“Bob, my legendary friend, take my freakishly large hand and let me lead you to the sanctum sanctorum.”
“Sizzler?”
“Not yet, Bob. We’ll stop at Sizzler on the way home, I promise.”
“I’m holding you to it.”
“I speak of a holy place, perhaps even quasi-mystical. A space of plans and dreams and the worst-looking feet you’ve ever seen in your life. Did you ever see The Red Shoes?”
“All over the place.”
“Not actual red shoes. The movie.”
“Ah. Was that the one with Peter Boyle?”
“Forget The Red Shoes, Bob. Grasp my prodigious paw and I will take you to a land of pure imagination.”
“Y’know, Bill, I’ve been in a dressing room once or twice.”
“Not like this, my esteemed prophet. The smells alone will have your nose reapplying for grad school. The camaraderie! The esprit de corps! The joie de vive!”
“Are those French for ‘dong?'”
“No, they’re in addition to the dong. Sweet Molly McCracken’s teats, we are gonna see some dong.”
“Bob, I cannot describe the joy that fills my enormous, broken body that you’ve joined me here at courtside to watch the most exciting sport ever invented by man, woman, or over-educated dog. I quote the philosopher Kurtis Blow when I say ‘I love basketball.'”
“Well, you know: I’m a fan.”
“Do you know where that word comes from? ‘Fan?’ In the olden days, before the advent of conditioned air, the spectators would bring palm fronds or other large foliage to wave at the players in hopes of cooling them down. Of course, since it was the old days, the fronds were also used for the purposes of racism.”
“Sure. Anything’s racist if you hit a minority with it.”
“Listen to the crowd, Bob! The excitement! The anticipation! We find ourselves as members of a proud lineage that stretches back to the Flavian Amphitheater or the Circus Maximus.”
“I was always a Ringling’s man myself.”
“And after the game, we’ll head down into the locker rooms and check out some dong. You’ve never seen dongs like these, Bob.”
“I’ve seen Phil’s.”
“It’s nothing like that. You’re comparing a golf ball to the Death Star. These are world-class athletes with world-class dongs. That’s why the shorts are so baggy nowadays.”
“Y’know, Mickey’s not the only one who knows how to execute a proper Merch Yoink.”
Nice. You and Jackie Greene are singing the anthem tonight, huh?
“Yup. Very exciting. We petitioned for a different song, but they were adamant.”
You didn’t want to sing the Star-Spangled Banner?
“Not especially.”
Why not?
“It’s a shitty song.”
Okay.
“There’s too many damn notes in the melody, and the lyrics are all about blowing people up.”
Morning Dew is about blowing people up.
“Sure, yeah, but the narrator of Morning Dew is upset about it. Whereas the authorial voice from whence the National Anthem issues is gleefully martial.”
Good point.
“But it’s mostly the notes. You gotta start down way lower than you’d imagine, or you run out of vocal range real quick.”
I’ve heard that.
“And, uh, you can’t dance to it.”
Strike three. You ever gonna wear that jersey?
“It will almost certainly be stolen by Monet to be worn as a dress on Instagram.”
Stay still, Bobby. James Harden’s vision is based on movement.
“Like an Argentinian?”
No, like a T-Rex.
“Very similar. T-Rex never got over the Falklands thing, either.”
I don’t know if that’s true.
“Phil sent me a Facebook link about it.”
Still. How’d you like the game?
“It was, uh, all right. Lots of back-and-forth. Shooting, passing, all kinds of action words. Very energetic sport. Plus, basketball’s the only non-glove sport. Baseball, hockey, football: gloves. Here, there’s nothing between the players’ hands and the fans. That creates a bond.”
I guess so.
“He’s still looking at me.”
Don’t move.
“I’m not. Not a twitch, except for talking to you and eating a hot dog.”
“No one that you’re looking at is Branford Marsalis, Mick.”
“Okay.”
“These beautiful athletes before you are the cream of the crop, in terms of raw talent, work ethic, and Instagram followers. There’s a reason they call basketball the Sport of Kings. Also, one of the teams is named the Kings.”
“Gotcha. When’s the drum solo? Between the third and fourth quarters?”
“There is no multi-instrumentalist exploration into the fantastic world of rhythm that stretches back to our roots as humans, but there is a guy with a tee-shirt cannon.”
“Did you say free tee-shirts?”
“Mick, I’ll buy you any shirt you want.”
“I already yoinked the one I wanted! You made me put it back.”
