Chosen Ones And Others

Last summer, in the frantic and screechy days leading up to LeBron James's peculiar, image-shredding, goofily grandiose "Decision" broadcast, I got pretty busy. There were some (Ryan Genovese-assisted) suggestions of ways to spice up the broadcast, inspired by the ultra-perplexing Dean Martin Variety Show and a puzzling over the week's wince-y phenomenology here and at Can't Stop The Bleeding (twice, actually). When James finally signed with the Heat, it was a let-down in a bunch of different ways and at a bunch of different levels, but it was also something of a relief. Not just because I'd no longer need to wade through inherently un-verifiable pseudo-scoops as part of my Daily Fix duties, although there was certainly that. Instead, something seemed settled about LeBron, who is pretty clearly the best and among the most interesting players of his generation.

It wasn't that he was a villain, although that was the narrative that (justifiably) emerged in the wake of his decision to break up with his home state in what amounted to a televised infomercial for himself. Scooby Doo cartoons and sports columns are the only place in which people "are revealed" as villains, and anyway the hero/villain thing is never not-bullshit, at least in a sports-y context. The real revelation, not so much on the evening of The Decision but during a season marked by some petty bully-boy bullshit, some pettier mean-girl bullshit, and finally by a certain hollowness -- was that LeBron was less the fun-loving if somewhat thwarted figure that he had appeared to be during his early years in Cleveland and was instead seemingly dedicated to chasing a Jordan-inf(l)ected vision of Greatness. Not greatness qua being great, although that's obviously part of it, but greatness as in vastness -- championships and memorable photos of himself after winning championships, a brand that expands and engulfs forever and ever amen, and so on. "Global icon" was a term he used for it earlier in his career, and in all its bleak, un-human and multiple capitalistic crassnesses it was apparently what he meant. It's one thing to pull against a player whose style of basketball or on-court affect or locality of employment are unappealing to you. It's another, easier, thing to wish defeat upon a player who aspires with all his being to global brand-hood, to someday being raptured directly into the NYSE. That was the disappointment, for me, with LeBron -- that a player with so beautiful a talent (and with what seemed a healthy sense of humor) aspired to become a post-human, living/breathing/sweating/pooping corporation.

It has been an orgy of revilement for LeBron since his Heat lost to the Mavericks in the NBA Finals, and while Bethlehem Shoals and I have discussed what that match-up meant to us in our GQ chats, and while everyone in the whole fucking world has discussed What LeBron's Problem Is, I apparently still had a little bit left in me on this. So I wrote something I'm pretty happy with about LeBron and His Sad Aspirations for The Awl. In it, I compare him to a Richard Serra sculpture, which is maybe not the high point of my metaphor-making career -- I'd imagine that would involve ham and either a politician or a quarterback, somehow -- but which did provide an excuse not to run a picture of LeBron with this post. So you're welcome for that, I guess?

The Century Club, Among Other Things

As you certainly already know, because you are a superfan, this is my 100th post here at David Roth, The Writer. Which means that I have now officially had 100 excellent thoughts -- thoughts about Guy Fieri and John Schnatter and libertarians and the "Ground Zero" "Mosque" (Oh man, remember that? CLASSIC SUMMER BIGOTRY!) and writing for no money and Frighteningly Nutty Sitcom Actors and terrible things and awful, awful David Brooks and so on. All of them excellent, all of them (apparently) worth the getting-deep-like-a-Navy-SEAL treatment. Which is to say: I guess I've been doing things at this address for a minute, now, although I'm still not exactly sure what I'm doing with it. I do know that I'm probably taking it a bit more seriously than I should.

I know that because the knowledge that this was my 100th post has kept me from writing anything here for awhile, because it Had To Be Good. Which is generally a good impulse, I suppose -- this sort of constructive self-consciousness is the thing that separates humans from Thomas Friedman -- but which also meant that I would periodically stare at a blank screen here, knowing that I should write something Totally Epic and Withering about a three-week old (but very terrible) feature story about evil prosciutto/New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (right), but also feeling tired and being busy and so on. And while I could easily fill my days writing about how sleepy, fatuous elites need to stop fluffing this graceless and cruelly cynical human hot pocket, I also know that that's not what this blog was for.

