I am a realist with specks of surrealism poking through my veins.  When I see mountains, I see mountains, though I admit, beneath their weighty crouch of pine trees, one can see shadows that resemble crow-dark figures. But the difference between a person like myself and those who dream of trolls and witches, is I prefer reality, whatever the hell that is*.  What-ifs are a futile form of phantasmal thinking. They are as pointless as is asking for charity from the big wig munchers sitting in Armani suits atop the towering buildings of American money trade.  But I must confess, as I grow older, more restless with the direction of Father time, and mount toward a gush of a pre-midlife crisis, the what-ifs linger like tinkling pennies in the piggy bank of the soul. Why, what, when, and how become a blabbing second personality–they control you from the inside-out with illusions of a glittering fantasy world.

Okay, not really. But the build up was quite nice. Writing Fan-Fiction ranks 209th on my list of literary successes, behind a research paper on the mating practices of cockroaches*.  I guess I’m learning to become more intrigued with the futurist perspective, the cruel reality of what the intellectuals call historical luck. So I’ll give this elementary form of literature a shot.

When M.J prematurely bolted from the NBA in 1993, after being crowned with vice-God status, oh, and three consecutive titles, David Stern and co. found themselves swallowed in the belly of “who next.”  David Robinson? Hakeem Olajuwan? Patrick Ewing? Reggie Miller? Shaq? Penny Hardaway? Chris Webber? and the list of plausible courtship’s continued. But none of them fit. For one, Robinson, Olajuwan, and Ewing all split time as the best centers in the NBA. They tore each other apart, night in and night out, passing title hopes to one another like a plate of chicken wings. Miller was just too funny looking to take serious. Shaq was dominant, but didn’t have the “that’s it” factor like his airness. C-Webb was a poor man’s Charles Barkley, and Penny Hardaway, a second fiddle to the big fella.

So as it was, after nearly two years in limbo, MJ stopped the pathetic whiff of the bat,  saving the NBA from the folly of ESPN2 status. But he was 35, and though God can’t be held by the shackles of age, clearly he had only three years left. So for three years the NBA garnered another glory run. We watched MJ’s greatest moments. 72 wins in ’96 and title 4; 69 wins in ’97, a heroic 38 in-game 5 with the flu, and title 5, and then his best, at 38, without a healthy Pippen, he won title 6 in ’98 with a game winner. The replay of the legends final moment paused in our minds forever. We fixated on what he’d given us for fifteen years, yet he wasn’t coming back, so we began to croon over the “what now?”

And this is where the world got murky. What-ifs clouded the senses. We glorified the likes of Jerry “score twenty on twenty-five shots” Stackhouse, and Grant “got hurt tying my shoe” Hill, as the ones who’d ascend this trialsome period. Because the compass of greatness passed over us with a gray fog of finality, we wandered lost, like the Israelites begging for redemption. Yet along it was not us, or his airness, that would lead us out of this dark place. It was the powers that be: historical luck, a.k.a., the Sam Bowie syndrome.

Draft day, 1996. Pick 1: Allen Iverson. Pick 5: Ray Allen. Pick 13: Kobe Bryant.  The boyish eighteen-year-old face, with pleasurable dimples, and a rail thin body, shyly bumbled to the stage, beneath a veil of lights, and a flutter of pictures. He wears the Charlotte Hornets’ shades of blue on his ball cap, perfectly slack at the side, further admitting to his school boy demeanor.  Charlotte is ecstatic. The cities deflated NBA economy inflates a bit with a keen interest in the High School boy who’s been compared to his airness. Pedestrians walk about the city whispering the what-ifs, the could it be’s, for a team coming off an average 41-41 season, with a superstar wing in Glen Rice.  Still lamenting over the tragedy of losing Alonzo Mourning and Larry Johnson to trades, the city hopes for a revival of the 1994-1995 season which saw the Hornets boast 50 wins. Surely the young kid could evolve into a dynamic threat, creating the most explosive duo in hoops–Bryant the athletic poster child, and Rice, the cool, collect, three-point aficinado,  segwaying the Hornets into a true playoff contendor.

Yet like me, the Charlotte Hornets are realist.  They wagered on Bryant to be a bust like  Harold Minor or Isaiah Rider.  And in so doing, they traded the thirteenth pick of the 1996 draft, Kobe Bryant, to the Los Angeles Lakers for veteran center, Vlade Divac, altering the league forever, and Hall of Fame faces such as Shaquille O’neal, Phil Jackson, Kevin Garnett, Tim Duncan, and Pau Gasol.

But what if the Hornets froze with a premonition of the boys greatness, further tossing historical luck down the philosophical drain? And Sam Bowie acted as the sports George Santyana, reminding Charlotte not to repeat history, but to transcend it with wit and insight? Assuredly the man known as the Black Mamba would be the face of Charlotte, a team with successes and failures, and his legacy slung in blue, not purple and gold.

