Life on the Rim, by David Levine
Queenan, Joe
M idway through the 1989-90 National Basketball Association season, I watched a televised broadcast of a game between the Philadelphia 76ers, a very good basketball team, and the New Jersey Nets, a...
...The linchpin of my argument was that I had never, ever, ever met anyone who had seen the Nets play...
...But Karl wasn't getting too worked up about it...
...Did he really think that spending eight months following around the Albany Patroons, a caravan of aging camels and future horsemeat, was going to turn him into this year's John Feinstein...
...Get a life on the rim, or off the rim...
...As Levine reports: shorter than the Gulls' 5 '7 " Spudd Webb got in free...
...People who have played for the Nets have never seen the Nets play...
...Almost none of these bozos would be in the NBA were it not for the league's preposterously aggressive expansion program of the past few years, a program that has brought us such authentically terrifying franchises as the Minnesota Timberwolves, the Orlando Magic, and the Miami Heat—New Jersey Nets without the Tradition...
...in the same decade...
...To give Levine his due, the former Sport magazine editor is a skilled reporter and a perfectly capablewriter...
...This is what is meant by the expression "bad dudes...
...The other good material in the book concerns Patroons coach George Karl, a respected former NBA ringmaster whose career went into reverse after he got hornswoggled into coaching both the Golden State Warriors and the Cleveland Cavaliers (pass the air freshener...
...this is life in the toilet...
...Writing a book about what a drag it is to play one night in Cedar Rapids and the next night in Wichita Falls is like spending a year in Afghanistan and then coming back with a book called Hey...
...The Nets, it must be recalled, are one of the worst teams in the history of the NBA...
...They are human Hefty bags who only get to play when their teammates—the worst players in the league—are already down by 33 points...
...J's and Oscar Robertsons compared to the poltroons they left behind in the Continental Basketball Association...
...17.95 Joe Queenan ficiently strong to gaze at what lurks at the end of the New Jersey Nets' bench...
...Unfortunately, no garbage cans were available, so they emptied it onto the court...
...The league was so bad that about three-quarters of the way through the season it canceled its playoffs...
...By the end of the third period, the 76ers had built up a 33-point lead over the lowly visitors...
...One night, it seems, the highly Caucasoid Jackson was driving a van filled with nine black players into Toronto...
...At this point, the Nets decided to empty their bench...
...The CBA, after all, is the cesspool of professional basketball, a sort of gunners' gulag where bad players go to get worse...
...LIFE ON THE RIM: A YEAR IN THE CONTINENTAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION David Levine/Macmillan/271 pp...
...Karl, like most of his players, was serving time in the minors because it kept him within a stone's throw of the big time, should anyone in Dallas or Cleveland die or enter the federal witness relocation program, where the fans couldn't get at his family...
...The clumsily titled Life on the Rim: A Year in the Continental Basketball Association is one hell of a strange offering, sort of a 101 Recipes for a Dead Bulimic...
...When the border guard asked the tall, acerbic white man to state his business in Canada, Jackson replied, "Bringing in slaves...
...But where's his self-esteem...
...playing at the Meadowlands in New Jersey when they were actually over in New York, boogeying until they—and the unmarried women they were with—dropped...
...That's the way I felt about three-quarters of the way through this book: Couldn't we please get someone to come in and cancel the last seventy pages...
...Oh, all right, it's not really that bad a book...
...M idway through the 1989-90 National Basketball Association season, I watched a televised broadcast of a game between the Philadelphia 76ers, a very good basketball team, and the New Jersey Nets, a very bad basketball team...
...Seeing this, I asked my wife and two small children to leave the room...
...Levine says that the players all wanted to do well because they honestly believed that an NBA scout—or some other living organism—might be watching the game...
...This isn't life on the rim...
...I did so out of a very strong conviction that only persons who have seen active military service or attended high school in the inner city possess constitutions sufJoe Queenan is a frequent contributor to Barron's and other publications...
...They are so awful, and have been so awful for so long, that I once wrote a story for Spy magazine advancing the theory that the team did not even exist, that the entire franchise was a huge hoax dreamed up by players and colluding sportswriters who wanted to trick their wives into thinking they were 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990 Levine recalls an evening when the Patroons were getting all excited because one of their games was going to be broadcast on ESPN...
...What Happened to the Nightlife...
...A Year in Downtown Kabul In any case, that's pretty much the book that Levine has written...
...It is thus only fitting that the league should have a bad book written about it...
...Clearly, his parents have a lot to answer for...
...What the Nets sent out were five Creatures from Beyond the Bottom of the Abyss, players so bad that even their names sounded bad: Jack Haley, Leon Wood, Peter Myers...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990 39...
...Needless to say, there are some amusing incidents in Levine's book, but unluckily for the author, most of them took place before he showed up with his laptop...
...And tell the author: Hey, get a life...
...Losers of twenty-four consecutive road games in 1989-90, during which they also compiled an overall record of 3-30 at one point, the Nets are the apotheosis of awfulness...
...And it is the players in the Continental Basketball Association—the very worst professional basketball players in existence, the guys who aren't even good enough to not play for the Nets—that author David Levine decided to spend a full season traveling with, as research for a not entirely unexpendable book...
...But Karl certainly had no illusions about the quality of the CBA product...
...Let us be very clear about this, then: The players at the end of the Nets' bench are the dregs of dunk, the jetsam of jam, the rubbish of roundball, the slime of slam...
...But get a life...
...A ballplayer in the CBA—a guy who may once have been an All-American at Memphis State or Nevada-Las Vegas, pumping in forty points a night before sellout crowds of 20,000 in some spanking new sports center named after a corrupt athletic director—now spends his nights playing third-rate competition in fourth-rate towns that even the people who live there wouldn't want to visit...
...Although the CBA has produced fifty-four players who are actually in the NBA today, the majority of these players are flat-out stiffs: warm bodies who get garbage time at the end of meaningless games, or are sent in to hurt stars of greater magnitude...
...ut I want to make a larger point: 1.3 that as bad as these benchwarming would-be has-beens are, they are veritable Magic Johnsons and Larry Birds and Dr...
...The best anecdotes concern former Patroons coach Phil Jackson, who won one championship ring as a headbanger for the New York Knicks, then was sent to Purgatory in Albany, and has now been assumed into Paradise, coaching Michael Jordan and the rest of the Chicago Bulls...
...Down in Hell's Root Cellar the travel is merciless, the pay is low, the food is bad, the future is bleak, and the present is even bleaker...
...Yup, just as many of us suspected, life in the CBA ain't much fun...
...The CBA is a league loaded with bad jumpers, bad defense, bad playmaking, bad knees, and bad attitudes...
Vol. 23 • June 1990 • No. 6