It was, almost a year ago, an attempt on my part to be professional, put all my stuff in one place, and do simultaneously a little plumage-flashing -- "I don't just write about sports, I also make fun of Paula Deen!" -- and some self-promoting. Which I guess I've done, but which I've also probably done too sporadically and (shock) in too prolix and off-topic a way to serve its desired purpose. What was supposed to be something I could put on a resume instead became, like, a blog. It's one with links to all my recent publications in the right-hand column (check it out, it's just to the right of these words!), but it's also a blog that I use the way people use blogs. I like it in that way, but also, really now. Really.

But also: really, it's nice to have a space to write about what I want to write about. I'm kind of past the "fuck an editor, it was perfect when I first thought it" stage in my life -- I make exceptions, periodically -- but given the stresses of trying to sell things, I suppose giving it away for free and enjoying the freedom from expectations that comes with that is maybe a healthy thing. And when someone calls me and says they want me to write a weekly column that is really a transcribed Gchat conversation about why so many Food Network personalities look like photographic negatives or freaky cartoons and yell all the time, I'm sure as hell going to be warmed up.

So yeah, 100 posts in a little under 365 days, and a 101st and so on in due time. I don't know that I'll use this space more effectively or responsibly in the future, but I know that I'll keep using it, and appreciate those of you who -- for whatever reason -- read it. (The Blogger stats thing suggests that, oddly and improbably, there are actually a few dozen of youse, which really reflects more on you than it does on me) I will also now use this post to promote something I wrote for The Awl about a week ago on the NFL Labor Apocalypse, which stars the adorable Jerry Richardson (he's the evil deflated Gingrich above). I'm happy with the piece, and think it's a good example of my work with The Awl over the past months, and that's why I'm putting it at the bottom of a 600-word post about myself and how I use my blog. I am really figuring this out!

Ulcers With Bylines: Okay, Gregg Doyel, Okay.

Most people in the world don't have to have an opinion, well-informed or no, about the sports columnists at CBS Sports. I suppose that I don't really have to have an opinion myself, although the fact that CBS is one of my regular visits when I'm doing The WSJ Daily Fix Thing means that I am at least familiar with who those columnists are. So this gives me a really uncool edge on all of you -- and it's probably more or less all of you -- who can be all, "Um, I know there's definitely Shannon Sharpe. Or Sterling Sharpe. And also I think Hugh Downs and Sherman Alexie? And is Summer Sanders still doing that blog?" It's one I would trade to you for pretty much anything. But it does enable me to have opinions on things that are transparently unimportant and none too interesting. To wit:

So CBS Sports has a bunch of columnists, more or less all of whom are at the very least Fix-usable and three of which -- the very great Ray Ratto and the very better-than-serviceable Dennis Dodd and Gary Parrish -- are pretty good. All of them have really terrible column photos, though: Parrish's gel-and-loosened-tie look is uncomfortably Frat Semi-Formal, Dodd looks like Mitch Pileggi For SlimFast and Ratto looks like a skeptical walrus. Again, it takes nothing away from any of them, and Ratto -- it bears mentioning again -- is one of the most consistently wry and wise and overall excellent writers out there who types about sports. But the picture atop Gregg Doyel's column is actually exactly right, and maybe even pretty flattering considering that the mohawked nightmare above is also Gregg Doyel. But the sour, puckered-up face Doyel is making in his column photo -- it's atop this column, which I'm going to write about in a moment -- is just so right for him. It's a picture of someone losing his train of thought mid-scold; it's a photo of the worst dad at a Little League game suddenly realizing that he has to go to the bathroom, number two, and pronto. It's pretty representative of Doyel's writing, too.