1996-1997 would be a season of building blocks. Rice would continue as the teams breakout superstar, while Mugsy Bogues runs the show, and Anthony Mason controls the middle.  Bryant would come off the bench for hard-working Dell Curry, at nearly twenty-five minutes a night, and show enough flashes of greatness to replace the veteran Curry the following season.

1997-1998 would be a season in which Bryant starts at the guard position. Rice now thirty, begins to be haunted by the lack of a championship, and chooses to demote some of his shot totals to the nineteen-year-old.  Anthony Mason plays third fiddle, and continues to play as one of the leagues premier do- it- all big men.  David Wesley, Bobby Phills, and Del Curry battle for back-up minutes, and Wesley wins. Phills fades into obscurity and Curry becomes a veteran, on a guard heavy team with little to any usage and retires. Bryant averages in the mid-teens, struggling down the stretch, and the Hornets lose in the 1st round.

1998-1999 was the season of the lockout and first post-Jordan experiment, acting as a minimal launching pad for Bryant. The Rice and Mason injuries allow for Bryant to assert himself offensively as the teams go to guy. Though there are flashes of stardom in the wake of the teams injuries, the youngster still lacks a consistent jump shot, and the assertiveness to tell off veterans like Derick Coleman, and J.R. Reid, who both shoot far too much for players with their lack of offensive abilities. The team misses the playoffs.

1999-2000 was a season of fine tuning the teams direction. Now season four of the Bryant/Rice experiment, the Hornets feel the pressure to make this thing work. Bryant now expects to be the man on a team stacked with paling reflections of one time all-stars. Coleman comes to camp overweight and is nothing more than a seventh or eighth man off the bench. Rice still has the ability to score, but at 33, with brittle knees, and a bad shooting elbow, his percentages drop, as does his demeanor. Mason’s ruptured leg causes the greatest decline, and though he averages a double-double through determination, he is unable to be counted on as anything more than a role guy. Rookie Baron Davis comes excited and both he, and Bryant, give life to a team in steep decline. Bryant averages 20-25 a night, Rice at 17, and Davis around 12, but the team misses the playoffs for a second straight season.

2000-2001 was a new beginning. The Rice/Bryant experiment did not work. Rice is dealt to a playoff team in need of a shooter, as is Mason, gone to free agency.  The pick up of Jamal Mashburn gives the team a much-needed offensive punch at the swing position. Bryant continues to shine, and records his second straight all-star appearance. He averages 25-28 points a night, while Davis continues to grow into a good point guard, though his shoot first attitude perturbs the star Bryant.  Both have a slightly poor relationship, and the friction causes the quiet tempered Mashburn to fade far into the background. The team makes the playoffs but fails to get anywhere but the second round.

2001-2002 was the final recordable season. Season six for Bryant, and the cities lack of drawing power for big name free agents, causes him to seek a new home. They still have the trio of Bryant, Davis, and Mashburn, but they are unable to upend the Eastern Conference elite: Pacers, Sixers, and Nets. Davis is nothing more than a poor shooting eighteen point, six assist point guard, and Mashburn is on the steady decline. Bryant averages 30+, but has become the same type of player as a Vince Carter or Tracy McGrady, a shoot first player with few playoff credentials.

2002-present has been a vague unreadable sign. Bryant, McGrady, VC, Iverson, Duncan, Garnett, Shaq, Wade, Bosh, Nowitski, and Durant all battle for superstar supremacy. It is fair to say, at this point, there would be no comparison between Bryant and Lebron. Lebron would clearly be the best of the best, lacking playoff successes. Duncan would probably have six titles to his name, and Garnett two. Bryant gets caught in the free agency fray much like a McGrady  or a VC, and continues to experience nothing more but all-star appearances and playoff losses.  Though a phenomenal athlete and tremendous scorer, Bryant is a poor man’s Dominique, nothing more than a top thirty to fifty player of all time.

The problem with WOW & Fan Fictionites, is they live in a world with little to any REAL credential*. It is creative in that it feeds the never-ending need to enslave oneself to something born far from reality. But what greatness is there in a world nobody cares about*? As I sit back, sipping on a beer, shooting the shit with friends, I am amazed at the tremendous ability life has to shape things with the hard and near impossible decisions. We all have made piss-poor choices, shoot, choices meant to be regretted over. But in the regret, we become better people, and learn how to fruitfully shape the real world. We will no longer (hopefully not) concern ourselves with our Bryant for Divac swaps, because whether we are the recipient of greatness or not, we’ve given ourselves over to the great collective–a fabric of souls interconnected by the dominoes of our lives.

I’d trade Bryant for Divac full well-knowing the kind of player he’d become.

For every Bryant there’s a Divac, both serving their place in the ying-yang world of sports.

