louis with a Harvard education and a cultural inferiority complex about his home country trying at once to escape its vulgarities and also redeem them by proving that the unwashed colonials could exceed the haggard mother country by becoming even better at being British than the British. He was a foolish young man, as we all are when young, but one helluva poet, which we all arenât, young or old.
Understand I was in a sadly comic way just like T.S.. I had left behind my good midwestern roots and was determined to prove that I could be come more superciliously superficial than the supercilious superficial Southern Californians that I thought I understood but did not then grasp the depths of.
Before that mirror moment my version was:
"If there were ball, and no concreteâŚâ
There is more concrete in Southern California than anywhere else in America. It was in a way a fulfillment of my youth to come to Southern California. I grew up in Tomâs Town formed by the concrete of Municipal Auditorium, of the Kansas City Power and Light Tower, of the WWI Memorial, of the Nelson, of Brush Creek and so on. I grew up in a concrete, art deco and red tiled Castillian oasis on grassâa horizontal city with a little high rise node on a hill before Los Angeles was such. Once Kansas City was Westport in America, then Los Angeles was. How could I NOT retrace the migration? How could I not go to Los Angeles to become more Los Angeleno than Los Angelenos. My arrival there seems as inevitable to me now looking back in a way, as it back then seemed utterly random. I was the master of my destiny, not the puppet at the stringâs end of it. HA!
How could I possibly have randomly arrived there? No way. It was the concrete and the western most-ness of Los Angeles and its high low-culture that it and Kansas City shared that made me come. Everything invented from whole cloth in both places in less than a century. No past European legacy worth noting further back. None. Just raw nature and an annihilated aboriginal ur-legacy people liked to talk about the pot shards of, but not the genocide that left only the pot shards and a few town names.
I had come there to prove that the great unwashed masses of midwesterners could be more superciliously superficial in and about high low-culture than the Los Angelenos. And I had succeeded impressively in barely a year.
But for a long time I did not know even to say it--to say what I did not have there.
That is real hell.
To not even know what you need that you lack.
That was what had transformed me inexorably into the Vampire LeBate at the mirror.
âBasketballâ he whispered, like Charles Foster Kane.
But LeBate is long gone, and good riddance to him.
Nah, just old fashioned asymmetric benefits of selfish benefit from prejudice. None of the rationalizers here of not having hired African Americans and women are secretive about the asymmetries of their thinking. They are proud of it. To them, this is normal. To want attainable, reasonable fairness is normal, too. They want that. They just don't want to act now--to bear any of the cost now, because they don't see a benefit to themselves now. It was the same with automakers and seat belts. They wished people didn't die. But they saw no next quarter incentive to changing. It was easier to do the wrong thing.
There is also an element of strategy to racism, sexism, and all top down ideological encouragement of asymmetric treatment of human beings, but strategy is mostly not conspiracy either.
Take richness/power. With food, roof, leisure, purposeful enjoyable work and security, they mean nothing if everyone is rich/powerful. Richness/power take on meaning and operational effectiveness only if they are in asymmetric distribution. Thus, ideologies fostering asymmetry are pursued top down, by most groups at most levels of the hierarchy, and at most nodes of the network to heighten control of future beneficial action and its sustainability.
Prejudice is a highly reliable strategy of creating and sustaining this asymmetry.
Conserving prejudice is a highly reliable tactic of preserving the strategy of prejudice.
Conspiracy isn't necessary most of the time, and only necessary at the margin, because conservation of prejudice is self incentivizing.
Unless laws, or wars, raise the cost of conserving prejudice to those imposing it as normal and tolerable in the short run and destined to be righted in the long run when they bear no cost, it goes on mostly without conspiracy--mostly through normalization. I try never to forget that considerable numbers of slaves were afraid of freedom; that Harriet Tubbman said one of her biggest problems was getting slaves to think freedom was even possible; this normalization through open, top down institutionalizing of asymmetry is the mechanism/dynamic that must be altered, not conspiracy.
Conspiracy assumes one cannot know who did what and that one must live with it. This is why intelligence organizations often spread and subsidize conspiracy theories in the wakes of their covert activities. Every person that believes in conspiracies and views the world through that lens is a self limiting problem. If you look for conspiracies you will find them and by definition their ultimate culprits cannot be known. Elegant. But just plain bad to do to a culture or group.
We just need to hire some more black head coaches and some women head coaches to free ALL of us of this strategy of asymmetry just a little more. There is no perfection. Not even thinking about perfection. But there is much greater symmetry both feasible and desirable.
Gotta do it.
Then the black folk gotta lend a hand and get us a Chinese head coach. Imagine how many shoes a great Chinese head coach could sell and how many more Yao Mings must be in China to develop in 2 billion people!
KU basketball. It helped change America. It can help change the world! But we can't lay down on the job and we can't rest on our laurels. We have fix what we have missed so far and keep moving forward. The more of these asymmetries we fix the bigger and better our recruiting and winning will become!
There is self interest--the enlightened kind--in doing the right thing.
Rock Chalk!
Good for Cliff. He probably would have started and played 30 mpg all season last year, if his family member's loan hadn't appeared to make Self hedge develop Cliff with Jam and Luke all season.
@JayHawkFanToo said:
KU should hire the best âpersonâ for the job regardless of color or gender, period. I am all for equal opportunity but I am not in favor of quotas
This is comical and tragic in 2015.
KU won't consider a woman for the men's basketball team. It never offered Pat Summit the job and she was better than Ted, Larry, Roy, and Bill and everyone knows it. She had no peer except maybe Wooden. She would have kicked the nuts off Konsonants 9 times out of ten. She was the best and KU never tried to hire her for the KU men's job. And that's a PERIOD.
And if you were really against quotas and for equal opportunity you would insist Self step aside with his now independent wealth and tell CBernie to get the best qualified woman in the men's head coaching position tomorrow. 51% of our population are women and there hasn't been a single woman as men's head coach at KU in over a century. If you don't like quotas, stop forcing them to be used. For god's sakes at least let a woman be head coach of women's ball, if you won't let them coach the men's team! And there's got to be a few African American men's coaches as qualified as Schneider, right?
Help me, help me, help me, I think I'm going insane!
I HATE quotas, but I LOVE quotas compared to letting this horse manure go on! If Americans had done the right thing about race and gender even just a century ago I would never have had to put up with all these quotas in my life. Everyone hates quotas, especially women and blacks. They hate living in a culture that has to be forced WITH QUOTAS to do the right thing.
Hire the best, like Pat Summit, or John McLendon, then WE don't have to be treated like hood wearing scum, or mysoginists. DO THE RIGHT THING AND WE DONT HAVE TO BE FORCE FED QUOTAS to make us do the right thing.