(It's worth mentioning, parenthetically, that Doyel may not actually be the worst columnist at CBS Sports. The hilariously, relentlessly anodyne Mike Freeman is just as predictable, but his dull, dutiful columns -- here's one about how the Mariners' knowing acquisition of rape-y former Rangers prospect Josh Lueke represents baseball's declining commitment to moral players -- aren't nearly as gripping as Doyel's equally dull but much more in-your-face troll bait. Also, Freeman loses points for forgetting about legendary Raw Talent Ambiorix Burgos. And one should never forget about Ambiorix Burgos, because he's presumably going to get out of jail someday)

Anyway, Doyel's an ulcer. I mean, I don't know what he's like in real life, but given how eager he is portray himself in columns as a guy who enjoys screaming disgustedly at his television it would seem unkind not to take him at his word. Of course, taking Doyel at his word would mean accepting his own self-assessment as a fearless truth-speaker, forever willing to take big names to task in near-unreadable columns that make for easy SEO-stack headlines. And it would mean ignoring the fact that he's obviously working the WWF Heel angle pretty hard -- drawing fire, drawing comments, hopefully drawing links and hits and ad-views or whatever. He shouldn't be taken too seriously.

And yet, while I sense he gets his own Heelery at a level that's probably not entirely unconscious, it's occasionally amazing to see how far he will go for a sell. The premise of the piece itself is straight comment-and-link-bait all by itself -- Doyel is "asking" Boise State to lose to Virginia Tech tonight. But even knowing that he's playing up the whole Gregg Doyel thing as per usual in the grafs I'm about to quote, even knowing that he's fishing for "Doyel UR retard!!1!!" comments on his piece -- even knowing that, isn't this a bit much?

It's nothing personal. Honest. I don't dislike Boise State or Boise State coach Chris Petersen, even if some of you in Idaho might recall a brief confrontation I had with Petersen last year on a conference call. If you're a conspiracy theorist, congratulations: There's another conspiracy for you. In addition to the SEC connection here at CBS -- plus I attended the University of Florida! -- Petersen and I butted heads, briefly, on a phone call last year ... so this year I'm getting even by rooting against the Broncos.

Problem with that theory is, I have notoriously bad phone etiquette. I also butted heads once on a phone call with Mike Krzyzewski. So the conspiracy theory falls apart there, because Krzyzewski coaches Duke and Duke beat Butler for the 2010 national basketball title and Boise State has been called the 2010 football season's equivalent to Butler, and since I once butted heads with Coach K that means I should, um ... now I'm confused.

So how about this. How about we just stick with the facts here?

And the fact is this: If Boise State beats Virginia Tech, the Broncos almost certainly will play for the national championship this season, and that's going to kill me. It's going to kill lots of fans of college football. Call us BCS snobs, call us front-runners, call us realists. Say we're stupid vestiges of the past, digging a moat around the BCS castle and guarding it with our alligator mouth and hummingbird ass.

Just say it in the comments, please. And on your blog, and on, like, Huffington Post and Bleacher Report, please. If Doyel is in earnest, he's got to be a pretty miserable guy. If he's not, then it seems like he's wasting what could be a pretty cool gig on what must be an exhausting and unsatisfying bit of play-acting. I'm starting to think that picture might be a candid.

Memphis Bleak

So, figure I wrote probably 15 cards for Shawne Williams, and then one long blog post, and now a slightly longer essay adapted from said blog post in which he's the effective protagonist. I'm not really hunting for more writing work at the moment, but I think it's fair to say that if Shawne Williams is looking for a biographer, I'd probably have to be on the list.

Luckily for me, I imagine that's fairly low on the guy's list at the moment, what with the lean-related indictment and the Orlando Summer League and the Vegas Summer League and such. But if the essay that just went up at The Awl is the last thing I ever write about Shawne Williams, I can at least say that I went out on a pretty okay note. As ever, it was a pleasure to work with them, and I'm pretty happy with the way the piece turned out. It's pretty long, and drifts and loops a bit (although less so given the gentle-but-helpful edit it received) and of course it will seem pretty familiar to those who struggled through last weekend's blog post on essentially the same topic. But, yeah: this website's ostensible purpose, besides the Puppy Vids, is for me to big up stuff like this. So I'll stop giving you reasons not to read it, and let you get on to doing so, if you're so inclined.

Oh, and my 500-page speculative nonfiction book about Shelden Williams comes out in September. Do that pre-order work!

