Book review: Basketball Junkie, by Chris Herren and Bill Reynolds

Oh to be young, rich and talented.

Over the past twenty years the NBA has a remarkable success rate at weeding out drug addicts. In the mid-eighties, the league instituted a three-strikes policy aimed at ridding the league of the American popular image of '70s pro basketball: that of overpaid and over-coked players who cared more about fighting than defense. Several of the league's top talents fell victim to nose candy in the 1980s: David "Skywalker" Thompson and Walter "The Greyhound" Davis managed to sustain effective NBA careers. However, guys like Chris Washburn, Richard Dumas and Roy Tarpley - I could name a dozen more off the top of my head - couldn't, and found themselves banished to eternal European ball.

Of all of these players, the one common denominator was talent. Each of them, from Thompson, who could have been the best player in the game, to Washburn, who was drafted third in 1986, was supremely gifted and capable of multiple All-Star games. Many were unable to control their habit, let alone sufficiently enough to function at NBA levels.

The same could be said of Chris Herren, one of the best ballers ever to come out of New England. His memoir "Basketball Junkie" portrays the life of an athlete blessed with talent, but cursed with addiction.

http://www.basketballjunkie.net/where-to-buy/

Herren was born to be a basketball star, and followed his brother as one of the greatest players in the history of Durfee High School, a storied Massachusetts basketball programme. At sixteen, he was so good - and messed up by "maturing" in small, working class Fall River - he was the subject of the best-seller "Fall River Dreams". The book, by journalist Bill Reynolds (with whom Herren collaborated in writing Basketball Junkie), reported the licence afforded teen athletes in a town where basketball is king.

Chris Herren managed to play two NBA seasons around the the time of the last NBA lockout. I use the verb "managed" because he did played while fighting, and eventually succumbing to, addiction to alcohol and opiates (including oxycontin and heroin). That he had the talent to play basketball was for a time perhaps his one saving grace, even though it was no longer a game for him: it was expectation, pressure and success. At his leve, playing basketball - in Denver, Boston, Italy, Turkey, China or Iran - meant he had the money to buy the drugs he needed to function.

There are two striking features of Herren's memoir: how easy it is to slip from "partying" to addiction; and secondly, simply, how functionally dependent he (and by extension, other addicts) became on opiates. What started as "Hey, I'd like to party with you" turned into mailing packages of Oxycontin to hotels he would be staying at on road trips so he could sustain his NBA form - and pay cheque. Herren wasn't addicted to getting high, but his body so craved the gear that he was completely unable to function without it. Graphic descriptions of withdrawal symptoms and his fear of both those symptoms and his future make for compelling and memorable reading.

His yearlong spell as a Celtic is effectively a haze, as it was for him at the time. He writes about how he could obtain drugs in almost any setting, from deepest, darkest China and Iran to flying into Providence airport, finding a dealer and then flying out again. The lengths he went to in order to score - like driving around Fall River with a needle in his arm and his baby daughter in the back seat.

He writes frankly about substance abuse beginning in his teen years to final, gut-wrenching, sobriety in 2008. This should-be joyous occasion, isn't so much celebrated as Championship victory but, in typical Herren matter-of-fact fashion, describes the rehab facility and every fearsome slip he made throughout.  You can sense some of the hallmarks of rehab in his words: ownership, reality and an almost total lack of astonishment at his past.

 The rehab process is depicted with the same grit and fear characterising the rest of the narrative. There is only one epiphany, the choice he describes as leading him to the choice he says all recovering addicts have to make in order to survive.  There's no trophy at the end of this longest season, only normalcy most take for granted.

This isn't a basketball book. Because Chris Herren scored more in back streets than in the NBA, it's an addict's memoir where the author is also good at basketball. There's little doubt in the reader's mind he would have been in a similar, but less fiscal, situation had basketball not taken him out of Fall River. The young Herren didn't dream of the Lakers, but Durfee High School and State championships.

To lose one's independence is a frightening thought; in fact, it may be the very concept people fear most. To become utterly dependent on a chemical is even more of a scary concept. Basketball Junkie tells how Chris Herren became totally dependent and later details the factors which allowed him to regain his life

Basketball Junkie is dirty, honest and frightening. Five stars.

