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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Book review: Chocolate Thunder, by Darryl Dawkins and Charley Rosen

A re-post from our affiliate Book Review site, Books with Balls.  

Darryl Dawkins is nothing if not an entertainer.  The names he gave his dunks were awesome, his proclamations about coming from the planet Lovetron were - and still are - amazing, and he was an effective NBA center for a decade before succumbing to injury.  He broke two plexiglass backboards during his days in the League and another one when playing for Torino of the Italian League - dude was a beast.

His book, penned alongside experienced basketball ghost-writer and free spirit Charley Rosen, is therefore a very entertaining read.  In fact, it's one of the books I've most enjoyed going back to pick up in recent times.  It's lightweight, honest, good for a chuckle and well worth a read.

At the same stage, it's also hardly a work which will truly describe the NBA's Dark Times to younger generations with the appropriate reality.  While it ploughs head-on into drug use - especially the casual stuff of Dawkins and the sadness of teammate Micheal Ray Richardson's addiction - it also presents most authority figures as broken men trying to compensate for a lack of control. 

In fact in places, it appears as if Dawkins - always the most likeable of souls - is simply unencumbered with an accurate version of reality.  The rate at which he bitches about referees and - without the same malice - most of his NBA coaches enlightens the reader as to why he wasn't the All-World player his talent said he should have been.  While refs did perhaps victimise DD (kiiiiind of), he was a notoriously bad defender and bought up-fakes like they were Internet futures in 1996.

courtesy: sportclassicbooks.com

We've been writing at Books with Balls for a while.  Chocolate Thunder is also the first book I've ever read where I've bookmarked certain pages for either being so deluded they're worth mentioning in and of themselves.  Examples?  How about when he suggests Phoenix Suns coach Alvin Gentry is so bad "he must have a photo of an NBA GM f***ing a goat or something"(pg 135).  Or when he says he "practically won Game 5 [of the 1980 NBA Finals] on my own".  In reality, Kareem led the Lakers to a huge win after really badly spraining an ankle and Magic Johnson jumped center in the decisive Game 6.  Maybe that's what he meant by "practically".

Some inaccuracies, like "Fast" Eddie Johnson being dead, or Micheal Ray Richardson embarrassing white Point guards like Mark Price (whose NBA career only barely overlapped "Sugar's") can be put down to poor editing.  Others can only be thought of as fallacies brought about by a combination of ego and a grasp on reality which perhaps occasionally slips, unhelped by the cocaine he freely admits to taking during his playing days.

Despite the obvious ego, there's a real sense that Darryl Dawkins loves life, no matter how hard it has occasionally gotten for him.  In fact, he comes off as a really admirable guy, which in itself is testament to his likeability.  For his words to burst off the page as they do, the reader is left not only with a sense of DD's conviction, but also of his irrepressible joy.  Naming dunks, sleeping with maybe 1000 women and enjoying coaching as much as he does are all signs of la joie de vivre.  And Chocolate Thunder's got that in spades.

Darryl Dawkins is a fascinating man and in some ways it's a pity he's chosen to deliver such a lightweight memoir.  In other ways, however, apart from his physical size, Dawkins is a man driven by levity.  That in itself makes this book about a "coodabeen" well worth the 220-page read.  Recommended, but only if your knowledge of basketball history doesn't object to occasional inaccuracies.  Three stars.

My Favourite Cricketer: Allan Border by Ben Roberts.

In the second of our series "My Favourite Cricketer", co-hosted by World Cricket Watch and Balanced Sports, is by Ben Roberts and features the man who single-handedly dragged Australian cricket from the doldrums, Allan Border.

Upon request I have journeyed deep into my memory to come to the point of selecting Allan Border as my favourite cricketer of all time. At the time that his career concluded I was just out of primary school and I am sure he was not the player that I aspired to be. My history however has the years rolling by with me continuing to turn over who my favourite player was at any one point, and likewise having been asked I have settled (with surprising ease) on Border as the one most worthy of my admiration.

My undoubted first love was Craig McDermott, now Australia's bowling coach. He was the fast bowler leading Australia's attack at the time I remember first watching cricket on TV and all I wanted to do was bowl fast. In hindsight it is a strange choice for two reasons. One, these formative memories have Sir Vivian Richards pasting McDermott and others all around Australia on his final visit to our shores; and two, my own cricket career finished with me an unspectacular opening batsman rather than a feared fast bowler.