Spitballing: Ideas on How the LeBron James Show Could Justify Its One-Hour Length

I've been fascinated, of late, by the long-form commercials for the DVD set containing The Best of The Dean Martin Variety Show (feel free to apply tone quotes where needed, as needed). It's not like I've ever seen one of these not-available-in-stores DVD sets that has ever made me want to call in, and I imagine that the rest of my life will probably go by like that, unless and until The Best of Mad TV: The Artie Lange Years comes out. At which point my life will end, because I will leap from something.

But upon researching the Dean Martin Show (read: looking the entry up on Wikipedia), the commercials started to seem even weirder. The maniacally stilted laughing-gas vibe of the variety show is, for generational reasons, as foreign to me as vaudeville, so the commercials are already pretty jarring. Hearing the crowd go apeshit when Michael Landon shows up at Dino's "door" -- a title announces who it is under his name, the crowd flies into Double Rainbow-grade ecstatic-tears like OH MY GOD IT'S MICHAEL LANDON HOLY SHIT I CAN'T BELIEVE IT'S REALLY MICHAEL LANDON -- or watching Martin lip-synch through a weird dance routine with Florence Henderson is already baffling enough to me. But that those hoary-from-the-jump shows could've been delivering their Hiroshima-grade hokiness payloads while Watergate was going on -- and that the show was on the air for nine freaking years! -- is even weirder. People are strange, obviously, and life moves quickly, but it's weird to think that something that's just five or so years older than me, and which was popular with regular American humans, basically looks like this to me now:



Anyway, given that the idea of spending an hour watching LeBron James get interviewed about where he will become a billionaire is roughly as impossible for me to imagine as sitting through a bunch of Dean Martin Variety Show episodes, I guess it was natural that the variety show format occurred to me as an easy -- and perhaps the only -- way for LeBron to make tonight's ESPN special watchable. I did some brainstorming with some friends -- thank you, Ryan Genovese and Brendan Flynn -- and I did some deep-dive conceptualizing myself. And while I know that it's probably too late for all but a few of these ideas to actually make it into tonight's show, here's what I'm most looking forward to from The LeBron James Variety Hour.

• A song and dance medley dedicated to the cities LeBron is considering, featuring musical and athletic ambassadors from each city. These would include LeBron performing "Crossroads" with Bone Thugz and Bernie Kosar, "If You Believe In Having Sex" with Luther Campbell and Edgerrin James, "500 Miles and Runnin" with MC Ren, Ice Cube and Loy Vaught and "Endless Summer Nights" with Richard Marx and Will Perdue. I know the last one seems out of place but 1) Common has an Old Navy photoshoot he has to be at and 2) Global Icons need diversified brands.


• Avant-garde moments, such as a mostly silent 15-minute segment in which LeBron paints an oil painting of Art Modell, screams a profanity, and then the show abruptly cuts to commercial. In another, a brief nature documentary about beavers plays, with dubbed narration in an imaginary language.


• LeBron is interviewed by a 12oz bottle of Powerade.


• In an earnest and surprisingly informative conversation with Charlie Rose, LeBron lays out his proposal for reforming the electoral college.


• A bewigged and very enthusiastic James performs Broadway classics with the cast of Glee, finally bringing down the house with a rollicking version of "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair." Then he signs with the Heat.


• A visibly nervous LeBron performs last night's Jay Leno monologue word for word, with uncomfortably long pauses for laughs after each Lindsay Lohan joke. He concludes with, "We've got a great show for you tonight, Reba McEntire is here, and I'm signing with the Clippers" and ESPN displays a test pattern for the next 56 minutes.


• After regretfully announcing that he won't be resigning with the Cavaliers, LeBron attempts to make it right with Clevelanders by punching Drew Carey in the face.


• Instead of discussing basketball, James delivers a teary and mostly incoherent 60-minute monologue on "Creeping Monarchic Fascism, In The Woodrow Wilson Tradition" in front of a dry-erase board on which he circles and recircles the word "Liberty." He concludes the show by yelling, "Wake up, Sheeple!" into the camera and pulling on a Miami Heat jersey.


• In a series of inspirational vignettes, LeBron visits overweight people across the country and helps them lose weight... and rediscover themselves.

