There is only one man who can answer these pondering’s, that being “Big Shot Bob,” otherwise known as Robert Horry, who made a living with the Rockets, Lakers, and Spurs, en route to seven rings by nailing the clutch shot.

Why does this matter? He was never a star, but he has rings galore bronzed on his swish- svelte fingers. 

In today’s NBA we judge  all-time greats by how many rings they’ve won and whether or not they led their teams to title town. But is this a fair assessment, considering a life-long bench guy like Horry can be carried to seven?

Never was Horry the franchise guy. In fact, as great as he seemed in closing minutes, Robert Horry never became the player we expected him to be after his timely three point shooting for Houston’s 2nd title run.

Horry’s brief stint in Phoenix after a trade in 1996, proved he was not endowed with a star motor. A hot tempered, dramatic and aloof head case, Bob languished averaging 6.9 points at a career low shooting clip: 41.8%. A trade by mid-season to the L.A. Lakers–a team filled with Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, Nick Van Exel, Eddie Jones, Elden Campbell, and Cedric Ceballos changed the trajectory of his failing career.

So why then is Bob a champion? Why not franchise guys like Barkley, Malone, Stockton, Dominique, Ewing, or Reggie Miller?

Each of those listed above were worthy of winning gold, were they not? All of them were respective franchise pieces with the heart, skills, and late game heroics to hold the O’Brien.

The answer to their problems was Michael Jordan’s Bulls: a team of role guys surrounding the king of the sport with that IT factor needed to win it all. Something today’s critics use to gauge greatness and rank the all time elites.

So what is the issue then with the tautness of this old-time equation? Why not turn a blind eye and allow this to be the answer to everything?

Simply because it just does not add up. It does not offer enough answers. If Big Shot Bob has seven, or the likes of Jack Haley–former twelfth man for Jordan’s final three peat has three, the equation’s a bit off. We need something else, a new perspective when thinking of the greats and why and how they never hung the O’Brien.

And I believe individual luck IS the partly the answer, luck, a maddening machine random like the California Lottery. Historians prefer the term historical happenings–a notion that choices are made for no other reason except that they were made, and the dominoes re-arrange the cosmos of a world more closely inter-connected than we might wish it to be (think guy who smells like farts at the movies, or the swine flu victim winding a cough onto the back nape of the neck.)

Luck.

To think Michael Jordan fell to number three in the 1984 draft could be easily overlooked for a variety of reasons: Sam Bowie, the number two pick before MJ, was a  college superstar and a big man compared at the time to the greats. The Blazers already had a gifted wingman in Clyde Drexler andat the time the league was built around bigs: Kareem, Sampson and Olajuwan, Robert Parish, Patrick Ewing, and Moses Malone.

But that doesn’t make things less ludicrous.  Look at how the draft shaped the NBA forever. MJ goes to an ordinary Bulls team built in perhaps the greatest city in America, where he wins ROY, ultimately five MVP’s, slam dunk contests, becomes the games biggest mogul, and wins six titles. Alongside Oprah, MJ is easily the greatest name in Chicago history and can be attributed for an economical explosion that saved the lower West side of the city once run with crime: drug abuse, gang wars, and prostitution.

Bowie, in the annals of the NBA, is known as ‘the bust.’ He never won a thing in the pros: no all star games, no shoe deals, thus injuring the once bright ideal the Blazers had in trading their franchise Center Bill Walton to Boston.

This, my friends, is the Sam Bowie, a supernatural element that cannot be ignored.

Luck.

Yet like so many children born into inner city poverty without the tools necessary to change their lives, we cannot judge the stars through the a similar bias, because not all players are born lucky into a posh franchise. The gift of playing in Los Angeles or Boston does not come to everyone. Not every player is born into a showtime era, a team so deep they make the ocean look like a kids pool.

For some, seeking a new home is like divorcing an abusive wife. In order for Mitch Richmond to adorn gold, the talented and true shooting guard had to eventually break ties in the perils of Sacramento. Karl Malone found it necessary to join with Kobe and Shaq in 04′ after a long tenure in Utah. And even the humble Clyde Drexlerleft a hell of a situation in Portland to win it Houston. All three of which were great with or without (Sing it Bono) a championship.

The reality of the situation is heart breaking for most. We as childish dreamers wish our favorite player could be greater than the others, but this is not real. Embracing a pragmatic approach to the sport tied less to your heart strings will allow you to see greatness wrapped in many different packages. 

Reality 1: Great players DO NOT win championships, great TEAMS win championships. The 2004 Detroit Pistons are a perfect example of this. A team of role guys without a future hall of famer, the Pistons had the momentary IT. Call it faith, hard work, purity, and any other beautiful thing you want, but to explain why they won a title over an L.A. Laker team stocked with four future hall of famers would be absurd.

Reality 2: Like the stars in the sky, NBA STARS need other STARS. Think for a moment about the teams who’ve won championships the last thirty years. All of them have one thing in common: team depth and stars surrounding stars. Magic had Kareem and Worthy; Bird–Mchale and Parish; Dr.J–Moses Malone; Isaiah–Dumars and Rodman; MJ–Pippen; Hakeem–Clyde; Shaq–Kobe and Wade; Duncan–Robinson, Parker, and Ginobili; Pierce–KG and Allen.

Reality 3:  Winning titles does mean a lot, but it does not mean everything for a myriad of reasons. If the 1919 Chicago Blacksox or dirty referees like Tim Donaghy can throw World Series and playoff games, then how serious can we take this thing? Not very. Take everything with a grain of salt and learn other decided facets when it comes to judging all-time greats: MVP’s, All Star appearances, Career Totals, Game Winners, Ability to close, Athleticism, Re-defining the sport, dominance-ometer, and sociological affects.