See, I'm fed up with having to put up with quotas, because I am willing to hire the best, but too many others haven't been. If we had hired John McLendon when we should have, instead of Harp, or Owens, or LB, or Roy, this would all be behind us. Same with Pat Summit. And I can guarandamnty ya we would have more rings with those two substituted for Harp, Owens and Roy than we have now. Several more.
P.S. I was probably the first UDK reporter to interview Marion Washington one on one at length. She was a helluva woman. And she knew the game. Not a great coach but a good one. She knew enough to put a saddle on Lynette.
P.P.S: "So much for racism and sexism." HOWLING! Peabody here. We're in the way back machine, Sherman. It's 1960 again.
P.P.P.S: And yes I knew about Coach Norwood with Miranda between him and Ted. If you wish hard, he might even comment here. Don't know WHAT he might say. Might say he's going fishin and he's too old for this shizzle. Whatever, I'm doubting he's going to say, yep, so much for racism and sexism.
It matters because it's a woman's basketball team and KU WONT EVEN CONSIDER HIRING A WOMAN COACH FOR THE MEN'S TEAM.
DO YOU REALLY NOT SEE THE ASYMMETRIC UNFAIRNESS?
Absolutely, so what you're really trying to avoid talking about is why were hiring a man for the coach of the women. . By rights, we should wait a century or more to hire a man for the women's team. It's only fair. There is no rush to hire a man for the women's team.
It makes it sound even worse when you try to rationalize it.
Are four African-Americans on the bench progress or the number Self has to have to convince African American recruits and parents that it's safe to go to a school that has never hired an African American head coach in over a century. If I were an African American, I would really wonder about that. What the hell, I might say, might as well go play in Dixie with the crackers where at least it's warm. The head coaches are all crackers at KU, Duke and UNC! At least UK hired Tubby once. May go there for a visit, son, the dad might say.
How many good young white assistants aren't getting a shot, because KU has to have 4 black assistants to make up for never hiring a black head coach?
There is no free lunch on this.
Prejudice mucks everything up.
LB had a black assistant coach in 1985 or so. This is flipping 2015. We broke the assistant coach colorline quite a long time ago.
Duke and UNC are disgraceful about not having hired an African American HC, too, But then their state fought for slavery. I expect a little more out of KU and Kansas.
Hell! Even Fizzouri has had two black head coaches!
It's embarrassing.
These indifferent--we've done enough--attitudes are what are forcing Tubby Smith to organize the black head coaches Association outside of the NCAA (which has its own committee on the issue also) to try to regain lost ground on the number of African-Americans coaching in Division I the last few years.
Every time we drag our feet on this as a culture, eventually we pay for it with inefficient quotas. The quotas are either government imposed, and/or sometimes the quotas take the form of redundant coaching associations that then make counterveiling alliances with big shoe and watchdog outfits like the drake group.
If we just loosened up and did the right thing, we would never have to have the sorts of inefficient redundant associations and countervailing alliances. if we just loosened up and did the right thing, we would never have to go through this crap.
But we are talking about the head coaching position and whomever he may be has a lot of organizational clout and a bully pulpit influencing where and who get juicy contracts and favors in the basketball revenue hog trough. And people have to identify with him to be big donors.
So there are a lot more factors than bench coaching and recruiting shaping the call and there in the prejudices operate.
Good to hear from you.
I am usually gender neutral on hires. But until KU men's basketball commits to hiring a woman, which I really don't see happening the few two centuries, because we haven't even had an African American head coach a decade plus after vile UK had one, I would like for KU to hire the best available woman. It unseemly for KU TO BE REGRESSIVE IN BOTH SPORTS.
That being said, he seems like a good guy and a good coach.
Phog and son? Can't remember.
Do you recall any previous signed KU recruits under Self the last three or four seasons actually succeeding in attracting another recruit to KU? Each season it seems we hear about recruits trying to convince other recruits to join them, but then I never learn later on whether, or not, they were successful in doing so. Or at least my increasingly feeble memory does not recall. :-) Just wondering.
đ
It is certainly a question worth asking as we look on remotely from the outside in.
I don't recall sufficient data yet to answer it reliably.
My hypothesis would be that it might be one of a complex of drivers moving the sport in the direction it is moving, but not the only driver.
Life is complex.
Insurance and long term law suits for effects of playing the game may also be a factor.
Maybe some influential persons even want to see the game grow less violent, as I, a board rat without influence, do.
And we are not yet really dealing with Big Gaming in an insightful way IMHO. Big Gaming thrives on predictability to some degree. And all parties to the game would rather see the best players playing than not be playing due to injury. There many be many forces converging to change the game.
And we know that the players are increasingly NOT coming from the playground environment that was rather harsh in its own way once upon a time. Players are increasingly "developed" from an early age and so represent sunk costs in which their destruction by injury seriously injures financial interests of many.
Look at this table above. Aren't we doing good? Doesn't it just make you feel all satisfied? We're down from maybe 18,000 alcohol related traffic fatalities, to, oh, I don't know, 13,000 a year. Hell, 13,000 dead Americans a year is nothing. Its like Harry Lime in The Third Man looking down from the Ferris Wheel on occupied Vienna after World War II selling bum antibiotics on the black market that were killing people and causing birth defects and saying to his old friend Hollie Martins, who was questioning his ethics:
"Hollie Martins: [on the ferris wheel] Have you ever seen any of your victims?
Harry Lime: You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don't be melodramatic. [gestures to people far below] Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays."
Its even possible fatalities haven't fallen because fewer persons are driving drunk, too.
Its possible that fatalities have fallen because medicine has improved and so we are losing fewer of these accident victims.
Hmmm.
On my bad days, I look at these and other tragedies of drunk driving and our culture's long term impotence to actually solve this vast problem, rather than just reduce it of late, and I cannot help but wonder if a complex (not a conspiracy) of interwoven investment in Big Auto, Big Insurance, Big Judicary, Big Addictive Substance, Big Insurance and Big Medicine might perpetuate it--MOSTLY JUST PASSIVELY DISCOURAGE IT FROM BEING SOLVED AND OCCASIONALLY ACTIVELY, ALSO. Big Auto, Big Addictive Substance, Big Insurance, Big Media and Big Medicine make vast short, medium, and long term revenues related to drunk driving. Let's list some of the revenue centers in a far less than exhaustive way.
Big Auto (the constellation of the auto companies their suppliers and their dependent deal networks):
Gets to sell tens, or hundreds, of thousands of new cars annually to replace the totaled cars.