To say that the possibilities are endless is obviously not true. To say that the end of this ridiculous and ridiculously tone-deaf orgy of poorly orchestrated hype is something I am seriously looking forward to is, however, very true. Start the countdown, and someone tell Michael Landon that he's on in five.

Darius Miles and Shawne Williams Walk Into A Bar...

I'm going to be honest with you: the Shawne Williams Topps Finest rookie auto card at left is not the most valuable basketball card I ever wrote. But I did write it, and I did even meet Shawne Williams when I was at the NBA Rookie Shoot back in 2006, during my time at Topps. (About which time you'll find more here). Williams was, like everyone I met at that event with the exception of Tyrus Thomas (so immature as to be kind of nervous-making) and Jordan Farmar (so cocky as to be a cock), seemingly a nice enough kid. Williams wasn't as self-possessed as your Dee Browns or Shelden Williams' or J.J. Redicks or Randy Foyes -- by the way, what a freaking terrible draft -- but I remember him being pleasant, if a little shell-shocked by the admittedly shell-shocky experience of being photographed a few thousand times during the AM hours at a gym in White Plains.

Williams, at the time of our 10 minutes of conversation, was 20 years old, and the Indiana Pacers had just made him the 17th pick of the 2006 NBA Draft. In so doing, they made him a millionaire. In a conversation I'm having with a good friend right now on The Gmail Chat -- because it's the future and such a thing is possible, and also because I'm the picture of bloggy dedication -- I was just asked if we can say, at this point, that Shawne Williams "wasn't that good." I don't know what to say to that, except that he was clearly a dazzling basketball player at some point in his young life. Williams was the best player on a Laurinburg Prep team that finished its '04-05 season at 40-0 and ranked ahead of an Oak Hill Academy team that featured Kevin Durant, Ty Lawson and Jamont Gordon (and Eric Devendorf, although that's not totally their fault). He then spent a year not being coached by John Calipari at Memphis, and then spent three years making a lot of money for not playing in the NBA and presumably dealing with the non-stop death-stare of villainous legend-who-looks-like-an-old-lesbian/Pacers GM Larry Bird. His stats are certainly not very good. But so much is presumed in cases like this, because we know so little.

What we know about Shawne Williams is that he bombed out in Indiana, was traded to the Mavericks and never played, then was traded to the Nets in a cost-cutting move and was more or less told not to show up; he didn't play in an organized basketball game in 2009-10. That's the transaction line. Williams' blotter is a bit more memorable: had a host of run-ins with the law that track pretty well with the sort of trouble that you'd imagine a suddenly very rich kid with limited life skills getting into. There are some differences -- most 21-year-olds pulled over for dumb traffic violations can't proffer their basketball card as a form of ID, and it's hard to justify not showing up for a court date whether you're an athletic wing who was once MVP of a national champion prep team or Lindsay Lohan or whoever. In January of 2010, after the New Jersey Nets bought out Williams -- more money as negative reinforcement, here -- he got into some much more serious trouble, this time for alleged codeine-related demi-kingpinnery. He was indicted, and -- having secured a signature success in the anti-sizzurp campaign dubbed "Operation Lockdown" -- the Memphis Police Department presumably took a moment to congratulate itself on ridding the city of crime for good.

In his mug shot, Williams looks tired and heavy. He hadn't played in a NBA game for over a year, but that didn't seem to explain it. Of all the failures in that 2006 Draft -- this would be a good spot to remind readers that Adam Freaking Morrison was the third overall pick -- here was the one that looked the most serious and most sad. You'd have to work pretty hard to project this recognition onto Williams' scared/sad face, but at some level Shawne Williams probably knew that this was the end for him, in a sense. Even before the arrest and indictment, Williams was on a deep dive towards the disdain-tinged anonymity from which his talent and long arms and athleticism might have rescued him. The sort of sports fans who wonder what happens to athletes once they stop being the most special people in the room know how this goes. Which is to say that we were about to hear the last from Shawne Williams. When the promise is dispelled, the narrative trail goes dead. There are exceptions to that, if the failure to deliver on past promise is dramatic enough -- here, for instance, is what Ed O'Bannon is up to these days -- but, for the most part, "Where Are They Now" is a rhetorical question.