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NBA trade deadline shenanigans

Good grief, what have we here? The single most apocalyptic trade deadline perhaps in NBA history as over the past two days thirteen trades were consummated - yes, thirteen - including seven All-stars, three members of Team USA, the third pick in last year's college draft, last year's Most Improved Player, probably the best Point Guard on the planet and the second pick in the 2009 draft. In total, so far confirmed hirty-eight players and fifteen-plus draft picks have changed teams, a figure The Sporting News' Sean Deveney tweeted that about 10% of NBA players have or are calling realtors. More surprising than anything though was the minutes-to-midnight deal which sent Boston Celtics starting Center Kendrick Perkins to Oklahoma City for swing Forward Jeff Green.

You can find a list of the deals here.

It's not too long a bow to draw to suggest that the NBA's balance of power has not just shifted eastwards but earthquaked that way by this week's shenanigans. By securing a young tweener in Green, the Celtics gave away possibly their greatest playoff asset - size - in releasing Perkins. Perkins, whose NBA Finals knee injury last year torched Celtics' chances of taking out the NBA championship, has in playoff series past whupped Orlando's Dwight Howard, his now replacement Shaquille O'Neal and Laker Andrew Bynum. Popular punditry has him as Dwight Howard's biggest fear due to his combination of defense-first mentality, strong widebody and fearlessness.

Perkins - with a scowl like no other - finds himself in Oklahoma, where he'll start (when healthy) alongside Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook in a squad formerly labelled a "donut" team. They've lacked an enforcer and rim defender, the two things that Perk does best. The Thunder, had to give up an asset - and were disclined to pay Free Agent-to-be Green - have acquired perhaps the piece which turns them from Playoff team to Potential contender.

The Eastern Conference - though giving up talent in depth in Harris, Wallace, Favors, Perkins, Gallinari & Felton - actually acquired the high-end abilities, with three of the four best players shifting addresses into their conference. Anthony will combine with Amar'e Stoudemire to form a very potent offensive New York Knicks team; their cross-town rival Nets used most of the package they had offered for Anthony to sign the best point guard in the league, Deron Williams, who'd apparently malcontented his way out of Utah.

The clubs not considered contending for the title were also active as sleeper deals - trades which could bring immense benefit without garnering the same uproar - improved all of the Atlanta Hawks, Portland Trail Blazers, New Orleans Hornets and Houston Rockets. The Blazers' acquisition of former All-star Gerald Wallace to combine with LaMarcus Aldridge, Nicolas Batum and the shell of Brandon Roy's knees forms a potent small-ball rotation, further reinforcing notions that no matter how chaotic their back office, their impressive list of assets allow them to remain difference-makers. The Rockets, in signing 7'3 uberbust Hasheem Thabeet and last Spring's playoff hero, Phoenix's Goran Dragic, rebooted by ridding themselves of a potential headache in Aaron Brookes. As bait, despite being last year's Most Improved Player, Brooks played terribly this season backing up the more defensive-minded Kyle Lowry but could be, with Polish Hammer Marcin Gortat, the first step in the Suns' post-Steve Nash era. Nash remains with the team but voices suggest he's likely to be moved before the Suns being their next campaign.

In seasons past, deadline day has been an irrelevancy, notable for who didn't move rather than who did. This year, with the NBA lockout looming, the league has put together perhaps the best season since 1997 and has topped it off with the Best. Trade. Deadline. Ever. As they face an offseason of doubt, the league has certainly done its part to put itself to the forefront of the imagination. All that remains is for him to facilitate an Owners/Players deal which equally dissatisfies all parties.

Book review: Red and Me, by Bill Russell

A few months ago I was in the book shop at the Central Station in Washington DC and happened upon a book by Bill Russell in the remainder bin. It was marked down from $24.99 to $4.99, so I bought it. It was entitled “Red and Me: My Coach, my lifelong friend”. I only recently picked it up to read and without fail, every thirty pages I was forced to exclaim to my wife how horrible a sports book it was with statements like “Now he's claiming to teach an 80-year old Auerbach about basketball from the stands!” or “I can see why it was in the remainder bin” or, less tactfully “What complete and utter BULL SHIT”. Yeah, I was yelling by the end of the sentence.

