The Book of Basketball - Bill Simmons

Bill Simmons tends to be one of those writers that elicits pretty strong opinions by those who encounter his writing. As you may or may not be aware, Simmons is famous for writing on ESPN's Page 2 and more recently for starring in one of the most popular sports podcasts. His schtick is that rather than writing from the perspective of a sports journalist he writes from the perspective of an everyday fan. This results in him being able to take strong, and often biased opinions and he hardly ever tries to be politically correct. Unlike pretty much every ESPN personality he rarely appears on the network, and even actively tries to separate himself from the company. This 'fan friendly' approach is often the source of the bad parts in his writing, but I think it's also what really separates himself from his contemporaries.

In Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs Chuck Klosterman points out that it appears that all sports reporters and writers actually hate sports. This is, he claims, because they get so close to the athletes and day to day operation of sports that they can't help to be disillusioned with what they see. Many athletes are indeed terrible people (as are people in any occupation) and becoming too close to those same people you need to idolize in their reporting eventually breaks down pretty much every sports journalist. Simmons avoids this by staying at arms length from the athletes, owners and coaches involved in professional sports. Although this creates some pretty strong biases in his writing (he's a HUGE Boston fan, which has become insufferable due to all their winning this decade) it actually leaves him less biased than most writers or talking heads when it comes to sports as a whole. He's allowed to call athletes out when they act like knuckleheads, and he's allowed to attack the owners when they act like rich, cheap assholes. By being able to voice his real opinions he fills a much needed gap in sports reporting which too often degenerates into a huge circlejerk between the writers, athletes and everyone else involved.

Although this is technically not his first book (he published one a few years ago about the Red Sox winning the World Series), this is Simmons' first book of almost completely new material. In The Book of Basketball he sets out to redesign the basketball hall of fame (which he finds inadequate) with a tier system and by ranking every player to make it into the hall of fame. His reasoning for doing this is something along the lines of 'why should Micheal Jordon (the best player ever) and Vince Carter (a malcontent and infamous ball hog) both be recognized to the same level'? It's a valid question, and one that should be considered for other sports as well. If the hall of fame is to recognize not only the accomplishments of those who contributed to a particular sport, but also to act as a history museum, shouldn't the levels of those accomplishments be acknowledged?

The Book of Basketball also attempts to answer many questions which Simmons thinks are important to the sport as a whole. There is a whole section dedicated to 'what-ifs' that considers how the league might be different if small (and sometimes huge) things happened differently. But really at the core of this book is something that Simmons calls The Secret. He wants to find out what really is the trick to winning basketball games and championships and what is the 'it' that some players seem to have while others are completely clueless. As he is first told by Isiah Thomas, The Secret is that 'basketball is not really about basketball'.

What Isiah, and pretty much every other great player, understands is that winning basketball games to some degree is not just about who has better players. More than baseball, and possibly rivaling football, basketball is a team sport. It doesn't matter who has the better players as much as you might think, what really matters is having a team that plays well together and having players that can fit certain roles. While this may seem obvious to some people, just watch any NBA game of the past 10 years and you'll see that hardly any players gets The Secret (which I guess is where the name comes from).

Simmons frames the focal point of this argument as whether or not you think Bill Russel or Wilt Chamberlain was the better basketball in the NBA's early years. Do you go with the defensive team minded Russell or the unstoppable scoring machine Wilt (who famously scored 100 points in one game)? As Simmons points out, this is a ridiculous argument seeing that Russel won 11 championships in 13 years, often beating Wilt's teams, while Wilt only won 2 championships his entire career. Why was it that Russell routinely beat Wilt even though Wilt arguably had more skills? According to Simmons, this argument is at the heart of understanding basketball as a whole, and where individual players rank against each other.

Other than these topics, Simmons also attempts to lay out a brief history of the league and the important events that shaped the NBA as we know it today. If this seems like a lot to go over for one book it is. There is a reason the book is 700 pages besides the fact that Simmons feels bad making his readers pay for his writing.

Although he has obviously done his research for the book (and likes to remind you of this fact over and over) the best parts of The Book of Basketball are anecdotes either from Simmons personally or from those he reads/interviews. The beginning sections of the book where Simmons describes going to Celtics games during Larry Bird's prime are absolute gold. You really get a feel of what it felt like to attend those historic games, and makes you yearn for the days before jumbotrons and around the clock sports coverage. Even if the Celtic love can get a little old at times, it's hard not to see how growing up watching that particular team would create an NBA fanatic.