Divac: hard-working, playoff contender, smart, and the greatest flopper of all time.

Bryant: five time champion, Olympic champion, top ten great of all time, top five scorer of all time, thirteen time all-star, one time MVP, and the list continues to mount.

The greatest flopper of all time lends itself to a round of merry humor– which we all need.

But if the Kobe accolades say enough for the name of reality, then, who the hell wouldn’t make that trade, and who would possibly have the guts to re-arrange the beauty of such greatness?

–Luke Johnson

Who? Yea I know, I know. For most of the sports world a name like McNamara means nothing. That is unless you are talking about the Central Coast realty agency. But for March Madness Maniacs like myself, the name McNamara takes  on a life of its own.

This is the best time of year. A time when college athletes from all over the country battle it out for supremacy. Conference tournaments do one of two things. If you come from a mid-major conference (Big West, Missouri Valley, etc.) winning your conference tournament is your only shot at recieving a birth come March. If you are from a power conference (ACC, Big East, Big 12) this is a time to settle the nay-sayers and establish yourself as a legitimate seed come playoff time.

The one-and-done atmosphere is like electricity to the veins of its viewers. March Madness Maniacs live for the David vs. Goliath matchups–1 vs. 16, 2 vs. 15, 3 vs. 14–because within the human heart we all root for the underdog. All of us at one time or another have felt completely overmatched whether it be in our business, collegiate academics, married life, health concerns, and the list goes on. And when we overcome incredible odds, the certainty of miracles grows stronger, more steadfast, more golden.

This common strand that interlinks our societal consciousness is lost when players go professional. Money becomes the central driving point, and before you know it, the competitor is lost to a swirling world of popularity. No longer can we revel in the that moment in time–that one moment in March–when the man we watched on TV was a strungout kid proving his greatness on the largest stage.

Which is why memories haunt college basketball fans. We only get the innocence of our loved competition for two to four years. Watching kids graduate, go pro, or overseas is less a culmination of success, and more a feeling of uncertainty for a game split down the seams between its two largest entities: collegiate and pro.

I am not surprised that our fastfood sports junkies have so quickly forgotten greatness wrapped in its stocky, awkward, out-of-nowhere form. A package wrapped with an outlying vanilla colored goatee, instead of a pretty form of wrapping paper that screams “ME!”

“Draft ME! Look at ME!”

His name is Gerry McNamara. One of the greatest players to ever adorn a Syracuse Orange jersey. A guy who played with the likes of current pros Carmelo Anthony and Hakeem Warrick.  The 6’2, 185 pound pride of Scranton, Pennsylvania, gloried in a four year run at Syracuse, leaving Orange fans and March Madness Maniacs with some of their greatest memories in tournament history.  Who as a freshman co-led with Carmelo Anthony, the Orange to their first basketball title in 2003. Had he been endowed with four more inches of height, he would still be tearing through defenses like a cavalier slicing and dicing foes to the bone.

Here is a nice clip of McNamara to ‘Melo. Pure beauty.

The true Mighty Mouse drove the lane with a poised abandon that made his knock-off, Damon Stoudamire, look like a cheap version bought at Wal Mart.  His ability to hit the step back three meant a defender had to body up at all times. If his defender did, G-Mac would stagger his off shoulder, drop a Tim Hardaway crossover then finish with a tear drop in the key.

2005-2006, McNamara’s senior year, left fans with his image inked in their minds forever. For much of the season McNamara was ridiculed with “too slow” and “undersized,” by pro scouts. The pinnacle of this type of media hit hard when Sports Illustrated published a featured story on McNamara being the most “overrated” player in the country. G-Mac bore the brunt of his teams off kilt 19-12 regular season record. Facing the Big East Tournament, the Orange needed to roll through its entirety to have any hope of earning McNamara and the Orange their fourth birth in March.

What he ended up doing was pure greatness. Fueled by the Sports Illustrated reports, and hobbled by a deep leg bruise, McNamara’s Orange upset Cincinnati in the first round of the tournament 74-73, in which he hit a one handed three point shot at the buzzer. The following day, he hit a fading three-point shot to tie number one ranked U Conn and send the game to overtime. There McNamara scored five more of his team high seventeen points to close out the country’s number one team.  In the conference semi-finals, McNamara hit five three-pointers in the second half against Georgetown to win their third game in three days.  Things culminated when G-Mac and the Orange upset Pitt in the Big East title game, 65-61. The Orange was the first team in Big East history to win four games in a row in the tournament. McNamara as you would expect, was Conference Tourney MVP.

His play was so superior to his foes, that the great and quiet natured Jim Boeheim went on a tirade like this:

McNamara adorned this t-shirt in mockery for a media more in love with big money athleticism than with the heart of a competitor…

G-Mac finished his Syracuse career starting every game (135). His 2,009 career points ranks him fourth all-time in Orange history, 4,781 minutes first, 258 steals second, 648 assist third, and 400 three-pointers first. He also owns the record for the most three-point field goals in Big East Tournament history (183).