“I did, yeah, because we were in the locker room and the shirt you yoinked was LeBron’s game jersey. Even if your kid’s the coach, you get tossed from the building for that kind of crap.”
“I liked that shirt. Anyway, who are these stripey fellows?”
“Those are the officials.”
“What do they do?”
“They officiate.”
“Which team are they on?”
“Whoever you’re rooting for, they’re on the other team.”
“Sounds complicated.”
“Basketball is both mind-meltingly complex and infantile in its simplicity. Much like the song Dark Star, the sport of basketball allows for an almost infinite amount of variation stemming from a limited set of rules.”
At first, there was no basketball. Then, suddenly: there was. It was cold in Springfield, Ohio, and the all the town’s boys were stuck in the gym. A man named James Naismith said to the boys, “Let’s go outside and stick our dicks in the snow,” because he was from Canada. The boys, Americans all, demurred. Naismith came up with a game for them to play in the gym, and he called it European Handball. The boys said, “Were you not reading the part about us being American? Get that weirdo bullshit out of here.”
“I have another idea,” said Naismith.
And thus basketball was born, or at least a primitive form of it in which there was no dribbling and you got a point for pegging an Irishman in the head with the ball. Over the years, the rules were refined and shorts were invented. One day, a guy showed up with a sweatband wrapped around his giant afro, and the game achieved a new paradigm. Today, basketball is the second-most popular sport in the world (after soccer), and this is possibly due to its duality: you can watch it or you can play it. You need a ton of people and equipment and room to play baseball, let alone tennis or golf or speed-skating, but you can play hoops anywhere. The sport is also amenable to wagering: there’s a billion permutations to bet on in every game, and then you can combinate the permutations and get yourself flat-busted in no time at all.
Next weekend, we will see the Final Four. Having been 64 teams, now only 4 remain; they shall battle, and the winning team shall be permitted to breed. This strengthens the genome.
But for whom should the conscientious Enthusiast root? (This is, of course, assuming that you didn’t attend any of the colleges. After all, alma mater is Latin for “institution whose tee-shirts I wear to bed.” If you went to one of the Final Four schools, you are exempt from this.) Which of the four teams is the most Grateful Dead?
We examine the question:
Kansas The Dead played the state of Kansas nine times, and four of those shows were in 1979: two in February and two in December. Does that seem like the best use of time, hitting Kansas City with double-barrels? Couldn’t they have gone when it was warmer? Kansas in February is so cold that it fired its Secretary of State by tweet.
Not only did the Dead play Kansas City (the city), but the Dead played Kansas City (the non-city). Bobby sang the Lieber/Stoller composition twice in concert, once on 10/28/85 at the Fabulous Fox Theatre in Atlanta. Was the other performance of Kansas City in Kansas City, you ask? Are you new here? Of fucking course they didn’t play it in Kansas City. They played it in Worcester, Mass. Of fucking course they did.
However, the college is in Manhattan, which is over a hundred miles from Kansas City (regardless of the fact that a hundred miles isn’t all that far in Kansas) and so Kansas is eliminated from contention.
Villanova The Dead played in Philly a shitload, but never at the suburban school known for basketball and its world-class motel management program. It is a Catholic institution, and several Grateful Deads were/are Catholic. Beyond that, I got nothing.
Also: they’re the Wildcats. If you’re not going to try, I’m not going to care, Villanova. Put some effort into your mascot.
Michigan Twice in ’71–two superb shows from December–and once in ’67, the Dead played the town of Ann Arbor; in ’79 and ’89, though, they played the Crisler Arena on campus. Unlike Villanova, the U of Michigan is not a Catholic school, and in fact contains many Hebrews. Similarly, Dead audiences contained many Hebrews. I’m gonna bet that Michigan had a rather healthy Deadhead frat. Also in Michigan’s favor: they are playing basketball and not football, and therefore no Gruden is involved.
Looking good for the Wolverines so far.
Loyola Listen, we all know the previous 600 words have been utter horseshit, and you don’t have a soul if you’re not rooting for Loyola.
FACTS:
Cinderella story.
They are from Chicago, and Barack Obama is from Chicago, and everyone misses Barack Obama but I don’t think he misses us.
It is a Jesuit university, and Jesuits are Catholicism’s version of warrior-poets.
Karla DeVito went there!
You know Karla DeVito, even though you don’t know it.
This is her:
Karla fucking DeVito!