But I did not stop there with the fast men, Glenn McGrath then followed in my affections. Maybe he carried to further height a similar style to McDermott, consistency and fire being in the right balance. Today, I remain enamoured with a fast bowler out of the current crop. Without a doubt it is Peter Siddle whom I love to watch play cricket most. But this is more about his overall attitude to the game than skills. As an adult now I have perspective on how misguided we can be that cricket is more than a game. Siddle is a breath of fresh air, he just loves playing the game, running in and bowling fast.

I have seen all the great modern Australian batsman score centuries live but none really stick in my memory as particularly inspiring. Of batsmen however, Steve Waugh during the 1989 Ashes was a favourite based purely on making the first centuries of his career with a Gunn and Moore bat (my first bat was a G&M also). I will also go to my grave claiming Mark Taylor is Australia's greatest captain ever.

But it is not the statistics or great memories that leave Border sitting atop my list. He was not the most classically gifted batsman as Greg Chappell was, nor could he play an innings of absolute power as Adam Gilchrist became known for. Yet Border climbed to the top of the batting world at a time where pitches varied wildly and each nation boasted an array of world-class bowling talent. He did so through willpower and technique alone. What elevates him above all others is who he was in Australian cricket history and what he means now to the historical landscape of Australian cricket. Allan Robert Border, no matter what position they found themselves in, represented Australian Cricket.

 
Getting his chance while the World Series players were out of the way, he quickly became a worthy First XI selection in a team of Second XI talent. Within only a few years he was a constant and a leader in a team that was as volatile off the field as it was on. He was a controlled player that underpinned the flashiness surrounding him.

When Australian cricket was at its lowest ebb, as a captain departed in tears and the core of the great side left as one, there Border remained, though still in his twenties, a man among the boys. He took on a role that today's leadership experts and sports psychologists would probably steer his type away from. In fact Border himself did not appear assured in accepting the role, being aware of his limitations in areas beyond batting.

He rolled through series after series of being battered by a West Indian pace attack that was as unforgiving as it was fast. If you look at his career he nearly outlasted three generations of these fearsome bowlers and of the greats, only Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh continued beyond him. Imagine turning up to your workplace day after day and being confronted by the message 'try as you might, you will fail today': This was Australian cricket in the 1980s.

 
Minimal footage exists of his 1984 test in Port of Spain where he dug in for 98* and 100*, but newspaper descriptions of it are enough to fire my enthusiasm for tough test cricket. West Indian wicketkeeper Jeff Dujon has gone on record saying it was the saddest thing he saw in his cricket career that AB didn't get a hundred in each innings. He was unforgiving in nature also. Less than established in the test team, Dean Jones found this out in the middle of India's M.A. Chidambaram Stadium. Though Jones scored a double hundred in immense heat, vomiting all the way, Border still asked more of him and the tied result of the match maybe justified his stance.

Despite never getting the ultimate success (for the age) against the West Indies, Border's career concluded with Australia as number two and taking off for the glory years. Border was still a constant and a force in the breakthrough 1987 World Cup and the 1989 Ashes victories. While others were on glorious runs of form in both of these tournaments, the captain held his game together as solidly as ever in the middle order. He retired after Australian cricket returned to South Africa and left behind a core of players that built on his legacy.

 
Both Waugh twins, Ian Healy, and Mark Taylor became the leaders of the next generation of Australian cricket and all learned much about mental toughness and winning hard from their former leader. Even while Shane Warne was spinning a web around the hapless Englishmen there was still one man who could still attack him. Warne himself has admitted that he has never been played as well as by Border (in training) in his early career. Despite his unspectacular batting nature you can do a lot worse than to watch footage of Border batting against spinners to learn the art of playing the slow men.

I never saw a Border century live, and struggle to remember seeing one on television except maybe for glimpses of his second test double century, this against England in 1993. I maintain Taylor as the best captain that Australian cricket had tactically and in understanding the game, but give me Border to bat or captain for my life any day. He did not inspire me as a child during his career, but in retrospect he has become the marker of what I consider quality cricket. Maybe why I love watching Peter Siddle today as it is he who epitomises individuals who play as though they want to squeeze every last drop of success out of their talent.

