NBA Prescription: More College, Less Influence for Shoe Companies

The following excerpt is taken from Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday Morning Quarterback column on ESPN's Page 2. Obviously, the general topic is football. This particular column is dedicated to basketball.

Pro basketball is in an "up" cycle partly because the new collective bargaining agreement forbids high school players from jumping directly to the NBA. The drafting of high school players was an unmitigated disaster for pro basketball -- it's no coincidence the league's decline in television ratings coincided with the arrival of high school kids. The high schoolers have immature games that drag down the quality of the sport: And never forget, quality is the essential feature of all products. With a few exceptions, the only style of play a high school kid knows is hey-look-at-me. Selfish basketball is far less entertaining than the ensemble version -- just consider the difference between last season's Phoenix Suns and New York Knicks.


Plus, by jumping directly to the NBA, 18-year-old prospects fail to go to college and become well-known players about whom fans would be excited. It's this second point that seems haunting, because it means the NBA has spent the past decade depriving itself of stars who might otherwise have come into existence. Yes, LeBron James was terrific in the NBA right out of high school. But James also would have been great coming out of college. The players who have made the high-school-to-NBA transition successfully (Kobe Bryant, Kevin Garnett, a few others) always were bound to become stars. It's the players who did not become stars, because they jumped too young, the NBA has cheated itself of.


Think about Kwame Brown, the high-schooler taken first overall in the 2001 NBA draft. Gifted with incredible physical talent, Brown is an embarrassing underachiever -- plus his personality appears stuck at his 17th birthday, lending him no marketing appeal. Now imagine an alternate path for the same young man. Instead of jumping directly from high school to the NBA, he goes to Kentucky or UCLA or any good basketball college. His game improves, he learns on-court concepts other than brooding selfishness, and off-court he matures in his ability to handle the world. Kwame Brown becomes a nationally known college star. When he's drafted first overall into the NBA, fans are excited. By now, people like me would be saying to my kids, "Wow, Kwame Brown is coming to town, let's get tickets and go see him!" Instead not one person has ever said, "Let's get some NBA tickets to see Kwame Brown," and it seems likely no one ever will.


This squandering of potential NBA stars is especially maddening because the pushing of too-young players into the NBA has been driven foremost by shoe companies. Somehow Nike and Reebok got it into their heads that teen sneaker buyers would identify more with 18-year-old unpolished NBA players enjoying instant wealth more than they would with mid-20s high-quality NBA players. I don't know how this idea arose, since by far the most successful sneaker endorser, Jordan, did not realize his marketing success until he was a mature player in his mid-20s. Perhaps thrusting high school players into the NBA maximized income for Nike and Reebok. But it was a disaster for NBA product quality, and hence hurt ratings.


Now the new league-union agreement mandates draftees be at least 19, a rule intended to require at least one year of college. And you'd hope that even gifted, NBA-bound athletes, after experiencing college for a year, might think, "This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get an education, maybe I should stick around." You'd also think the shoe companies would be aligning themselves with education over ignorance. Apparently you'd think wrong. According to this New York Times story by Pete Thamel and Thayer Evans, a shoe company consultant has been making the rounds, suggesting to some teenage future NBA prospects that they skip the minimum year of college and play in Europe, then file for the NBA draft. To avoid the horror, the horror, of having to sit in class and think!


The Times didn't connect the dots on this, so allow me. Dot 1: Most players being encouraged not to attend college are African-American. If athletic shoe companies believe African-American males are incapable of handling college coursework, they should state this for the record. Dot 2: Shallowness is a core problem of big-deal athletics. The NBA, NFL and MLB create celebrity athletes looked up to by the young. A few do become role models for an informed, intelligent approach to life -- think Tiki Barber. But most celebrity athletes couldn't tell you what Ernest Hemingway wrote, or what just happened in the Mexican presidential election, if their lives depended on it. Now the NBA is taking the high road, urging its prospects back toward the educational system. The shoe companies are resisting, while street-hustler types have been steering promising basketball prospects to storefront diploma-mill "schools" that make no attempt to teach -- see the Thamel-Evans article on that. In their 2000 book "The Shape of the River," William Bowen and Derek Bok showed that in recent decades African-American career women have closed most of their degrees-earned and income gaps with white career women, while African-American males have made less progress compared to white males. One factor might be that many young black men look up to ill-educated athletes and pop stars, while young black women have role models such as Oprah Winfrey, who constantly emphasizes books and learning. Both the NBA and NCAA need to do far more to educate basketball prospects, if only for the role-model effect on young men. And while we're on this, thanks to Thamel, Evans and their editors for fighting the cultural assumption that it's OK for star athletes to be functional illiterates.


