review: The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons

The Book of Basketball
By Bill Simmons
ESPN, 2009

Like Gilbert Arenas' gunhandling and sharpshooting ways, ESPN writer Bill Simmons’ new Book of Basketball is a polarizing force. Sports types love him and hate him, all the while turning that interest into fat checks that other sportswriters can only imagine as heaven.

There's no stretch to suggest that Bill Simmons is perhaps the most successful Internet writer ever, his words appearing on screen long before they ever inhabited a place in a magazine. He started on some AOL sports site, gained a loyal following for essentially being one of the few relevant sports columnists to young males, daring to talk about Swingers and Vince Vaughn alongside the Boston Red Sox while others could only discuss moral turpitude and the modern athlete.

Everything Simmons did seems like no big deal now, but I guess it was and somehow he has become the most successful sportswriter in America, even though he stays at his house most of the time, never sits in a press box and has season tickets to the historically worst professional sports team.


It would be annoying for Simmons to beat his uniqueness over our heads, and he doesn’t do that in this book, but his manner seems quite irreverent for a hardcover book and basketball. All his sexual jokes are unusual in this form, where on the Internet it doesn’t seem bad at all, maybe just tame. But to talk frankly about strippers in relationship to Jason Kidd is not really funny, just kind of odd, as I can’t believe this guy is married sometimes, his frankness embarrasses me as if I'm a 7th grader reading Madame Bovary.

There exists a running count of Boogie Nights jokes, and the number dials high, and so a fictional movie about a porn star is his grand allusion, his literary cred running high. But no one came to Simmons for his literary cred, but precisely because he dared to make those comparisons in the first place. So though Boogie Nights is beat like a dead horse, that becomes the point--to beat a dead horse as many times as possible.

But concentrating on those things is not the point of the book, in fact this discussion at NY Mag, made me think the whole book was about sex. When in fact, it’s about basketball. But not an encyclopedia of basketball, or a chronology of basketball, but more of an interesting paradigm to discuss basketball. Much of the book’s structure derives from actual conversations, claims Simmons, in the vein of one of his favorite buddy-Vegas movies apparently. So there’s a pyramid of the greatest 90 some odd players to have played the game of basketball, a riveting chapter on the debate of Chamberlain vs. Russell and a ranking of the most dominant teams best in the spirit of Keyser Soze (watch The Usual Suspects).

It is no surprise that the Boston Celtics have a significant role in this book, much because Simmons is a Boston native, raised on the Celtics and Larry Bird and the legend of Bill Russell. But even though Simmons cares deeply about the Celtics, his arguments in favor of them are well-reasoned and factually based, the only subjective part is how high to rank Rober Parrish over James Worthy or the proper place of Dennis Johnson in the pantheon of minor all-stars. This pyramid ranking of the greats is the meatiest of the book, though his meeting with Isaiah Thomas to discuss “the secret” is the crux of Simmons’ argument, boiling down to the fact that basketball is not about basketball, meaning that the me-first Chamberlain fails to the team-first Russell, that Jordan understood “the secret” after two years off playing baseball, that Kobe may not have grasped “the secret” until Shaq/Jackson troubles and rape accusations.

I actually liked the ending interview with Bill Walton better, where Walton frames it as players making "a choice" to be unselfish, rather than "the secret." But Simmons met Isaiah Thomas at a topless bar and he only met Walton in his house, so "the secret" it is.

But I generally support Simmons’ outlook on basketball. I enjoy Magic Johnson. I understand the greatness of Hakeen Olajuwon and how underrated Tim Duncan is. I don’t think John Stockton or Patrick Ewing were as bad as Simmons says. Now he is rightfully Kevin Durant’s greatest cheerleader.

Back over at NY Mag, they try to dissect “micro” vs. “macro” Simmons, meaning can you put up with Simmons’ style to understand his points? Many times, I can’t. As a frequent reader of his columns, I bypass all of his football columns, because I don’t enjoy whining about fantasy teams and Simmons has singlehandedly made me want to avoid ever watching Swingers or the aforementioned Boogie Nights—I get enough of those two cinematic masterpieces from the scraps and fragments I pull together from all of Simmons’ columns and books. His boyhood fantasies and trips to Vegas have proven proper canon fodder for quite awhile, he’s going to have to take a few more local trips through Hollywood or twist his writing into sassy parenting metaphors a la Neal Pollack to stick around much longer. In other words, even Vince Vaughan has grown up.