Gets to repair annually tens, or hundreds, of thousands of cars partially wrecked.
Big Insurance:
Continually appears to use these accidents as a lever to raise premiums likely beyond actuarial necessities.
Gets to sell more and more insurance at higher and premiums related to anticipating the risk of losing bread winners and loved ones to drunk driving injury and fatalities.
Big Judiciary:
Lawyers make fortunes defending and prosecuting cases related to these accidents.
Cities and Police use this issue to justify hiring huge numbers of patrol cars and motorcycles to issue speeding citations that are a key revenue stream for many cities and towns.
Prisons make fortunes off housing these offenders.
Big Addictive Substance:
I don't need to master the obvious here.
Big Media:
Gets a free steady stream of grisly media content ideal for keeping audiences stimulated and watching the horror of the evening news.
Big Medicine:
It is almost incomprehensible how much money is made off alcohol related injuries and fatalities.
Step back and look at this list of players as an interdependent complex--economic ecology, if you will. Look at the amount of revenues involved to all of these large organizations growing out of these alcohol related auto deaths. And look at who ultimately pays for all these revenues: ordinary persons--both the sober ones and the drunks--with their lives and with their premiums, fees, etc.
The alcohol related death and Injury accidents have to form in aggregate a very significant economic sector of our domestic economy.
And we already know from Warren Buffet's (reputedly controlling investor in Geico) reputed comments to investors about the problem of driverless auto technology that the auto insurance industry feels traumatized by the prospect of the anticipated reduction in accidents from imminent introduction of driverless auto technology. Buffet believes it will introduce a sharp reduction in accidents and he pulls no punches; that would threaten the solvency of the auto insurance industry if it were introduced too fast.
No conspiracy!
He comments on it matter of factly.
He's just doing his job helping insure Americans profitably for his investors...and himself.
Its business. I believe Buffet has noting intrinsically against driverless auto technology. Probably even thinks its a good thing in some regards. Probably thinks it will generate new kinds of accidents that will need insurance. Just not enough of them to offset lost accidents, and so support the cost benefit model and actuarial stats the industry currently is structured around.
So: if driverless auto technology threatens the solvency of the auto insurance industry by reducing accidents, imagine what eliminating drunk driving would do to the bottom lines not only of Big Insurance, but Big Auto, Big Media, Big Addictive Substance, Big Medicine, Big Judiciary, etc., but to the whole global economy if it were allowed to happen.
Staggering.
Many in the complex of industries described above have probably known for a decade or more that drive by wire technologies embedded in highways could have sharply reduced the carnage on the nation's highways. Many can guess the complex reputedly lobbied quietly against it, or at the very least passively resisted it--dragged their feet in layman's terms.
Now, everyone knows driverless auto technology (a nexus of in-car computers, sensors, fuzzy algorithms, GPS, and wifi that eliminate even the need for in road wires) could end it. Who wants to bet the complex is lobbying quietly against the standards required to bring it to market, at least until the industry can restructure its sunk costs over, oh, say, the next 50 flipping years?
Killing humans is big business not only in war, but on the nation's highways. There is lots of money to be made killing humans, or letting humans be killed. There are huge long term sunk costs in killing humans, and letting humans be killed, not just in war but, to be as annoyingly redundant as the killing itself, I will repeat, killed on the highways.
I don't wish to demonize these folks. Its just business. Its just satisficing pursuit of profit in a rational cost-benefit activity. They have to kill who they have to kill. Or maybe a fairer way to say it is: they have to let be killed who they have to let be killed. They don't really want to kill them. They just, well, they just have to do what they have to do. They are like zombies in George Romero's Dead Movies. They don't want to profit from killing, maiming, and eating the living; they have to. Its how it is. The Vampire LeStat would understand. Surely we can, too?
Truth be told, what used to be called the Merchants of Death, but which should now more aptly be called The Money Managers of Death, really aren't very good at thinking of how to make money any other way than killing people. They are apparently go with the flow types. They are apparently conservers and growers of the status quo of sunk costs. They are proud of being this way. They think this is the right way to be--the only way really. Everything else leads to anarchy they seem to think. To them, just adding seat belts once upon a time seemed a threat to Western financial order.
These are good people. I view them as I view the zombies in Night of the Living Dead. They aren't evil. They just have to do it. Thus, I want to understand them and be compassionate, same as I wanted to with Romero's zombies.
They were kind of funny in their own way, when they weren't threatening to eat someone at least. They stumbled around mindlessly bumping into each other in subdivisions, and shopping malls, and what have you. They were kind of the Keystone cops of death; that's the way Money Managers are, too. They are so used to investing in death that they are numb to it. They actually stumble and bump into each other trying to find the next investment vehicle of death--the next new way to kill, maim, and eat persons. Like zombies, the part of them that might have been appalled has died.
I suspect the Money Managers of Death even view making money by killing people as a professionally necessary "diversification" in the investment risk management game; that's the game they like to play, you know.
Oh, sure, they invest some, even a lot, in making goods and services that don't kill people, but many good money managers know they eventually HAVE to diversify into the death business to diversify risk.
There are goods and services that nurture life, and goods and services that nurture death. Gotta invest in both. Gotta. Even in just a random walk down the yellow brick road of money management.
Gotta do it.
And, of course, life and death really are intertwined, aren't they.
The world's great religions have always understood this.
And Money Management is now one of the world's great religions, isn't it?
Killing people is essential to making so many of the other goods and services necessary. Now, I mean this with all due respect: contrary to the hype, the Money Managers of Death aren't super good business men at all. They are rather one-trick death ponies; that is what they are.
I am not demonizing them here, nor am I suggesting that they are evil persons and conspirators in this. I am only describing them as they are, doing what they do, for the apparent reasons that they keep doing them. Its a job. There's money to be made. Someone will do it. They aren't really good at painting, or singing, or inventing the next iPhone, or visualizing heaven on earth, or ensuring plenty for all. They are just good at killing persons with money management to achieve a good risk-return matrix; that some of them are good at.
Why, they are not even murderers in the eyes of the law. They are shamans of risk management managing risk and return for themselves and their clients, and so for the good of us all, even if they kill, maim, or sicken us in the process.
A rational case could be made that their core business IS killing and injuring persons in order to make investment their in panoply of other goods and services necessary to all of us. Or maybe to be fair, letting persons be killed and maimed and sickened in this pursuit.
Its all about risk management, isn't it?
They have to, I suppose, continually raise the risk to a lot of us of not buying their laundry list of goods and services by investing in death and injury, otherwise we might stop buying, or might not buy enough in a timely fashion.