Being only moderately knowledgeable about basketball I found The Book of Basketball to be at the perfect level of depth. However, if you know hardly anything about basketball, or more specifically basketball greats of the past, you might glaze over when Simmons starts his countdown to the greatest players ever. Especially in the lower numbers (he lists the 96 greatest players ever leaving room for current players that don't yet make the cut) I too often found myself in sections of 5 or so players who I had never heard of before. Simmons tries to break this up with humor and funny anecdotes, but many of the older less known players blended together. This is not to say this is his fault, I'm sure someone with more knowledge of basketball history would be much more interested in these sections than I was.

The thing that really keeps this book going is Simmons' patented humor and stories. He fills this book with footnotes (almost 2 a page) and while this makes this book a 'long' 700 pages, they are mostly used to break up the basketball talk. I know it might make me somewhat of a 'dude', but I often find Simmons really, really funny. However it's in this 'dude' quality that I think that the book's weakest moments lie. Seeing that normally he has to listen to ESPNs censors, he really lets himself go with lots of dick and sex jokes. He occasionally makes comments that could be deemed sexist, and while I appreciate him trying to challenge the overly politically correctness of out times, it did occasionally make me cringe. Also a little over the top are his pop culture jokes. He likes to think he's a king of pop culture references, but it's really just Karate Kid, Teen Wolf, and Boogie Nights jokes over and over. I also think he'll regret making references and comparisons to things like The Bachelor, seeing that I don't think these references will age particularly well.

As much as I wish Simmons held back at times, what really makes The Book of Basketball great is his ability to point out which players and teams mattered, and which people had worthwhile personal stories to tell. Simmons turned me own to players who I knew about but never fully appreciated, Bill Walton and Julius Erving to name a few (seriously, who was cooler than Dr. J? See below), and made me realize how much of a team sport basketball really is. I also liked the sections where he would trash players (i.e. Patrick Ewing, Vince Carter, Pete Maravich, all for different reasons) who are often (mistakenly) thought of as all-time greats, especially given that his talents for humor lend themselves to negative criticism. Reading this book has already made me appreciate understand basketball when I watch it much more than I previously have.






















On the personal stories front, his discussions on race relations in the early days of the NBA are particularly great, especially given that this too often gets ignored when discussing sports history. His treatment of lives of Elgin Baylor and Oscar Robinson gave me chills, and I'm not the kind of person who throws that term around. If anyone ever wonders why sports matter, I would encourage them to read about the lives of these and other players.

If you're a fan of Simmons, basketball, or sports in general I would say this is a solid 'must read'. He structures it such that if you get bored with a certain section, you can easily skip around and still enjoy the book. Only want to read about players or teams you know? Go ahead, he encourages it. The 'R-rated' humor will cause a few eye rolls, as well as some audible guffaws, but you will finish the book having a much better feeling about why basketball is a great sport, and which players were truly transcendent.

Eating the Dinosaur - Chuck Klosterman

On the back cover of Chuck Klosterman's newest book there is a fake question and answer with the writer. Besides containing some of the typical smartassness found in Klosterman's writing there is the following section discussing the book's theme:

Q: Is there a larger theme?

A: Oh, something about reality. "What is reality," maybe? No, that's not it. Not exactly. I get the sense that most of the core questions dwell on the way media perception constructs a fake reality that ends up becoming more meaningful that whatever actually happened.

Although Klosterman often hides though humor or snarkiness, this is some of the best self analysis that he's written, and it perfectly explains what Eating the Dinosaur is about.

Compared to the other books of his that I have read (Killing Yourself to Live and Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs) Eating the Dinosaur has a much stronger central theme and seems to have had more thought put into it. Although Killing Yourself to Live has a 'strong theme' in theory, it too often gets dragged down by his various musings and distractions. In Dinosaur he stays much more on topic, and almost never gets distracted from his central idea (he barely brings up his personal life, which is a welcome change from his previous efforts). Although I haven't read all of Klosterman's other work, I think it's safe to say that Eating the Dinosaur is is best work to date.

As stated above, Dinosaur has a central theme of "reality versus perceived reality as it is affected by culture". Although like Cocoa Puffs it is a collection of essays on various subjects, unlike Cocoa Puffs all these essays seem to be connected on a deeper level. Whether it's talking about the failure of Chris Gaines, the fall and perception of Ralph Sampson, laughtracks, the sincerity of Rivers Cuomo, Ralph Nader and Warner Herzog or the things the Unabomber got right (more on this in a bit) Dinosaur attempts to analyze ways in which our world experience is mediated and affected through the culture in which we live.