This edition of the Book of Basketball may be Simmons’ last stand with his most familiar metaphors. With the rise of Deadspin and more focus on differing approaches to basketball in general (read FreeDarko.com), Simmons is dangerously close to becoming the new old guard. But this book is a powerful defense. More after the jump...

review: A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge by Josh Neufeld

Every Thursday in August, we're featuring something about Hurricane Katrina. The storm hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Mississippi four years ago, on Aug. 29, 2005. Last week, we reviewed Zeitoun by Dave Eggers. For this week, here's a review of A.D. New Orleans After The Deluge.

A.D. New Orleans After The Deluge
by Josh Neufeld
Pantheon Books, 2009

To my knowledge, this is the first major graphic novel work about Hurricane Katrina to emerge, and it first appeared as part of an ongoing web-comic on Smith Mag. But the subject matter is primarily visual--that's why Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke is more powerful than Jed Horne or Douglas Brinkley's excellent accounts. But this disaster had incredible access. TV cameras couldn't make it inside the World Trade Center. Columbine happened and then it was over with small snatches of video evidence.

But this event unfolded on the outside over several days, people struggling to get out into the open rather than to slink and hide inside the privacy of their homes. These people needed to be seen, needed to be on television, needed to be heard, needed to be saved. With those visuals still in our collective conscience, Hurricane Katrina and its complicated aftermath is great for a graphic novel.

Wow, what a challenge. Maus set the bar incredibly high for those that wade in after it. Neufeld, of American Splendor fame, chooses to work only in a single color for sets of panels, veering from dull neon yellow to mauve, to light green. It's a subtle reminder that all of the stories are told through rose-colored glasses, views marred by individuals. It also shows the limited options that each character has at their disposal. Though most pages use three to four panels to move the story, Neufeld uses large single pages and double trucks to display the power of nature. A swirling toilet bowl mirrors the gathering storm, a smoky black and yellow colored storm cloud looks like a nuclear bomb, Abbas and Darnell through the dark sludge of mud along the street after Abbas' store had been overwhelmed with water.

The individual story is fascinating (such as in Zeitoun), but that limited view is like eating too much chocolate cake--too much of it leaves deficiencies. But to switch to generalities loses the narrative story, the history books already do that. So Neufeld chooses five people to make his snapshot, five from different neighborhoods with different ethnicities who make different choices about how to deal with the storm. Not too many, not too few, just enough. Their hardships in animated form do not detract from the desperation in the situation, but create and allow visual images for where the cameras could not go and could not capture.


(From Smith Magazine)

Neufeld uses his own incredible visual imagination and perspective to demonstrate those in an intimate and personal way, such as Denise falling headfirst at the reader as the storm befalls her house. At the time of the event, she stared at a wall or some other inanimate object, but here she stares at us, the reader and we are as incapable of helping her now as we were then.

But now, thanks to Neufeld, we can empathize. We see her perspective. Some of the stories gets the short end of the stick. The doctor in the French Quarter who is never under any sort of threat gets little ink--his story is true and honest and needs to be told--like how the French Quarter experienced minimal damage--if only to stand in contrast to the more turbulent tale of Denise, who leaves from a crowded hospital, only to have her roof fall in and then eventually end up at the storied Convention Center.

Neufeld tries to include some of the actual realities and small successes--Leo offers foreboding warnings about the fate of his comic books and other possessions, him and Michelle rejoice when the FEMA checks come. Their good fortune at the ATM and lounging at a friend's house is in stark contrast to Abbas and Darnell sleeping on a roof. Though those are subtle jabs at the politics, in a few places the characters overexplain "thugs looting" for water to give to others versus "police getting supplies" to take care of themselves.

Of course, Neufeld is justified--those points were lost on the media the first time around, so he makes sure everybody gets it this time. The monochromatic scenes change once the characters return and start to rebuild their lives--they are highlighted in a different color than their surroundings, marked as a special breed in a special class--the displaced, the refugees, the returnees to New Orleans giving and sharing their stories after losing so much. In A.D., Neufeld uses an expressive medium to compensate for the feelings that words often miss--the significance of destruction, the loneliness, the frustration at an injust system. Though A.D. is only a glimpse into all of those, it's really all that's needed.
More after the jump...