NBA commissioner David Stern is aware of the problems described in the above paragraphs. Recently he said it was wrong that college recruiters are highly restricted in their ability to talk to high school basketball prospects about attending college, but "street runners or shoe representatives" can promise tall teenagers the moon. For Stern to criticize the shoe companies is gutsy, given their business relationship with the league. Perhaps the commissioner has realized shoe firms and pro basketball have divergent interests. Shoe firms might do fine financially by glamorizing minimally-educated prodigy athletes, while the NBA needs to develop quality players and protect its image, lest the league become perceived as an opponent of learning. Stern is floating the idea of the NBA establishing a basketball academy for the top few hundred teen prospects in the United States -- essentially a private high school that would emphasize basketball, but enforce real classroom and graduation standards. This would be preferable to the current system, which actively discourages NBA-bound young men from seeking educations.


MY PERSONAL THOUGHTS: It's hard to disagree with this argument. And I wouldn't dare. I think he brings issues to light that Bill Cosby and others have been saying. Maybe not as abrasive as Mr. Cosby, but fundamentally the same notion.

for the record though, the concept of playing overseas is nothing new. Lebron James was offered $9 million dollars by a team in the Italian league (I believe) to forgo his senior year in high school.

Back to the issue:
I have debated within myself the issue of jumping to the league for instant guaranteed millions as oppossed to getting in the league through the college route. That debate was kind of ended when Stren and the C.B.A. mandated that you had to be a year out of high to become eligible to play in the N.B.A. Considering, the opinion that college can be the best years of your life, I don't see why there is any hesitance to going. And I was perfectly placed nobody in school. Imagine being "the man" on campus and what that could afford you. But if you aren't going to learn anything anyway, I can see why some athelets say, "What's the point!" Especially, when you are going to have millions and the privilege to do things on a regular basis that people dream to experience once in their lifetime.

Let the debate continue...

Digging Deeper

I had a scare a few minutes ago. I opened up Explorer and read the headline, "Nagin Criticizes World Trade Center Rebuilding." My initial reaction was, "this guy had just gone off the deep end." Especially considering earlier this week, many of us re-witnessed the devastation of Katrina. "Levees" also exposed a few things that could have been done differently on Mr. Nagin's part. Based on the headline alone, I was thinking this may be the wrong time for him to be saying anything negative.

Upon actually reading the article, I see that what he really said was, "You guys in New York can’t get a hole in the ground fixed, and it’s five years later. So let’s be fair." This was in response to a reporter from 60 Minutes asking about the post-Katrina damaged cars still found around the city. Obviously Nagin could have chosen better words than, "a hole in the ground," but people should be able to see the point that he is making.

On a much larger scale, it was a personal reminder that "creating headlines" is what sells printed news. By "printed" I mean, both the papers and online or any other place where you actually are reading the news for yourself. In television, it is called a "tease." The sole purpose is to get you to read the actual article or watch the segment. How many times does that happen in someone's busy, short stop, K.I.M., life? Far too often, people take headlines for face value. That's when information starts to get iffy. Especially as that information gets passed on from person to person.

The point is, we all need to be a little bit more pro-active in digging deeper into the issues that are presented to us in headlines and teases. I understand it's hard to keep up on everything with the busy lives we lead, but the truth is usually right there in front of us. It is up to us to take the initiative to scratch the surface or dig a little deeper to get to it.


In addition to the the aformentioned article, I have to also credit "The Matrix" and Mr. Dave Chapelle.

I saw Dave in Chicago last Saturday and this issue is one of the things he talked about. He started by talking about the portrayals of himself in the media when he stepped away from his show. The main point was that most of the things being said originated from the very company he had walked away from, Viacom.

Due to many circumstances, but most importantly, Michael Powell, the consolidation of media outlets has aggressivley shrunken over the past decade. As Dave said, there are about six media conglomerates that control everything we see on the television, hear on the radio and read in newspapers and magazines. That is definitely not a good look for the masses!