Ya follow?
While its true that accidents happen regardless, the big taboo (not a conspiracy, just an under publicized fact really) of our economy is that accidents and the resulting injuries and deaths can be biased to happen more or less than they do. This is ability is within our feeble human grasp even on this mortal coil. Death, injury and sickness from goods and services produced generally CAN be modulated to varying degrees, and what's even better (for the Money Managers of Death) is fear of death, injury and sickness can be modulated through mass media, too.
If you need to sell a little more car insurance, invest in Big Addictive Substances and sell more addictive substances, and show more effects of drunk driving on the evening news. Boom!!! If you need to sell more health insurance, invest in and sell more cancer causing products. If you need to sell more attack helicopters, guns, bullets, cruise missiles, helmets, uniforms, military vehicles, and ships, invest in terrorist organizations, then take them off the teat briefly, and watch them stir up enough trouble to justify a war, in a place with the resources you covet. These are the dynamics of designer death managed by the Money Managers of Death.
If we take death and injury away from cars, how will they replace that lost revenue? Sell more convertibles? I don't think that will cut it, as unsafe as convertibles can be. Maybe take out the seat belts? Not likely; that's a little heavy handed. What could the former Merchants and now Money Managers of Death do if death and injury were largely removed from cars?
They would have to invest in new ways to kill, injure and sicken us; that much we can guess. Its a question of diversification. They can't get out of the death business. They have sunk costs after all. They have risk return dynamics to offset. They have historically shown little willingness to get out of the killing, injuring and sickening industries. IMHO, its not JUST the sunk costs. Its the risk diversification that keeps them doing what they do.
I suppose they might just invest more heavily in GMO food and engineer more foods and fluids that take us out in the short, medium, and long range by design, if such can be orchestrated by actuarial tables.
This is how it is, until human beings decide to get these intelligent, god fearing, honorable, skillful, parasites off our persons out of control of our economies and our body politic.
THERE IS SO MUCH MONEY TO BE MADE KILLING PEOPLE.
This NOT a conspiracy.
This is business.
P.S.: Did I say I am tired of persons I have known dying from drunk drivers?
Touch foul: phantom call used to keep the score in the point spread
30 second clock: a way to give referees more possessions to make phantom calls
Seeding: creating match ups that eliminate small media market teams ASAP
Video review: lengthy study of a phantom call used to keep a game in the point spread
High Basketball IQ: can't jump
A good motor: a player with more adrenalin than skill
Coach's agent: the player's agent, while the player can't have an agent.
School Shoe Contract: school's promise to sign only players aligned with that same shoe brand
Recruiting analyst: the communication channel between the recruit and coach, when direct communication is not allowed.
This could mean Bragg plays a ton this season, if he can put it on the deck from high post and make > 70% of his FTAs.
Imagine Perry at 4 and Bragg at 5 driving every time they touch the ball high or spinning low!!!
How about Mick?? Is he good from the stripe???
KU could go undefeated turning every game into a FT shooting contest with a starting 5 of good driving FT SHOOTERS, plus two more rotating--one inside and one on the wing!!!!
Touch fouls?
Oooooh, imagine how many 2 PTAs and a FT that Bad Ball will produce!!!!
Bad Ball will guaranty a short 3 every possession if they call touch fouls.
That explains the three guard offense in Korea right there.
The game will now default to the five most active drivers that are also the five best FT shooters.
@SoftballDad2011 said:
Ortega said that, after speaking with Lightfoot, he phoned recruiting analyst Jerry Mullen, who contacted KU about Lightfootâs interest.
This maybe the most interesting aspect of this story beyond KU signing a No. 113 big during the apparent Embargo.
Notice that AAU Coach John Ortega did NOT phone KU directly. Ortega used an intermediary reported to be a "recruiting analyst" named Jerry Mullen.
Does anyone know if this is a current convention for the AAU coach not to contact the head coach directly about a player's interest in that head coach and his program?
I would have thought an AAU coach would like to call a head coach himself with that kind of information.
And what is this group of professionals called "recruiting analysts"? Are they an informal group, or do they have a professional association of some kind?
Here is some Wiki-skinny on Jerry Mullen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Mullen â
And here is a link to his bio on Mullen Sports Enterprises.
http://www.mullensports.net/jerry-mullen/ â
A USF All American probably a year or so before Big Russ and Casey Jones became Dons, he was drafted by the NBA, but opted to play AAU semi-pro 6 years for the Wichita Vickers; that was not unprecedented in those days. Head coached Cowley County Juco 1973-1979 and Barton Juco till 1985 compiling a .615 W&L statement. Since '85 he has run a juco scouting service, a Top 1o0 juco camp, and joined with Mike Mitchell, of Midwest Scouting, to host the 60 team Mullen/Mitchell juco jamboree.
Mike Mitchell's Midwest Scouting is located in, drum roll please, Edmond, Oklahoma, the birth place of Bill Self. Here is a link to Midwest Scouting Service, which claims to be "the best in the business...since 1986."
http://midwestscoutingservice.com/mss/Contact â
I am getting to the point of needing to flow chart recruiting.:-)
FWIW, its kind of nice to know that juco ball is still out there.
@drgnslayr said:
Lightfoot said: âI want to play the game like itâs supposed to be played, full speed, not taking any plays off. Be the best I can be on the court by working the hardest. Itâs an intangible that works to my benefit.â"
That is all ye know and all ye need to know about Mitch Lightfoot.
Can you imagine how much Norm and Bill would like to work with a guy that even just talks that way?
It would be like being a basketball coach again, instead of a wet nurse.
I haven't seen his tapes. I have no idea what his strong skills are. I have no idea if he can bulk up.
But if the guy just goes hard and can make B's in the classroom for four years, he is at bare minimum the designated third or fourth rotation big starting his sophomore season that makes wet nursing 5-stars through their freshman seasons of underachievement feasible and tolerable.
Oh, and then there is the on-going reality that during the Embargo, Self has to sign feasible bigs whenever and wherever he can find them.
Frankly, I'm getting juiced about having Bragg, Diallo, Colby and Lightfoot with all their motors revving simultaneously season after this one, even if we don't sign another. I really don't see Diallo, or Bragg, going pro, so I really don't see us signing another big, unless Diallo just can't get cleared at all, and has to move on to D-League, or overseas.
And I :pray: that Diallo can stay.
Maybe that means they are expecting him to clear?
Also, it suggests Self is going to try to steal more baskets.
Welcome to Cherry Picking time, Cheick!
Room, board, tuition and all the shoes one can sell, and cash under the table are pay.