One of my favorite essays was Klosterman explaining why he loves football (which can be read here on ESPN, to which Klosterman is an occasional contributor), and why it's such a fantastic sport. He ends the chapter with his best thoughts about the subject:

Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from everything, all the time, always.

Klosterman is here discussing how when it comes to the way football develops tactically, coaches are willing to try anything, constantly challenging the intellect. There is no 'right' way to play (unlike in other sports, say Baseball) and teams are constantly coming up with unique formations and plays to challenge what we thought was possible. However in a way football does support 'old school values' and this results in Klosterman calling it a kind of reverse libertarian. This section explains many of the reasons I myself love football, and I would point to it for anyone who doesn't understand America's fascination with this sport.

As much as I liked the chapter on football, objectively Klosterman's best section is the one in which he tackles the Unabomber. He begins the section with the usual caveats when discussing a possibly sensitive subject, and compares discussing the Unabombers manifesto to discussing O.J. Simpson as a football player. Regardless of the 'appropriateness' of the discussion, he makes some good points. Klosterman writes:

Like so many modern people, my relationship with technology makes no sense whatsoever: It's the most important aspect of my life that I hate. The more central it becomes to how I live, the worse it seems for the world at large. I believe all technology has a positive short-term effect and a negative long-term impact, and-on balance-the exponential of upsurge of technology's social import has been detrimental to the human experience.

Being a little young when the Unabomber was fully active, I was somewhat unaware of what he was all about. I knew he was a crazy guy who lived in the woods of Montana and who sent bombs in the mail to random people in order to have his manifesto published. After reading this section I went online to read though parts of the manifesto, and it ended up making me really depressed. Really, I was upset that I shared to many of the same ideas about society and technology that the Unabomber posits (and Klosterman agrees with here) that it was hard for me to reconcile how I could not come to the same conclusions as Ted Kaczynski.

Kaczynski's main thesis is that as we have become more reliant on technology, and thus don't have to work to fulfill our basic needs as an organism, we have become unhappy and depressed as a species. Almost every activity we associate with 'being human' from art to science to even charity, he ascribes as a 'surrogate activity' that is really taking the place of living and surviving. I don't necessarily agree with him here, but it's hard not to follow his logic to some of these conclusions. After thinking about this a while I came to the conclusion that yes our species seems to be having some issues with the acceleration of society and technology, but I don't think we can go back at this point. Not everyone in the world can live in a cabin in Montana, and many of the people that I love would not be alive if it were not for advanced technology. It's true that human's weren't 'made' to sit and look at screens all day, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices.

It's in this last section that many of the ideas that Klosterman has batted around for a while in various books and articles come together. The modern human is fully immersed in his society, and many of our ideas or thoughts that we would think originate from ourselves are actually a manifestation of the society we inhabit. Is our own reality different than the reality we experience through media such as television, movies or the internet? How much of our own mind is distinct to us and not shared with the rest of our society? These are some serious questions that Klosterman hints at in Dinosaur while discussing his usual assortment of 'irrelevant' topics. Like his other books Eating the Dinosaur is entertaining and a fast read, but I think it does dig a little deeper. Instead of finding myself rereading sections from confused by what Klosterman is saying because of his complicated wordplay, while reading Dinosaur I found myself rereading sections in order to understand what sophisticated philosophical idea he was trying to connect to ABB, or whatever other piece of irrelevant pop culture he choses to disect.

Ender's Shadow - Orson Scott Card

After a college friend revealed Orson Scott Card's feelings towards homosexuals to me it was hard not to let his personal feelings affect my opinion of Ender's Game. This brought up the common question of 'does an artist's personal opinions affect the enjoyment of his art or ideas in such a way that it completely ruins them?' Nietzsche was a well known sexist, and there are even many passages in his books that tout these ignorant opinions, but does that mean his other, more enlightened views are thus negated? Some (okay, 99 percent) rappers have hateful or sexist lines in their songs, but does that mean we can't look past it or enjoy their other songs? Or with the case of Card, can we enjoy his books even though he actively supports the mistreatment of an entire section of people in our society?

