Carl Ervin and a Point Guard’s Vision

June 28, 2011 By 5 Comments

Carl Ervin once wrote in my Cleveland High School yearbook, “Thanks for making me famous.”

The late Carl Ervin, with his daughter Karlee and wife Penny, at his Seattle U. Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

Over the years, I tried to argue with Erv that it was quite the other way around. But he loved to debate, and I figured that one day we’d be rocking on a porch having the same discussion over and over again.

But that’s not happening. Erv, one of the greatest high-school basketball players I’ve ever seen, lost a battle on Saturday with pancreatic cancer that I didn’t even know he was waging. Which is funny to say because we talked on the phone. And even at the beginning of the year he was lobbying me to attend the banner-hanging and jersey retirement ceremony at our alma mater.

I couldn’t attend because of personal matters and work obligations that now seem so trivial. Erv was relentless, but not once did he say, “Dude, I’m sick, you need to come.” Instead, Erv, the master facilitator and leader, said, “Man, you were as big a part of this as anyone.”
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Of King James, Dexter and a Culture of Comeuppance

June 13, 2011 By 1 Comment

What comes around, goes around.

Where and when I grew up, we’d say that so often, it became a way of life, a way of thinking and believing. A lot of NBA players come up in similar circumstances, so I can’t imagine that they didn’t also hear that bit of wisdom uttered a time or two.

LeBron: What Comes Around

Did they simply fail to listen? I mean, was LeBron James so intent on taking his talents to the NBA that he grew deaf while growing up in Akron, Ohio?

I don’t know the guy. He came after I stopped covering the NBA. After 17 years, it had become, for me, a league of antics. You know what I mean: Whenever there’s a crowd of adults, some kid runs up to the hot microphone and starts singing, or some boy throws a frog into a flock of girls. After starting out knowing Larry Bird, Earvin Johnson and Michael Jordan as genuine people, the league for me had devolved into a silly show with its players clamoring for more and more attention, as if all the dollars weren’t enough.
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‘When You’re a Freak, Freaky Things Happen to You’

June 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The headline to this post is one of the greatest lines ever uttered to me during an interview. You probably don’t even have to guess from whom it came.

Shaq-Fu

Shaq: "When you're a freak, freaky things happen."

I could go on a Shaqilicious rampage here, but I had my time and so did Shaquille O’Neal. Since he announced his retirement from pro ball, appropriately enough on Twitter, there already has been much written about his place in NBA history and his abundant nicknames. I just wanted to drop a few personal memories and acknowledge that it required Shaq’s retirement to prod me out of my mini-retirement from the blogosphere.

Way back when I was still a newspaper writer, I wrote a large piece about Shaq as an emerging crossover star (see Welcome to ShaqWorld). He hadn’t even won his first NBA title, though he’d dropped his first recorded verse and filmed an ill-fated movie. This was during a time when a writer could earn big-time access to superstars, and I hung around him for a few days in El-Lay.
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