Of course, the person who is also the player goes on doing whatever it was he did before the world started and stopped caring. He goes to jail for associating with the sort of visionaries who see a way to get high in a bottle of Triaminic or he goes to Europe and makes a bunch of money and learns a foreign language. Maybe he signs with a pro team in Iran, makes some money, writes a blog, and grows up into an interesting man or maybe he opens a barber shop or coaches or finds God or loses God or looks back and laughs or ferments in all that curdled narcissism into the meanest and most righteous sort of depressive. But all that happens off-camera, and to a certain extent the moral to Shawne Williams' story, and that story's ending, are already written, regardless of how the middle chapters fill in. The ending is yours to pick, not his: he's another knucklehead not ready for the spotlight or unready for failure or an incautiously pampered kid who has never previously been required not to be lazy or a nice kid surrounded by bad influences or a helpless/hapless product of a rotten environment or whatever you choose.

I can't say that I'm pulling for Shawne Williams any more or less than I'm pulling for anyone who has fucked up and should stop fucking up -- I met him once for 10 minutes and we talked about breakfast cereal and Jim O'Brien's emphasis on defense, I have no real emotional stake in this. The quote Williams gave me that day, which I used on the back of his Topps Big Game Picture Perfect Rookie Auto-Relic, is this: "I never thought about leaving college, never until the last game. The confidence (to do it) came from me and from God." We connected about as much as that quote suggests.

But, but: I was happy, in a way that had not too terribly much to do with Shawne Williams, when I saw that he was on the Charlotte Bobcats absolute monster of a NBA Summer League roster. I doubt that Williams makes the Bobcats -- he was indicted and got fat, and in most cases just one of those is enough to keep someone off a team's roster. (Usually) But what makes me so happy about the NBA Summer League -- happy enough that I wrote a feature about it for Slate that still stands as one of my favorite published journalistic attempts, and happy enough that I still get psyched when the Summer League rosters arrive -- is that it provides a home for the NBA's homeless, if only for a little while and if only in semi-watchable pickup-style games. But if it seems like there's a whimsy to these Summer League rosters -- and basketball dorks should know that Charlotte's roster, which also features ur-washout Darius Miles, among other refugees from the Island of Lost Wing Players -- I think it's because the residual joy of a basketball game overwhelms all the other bleak stuff I just spent all those words going over. The Summer League's ostensible purpose is to evaluate talent, and I suppose that it does that; players do get jobs off their Summer League showings, although those jobs are more frequently in Italy or Greece or Spain than in Indianapolis or Milwaukee or Oklahoma City. (Note: somehow, the latter are deemed preferable destinations) But more than that, if only by including your Shawne Williams' and Darius Miles' and Ndudi Ebi's, the Summer League celebrates talent more than it evaluates it. No one's putting Ndudi Ebi on the floor in a NBA game this year, I promise, but whoever brought him in to play for Orlando's Summer League team evidently did want to see him play. In that sense, the nameless talent evaluator -- the guy who will eventually stop returning phone calls from the agents of all these players -- was thinking like a sentimental basketball fan.

And Summer League games are different. There are coaches there, but for the most part the players just play -- it's really as close to watching these guys in a playground game (albeit an exceedingly self-conscious one) as most fans will ever get, and generally worth the $14.95 it costs to watch them online. Given his personal and professional struggles, given the fact that he seemingly never quite grew up into anything but an object lesson in the weaknesses of the NBA's Rookie Transition Program, letting Shawne Williams get out there and play this summer, if he can even find the floor, is both the least and the kindest thing the NBA can do for him. Shawne Williams will be paying for the mistakes he made as a dumb and not-ready kid for the rest of his life, either in jail or just by walking around with ubermenschy mega-success stories like me feeling comfortable deeming him a failure, full stop. I don't know enough about him to know whether things will work out for Shawne Williams, as a player or otherwise. But I liked him well enough all those years ago to be glad that someone in the game of basketball saw it fit to give him him an opportunity to get out there and play the game of basketball, and maybe see if there's any fun left in it. There's some real worth in that. Isn't that right, Darius Miles?



"Oh, indeed."