Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

How the Ball Bounces - Basketball As an Oracle of Self-Knowledge

After a dry spell the Portland Trail Blazers are back in the playoffs. This year's impressive Game 1 win over the Phoenix Suns was enough to remove some of the sting from 2009's first round exit at the hands of the Houston Rockets. Basking in the glow of that victory had many Blazer fans feeling optimistic about the team's championship potential in the years to come. After a season plagued by injury (including potentially career threatening knee injuries to both the centers that Portland started the season with and a ruptured Achilles tendon suffered by head coach Nate McMillan while scrimmaging with his injury-depleted team) the team and fans could be excused for taking any opportunity to feel excited for the future or to wax nostalgic about past glories.

Of course, what passage in Blazer history could eclipse their (thus far) one championship season? Matt Love's third installment in his Beaver State Trilogy, Red Hot and Rollin': a Retrospective of the Portland Trail Blazers' 1976-77 NBA Championship Season captures all the iconic (and often surreal) images of this championship run, literally. Included with the book is a DVD copy of Fast Break a 1978 documentary about the Blazers' 76-77 season. Filled with stunning visuals such as Bill Walton riding his bike along the Oregon Coast and addressing a camp full of youthful hoopsters on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation or Maurice Lucas increasing his lung capacity by holding his breath underwater, Fast Break is worth the price of admission alone. The film was shown for a week in Portland after its completion before being virtually forgotten until the publication of Red Hot and Rollin'. Sadly, film maker Don Zavin passed away a few years ago but this interview with co-director Mark McLeod provides some in-depth detail about the production of such an unusual documentary.

The passion that even the most committed Blazer fan feels for their team, Bill Simmons feels for all things NBA. His most recent work, The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to the Sports Guy, is a love letter to the NBA in which Simmons expounds on and re-imagines all things basketball; the Basketball Hall of Fame becomes a five-level pyramid with only the finest players occupying its most elite level, the long standing debate over who was the better player, Wilt "The Stilt" Chamberlain or Bill Russell, is finally resolved and the "secret" of basketball is revealed by, of all people, Isiah Thomas (psst... the secret is that Basketball is PEOPLE). Simmons is fiery writer who uses whit and charm to engage the reader but the most attractive quality of this work is the sincere love of hoops with which he writes. This makes The Book of Basketball a worthy and enriching read for anyone who cares to absorb vibrant and powerful enthusiasm, not just basketball fans.

At first glance, with its glossy, modern images and quirky styling, Freedarko Presents the Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac: Styles, Stats and Stars in Today's Game seems an ironic conflagration of obscure factoids and opaque whimsy but there is something deeper represented here. Freedarko started as a blog and Freedarko Presents captures much of the free-wheeling and playful sensibility that characterized that incarnation. Drawing inspiration from, and paying homage to, the most charismatic personas of the NBA's past and present (be they famous or not) Freedarko Presents could be accused of playing into the cult of personality that some feel has made us a celebrity obsessed society. Thankfully, threads of peculiar insight and subversive creativity flip this equation on its head. Instead of the passion of the fan empowering the superstar, Freedarko Presents imagines a universe in which basketball trivia becomes an oracle of self-knowledge. To know what makes our favorite, and most despised players, great is to know the source of greatness in ourselves. Bearing in this in mind, hoping for playoff success in 2010 for the Portland Trail Blazers might be a way of exploring our own potential. Fingers crossed...