But I think it would be right to pay basketball players a salary above board for what they do. I got paid as a grad student teaching. I see them doing a job for the university.
Would paying them help bring any other change about? I just don't know.
@wissoxfan83 said:
I love a good conspiracy theory as well as the next guy or gal. However, I have to resist the urge to say conspiracy whenever something goes on against KU.
I keep telling you: THERE ARE NO CONSPIRACIES, WHEN ACTIONS ARE LEGAL.
There is only cooperation resulting in legal asymmetries.
You are too smart to talk about conspiracies, even casually, as you have just done above.
You are a teacher of our children if I recall correctly.
Its scary to think that you may be talking to your students about conspiracy theories and dismissing them as put out by kooks, when the conspiracy theories and the kooks (often spooks) that spread them, are so irrelevant.
Conspiracies are largely for suckers and the last thing I want is some teacher teaching kids that conspiracy theories are prevalent and usually bogus. I don't know if they are mostly bogus, or not, because real conspiracy theories are mostly about illegal activities and I don't know much about, nor want to know much about, illegal activities. Teaching kids about conspiracy theories would be like teachers wasting valuable teaching time teaching kids that the sky is not green. Everyone can look up and know its not green. Kids don't need to be taught that. The question is why is the sky blue? Common sense should tell most kids and adults that conspiracy theories are mostly irrelevant to what goes on in daily life, especially in big important stuff.
IMHO conspiracies drive almost nothing that happens in a big dollar value way in our culture, and so they are a huge waste of time to talk about, and an insult to persons' intelligences also. The law enforcement authorities are among those most qualified to talk about conspiracies and its worth noting that many of them couldn't even see a conspiracy in John Kennedy's head being blown back and to the left by a documented ex Marine Corp radio eavesdropper and documented participant in a fake defector program run by the CIA firing at him from behind.
IMHO, asymmetric legalities are what drive 99% of the big dollar unfairness in the world and I believe that even as I am able to concede begrudgingly after all these years, that, well, yes, my beloved President Kennedy, once a member of ONI, got whacked in a cross fire in Dallas by some folks that hoped to sew dissension in our government because they understood the deep divisions created by JFKs steps to defrock the CIA, sharply reduce commitment to South Vietnam, build a special operations capability (a Praetorian guard if you will) reporting directly to JKF (not the JCS) and became the first President since Lincoln to print a competing currency to the Federal Resere Note (Silver Certificates).
I didn't always think conspiracies were so marginal. I got seduced by the whole conspiracy smear game for awhile. But once you dig in a little and do your homework, its just another spinfluence technique that got over used for several decades, especially when the XTReme Wacko Right was going after Clinton, but then went on steroids during the naught decade when the national security state began flexing its psy-ops and propaganda muscles big time after 9-11. It was like the public relations, media spin managers, psy-ops types, and propagandists, engaged in public dumping of the "c" word and there was no countervailing force in media to counteract them. It wasn't a conspiracy either. It was just a media management strategy; that's all. But in one of the great ironies of propaganda, or maybe not, the "conspiracy" word then got picked up as a popular phrase by many socio-economic and professional classes of America. It became this new contemporary variation on saying someone was "full of shit." But the beauty of it as a smear word was that it also implied something about someone being crazy; that's the most sadly hilarious part of the whole episode. Instead of telling persons one disagreed with one was full of shit, one said, awwwww, you're a conspiracy nut, or a conspiracy theorist. It was wild to watch it unfold, as someone that suspected it was bull shit from the beginning. But now here we are and people still pull it up and use it frequently long after the professional spinfluencers have moved on from it.
Let's go down memory lane, or should I say the memory hole, again.
The massive wealth redistribution since Ronald Reagan's election in 1980? All legal. No conspiracy. All done with huge amounts of monies invested legally in lobbying and getting legislation enabling the legislation. Carefully planned out. All the conservative and neoconservative organizations involved? All legal. All operating legally the vast majority of the time. These organizations have been openly and proudly orchestrated by persons taking enormous credit for--ever hear of Grover Norquist--and pride in having shifted the wealth upwards where they think it belongs. They don't believe poor people should do better. They didn't believe the middle class was necessary after the Cold War ended. Unions as a bulwark against communism after communism fell? Fugggeddabout'em. Greed was good. Universal health care? Who cares if 40 million fellow citizens can't see a doctor until they are convulsing and hauled into an emergency room and denied care, or under treated? Make money. Take it from medical care by cutting services to more and more Americans. Making money by taking it from the middle class was good. Taxing the middle class to pay for moving their firms and jobs abroad was good. And legal. Oh man was it ever legal. And fun!!!! Talking about conspiracies is how you distract those suffering from the vicious asymmetries of designed wealth redistribution upwards, not how you remedy the egregious abuse.
Conspiracy is for suckers.
In wealth redistribution and in basketball and in most every other form of high buck activity probably, and college basketball now qualifies as a high buck, not mega buck, but high buck activity IMHO.
The Standard Oil Trust was never illegal until long after it had profitted so greatly from its overtly collusive activities that it then reputedly among some colluded with government itself to legislate the Sherman Anti-Trust Act precisely to make sure no other petroleum organization could use trust organization as a means of eclipsing The Standard. Rockefeller himself could not have asked for better legislation to protect his fortune than the Sherman Anti Trust Act which enabled him to restructure his Trust into an oligopoly woven together by interlocking directorates and strategic incentives for oligopolistic cooperation. Same with the Federal Income Tax Act of 1914 that promises preferred distribution of the Federal Income taxes first to pay the debts of the Federal Reserve created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 shepherded into law in the Senate by John D. Rockefellers father in law--Senator Aldrich. All legal. All above board. All known about and debated about and intensely criticized as selling out our Republic in the Congressional record.
There are no conspiracies of real consequence in America.
Oh, maybe the JFK, RFK, MLK assassinations. But, well, exceptions prove rules, sometimes. And who knows? Maybe somewhere down in the bowels of the National Security Act and the National Security Council archives and the body of legislation related to the National Security State it could be argued by some lawyer that those hits were necessary for national security. I am just a citizen basketball fan. I don't know what lawyers arguing under a seal of national security could argue and get away with. I only know that calling torture enhanced interrogation and running a USA torture prison archipelago was considered okay.
I believe it maybe one of the things that distinguishes America from so many other places.
The founders just embraced the idea that less government is better government and that the more legal grey areas you have (and later create) the more room entrepreneurial citizens have room to move, and the more life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness can occur, albeit with a goodly share of abuses.
Conspiracies are for crooks and small time suckers and the occasional murder that has to be committed to perpetuate some kind of complex in a legal grey that is about to be out maneuvered by some other complex in a legal grey area.