Card's situation is a little different that the other examples above because his personal opinions are a little less obvious from his work. There is no way to tell that he is a homophobe from the text of Ender's Game. In fact all the scenes of little boys running around naked and talking about their love for each other is more than a little homoerotic. However, Ender's Game was written before Card became more outspoken about his beliefs so it's possible that he just didn't feel as strongly at the time. After talking to some friends, and reading about his other work on the internet, I decided I had no interest in reading the rest of the Ender series. However, I was interested in Ender's Shadow on the strength of a couple of recommendations, and was also interested to see if Card's homophobic beliefs would rear their ugly head in this later written piece.

On the later of these accounts, I found Ender's Shadow to be no more homophobic than Ender's Game. Frankly it was possibly even more homoerotic than his seminal work. Now I'm not the kind of person that thinks every homophobe is possibly just a closeted self-loathing gay, but the thought did cross my mind more than once when it comes to Card.

Ender's Shadow is as the subtitle says, 'a parrallel novel to Ender's Game'. It takes (mostly) the same story and tells it from the character of Bean, Ender's right hand man and another small but intelligent child. Additionally to telling Bean's point of view, Shadow is used to give us more background and explanation for the events that happened in Game either through Bean's interaction with the teachers and commanders or through blunt bits of exposition through other characters.

I found Bean's own development to be interesting, if not a little more than reminiscent of the story we are told about Ender. They are both younger than the typical members of battle school, and furthermore they are small for their age. They both are singled out for their size and intelligence by their instructor during their lunch to the school in order to ostrisize them from their fellow students. Although this makes sense later on when we learn that Bean is really the 'back up' to Ender in case he should fail, it still feels a little too repetitive. Further making Ender's Shadow repetitive is the fact that the sections with Ender are exactly like they are in the previous book, with us getting the running monologue of Bean's head instead of Enders. Also, Card still has no idea how to write children (I don't care how smart they are, children don't speak like that!).

In addition to using many of the same sections for the plat, Card also doesn't have the best of writing styles. It is often said that the best films 'show and not tell', and even though this is a book I think the same basic principle applies to all storytelling. It is best to tell a story while leaving the audience to fill in some gaps themselves. The best storytellers will leave enough gaps to keep the audience stimulated and thinking, while giving them enough information so everyone can follow along and come to (mostly) the same conclusions. There are way too many sections of unnecessary explanation in Card's books, and it makes him only a mediocre writer. There is no need ot have a character explain what happened and why in a two page monologue after the reader themselves have also read the event in question. Card is either spoon feeding the reader, or trying to make his characters seem 'analytical', but it really just comes off as both patronizing and boring.

I didn't hate Ender's Shadow, and found much of it entertaining as I did with Ender's Game. Card does reuse a lot of the same tricks, and clumsily connects events and characters while over-explaining everything, but the story is still interesting. After reading Shadow, and reading about the other books in both the Ender and Bean series, I can see why people think Card is a one trick pony. Shadow did feel a little like Card realized he had used up his one good idea, and that he missed the boat and underdeveloped many of the characters in that book. Shadow is really for Ender's Game fanatics who can't get enough of that universe, but for everyone else I'd say it's a solid skip.

So how did I come out of this feeling about Card the person? Well from Shadow and Game I gather that Card feels two things about himself, or at least about himself at a young age. 1) That he was small and unfairly picked upon as a child. And 2) that he was beyond his age in intelligence and was able to use this to trick the older and bigger kids. Furthermore, it's obvious from his online commentaries that he is just another conservative religious man who recently decided to make gay-bashing his personal quest. So can we disconnect his art from the person? In this case I think you can, even though he only has 1 great book (that is poorly written like many sci-fi greats) and I don't think he's really worth the energy getting that upset about in the first place.

The Greatest Show on Earth - Richard Dawkins

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact... [It] didn't have to be true. It is not self-evidently, tautologically, obviously true, and there was a time when most people, even
educated people, thought it wasn't. It didn't have to be true, but it is.

In my previous post discussing one of Dawkins' other books I wrote that I didn't really want to get into another debate about evolution vs. creationism. In reviewing his most recent book, it would be impossible and irresponsible for me to ignore this ongoing and often spiteful dialog.

