I spent my third day with this year’s flu today. In my fever induced haze, I did manage to read some books I’ve already read, and I made a tiny bit of progress in the video games that I’ve been playing. I have to say, Lost Odyessey is great fun and all, but the costumes on the female “leads” are a few levels past chainmail bras. These chicks go into fights in Full Victoria’s Secret +4 Battle Underwear. This made it hard to concentrate, so I tried some Call of Duty, but even on Easy this game is too hard. Defeated, I laid down in bed and watched YouTube clips at random.
So, courtesy of Bill Simmons over at ESPN, I found this collection of Larry Bird clips. Check out the fake behind the back spinning bounce pass of death at about 1:50 into the movie.
The video really stands on its own, but while I lay in bed watching it through glazed eyes, I realized that since the 1990s, in the intermittent times when I had watched the odd game of hoops on TV, I had not seen anyone make a pass even 1/50th as good as any of the passes in this collection. Maybe I just missed it?
If not, it seems to me the game as we know it is truly dead. If so, I guess I’m just an old coot.
I haven’t watched basketball since I stopped playing (aside from part of a game here or there), but I have to say that the ‘old skool’ players (magic, larry, kareem, julius…) all seem incredible, they seemed utterly unbelievable when I was young and playing ball.
I think there are players out there today as individually good as old-skool players, I just miss much of the grace and spontaneity that I remember from my childhood. I have to say that the best, most awe inspiring basketball moment I ever had (aside from beating Billy King 1-on-1) was seeing Bill Unseld take a rebound off the glass, pivot in mid-air and overhand the ball into the opposite end basket… admittedly he did attempt it three times at the summer camp, but still quite amazing.
-Chris
Sabonis had awesome passing.
Oh if only the Blazers had Sabonis in the 90s instead of Duckworth…