So where in the world is Gerry McNamara?

After three years of bouncing between NBA training camps and professional ball in Greece, McNamara now leads shooting clinics near Syracuse University at Onandaga Community College. He has become a primetime guest on a popular radio station, and as of 2009, has been an assistant coach for Boheim and Syracuse. Despite never making the pros, McNamara left fans with memories of why college basketball’s March Madness is superior to the NBA’s take-a-night-off-and-nap seven game series.

Thinking of McNamara brought up a few more past greats…

Leading his team to back-to-back title games (winning one),  former Arkansas Razorback guard Scotty Thurman took a set of bad advice and declared early for the 1995 NBA draft, where he went undrafted. Thurman was a do-it-all guard with a wide wingspan. His ability to hit the deep shot was on full display when he drilled a three-point shot in the final minutes of a title win over Grant Hill’s Duke Blue Devils 76-72. Thurman played overseas for a few years, but never stepped foot in the NBA. He is now a real estate agent in Little Rock, Arkansas.

How about the 5’10, 202 pound tank, Khalid El-Amin? El-Amin was the driving force with Rip Hamilton to U Conn’s title in 1999. Rip went on to a nice NBA career, but El-Amin left after his junior year citing financial troubles. Playing just fifty games in the pros, El-Amin has had quite a nice career overseas. He was a back-to-back all-star in Turkey from 2004-2005, averaging 20.5 points per game, and in 2007, El-Amin won the Ukranian league MVP award and led his team to the Ukranian title.

Most of you remember Brevin Knight, the former great who played point guard for the Stanford Cardinal teams in the late nineties. But what about Brevin’s brother Brandin Knight of Pittsburgh? Knight was a standout point guard for the Panthers who helped establish their recent string of success. He was co-Big East player of the year in 2002, and is currently first all-time in assist for the Panthers, and first in steals. Knight played two years in the NBDL before blowing out his knee, and is currently an assistant coach for the Panthers.

Another past name is Joseph Forte, former standout guard for North Carolina. In his sophomore season he averaged 21 points per game and shot 38 percent from the three-point range. Still considered one of the great guards to ever roll through North Carolina, Forte left early for the NBA draft. Drafted by the Celtics late in the first round, Forte never got the PT and currently plays overseas.

Power forward John Wallace of Syracuse left Orange fans with great memories. A bruiser in the paint, Wallace led the Orange to the 1996 championship game, where they lost to a deep Kentucky team filled with Tony Delk, Walter McCarty, Jeff Shepherd, Ron Mercer, Derek Anderson, and Antoine Walker. Wallace is one of fifty-six players to finish his collegiate career with 2,000 career points and 1,000 rebounds. Drafted 18th overall in the 1996 draft to the Knicks, Wallace bounced around the league for eight years before retiring in 2005.

Before Buckeyes like Greg Oden, Evan Turner, and Jared Sulinger,  Scoonie Penn was the god of Ohio basketball from’98-’00. Born with a forty-inch vertical, the alt-athlete–a blend of both finesse, strength, and speed–led the Buckeyes with current pro Mike Redd to the 1999 final four. An inch under six feet, was the only knock on Scoonie’s Chauncey Billups like game. Because of that Penn was drafted 57th overall to the Hawks in 2000, and never played a minute in the NBA. Penn currently plays ball in Italy.

Checkout this video of Scoonie’s greatness and how about the young Ronald Artest?

The “fab five” for the Michigan Wolverines went to back to back final fours in 1992 and 1993. With Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, and Juwan Howard, it was easy to dissapear. But the “other two,” Ray Jackson and Jimmy King were no slouches. Both were high school all-Americans and top one hundred recruits. King had the ability to drive to the hoop, acting as a safe zone offensively when Rose or Webber was in foul trouble. Ray Jackson was a defensive stopper and a captain, a guy who acted as the glue in tense situations. Once the other three left for the pros, both King and Jackson combined for 30.5 points per game their senior season. King was drafted 35th overall to the Raptors in 1995, and played a total of sixty-four games in his pro career. Retiring in 1997, King now works for Meryl Lynch in New York City.  Jackson was the only one of the five who went undrafted in the NBA, though he played three years in the CBA, winning the Rookie of the Year in 1996. He now runs a non-profit in Austin, Texas assisting underpriveledged kids.

As the gift of March Madness enfolds in the coming weeks with game winners and upsets, players will establish themselves in the ranks of tournament greats. These players will leave us with their legacies in the backdrops of our minds, haunting us with the need to replay their moments over and over. Which is the very reason, why college basketball’s march madness is the greatest playoff atmosphere in the world.