With questions abounding Australian cricket of what group of players will lead the way back up to the top the question for me is not how much do they want success? It is whether they want it as much as AB did?

Obituary: Remembering Maurice Lucas

Maurice Lucas is dead. The King is Dead.

Former NBA power forward Maurice Lucas died yesterday as a result of a long illness with bladder cancer. He was fifty-eight.

Maurice Lucas was unquestionably one of the best things about Pro Basketball's "dark times" - the time after the great Celtics/Lakers rivalries of the 1960s and before the great Celtics/Lakers rivalries of the 1980s. In a time where basketball was thought of alternately as too black, too violent or too druggy, the Power Forward position was thought of as an enforcer - someone to start fights and - crucially - finish them. No one finished fights like Luke. A bruising PF, Maurice Lucas was also a student of the game and a "thinker" - indeed he gave up red meat and started elaborate stretching exercises long before core-strength was regarded as important in any sports other than gymnastics.

He got his pro start with the most amusing team of them all, the Spirits of St. Louis, after joining the ABA despite being drafted by Chicago of the NBA. Indeed, to look at the Chicago sides of the 1970s and insert Mo Lucas is to see a near-Championship calibre squad. But Lucas chose the money and playing time of St. Louis and was dumped straight into the world of Marvin "Bad News" Barnes and Fly Williams. On a team renowned for craziness, Lucas was a calming influence and one of the only players and people on the roster on whom management could rely.

Although he began his ABA career at 6'9 and only 220 pounds, Lucas took to the role of enforcer like few before him. In the tradition of Jungle Jim Loscutoff and Chet Walker, Mo was tough and provided the ultimate example of Star Wars' Tarkin Doctrine - ruling through fear of force, rather than through force itself. When it was necessary to step up and fight as the basketball of the era demanded, Maurice did so with a fury that no-one in either league could match - in his most memorable stoush he knocked out 7'3 giant Artis Gilmore with one punch. What's not remembered as clearly though is that Luke tried to avoid the conflict and only fought when it became clear it was a case of "kill or be killed".

After a time with the Spirits, it became obvious that the dedicated, passionate Lucas and the free-spirited, drug-addled-but-supremely-talented Barnes couldn't co-exist and he was traded to Kentucky to form possibly one of the most imposing "big" lineups in memory: he joined the behemoth Gilmore. When Kentucky folded at the conclusion of the final ABA season, he was the first pick in the ABA Dispersal draft and joined Portland, where he is most fondly remembered. In the first year post-merger, "Luke" led the Trailblazers in scoring and grabbed 10.4 rebounds per game to be the league's best power forward (you will never convince me that "Big E" Elvin Hayes was better that year).

Although the Blazers won the Championship, Lucas wasn't rewarded with the improved contract he had been seeking. His 1978 was superior (according to the experts) as he made the All-NBA Second team, but as his contract demands became an irritation he was deemed by coach Jack Ramsey as a disruptive influence and traded to New Jersey in 1980. Luke was never the same player - he was 27 at the time of the trade - and made one more All-Star game appearance though his career headed down the road marked "Journeyman".

After stints in New Jersey, New York, Phoenix, LA (the Lakers) and Seattle, Mo returned to Portalnd for his final season in 1987-88. He will be remembered in many ways: not least because Bill Walton said he was his favourite teammate and best friend, and the reason why Walton's third son was named Luke. It was his scoring and toughness that won the Blazers their sole NBA title in 1977 and his game allowed smaller guards like Jonny Davis and Lionel Hollins to flourish. Luke was a winner and took no crap: although almost every Phoenix player during his time there enjoyed using nose candy, Luke did not. He helped an extremely young Sonics to the 1987 Western Conference Finals. Portland was never the same after he left with youngsters like Billy Ray Bates taking over the asylum. Luke wasn't management, but he made sure you did the best thing by the team.

Luke finished his NBA involvement last year working with Great Blazer Hope for the Future Greg Oden as an assistant coach before leaving to fight his condition. He will be remembered. He will be missed.

Rest In Peace Maurice Lucas.