I remember doing a paper in college on the merger between AOL and Time Warner. At the time it was a monumental deal for various reasons. The biggest was that it signalled the official arrival of "new media." We all know about the riches that people made in the "dot com era," but AOL leveraged those gains into purchasing one of the largest media companies in the world. Time Warner held such entities as Time magazine, TBS, TNT, Warner Bros. Studios, and even Internet provider, RoadRunner along with a host of other companies. The deal was touted as a cynergistic means to cross-market, promote and advertise through all of these different media streams. Meaning AOL/ Time Warner now controlled enough media outlets to the point where they can now send one message through it's various streams (READ: Great Lakes) to hundreds of millions of people. After seeing the same message through various different outlets and numerous times over, people would probably tend to accept that as a "must be true" situation.

Getting back to Dave, it is his belief that Viacom- which owns: Comedy Central, CBS, MTV, BET and various other entities- began a slander campaign as a way to force him back to the show. It basically is the same technique that cops use when they put out an A.P.B. and release photos of a suspected criminal to the media. The sad part is, he even admitted that sometimes it almost worked. Not in the "I submit, I will come back to the show" vein, but in the questioning of his own sanity. He said he was sitting on a beach in South Africa and literally had to look around to make sure he was where he thought he was. We all know those surreal moments when you do a double take, just to make sure you aren't dreaming. His was on a beach in Durban. He said he looked around to make sure he really wasn't in an insane asylum and that he wasn't hopped on some doctor's meds that had him thinking he was on a beach. I am sure it only lasted a second, but it happened. And I believe it can and does happen to "regular" folk on the regular.

In my Katrina blog from last year I talked about the "tail wagging the dog," it's the same thing. Dig deeper! It could be the difference between ignorance and informed.

When The Levees Broke: a Reqieum in Quotes Pt.II

Tuesday:

- "Wathing in the water, wathing through the water..." (Opening Prayer)

- "[Our people were] thrown to the four corners of this nation."

- "George Bush doesn't care about black people!" (Kanye West)

- "It is what it is." (Mike Meyers)

- "Go fuck yourself Mr. Cheney!"

"He says it to people in Congress." (Dr. Ben Marble)

- "He stayed on holiday while people in New Orleans were drowning." (British reporter in regards to George Bush right after Katrina hit)

- "Two, three days is too late to take responsibility!"

- "President Bush can kiss my ass!" (Sheryl Livadays)

- "The aftermath is worse than the levees breaking"

- "Black Friday because that's what I see." (Phyllis Montana LeBlanc in regards to the Friday after thanksgiving a.k.a "Black Friday")

- "This is working well for them. A lot of them were underprivileged." (Barbara Bush)

- "And I aint Mike Jones!" (Phyllis Montana LeBlanc after giving out her phone number so that Barbara Bush could give her a call.)

- "Transform the Jericho Road" (Quoted from Martin Luther King)

- "If they wanted us in New Orleans, they wouldn't have tried to drown us and kill us! So I'm not going back so they can finish the job!"

- "Why don't you give them a ticket back home?" (In regards to the govt. shipping people away, but not giving them a way to get back)

- "Without black people, New Orleans would be like a bad version of Disney World."

- "The Paris of the South." (Wynton Marsalis talking about the history of N.O.)

- "It looked like someone had dropped a nuclear bomb."

- "Everything was gray."

- "I knew it was devastation, but I didn't think it was this bad. It's unbelievable!"

- "It's like someone violated your mama!" (Wynton Marsalis)

- "I've been on six different medications...." (In regards to the stress after Katrina)

- "And I never got a chance to say goodbye!" (Serena's mom)

- "She was in the kitchen under a refrigerator."

- "Katrina didn't do in New Orleans. The Army Corp of Engineers did!"

- "We didn't know why these things failed." (Army Corp of Engineers rep.)

- "We had a catastrophic failure."

- "You can't sue the Army Corp. of Engineers."

- "If they knew it could happen. It's almost like they let it happen."

- "We'd all be driving Bentleys." (In regards to the fact that the U.S. Govt. take all of the income from the oil refinaries and gives nothing to LA or New Orleans.)

- "Give us our got damn money. Give us our gas money and you can kiss our ass!"

- No place like home. (Sign)

- "Where is my government?"

- "FEMA's a disaster!"

- "FEMA's a joke!"

- "Whenever I decide to give some a blow job!" (Sheryl Livadays in regards to when her trailer will get electricity.

- "Quit the bullshit!"

- "It took all 30 years to pay that $13,000." (Wendell ____ a.k.a. Dude from 'The Wire')

- "They come up with any way to get out of paying!" (Wendell ____ a.k.a. Dude from 'The Wire' in regards to the insurance companies)

- "You are not in good hands... with Allstate!" (Wendell ____ a.k.a. Dude from 'The Wire')

- "Why didn't you tell me that in New Orleans?"