(She’s lip-syncing. Ellen Foley sang the part on the record, but still: Karla fucking DeVito!)
“Loyola” also sounds like a noise a very fancy gambler would make as he threw a pair of dice.
“Here we go, here we go, LOYOLA!”
Maybe it’s just me.
Oh, and Sister Jean.
I don’t wanna hear any cynical bullshit about Sister Jean.
She’s all right.
And, finally, the Dead’s connection to the school: on 11/17/78, in the afternoon, the Dead (most of ’em, anyway) played an acoustic set in something called the Rambler Room, which was just a provincial name for the Student Union. Billed as the Bob Weir Band, they performed eight or nine tunes real loose-like. It looked like this:
As is customary, there are nothing but questions. This clearly wasn’t planned–Phil’s playing a borrowed Fender Precision and half the band is absent–and the band had no overt ties to the college. In addition, they literally never did this. What the fuck is wrong with you, Grateful Dead?
Disregarding the mysteries, we must award a thousand bonus points to Loyola for the uniquity of the occasion. Also: Sister Jean.
These are Lithuanians, Young Enthusiasts; they’re supposed to look like that. This is 1992, and the Soviet Union had just broken up–it was a mutual decision–and so this would be the first time that Lithuania could have their own basketball team in the Olympics, and that was important to them because Lithuanians are nuts for basketball, and they’re good at it, too: in 1988, four out of the five starters for the Soviet Olympic team were Lithuanian.
Commies were all about the Glory of Sport: their athletes were selected at young ages and trained in academies; they may also have been educated. Drugs and beatings and (I’d wager) uncountable acts of child abuse and punishment for losing. In Soviet Russia, the cover of the Wheaties box went on you.
What does that mean?
Shh. I’m talking about history. Anyway, the Soviet system was basically a gulag archipelago of gyms, but there were also perks. Winning had its rewards, comrade. A new Lada. Dacha on the Black Sea. Extra potato. Or, maybe, you could get a ticket out from behind the Iron Curtain. The Ministry of Sport–seriously, it was called that–promised the four Lithuanians on that ’88 basketball team that if they brought home gold for Mother Russia, then they could go play for the NBA. (They’d have to send all the money back home, but it was better than nothing.)
The NBA’s the important part here, Younger Enthusiast, because it serves a position in the story of both carrot and stick. The Lithuanians’ desperation to get to the NBA led to them beating the United States and taking home the gold. Said beating caused America to stand up from its chair, shivering with rage and aching with fear at the terrible thing that it knew it must now do.
“Release the Jordan.”
And so in 1992, you had the Dream Team–Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, and eight other Hall-of-Famers who weren’t Isiah Thomas–and no matter what you promised a Lithuanian, no one was beating them.
I’m ahead of myself: remember how those rotten, collectivist, turnip-fucking cossacks promised the noble, brave, hardworking Lithuanians that they could go to America and play in the NBA in return for the medal? They lied. Only one guy was allowed to go, a 6’5″ shooting guard named Šarūnas Marčiulionis, and he ended up on the Golden State Warriors, who play in the city of San Francisco. This was ’89. Couldn’t speak the language, but he was outgoing and friendly and so he ended up going out with his friends a lot. Some of his friends were associates of a certain semi-defunct, choogly-type band.
On Christmas Day, 1991, the Soviet Union fell. (And God bless us, everyone.) Marčiulionis had one goal: put together a Lithuanian national team to compete in the Olympics, and kick the shit out of the Russians. He had the players, but not the money, and so he started asking around town. Up and down Market, and all around Lombard, and door-to-door in the Castro. He even brought his beggar’s bowl to Front Street.
The Dead sent a check, and a couple boxes full of shirts and shorts. These were men who had grown up under Soviet rule: they were not familiar with tie-dye. The bright colors seemed right, though. Marčiulionis and the Lithuanians made it through the qualifying rounds, and went on to Barcelona. They played the Dream Team: 127-76. The score makes it seem closer than it was, but that wasn’t why they went to Spain.
In the bronze medal match, Lithuania beat Russia 82-78.
By now, the team had attracted sponsors and they had fancy workout clothes, but they wore their tie-dye onto the medal podium, both to show their national colors and to thank the Dead. Skully–that’s what they named the slam-dunking skeleton on the front of the shirt–is in the Basketball Hall of Fame, right alongside all the members of the Dream Team. We really are everywhere.
It is not clear whether or not the team’s fanny packs were provided by Bobby.
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