Otherwise, did I say, conspiracy is for suckers?
Let's keep skipping down memory lane.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was no conspiracy. It was all above board. It was all legal. It was perhaps misnamed. It perhaps should have been called The Sherman Oligopoly Act, or the Sherman Pull Up the Trust Ladder So No One Else Can Do to John D. Rockefeller What John D. Rockefeller Did to Hundreds, or Thousands of Others. Same as the Income Tax Act was perhaps misnamed. It perhaps should have been called the Pull up the No Tax Ladder So No One Else Can Do to John D. Rockefeller what John D. Rockefeller Did to Hundreds, or Thousands of Others.
Do you see why John D. Rockefeller might well have privately supported both the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and the Income Tax Act, while publicly complaining about them? Both converged to make sure no one could repeat his trick and so eclipse him. Imagine how much harder it would be to corner the oil refining bidness if you couldn't openly monopolize through a trust shell AND had to pay taxes the John D. never had to pay.
This appears to be how the game is played at a high level.
Do unto others, before they can do to you, then clear the wake and institute so that others cannot later do unto you what you just did.
Conspiracies are for suckers and for those so lacking in imagination, skill, power and influence that they have to break the law instead of use it and get it rewritten.
Cooperation in grey areas and rewriting laws/regs as feasible are how things get done in a big way.
Cooperation in grey areas that are not yet highly specified by law is how things get done.
There is nothing I can infer that is illegal, or paranoid, about the apparent Nike/UK/Cal/Westley/Rose/CAA/SEC/ESPN/NCAA complex. Its just there incompletely understood as a complex, because, if it were there, there would be little, or no, incentive for them to explain how they are doing what they are doing in order to make the big bucks rain. Does your plumber like to tell you how to sweat pipes, so you can do it yourself and not pay him? Does investment manager like to explain exactly how he picks the best stocks and exactly who he gets the information from, and how to get it yourself, so you can DIY and quit giving him a fee? No.
So: please reconsider this conspiracy theory allegation stuff fer Chrisssakes, fer Yahweh's sakes, and for Allah's sakes, and for Buddha's sakes, okay?
Complexes are apparently mostly how asymmetric exploitation of grey areas are enabled.
The apparent complex members may not be running around clapping their hands and saying look at what we are doing, but that is normal for all businesses, once they get highly successful and haven't yet figured a way out to keep others from entering in and competing.
I don't recall a single successful business man giving all the keys to his business to anyone outside it, so that another could start up and do what he did and so take a cut of his action; that's not human nature.
We're not talking about Anti-Castro Cubans here.
We're talking about serious business men here and coaches and university presidents, and CEOs, network execs, and Talent agents, etc.
It may not fair, but its probably mostly legal, or at least in a grey area that these individuals believe their lawyers could credibly argue was legal and likely win.
We are talking about Multinational Shoe corporations, a major state university, a high profile basketball coach making multi millions of dollars per year, a former shoe salesmen become coach's agent and entertainment agent/consultant, a major entertainment agent, probably the biggest entertainment agency firm, a Big Five Power conference, perhaps the largest sports network in the USA, and the largest oversight and TV contracting entity for college sports in the USA. And I'm not even including Big Gaming in the complex, but logically could.
Please, please, please, don't spray the squid ink of conspiracy into public discourse, when it is so obviously apparently irrelevant.
If you must, doubt the probability of asymmetric legalities.
Though to be frank, I don't see how you possibly could so with a straight face in todays republic, and today's college game, but at least talk about the 900 pound gorilla in the room, instead of the tit mouse under the floor board.
Rock Chalk!
A separate tournament has always interested me; that was Phog Allen's solution (the NCAA) once the NIT had become an asymmetric regional dominated racket that obstructed KU and so many others from fair participation in the pursuit of "national" championships. What KU leadership now needs to do is think of the issue in similarly scaled up terms. The apparent Nike/Cal/Westley/Rose/CAA/SEC/ESPN/NCAA complex is appears to be impeding ours and others competition for a national champion, so let us leap frog and compete for a world championship of college basketball.
Part of the reason I have been bullish on the B12 expanding into the EST, is so that it could build common cause with EST schools in and outside of such an expanded B12 constructive engagement (i.e., inter league and inter time zone play).
For a separate tournament to be not just a one time boycott device, but a credible threat that might compel change, we need CST and EST schools, and preferably schools from MST and PST too. The idea is to confront the complex with a viable countervailing marketing force--a tournament truly inclusive of all parts of USA, and then from college teams from around the world--a Naismith World College Basketball Championship Tournament.
But to make it viable, we've got to engage the EST college basketball programs that are getting stiffed as badly as KU is by the current complex's running of the system.
The World University Games offer a good model but they lack a tie to Naismith and so far they are not claiming to be producing a true world champion of college basketball. Imagine a World College Basketball Championship Tournament played on Naismith Drive in Allen Field House, Sprint Center, the Round House in Wichita, Creighton's facility, maybe Oklahoma City's arena and the Octogon with the championship games being held in Allen Field House on James Naismith Court. It might be a two month tournament. It might involve several hundred college teams seeded objectively, by a consensus of state of the art statistical programs.
The advertising/PR hook would be: if you want to watch the basketball equivalent of All Star Wrestling, where the seeding and outcomes are pre-determined, watch the NCAA tournament. If you want to watch real championship basketball, watch the Naismith World College Basketball Championship....BASKETBALL AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE!!!!!
This could very quickly get bigger than anything the apparent Nike/Cal/Westley/Rose/CAA/SEC/ESPN could stop. Its called enlarging the problem to a scale where one can prevail.
We could engage Latin American, South American, European and Asian and African universities.
We could use some of the huge foreign networks to televise and distribute it, if domestic networks dragged their feet.
We could leap frog the apparent complex to attaining the global college basketball market.
Some eggs would get broken for sure.
But OUR eggs are being broken now.
Perhaps its time for some of their eggs to break, too, while college basketball quests for a new legitimacy.
The competition of these two entities would accelerate the proliferation of the game, too, as surely as the competition between the old NFL and AFL did the same for professional football.
Amidst admissions the seeding is biased for television, amidst the appearance of tournament officiating looking fishy, amidst the apparent asymmetric talent distributions, and amidst the reputed comments of some coaches that they cannot comment on the record about aspects of the current recruiting system for fear of retribution, and amidst ADs wanting to confine the season to second semester and move March Madness back some months, is it time for the father of all college basketball programs to lead a boycott of the NCAA TOURNAMENT, while keeping the television money? KU is hardly alone among schools appearing to be marginalized by the process. Or does the chance to play and win a ring outweigh all principle?