"I've been paying them for 50 years!" (Wendell ____ a.k.a. Dude from 'The Wire's father in regards to his payment from the insurance company)

- "New Orleans is surrounded by water!" (Lady at N.O. meeting/hearing)

- "Lego levees"

- "We need a diffeent government!"

- "Is it safe?" (Spike Lee)
"No it's not safe." (Civil engineer being interviewed)

- "Out of all the brokeness, I am healing." (Phyllis Montana LeBlanc)

When The Levees Broke: a Requiem in Quotes

I watched "Levees" with a pen in hand a piece of paper in fron of me. My goal was to take the quotes that I thought were important then and post them in a blog. This will probably end up being nonsensical for those that didn't see the documentary, maybe even for those that did. The point was to tell the story through random quotes, points and pieces of observation. So we will see how it goes.

Monday:

- 911 was not accepting calls after the flooding started

- "If you don't move we won't help you" (The city/state to it's citizens before
Katrina came as told by Phyllis Montana LeBlanc)

- "That's not this talking. That's the truth!" (Sheryl Livadays referring to the beer in her hand)

- Category 1 broke the levee

- In 1927 the levee was blown on purpose after Hurricane Betsy

- "What you looking at?" (A man wading through the water as a photo journalist rode by in a boat)

- "I'm getting tired" (Man who tied beer kegs to his body to stay afloat)

- Water coming UP through the potholes and sewage drains

- "Water like to sank my boat" (In reference to the Red Cross throwing down bottles of water from their helicoptor)

- "The Coast Guard threw out the books" (In reference to them throwing out standard procedures to help in the rescue effort)

- "It was hot! It was beyond Africa hot!" (Phyllis Montana LeBlanc)

- "The Cajun Navy" (what the residents with boats who were helping the others were called)

- Kudos to Sean Penn!

- "I had to push [her] out the way" (Man whose Mother died in her wheelchair in the Super Dome waiting for the buses)

- "She needed oxygen!" (Little girl talking baout her mother)

- "We just need some help and support" (Little boy with the lisp)

- "[It happened by] Bush's will and mandate." (Harry Belafonte)

- Cops IN UNIFORM looting store and stealing DVDs

- "It was like being in a sewer. It was like being in a live sewer!"

- "OK men with guns" (White woman after being told she could not enter "Jeffersonia")

- Jefferson Parrish official putting cops with guns at the entrance to "Jeffersonia" at the end of the Crescent City connection

- "Not niggers but animals" (White man in regards to being pushed against the gates as people waited to get on relief buses)

- "The arrogance of power!" (Harry Belafonte)

- "We want help!" (Group of chanters at the Super dome)

- "Rudy would have walked on water!" (In reference to Rudy Guliani)

- "He's the type of person that gives C-students a bad name!" (In reference to George Bush)

- "Put those weapons down! "Put'em down got damn it!" (The General with the berret)

- "Women's periods were down on them! People has shit on them... piss on them!"

- "Do you have any drugs on you?" (Airport official)

"If I did I would smoke'em!" (Phyllis Montana LeBlanc)

- "I will take you outside and beat your muthafuckin' ass!" (Phyllis Montana LeBlanc to the airport official)

- "[Give us] some type of compassion. Empathy. Understanding...." (Phyllis Montana LeBlanc)

When the Levees Broke

If you are near a TV and also are a HBO subscriber, please check out the new Spike Lee documentary "When The Levees Broke." The first two installments are airing tonight. The last two will be airing tomorrow night. And I assume they will also be re-running it and make it available On-Demand sometime later this week and for a while after.

I know the whole Katrina thing has fallen to almost forgotten on most people's list of "What the F is going on in the world?" but I am sure this documentary will offer something that the mainstream media missed and has since forgotten about in the wake of Lance Bass, Maurice Clarett, Jon-Benet's suppossed killer and all of the other "news" that is being thrown at us right now.

So instead of watching the usual "must see TV" shows that I normally watch on Monday, I will be tuning in to hear the story of Katrina through the eye of Spike's camera. Hopefully you will too.

Congrats!

Just wanted to take the time to extend my congratulations to my friends Mr. & Mrs. Straight Shooter!

It was a wonderful ceremony and a wonderful overall event. I had one of the best times of my life sharing your day with you and the rest of our family. I wish you both the best and the happiest of lives together!

Until I see yall again, take care!




On another note, I want to extend my congrats to Mr. & Mrs. Elder Statesman. They recently celebrated their 2-yr anniversary!