The musings of a madman...

  (new shxt, AI imaging...  No more Google-and-steal!)      I don’t know who does or doesn’t know this, but in a past life I was pretty damn good at basketball.   My mom and uncle grew up with a neighborhood friend who went on to be an All-American at Virginia Tech and was drafted into the NBA.   With this connection, my brother and I spent a lot of our childhood summers in basketball camps. The fact now, to be honest, is that I still am but I am just a lot less mobile at 43 than I was at 23.   My jumpshot it still lethal though.   If not for this cursed 5’8”-ness, something could have come of it.      Nowadays, though, we are a bit too busy to get out on the court and break a sweat anymore.   We both have hoops in our driveways and we both spend time working with our littles on THEIR game(s). While my now-sixth-grade daughter only took interest in hooping between the summers of 2021 and 2022 before her inter...

     We knew the day was coming.  We knew it April 2016 when he made his Swan Song in that 60-pt exit from the only full time job he will need to have had. I’m 38, and with the exception of a couple of bandwagon years with the Payton/Kemp-era Sonics, I have always been a Lakers fan.  After my Junior year in high school, there was a magazine and newspaper (no one was on the internet like that in 1996) buzz about a dude near Philadelphia who was looking at ACC schools but had since decided to skip it all and go straight to the league.      I was interested in it because the buzz was immediately “local” because the arrangement seemed from the beginning to be that the Charlotte Hornets – only about 90 minutes from me – would be the team to draft him with plans to trade him to the Lakers.  The interest was because the guy was only 10 months and some change older than me.  The interest was because it was becoming immediately ap...

(wait…  Joe Jackson isn’t dead yet?  Well damn, is he like a little bit sick or something?  Oh well, carrying on!)      I think you see where I am going with this one.  Previous winners would include the likes of Earl Woods and Richard Williams. While the days of whooping your kids asses in order for you to live off of their success are gone, there still exists a world where you can push them to continue to do something they may or may not actually want to do to the point of extreme success, for which you will yourself be rewarded with a share of.      F’rinstance, no one exactly knows whether or not a young Eldrick Woods actually wanted to play golf, but his father – an old-school Black man raised through Jim Crow – pushed his son to be good at what was and still kind of is a white man’s game.  It worked to the point where he was the best to do it for a very long time.      On that s...

     After an off-season that seems to have never actually ended and with a season ahead of us full of seemingly foregone conclusions, the NBA season is back on tonight with two pretty highly-touted games.  Boston and Cleveland will tip off the season at 8pm, a game of interest with the movement and back-and-forth between the teams late in the offseason.  That will be followed at 10:30pm by the up-and-coming Houston Rockets taking on the defending champion Golden State Warriors. It’s as if the NBA schedule writers KNEW the NFL would be mired in knee-deep shit with the protests and beefing with the fuckboy in chief 45 and decided to throw out some games of interest right from the start. As much time as I would love to expound on the virtues of basketball, I am already 138 words in and I have a short attention span.  I will get right to the NBA season predications. Rookie of the Year      LaVar Ball, Los Angeles Lakers…...

     Okay, so we have talked about the past, we have brought things up into the present.  The very natural next question is “well what does the future hold?” As much as I would love to say that I have the answer to that question, the fact remains simply that I cannot have such information.      This coming year, the NBA Commissioner of the hip hop era is retiring and one of his understudies will take his position.  It will remain to be seen whether that means that he will continue the non hip hop friendly approach that Stern attempted within the past ten or so years or if he will simply let things fall to the way of profitability of the time just before those years.  What we DO know is that kids are still playing ball, even if not outdoors as much as they did when those around my own age did.  What is known is that rappers are still dropping basketball metaphors and are still seen courtside at games.  I cannot imagin...

9:Renaissance(s)      The concept that a sport or a genre of music, especially one often marginalized as “not music” like hip hop has often been through its years seems foreign to some.  The fact, however, is still that each has had an almost consistently generational window of change that can be expected to take place.  In basketball, the change can be usually marked to include a “generation” lasting about the length of the careers of the most prominent players of that time.  Often times, you hear them discussed/named in terms of the most prominent players/combinations of those particular times.  Examples include the “Celtics dynasty,” the “NBA vs ABA,” of course the vaunted “Magic vs Bird” era, the “Jordan era,” and then the shared “Shaq/Kobe era” and “Spurs dynasty” years.  Based upon the best players playing 11-15 years, those five great periods have bridged the time from professional basketball’s days of infancy in the late-40s and 5...

