Bill Simmons.
One of Poor Man’s Commish’s jobs is to not only pass on stories that happen in Dream League and that could only come through a hoops commish, but also things that other places may have missed. Like something that makes you ROTFL or LMFAO. Take Bill Simmons, for example. (Btw, thanks to JoJo Pierce for teaching me those acronyms last year.)
Over the years, it has gotten increasingly more difficult to read Bill Simmons’s columns. They are just too long (kinda like my blogposts, but I’m working on that, I assure you — not to mention, they’re still one-fifth of Simmons’s rants). Then came the podcast. Since I don’t live in that wonderful Concrete Jungle where you must walk and take a subway everywhere, I didn’t have an iPod and therefore had no clue as to what this fuss about podcasts was all about.
But dude is funny and his latest two-part NBA Preview for 2009-10 (both Part 1 and Part 2) is a blast, worth the long read. Now, remember, here on Poor Man, we have a penchant for the following…
- Learn more as a student of the game. Simmons is a smart fella. He has amazing insights to all things basketball.
- Rags to riches. He was a poor man once, too. Took his blog to the stratosphere. I love self-made wealthionaire stories.
- The business of basketball. Even your garden variety weekend warrior is a business (duh?), my friend! Incidentally, it was this business that has recently caused me to delay my one-blogpost-per-day goal. To understand how the Earth spins in terms of capitalism and the seven deadly sins of human beings, to take a microcosm of that and apply it to the world of basketball, results in basketball enlightenment.
So here are the parts that had me ROTFL and LMFAO…
(We did learn a lesson from the troubles of Beasley, Delonte West and Stephon Marbury: Neck tattoos are to pro athletes what nape-of-the-back tattoos are to women. In other words, they’re a red flag. A big one. For an athlete, it seems to mean, “I am going to do some really strange things — you know, like putting a painful tattoo on my neck.” For a woman, it seems to mean either, “I’m easy” or “I needed to figure out a way to fit in with the other women at the strip joint.” Either way, red flag.)
Phil: Hey, he told me himself — “Tell Kobe to call me when he gets to six.”
Kobe (eyes narrowing): He said that?
Phil: Yup. He said he can’t even take you seriously until you win two more.
Kobe: Really?
Phil: Yup. That’s why we need Bynum right now. The Pechonkamappadosa tribe has a phrase for this called, “Kakaboomaka.” It means, “To share the credit without giving up credit with those who matter.” I just want to build his confidence up and save your legs. We put a ton of miles on those babies these past two years — 208 games. This is good for you.
Kobe: Lemme think about it.
(Kobe leaves. Phil turns to Shaw.)
Phil: This is too easy.
And you know what else? It’s fun to have teams that you hate. I hate Sasha Vujacic’s hair. I hate the fact women like Luke Walton. I hate their uniforms. I hate when Pau Gasol gets excited and does that thing where he barks with his hands at his sides as his ugly beard drips sweat over everyone. I hate not being able to hate Derek Fisher. I love being able to hate Kobe, who has brought me more hateable joy than anyone else this decade. (But damn, is that guy good. I do respect him.) I hate Laker fans who show up for Clipper games and only start making noise when the Lakers go up double-digits. I hate the fact D.J. Mbenga has a publicist. I could go on and on.
I would hope that Lakers fans are OK with this. I would hope they hate the Celtics just as much, for reasons that are just as personal to them. That’s what makes the rivalry great — we hate them, they hate us, and somehow, the hatred is deepening, in a good way. After all, it’s just sports. I don’t REALLY hate anyone. (Well, except for Vujacic. If he was crossing the street on a crosswalk, I’d like to think that I wouldn’t run him over, but I would definitely glance around to see how many people were looking before I made a final decision.) So that’s what makes me so happy that the Lakers added not just the black sheep Kardashian sister, but … Ron Artest
Be careful where you walk, Sasha!
With that and the fact that sometimes I have to do a fair amount of driving, which allows me to take some time listening to the B.S. Report podcasts (long live the Palm Pre!), I have decided that I will be posting interesting tidbits from the SportsGuy’s latest podcasts.
They’re kinda cool in that there’s no structure to the podcast.
He and someone else just talk and cool basketball subject matter appears as the conversation twists and turns. Someone else will have to fill you in on those essays he writes for ESPN Magazine, though.
Here’s the summary from Bill Simmons’s two-part interview with South Park co-creater Matt Stone…
- Stone and Trey Parker used to do the classic “rags to riches” thing: sleep on friend’s couches and hustle their art as much as they could, until finally getting the big break, which was being cast in the movie Baseketball. [Commish's aside: Mark Cuban used to sleep on friend's couches before becoming a billionaire. Google his blog; his best posts are the ones that harken back to when he was a Poor Man.]
- They cram before each episode. The thought of a deadline just makes them work with more passion. Stone says that when he was in college, he’d wake up early and cram the morning of the exam. Simmons agrees in the context of writing articles for ESPN.
- LA Clippers owner Donald Sterling has it made. Simmons says he makes like $10 to $20 million per year even having a sucky team.
- Stone can’t follow football anymore. Too old. Gets to a point where you can only follow one sport. I feel the same way.
- Simmons says the 2005 NBA All-Star weekend was the best one because it was in Denver, the South Park creator’s home metro. Denver was too small for anyone else to go anywhere. Everyone was packed into the same area.
- The Hollywood writers’ strike led all the powers that be to reconfigure the infrastructure of Hollywood producing. [Commish's aside: kinda sounds like the NBA referee situation.]
- They used to use $25,000 Silicon Graphics machines to do the animation; now those machines are thrown out like garbage. Amazing how technology advances so fast.
- South Park has achieved the can’t-touch-this level of Howard Stern or Charles Barkley. They can do whatever they want.
- Stone says that you should use money to embolden you. You don’t need to worry about a job anymore. Do the stuff that you want to do. But Simmons says that can also be dangerous like Eddie Murphy, who kind of slacked off and didn’t keep to his bread-and-butter or make his bread-and-butter emboldened. For Stone, that bread-and-butter was Raw, which he has seen about a thousand times.
- One new episode of South Park could be about the “look at me” attitude of Harley Davidson motorcyclers. If there was an episode where someone they made fun of would actually kill them, it would be the Harleys. Simmons says: “No, you should go after David Stern!”
- They’ve never done an episode about basketball nor did they really think about making fun of the Kobe Bryant Colorado incident.
- Simmons: A good episode would be about Michael Jordan being bitter. He’s now “sad”, not happy like Barkley. He can’t turn off the switch. He wants to come back like Michael Corleone.
- Simmons: The only reason MJ came back a second time was because when he was with the Wizards, everybody he ran into was lamenting to him that he couldn’t play anymore, when inside MJ was thinking, “Waddya mean I can’t play anymore?” As such, at his Hall Of Fame induction speech, no one was really sure if he was joking about making a comeback at 50. He has the same competitiveness as Muhammad Ali.
- A weird comparison to that is Bill Clinton. It’d be like the movie Firefox where he’s chopping wood in Alaska and the higher-ups come and say, “We need you back!” Someone like Clinton would come back in a heartbeat.
You might also like:
- Kobe’s personal scout/traitor
- Z leaves just four decade-plus lifers
- The articulate Jared Dudley
- Lessons of NBA League Pass: Last Night’s Top Ocho 11/24/09
- Concrete jungle where Dream League has a tourney
- Perpetrators in dreamleague? Never!
- Carmelo Anthony pointing fingers while claiming he’s not
- Deep confessions from another Poor Man’s Commish