An insight into a particularly successful coach/player relationship? I think not. It is only 180-odd pages of drivel by a man whose ego simply knows no limits. When many people think back on the age-old “Wilt or Russell” debate, Chamberlain's ability to reel off his statistics and accomplishments has usually marked him the more egotistical of the pair. Russ, however, simply put it as “Eleven rings, ten fingers”. That Wilt only won twice – on mostly inferior teams – was the burden he had to lug about and as such in the “Who's better, who's best” game he had to rely on his extraordinary personal achievements. Russell has always been seen as the less-outspoken and less crass of the pair.

Until now. Red and Me was less about Red and more about Me. It was undoubtedly the most arrogant, selfish, egotistical and self-gratifying sports book I've ever had the misfortune to read and without question ranks at the bottom of the pile. And I've read Dean Jones: One day Magic, Punter: The first Tests of a Champion and the immortally bad Second Coming where Sam Smith attempts to revisit the success he had with The Jordan Rules but with only a modicum of enthusiasm. The point is, I've read some rubbish in my time but never have I read a sports book I enjoyed less.

These are not the recollections of a coach/player relationship and what made it so successful, more an attempted apologetic at how good Bill Russell was as a player. For several years during and after the careers of Wilt and Russell – I hate bringing Wilt's name into this but their careers will always be inextricably linked – Russell always said the Celtics triumphed most often because they had the better teams, which was for the large part true. Now he appears to be coming out saying that his teammates weren't nearly as good as history has made them out, and that all the glory for their championship years should go to him, simply because he was that good. I get the feeling now there is a swell of posthumous support for Chamberlain's case as greater and this is Russell trying to tell everyone that he was the best ever in a very gentle sense. He fails horribly in this.

Throughout the book, as he dwells on his family history, his relationships with his coaches and his experience Russell says “It is better to understand than to be understood” and lets on that this is his personal philosophy, the mantra he's led his life by. What twaddle! It may very well be true, but when he follows it immediately with a “Why do the citizens of Boston hate me?” soliloquy after purporting to understand them it rings very false indeed. He then uses the “... than to be understood” as an excuse to do just as he wants in life and be excused for it, no matter what the consequences on those around him. This makes him look a very sad, extremely angry and ultimately exceedingly lonely man.

Russell has a reputation for being a little spiky, perhaps hard to get to know. He often has refused to sign autographs for young fans, backing it up with statements like “Young children should ask their teacher for their autograph”. Within 30 pages he shoots that argument in the foot automatically and irrevocably by stating that he learnt nothing from his coaches at the University of San Francisco or from Auerbach during their ten years together. Indeed he then says he never respected any coaches he'd had except Red Auerbach, and the reason he held Red in such esteem was that he didn't try to get Russell to play according to team rules but changed the team rules to what was best for the Big Fella. He then says he knew everything about basketball before comin into the NBA as a 22-year old. According to Bill, Red identified early his talent and then essentially gave him carté blanche to do as he pleased.

No-one can ever argue with the record of the Boston Celtics during the 1950s and 1960s. I would have said “No-one can ever argue with Bill Russell's record ...” except this book has engendered such a dislike of the man in me that I now simply refuse to acknowledge him out of the Celtics team. That this man, such an icon of the sporting world, the first black coach in any pro sport comes out and says “I liked Red Auerbach because he let me do things the way I wanted”. No-one can dispute the results of this theory, so perhaps Auerbach was every bit the coach we now think of him as. To effectively get a player with a chip on his shoulder the size of Russell's to suit up and play hard every game ensures Red's reputation as one of the greats but more than that, Red and Me places Bill Russell inelegantly balancing at the top of Sporting Hall of Fame for Complete Dicks.

So to sum up: Red and Me: My Coach, my lifelong friend – 0 stars.

Don't even buy it for your worst enemy.