8:Detractors Abound Despite the very much displayed facts supporting that hip hop and basketball are blood brothers, there still happens to be groups who’d sooner have it otherwise.  Following the infamous “brawl at the palace,” NBA Commissioner David Stern reverted back to his pre-Air-Jordan-days and implemented changes that specifically blackballed things that had always been openly embraced by hip hop at large; specifically the players were forbidden from “street” clothes – no jeans/athletic wear, specifically only “dressy” clothes – and big visible necklace/medallion combinations as they entered and exited the arenas in which they played.  It seemed to matter not that they were to be infrequently seen by anyone other than cameras already tasked and properly compensated with being there to cover them, instead of fans or civilian paparazzi – both of whom would lack credentials to gain that kind of access.  This approach played best into the most lucrativ...

7: The Spirit of Competition      It is no secret that basketball, like any sport, is competitive in nature.  The fact that score is kept and a winner is declared at the end of the competition defines that.  What may or may not be up for debate is just how similarly appointed as a competitive medium that hip hop is. On the surface, Billboard releases their Top 200 and Rap/R&B-specific charts once weekly to outline who sold the most copies of their songs/albums each week.  In a 2012 economic climate, every album or song sale is a hard-fought-for sale, and it stands to reason that artists and executives are cognizant of this and work hard at either bending tastes of their audience to the enjoyment of their work or bending their work to the will and tastes of their desired listening public.      With these things in mind, the heat of the battle has the tendencies to cause the participants to become a bit testy while co...

6: “Who Can I Trust?”      It has been said that when you reach a certain income/exposure level, you can never date a “regular” person – at least not one who didn’t know you before you had anything. The same is to be said for the people you will have in your circle.      What remains in application is the exhibited fact that the only person/people you can trust to understand your situation and problems are the ones who have been through similar circumstances themselves.  When, as we have discussed, NBA players and rappers more often than not come up through the same ills we understand the connection that they come to have.  As nothing is ever perfect, we’ve seen even these situations go sour and end ugly – usually just with the loss of a friendship and hopefully not the loss of a friend.  To that ends, the “bosses” of both camps spend major time and resources on educating and guiding them to the building of healthy interp...

5: “Me Too!” and “Let’s Get Money Together”      No, this is not related to any basketball players’ attempts to rap or any rappers’ attempts to show how much “like Mike” he was in the gym.  It is more related to each side recognizing the other’s validity in the arena of entertainment.  There is a possibility that this could have been taken along with the “Acknowledgment” we previously discussed, but the level that this is taken to has a life of its own, beyond simple acknowledgment.  It almost becomes necessary to point to the fact that each experienced a bit of a burst in popularity right around the mid-80s, directly in line with the spikes in the popularities of – all at once – national media outlets (broadcast and cable TV, radio, etc.), the renewal of the Lakers/Celtics rivalry and perhaps most importantly, the previously mentioned marketing juggernaut named Michael Jeffrey Jordan.      A term born of this mutual resp...

4: Fashion Sensibilities      Two things can be guaranteed to be taken into consideration when it comes to regional applications and those are fashion and local team fanship.  When it boils down to it, through the presented history hip hop in popular culture, it was no huge deal – one could argue that it was expected – to see their favorite rappers donning the jersey of their favorite player or hat of their favorite team, or even both! One of the “standard” hip hop uniforms from the earliest days included the simple jeans and t-shirt with a pair of sneakers.  Sneakers would become one of the EARLIEST connected fashion items tying hip hop and basketball together.  As a child born in the late 70s and raised in the 80s, I distinctly recall seeing and desiring to own the player-specific Converse sneakers worn by Dr. J and Magic Johnson, badgering my parents for a new pair of the Chuck Taylors that seemingly every other player wore and To this ...

3: “Just Like Us”      So now we’ve seen an understandable correlation born of the similar creations of basketball and hip hop.  We’ve discussed why the participants should want to involve themselves with one another, if only from more often than not coming up from similar backgrounds themselves.  Now it is time we discuss what good reason they may have to continue and cultivate the personal-cum-business relationship(s).      As with any connected entities, their mutual involvement will eventually espouse emulation.  One could argue that Biggie saw this coming (or had already witnessed) when, on his first album, he mentioned “either you slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jumpshot” with the at-the-time unspoken third option naturally being music.  It was ironic, because he was passively speaking out that third option by participating in it for his own out of those very same neighborhoods.  Either way, ge...