The goal of this book, as the subtitle lets on, is for Dawkins to produce the 'Evidence for Evolution'. Although examples of and evidence for evolution is found throughout his other writing, he doesn't have a book that states 'these are the facts, and this is why evolution is true'. In this way The Greatest Show on Earth is a much needed book. Although another book (which Dawkins fully reccomends) that tackles this subject was released earlier this year in Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True, I think it's neccesary for someone who is widely known (as much in our society that a scientist can be) to also tackle this subject. Too many people either believe or contradict evoluution without really knowing the facts. As Dawkins often points out, General scientific knowledge in our world is at an extremely depressing level given how much knowledge we as a species have. The purpose of this book is both to convince those on the fence that evolution is indeed true, and to arm those who believe in it against those who Dawkins calls 'history deniers'.

The first thing that Dawkins tackles in this book, and the one thing that I think is sorely needed in the current discussion about evolution, is the idea that it is 'only a theory'. He frames the argument so well in the book it would be hard for me to recapitulate his ideas. Basically, he points out that the only thing that can be proven are mathematical theorems. You often hear Darwinists sarcastically say 'well gravity is only a theory', and really it's true. You can prove that the square root of 2 is an irrational number, but you cannot prove that evolution is true. This does not mean that beyond any doubt it is true.

Dawkins uses the risky move of pointing out that many people in the world no longer believe the Holocaust occurred. He compares this case of 'ignoring' the facts to those who ignore the truth of evolution. It's a risky move because any time you use Hitler or the Holocaust in an argument, one typically losses all credibility. But here I think he makes a valid point. Even with the eye witnesses (which are becoming fewer and fewer these days) he claims that the evidence for evolution is just as strong as the evidence for the occurrence of the Holocaust. The point here is for him to point out what we consider to be 'evidence' and how we as humans make decisions about what happened in the past.

This brings up the next set of arguments that Dawkins tackles. He spends a fair amount of time on the fossil record, and whether or not it is 'incomplete'. Many people (not just creationists) believe that the fossil record is the biggest, and perhaps only, evidence for evolution. Thus they are taught to say 'the record is incomplete' thinking that if they point out areas where we don't have fossils of intermediate species evolution will be blown to shreds. There are two main points here that Dawkins points out. First, our record is more complete than we have any right ot expect. We have so many 'intermediates' and examples of not only human ancestors, but ancestors of many species that it is more than enough to conclude evolution's truth. Second, any time we find a new fossil, creationists then can say 'where is the intermediate between that and the one before'. As I've pointed out in my reivew for The Ancestor's tale, there are an infinate number of 'intermediates' between species. Placing everything in a neat and tidy box is a human way of thinking, and nature does not work this way.

Furthermore, Dawkins makes the argument that our evidence for evolution is so convincing that even if we did not have one fossil we would be just as confident in the truth of evolution by natural selection. Comparing scientists to detectives who have to figure out what happened inthe aftermath of a crime, Dawkins writes:

The fossil record, like the spy camera in the murder story, is a bonus, something that we had no right ot expect as a matter of entitlement.

There is something else that creationists, and those who don't take the time to learn the subject often miss. They think that evolution is 'in the past' and something that has to be proven like a fact of history. The thing they miss is that evolution is happening all around us every day. Furthermore, as Dawkins writes:

there is more than enough evidence for the fact of evolution in the comparative study of modern species and their geographical distribution. We don't need fossils - the case for evolution is watertight without them; so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution. We are, as I say, lucky to have fossils at all.

It is theses other pieces of evidence that I think make this book required reading for enlightened adults. Everyone knows what fossils are and how they work. But hardly anyone really understands the other pieces of evidence that are produced throughout this book. I won't really go into them here, because I think one really needs to sit down and read this book (or a book like it like Coyne's) to understand the evidence. The domestication of animals, our relationships to other creatures, geological features and countless other examples are used to show how everything in biology and life is driven by evolution and natural selection.

One of the main arguments that is often used against 'Darwinists' is that they're just replacing one ideology with another. This argument is used by both those who are religous and obviously at odds with Darwinism, and by those who think that any kind of ideology is ridiculous and harmful. Furthermore, this argument is even extended to all of science, where they believe 'Religion' is just being replaced with 'Science' with those who believe acting just as blind and indoctrinated. I find this argument utterly ridiculous. Science is a way of thinking, not a set of beliefs. As Dawkins points out above, evolution didn't have to be true but all of our evidence points out that it is. If there were some, any, evidence that Darwinian Evolution wasn't true those of us who believe in it would have to abandon this idea and try to figure out how things really work. Those who believe in 'creationism' or any other religious belief will never change their indivdual beliefs. They are set in stone for all time, unable to be changed by even the most convincing mounds of evidence.