Just wondering.
ANSWERS IN CAPS
âWill HCBS let them play âoutside-inâ and shoot the 3 at will all season long?â
THE FIRST TEN SECONDS OF EACH POSSESSION. THEN BAD BALL FOR 20 SECONDS.âWill HCBS let them shoot 3âs for half the season and then pull the plug?â
NO, INJURIES AND REFS PERMITTING THEY WILL FIRE ALL SEASON.âWill HCBS make them play âinside-outâ from Day 1?â
ONLY THE LAT 20 SECONDS OF EACH POSSESSION.Inquiring minds want to know!!!
THANK HEAVENS.
Special Agent,
DIRECTOR/JANITOR jaybate 1.0
Imagine my complete lack of shock at Lab getting cleared in a context of what occasionally appears like a Nike/Cal/Westley/Rose/CAA/NCAA/SEC/ESPN complex, whether or not it actually is.
Maybe?
If only Perry were near the size you say and had a short neck he would be able to score B2B and rock with the blue meanies, instead of have to spin and stretch at the 4.
He apparently had a fine touch from Trey when he came to KU, but Self's other starters precluded letting him shoot from there before he was futilely tried as power forward. Woe, woe, woe is Perry Ellis; two whole seasons waisted banging inside, when he was too small.
Perry can't be effective on the blocks against fully half the players he meets in D1 after 3 years. He only began to flourish when Self began to recast him as a stretch 4, which in Perry's case is really a second 3.
But he is exceptional in that role, as he always would have been, because of his near 40% Trey gun.
Brilliant photo recon Case Officer @Crimsonorblue22.
That's one old way to tape a floating knee cap.
Agree with most of what you say on the defensive end.
But it appeared to me that KU worked exceptionally hard for half a season developing BAD BALL. They had break a lot of habits of trying to expand the impact space to get open and, instead, learn to shrink the impact space constantly to shoe while covered in order to draw the fouls. This was completely counter intuitive for Self offensive play the previous seasons. It was our difficulty in breaking these habits that made us look so bad so often, while learning to do it. Then late in the season as we began to habituate BAD BALL, our injuries compounded and those injuries kept us looking worse than we would have otherwise.
Shrinking impact space systematically all over the floor on offense; that was the essence of BAD BALL and what finally distinguished it from Bo Ryan Ball from whence it appears to have sprung in Self's fertile mind.
To understand the degree of impact Bad Ball had on D1 last season, you have to recall that Fred beat us the first time playing his brand of ball that you describe so well.
By the second meeting, Fred played BAD BALL for a full half.
Think about that!
Bad Ball was such a potent solution to the officiating constraint by then driving play down the stretch of the season that Fred abandoned a successful approach and embraced Bad Ball to try to beat an injury depleted KU team!
Self may never go back to BAD BALL to the extent he did, unless another rash of injuries compells him to, but he will never be able to completely walk away from it. It is too potent a weapon situationally to jettison it. Especially with the players he has back this season. Unless Diallo and Bragg become money b2b, how can Self possibly NOT play some BAD BALL?
@JayHawkFanToo said:
however, if he plays PF he need to gain at least 10-15 lbs.
Don't tell Kevin Young that.
But KY was something of an anomaly, so I don't dispute the weight estimate you suggest.
My point is only that smart coaches recognize and play the anomalies.
Self recognized that Frank Mason was an anomaly that could play.
Long neck.
Long trunk.
Short effective height.
But out the roof fast twitch muscle and speed and toughness and shooting touch.
He has to play even though he doesn't look at all like he should excel in D1.
Don't judge the book by the cover. Read it.
The player that might normally need to add 10-15 lbs. might have been read by Self and might be quite well suited to the position at a lighter weight.
Self has an extraordinarily keen sense of players abilities beyond morphological norms.
I still stubbornly insist that Perry Ellis' is ridiculously too small, with ridiculously too small hands, to be playing the 4. But Self has found a way to win two conference titles with mister mini-mite at the 4.
Perry has as much time not passing the eye test at the 4, as Brady Morningstar did at the 3, and Kevin Young did at the 4.
One of the great joys I get watching Self coach is his frequent successful defiance of eye tests.
I hate eye tests, even though I can "see" some occasional utility to them.
PHOF!!!!
Let players be seen for what they and their body morphologies and heads and hearts and work ethics let them do on the sacred wood.
Independent of stereotypes.
Strange as it is, Henry Iba evolved the the high-low offense from his single post weave offense, which was an offense he ran from a single post offense (single low when he had a big man, single high when he had a short post man) for many years, as did many others before and during Iba's time.
The idea of the original high low was to create an offensive formation that one could use perimeter and inside-out ball movement without a weave to create impact space, or from the same formation run the weave. Iba's thinking was apparently that when you had little time to teach a team an offense, as at the Olympics, the team would just be taught the passing offense and not the weave, which required more practice and timing. Iba apparently thought the passing offense and the weave were perfectly complementary, originating out of the same formation and that doing so gave a defense a recognition problem to contend with. Another part of the innovation was that the offense enabled greater specialization of tasks inside versus outside. Offenses like Bruce Drake's Oklahoma Shuffle that grew to dominate the game by the early 1960s shuffled four players through all the positions on the floor except for the post man, who remained in the post and simply moved high and low. But this meant that a big forward, what we today call a 4, who was in the offense precisely to rebound and stick back the misses of the perimeter players and the post man, was frequently outside the paint. The High Low was created in part to relieve the big forward from having to run all over the floor, i.e., be a stretch 4, and just let him work the paint, along with the post an, and leave the perimeter to perimeter players. One irony today is of course that the stretch 4 is in Self's opinion now the toughest to guard in college basketball. So: though Self runs the high low for many of the same reasons Iba created it, he strives to find the Stretch 4 that is not just a high post man but an attacker from all over the floor as he roams looking for opportunities.
My hunch is:
Play for the quick 3 (Good Ball), as in Korea for the first 10 seconds of the clock. Try to take a quick 3 after crossing mid court. If not open pass into post for quick kick out. If no 3pta, shift into Bad Ball the last 20 seconds of the clock.
To do this will leave more decisions about when and where to shoot, and when to shift from good to bad in mid possession to the players.
The object is to maximize long 3ptas and short 3ptas (Bad Ball drive with a FT). Kiss the mid range 2pta good bye.
Bad Ball Defense will be alternated with conventional Self Defense.
The idea will be to keep them disrupted and unable to get comfortable on both ends.
An important insight. Thanks for weighing in.
