"Dysfunctional Family"

[Hironaka <j.hironaka@unesco.org>]

    I recommend a basketball article in the NY Times Sunday Magazine.
Even though it is not Celtics related, it gives a fascinating and
credible-sounding account of NBA life today. The depiction of the Knicks
provides a real contrast to the Celtics college camaraderie that Antoine
Walker refers to.

    Aside from the excerpted segment posted below, there is a revealing
profile of Van Gundy and his coaching style as well as some bizzaro
moments, like the Camby punching incident and another where the three
"born agains" Charlie Ward, Allan Houston and Kurt Thomas corner the
reporter Eric Konigsberg to ask him why the Jews killed Christ ("There
are Christians getting persecuted by Jews every day. There's been books
written about..." Charlie Ward).

    I'll just post the URL and some excerpts below, copywrite NY Times.
You have to register on the site, if you haven't done so already.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/22/magazine/22KNICKS.html



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"This team gets along well, but we don't necessarily hang out," Allan
Houston said over a bowl of Frosted Flakes, his pregame ritual, at the
coffee shop of the Wyndham hotel in Milwaukee. Upstairs, his teammates
had all ordered room service. "I mean, we spend a lot of time together,
but we may not talk about anything that's really quality conversation
until maybe February." (The Knicks' season started in October.)

This was something I heard from many of the Knicks. If they knew better
than to rely on their superiors for support, it didn't mean they could
expect much from one another. "In general, teammates don't interact very
much," said Luc Longley, the Australian-born center. "When I first came
in, I had no idea the league was so mercenary. You're basically hired
guns. Guys get traded off all the time, and also there's a certain
competitiveness, guys competing for salary money."

After home games, the players disperse, each man heading for the posse
that awaits him in the Garden stands. Even when they are together on the
road, the players, especially veterans like Larry Johnson, tend to have
their own friends in each city and can be seen venturing out alone from
the team hotel.

"Larry brings us together, though," said Chris Childs, the backup point
guard who has since been traded to Toronto. What does he do? Childs
thought about it. "He buys everybody lotion."

To ward off loneliness, Camby pays a salary to a childhood friend,
Percell Oliver, nicknamed Bugz, to live at his mansion in Westchester --
one wonders how this goes over with Camby's cohabitant girlfriend -- and
also to drive with him to home games, organize his schedule and work for
his charitable foundation. "I've known Bugz since we were sharing
clothes together at Bellevue Square," a housing project in Hartford,
Camby said. (He quoted a rap song by KRS-One in which a kid is forced to
share three pairs of pants with his brother and learns that "with one
and a half pairs of pants, you ain't cool.") This is, in fact, common
practice in the N.B.A.; Allan Houston employed a college friend in a
similar arrangement before getting married. "It's important to have
people around that you know are your friends before you ever had
anything," Sprewell said. "Your teammate's probably not gonna be as
close to you as somebody you played ball with your whole life."

But interactions with their hometown friends aren't what they used to
be. "It's hard now for Latrell to relate to his boys," said James
Gordon, who coached Sprewell at Washington High School in Milwaukee.
"What do any of them understand about his life? Most of them are back
home, working night shift." Gordon came by the Knicks' morning
shoot-around the day they were to play the Bucks in Milwaukee, and in
his presence Sprewell lost a few years. That cocky game face dropped,
and he was bashful, almost apologetic, when Gordon thanked him for the
$100,000 floor he is donating to his alma mater's gym.

The players are so far from where they started that their mentors can't
be mentors anymore. One night in the Garden stands, Stevie Johnson, a
friend from Hartford who was essentially Camby's surrogate father, told
of a time during Camby's freshman year of college, when he came home
from work, "and there was Marcus in my bed with the remote, watching a
game. He was homesick." Now, watching Camby play for the Knicks, Johnson
said, "I always imagine myself down there on the bench, being Marcus's
own towel man."