LeBron James is not a sell out because the guy wants to win, he’s a realist. A star unselfish enough to admit that NO star including himself, can win a title completely on his own.

LeBron is stuck in the the Bill Clinton Vacuum. Though he does great things, he is brushed aside because of one unlikeable decision.

But greatness is not a grade school quiz on being friendly, it is brutal giftedness. And likeability is not the twin brother to being great.

LeBron made a  decision to better his career andhis life. Leading a Cleveland Cavs team the last seven years, that never boasted anybody better than a has-been version of Antawn Jamison warrants James departure.  No it does not warrant the overdone TV cinematic’s regarding “the decision,” nor the Pat Riley blowout introduction party in South Beach. Yet neither should it foster the illogical hysteria across America attempting to deny the man’s sheer dominance and greatness.

This isn’t patty cake kids. We are talking about a production entertainment, where all titles are but a decorative decor. They might help the woman look fine, but if that woman is not fine without the jewelry or the tight fitting jeans, I say run, run as fast as you can.

Drop by the nearest bar and have a scotch on me. Look through the world with freshness and at what is truly great (it is not the girl next to you.). It is the scraggly bartender able to whip up drinks faster than the average Joe.

Once while pitching a no-hitter in the sixth grade my pants ripped through the crotch revealing the graying pickled nose of my sweaty cup. I was determined to battle through, as if my twelve year old league held a form of valor similar to that of an ancient warriors, but to no avail.  The likes of frozen nut syndrome, and the admittance of a heart crush on a certain girl staring at me with eyes of embarrassment, wide as a horse surfaced my jitters and combusted my moment of greatness into a final inning disaster: four hits (including to the eighth hitter in the lineup), three runs, plenty of walks, and a head hung low–an oversized one to say the least.

At sixteen I opened up to a pastor regarding sexuality and he told me to put tobasco sauce on my fingertips to stop me fiddling down under. He didn’t say fiddling down under, because I am sure he thought the last thing he should do is jest, and hence arise the humorist within me. If you wonder whether I tried it, I did. It doesn’t work, just warms it up a little, and besides that rather good factoid…I was a healthy boy, one whom hid posters of Kathy Ireland splayed in string bikinis under my A-Rod posters.

Nothing can stop the activity of a healthy buck.

Once asked which man I would choose to make love too (if a gun was stuck to my head), I asserted the mulleted Full House version of John Stamos. My reasons for choosing the Italian Stallion I’m sure America is to blame for, considering every and any form of media promises a perfect life, perfect body, and a rock n’ roll existence; all of which Stamos is packaged with.

Two years ago I woke my wife in the middle of the night randomly shouting “tortilla!” Now if I have an issue with sleep speaking, which means I am a sleep muser, should I fear what forms of things I am dreaming about? Not if food continues to assert its dominance over other meaningless dreamscapes: embodying Snake Eyes, living life as a merman, and fathering pinkie size children.

Like labyrinths without an exit we all concede sanity: meanings, definitions, those manicured mathematics that theorize everything and butter our world with the blood of care bears. Sets of religioius rules and values– things like morals should never be ingested into macro environments. Macro morals foreshadow hysterical immorality, and concede an acceptance for equality and diversity.

The problem? America IS diversity and equality. We are the segway to continuity and progression; rationality and spirituality; division and equality. All that IS can be found in US, not a political invention, nor the modern motor model for human thinking. A is not to B, as B is not to C. Rather ABC are to Z as Z is to variable X.

State of mind X governs you and I, like light and darkness, food and water. We NEED our state of being like children incessantly seeking the truths to the universe: the magic of breathing in oxygen only to blow carbon dioxide out the fleshy greenhouse of the lungs, or the oxidation complex in our vein constructs, that without the immersion of water in a ninety-six hour period of time will fail and cause us cardiac arrest.

These NEEDS we cannot live without. Attempting to do so is death, and death seems to hold no regard for stature or faith. Our states of mind fill our rather skeletal longings with wonderment and hope–love, lust, passion, and desire. There is no other explanation when it comes to our definitive stance on the difference between entertainment and athletics. Once a fine line drawn in the sand has become muddied and spilled over–a loss of interpretive elements with no grid in which to define the two.

I once saw a kid strain so hard during a math quiz, that I questioned my definition of athletics. I am certain many of our interpretations are drawn from historiography: things like the Roman Olympics which safe-guarded the athlete from the philosopher with varied themes of quest, champion, and bodily strain, overrun by a will to beat-out adversity.

This in Roman days the Philosopher did not do. Though incredibly respected, the philosopher had no peril to overcome. And to today’s Roman thinker, the fork between intellectual achievements and athletic accomplishments are grounded in the same theory.

But how ridiculous! I lost my now hitter because I did not have the intellectual where-with-all to steady the body. The boy who strained during his math quiz flexed his forehead and scribbled with his pen. His intellect directed the achievement, and the achievement left him physically exhausted.

Both worked in unison.

We all have columns of W’s and L’s in our lives: some unfortunately more victorious others. This alone sets us on quest larger than the Lakers, LeBron James, or Dirk Nowitiski. Our states of mind are stuck in a never-ending dog fight ( I am not referencing Mike Vick), and we are called upon daily, hourly, and momentarily, to overcome adversity and make something of ourselves.

With time running out at work, our relationships, our health,  and our family, we grow accustomed to taking the last shots. We alone are our very own last-minute closer in the sports of our lives. Rest in peace Macho Man.

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