***"Seems that we need to make a goal to play a new kind of basketball -
GOOD BALL / BAD BALL
Dr. Jekyll /Mr. Hyde
âGood Cop / Bad Copâ
--@drgnslayr ***
You are probably exactly correct about where this could, should and will go.
Self is a genius.
In short order he has discovered two major innovations in my opinion.
First, last season Self discovered, or perhaps rediscovered, a very startling potential in the game of basketball with Bad Ball. It was something others like Ryan at UW had begun moving toward. Others had long nibbled around the edges of it over the years within many offensive schemes. Frankly, Dean Smith's four corners offense, which started as a stall, but then became a situational offense, is the forerunner of it in a kinder gentler age of basketball. Bad Ball is in principle Dean Smith's Four Corners in the Age of XTReme Muscle. What Self the genius seemed to add to it was to systematize the idea of collapsing the space between offense and defense GENERALLY. Self took what Dean's point guards did in the four corners, which was to collapse the space between the ball handler and the defender and generalized it to every position on the floor, and then pretty much did the same on the defensive end, too!!! It was an insanely counter intuitive thing to do, but it worked brilliantly. Geniuses often let genies out of bottles that others wish would not have been released. Generals dearly wish that the brainiacs at Los Alamos had not figured out the atom bomb, because it obsoleted so much of what was venerated about warfare. Generals also wish special ops had not taken over so much of modern warfare, because so much of special ops is just dirty, low down cheating and criminal in traditional military terms. There is not much glory and honor in special ops. You can't even brag about most of it. You can't be hailed a conquering hero. You are a hit and run bunch operating in the shadows and using every horrific mode of counter terrorism to win with you can. Where is the glory in that?!!!! But Atom bombs got loose and triggered limited warfare and Special ops proved the best way to fight limited warfare up to a point, and after that you used conventional forces not to win, but to muck up a country to the point no one could use it. It was a cascade that lead to really ugly business. I think of Bad Ball like that. You can pretend it didn't happen. You can try to clean it up. You can have the team start wearing black berets. You can hire some PR firm to write the Ballad of the Bad Ball Berets. But bottom line its dirty business that has gotten out of the genies bottle.
And it only helps a little knowing Dean evolved the Four Corners out of the Carolina Passing Game which was Henry Iba's High Low Offense with some Bruce Drake Oklahoma Shuffle and Frank McGuire improvisations and some old Phog Allen routines sewn onto it making a quilt of many colors, but all High Low underneath.
Bottom line, Bad Ball is ugly, not graceful.
Second, this past summer Self discovered (or at least put on display for the first time) something in Korea that I think is going to take even longer to understand than Bad Ball. Board Rats, including me, were too busy being delighted by the change from Bad Ball to whatever it was we witnessed remotely over in Korea, to understand just what the hell we were seeing. But I am here to tell you that what you saw in Korea was not an accident. It was not unplanned. It had Self's own weird spin on it as surely as Bad Ball did, too.
Let's just cut to the chase and call what we saw in Korea "Good Ball," shall we?
I'm frankly not able to decipher what Self did to the game of basketball in Korea.
But I have a hunch it was profound and I have a hunch we will find its roots in something some other coach of substance had done in the past. And whomever did it, they are probably not likely to have fallen too far from the Iba-Smith-Eddie-Larry tree.
I have a hunch it may be something that Doyle Parrock tried at Oklahoma City University that has been lost to posterity, except a few Okie Ball geeks like Self. Or it could be Paul Westhead. Or it could be something Jerry Tarkanian screwed around with for a time. Self mentioned Tarkanian in a positive light a few times last season, so we can reasonably guess that something Tark used to do has been catching his fancy.
Self has no choice but to improvise.
The Embargo forces him to do so.
The interesting thing is that Self is at about exactly the age the Wooden was at, when he too realized he had to improvise or die. Wooden came up with the final couple of pieces of the UCLA way--one of which was the 2-2-`1 zone press Jerry Norman brought him--to begin winning rings.
Bad Ball was one improvisation.
Good Ball was one improvisation.
Only a genius who can also be methodical about working on his non linear discoveries and improvisations can have a clue right now about where this may be heading.
All I can say after watching Self a lot of years is that he likes the idea of BOTH-ness in what ever he does a lot of.
Right now Bad Ball and Good Ball seem mutually exclusive paths.
But Self signaled where he wants to go in the last game of the WUGs.
After playing a lot of Good Ball, he shifted gears briefly and played Bad Ball.
It didn't appear to work very well.
But a lot of things that geniuses do don't look great in development at times, and then they suddenly blossom into unexpectedly great things.
Rock Chalk!
A broad change of assistants is not something I have contemplated.
You raise some interesting points.
But I am not sure I can walk down this path with you, which is a change, as I usually get and go along with you when you open my eyes to another way.
I agree that player development (aka coaching'em up) has to be a strength of the staff, because lack of KU connection to the reputed Nike/Wesley/Rose/CAA complex means Self will not be able to overwhelm opponents with too much talent for the foreseeable future. Developing 4 and 5 star talent, and finding 3 star talent that can be developed--these are likely going to be the coins of the winning realm. Plugging an OAD or two into that "developed" core will be another strength needed.
I begin to diverge with the assumption that our current assistant coaches are to be considered responsible for Jamari's slow development. Jamari has been a tough row to hoe for our assistants and would have been for others as well. He is arguably the least talented big Self has ever tried to use in a front court rotation in Self's KU tenure. Danny never had to coach a rotation player as short on skills and physical attributes as Traylor is. I am not sure Jamari would have been better under Danny.
Roberts seems to have done okay with those bigs that have possessed legitimate D1 talent.
Another variable effecting Roberts: since Snacks got in trouble, Snacks has apparently been marginalized from recruiting; that has likely had a ripple effect of making Roberts recruit even more and work even less with the bigs than usual; and that may be responsible for some of the deficiencies in the bigs we saw in Korea.
Roberts arguably did a great job with Embiid.
Roberts arguably has done a so-s0 job with Ellis, but that has to do with Self insisting on Ellis being a stretch 4, rather than play the 3 as he would have at other schools. Roberts and Ellis should not be blamed for what Self wants Ellis to be in college.
I feel like our perimeter guys are well coached.
I think our stifled recruiting tracks to the shoe embargo, not the age of Kurtis and Norm.
And I think Self has gotten younger with Snacks, Fred and now Aaron.
So: I think he has this covered.
I believe Bad Ball will remain an arrow in our quiver, but not the main one...UNLESS Bragg and Diallo can provide no B2B scoring, and none of the returning bigs can do so either.