Opening Of The Flood Gates, Part III

Around this time last year, I affectionately dubbed A Pack To Be Named Later the "Best Blog Ever." I've come to realize this proclamation was a bit hasty. In the last year, I've come across many blogs I would consider better. So in the spirit of highlighting a really great blog -- and jacking their idea a second time -- I'd like to crown "A Pack..." as the "Best Blog You've Probably Never Heard Of." Their mission is simple: purchase a pack of sports cards, open said pack of sports cards, the scan and post the cards for their readers to see. Anyone who loved cards as a kid (or still does) could easily lose themselves for an hour on this site.

I bought two packs of the 2009/10 Upper Deck Greats of the Game series -- a set dedicated to the greats of the college game. I bought them at a Dollar Store. Don't laugh. The Dollar Store is an untapped gold mine for card collecting. Firstly, there is no purchasing competition because no one knows they can buy basketball cards at the Dollar Store. Second, $1 for a pack of relatively new cards is cheaper than anywhere else. The big drawback, of course, is selection. What's there is there and sometimes what's there sucks.

Not the case this time, as the Greats of the Game set is a pretty good one. I looked up the set's details when I got home and am kicking myself now. The retail price for a box of these cards is $65 and contains 16 packs of 8 cards (128 cards). Each box contains TWO AUTOGRAPHS and ONE MEMORABILIA card (jersey swatches, etc). Each pack at the Dollar Store contained only five cards, so I could have bought 26 packs (130 cards) and ended up with the equivalent of a box. It would have been $39!!! cheaper and the odds say I would have driven home with three (sentimentally) valuable cards. Oh well. Here were the ten cards I pulled. No autographs, no memorabilia, just some damn good basketball players.

   

We'll never even see a middling NBA player from the Naval Academy in today's game, let alone a player as talented as Robinson.

Here's something fun to do in college: drunkenly argue with your roommate about whether Magic Johnson or Oscar Robertson is the greatest NBA point guard. You both will inevitably agree on one of them -- then some one at the party neither of you know will throw John Stockton's name into the ring.

Pulling a Michael Jordan from the pack is and always will be a big deal to me. He is incapable of taking a bad action photo.

And to follow Jordan up with Rose, almost too good to be true! Not much to say except I still can't believe he plays for the Bulls, I still can't believe he's one of the League's best players, and I still can't believe he's going to get better. Rose's career thus far is like going from 0 to 60 mph in 0.7 seconds.

George Gervin was listed at 6'7 and 180 lbs. in his playing days. He looks even skinnier than that in every picture I've seen of him. Think Kevin Durant but two inches shorter, 30 pounds lighter and less range. I would love to see if he could score on today's bigger, stronger players. Also: the American flag in the background is the stuff of legends. What a shot!


For Part II of the 2009/10 Upper Deck Greats of the Game pack opening, click here.

An Interesting Inquiry

Below is an excerpt from Larry Bird and Magic Johnson's book When The Game Was Ours, written by Jackie MacMullan:

   The "Dream Team" needed buffers for their privacy and their safety. During their 16 days in Barcelona, the Ambassador's game room served as an exclusive club where the players could shoot pool, play cards, enjoy a beer, and invent occasions to compete with one another.
On the night of August 7th, [some of the players] were wide awake, embroiled in an emotional debate over a simple question posed by Bird: which NBA team was the greatest of all time?
"Obviously one of our Lakers teams," answered Magic, leaning on his pool stick. "We won five championships. More than all of you."
"No, it's the great Celtics teams with my man Bill Russell," said center Patrick Ewing, who played for the New York Knicks but was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "He won 11 rings."
"You're forgetting the '86 Celtics, with the best front line in the history of basketball, including this guy right here," added NBC commentator Ahmad Rashad, pointing to Bird.
"That Celtics front line was brutal," agreed Charles Barkley.
Jordan, refusing to allow the chatter to disrupt his concentration, knocked his ball into the corner pocket and puffed on his cigar. He was 29 years old and had just won his second straight championship and his sixth consecutive scoring title. His counterparts in the room were decorated NBA veterans, yet their body of work was nearly complete. The maestro of the Bulls was only just beginning to add new strokes to his championship canvas.
"You haven't even seen the best NBA team of all time yet," Jordan announced. "I'm just getting started. I'm going to win more championships than all of you guys. Tell you what. Let's have this conversation after I'm done playing."
"You aren't winning five championships," Magic protested.
"Michael, I'm going to steal at least one of them from you," Barkley shot back.
"Quiet," Bird said. "Charles, you ain't won nothing. You're out of this discussion. Ahmad, same thing. You're gone. Patrick, you don't have any championships either, so you need to shut up and sit down right here and learn some things."
Jordan insisted that his Chicago teams belonged in the conversation about the all-time greats; Bird reminded Jordan that he used to torture Scottie Pippen regularly before his back betrayed him.
"I feel sorry for you," Magic told Jordan. "You will never have what Larry and I had. We went two weeks without sleep knowing, if we made one mistake, the other guy was going to take it and use it to beat us. Who do you measure yourself against?"

Magic's last question, "Who do you measure yourself against?" particularly resonates in today's NBA. The League's current batch of stars has been criticized for being too friendly with each other, a criticism that reached its pinnacle this summer when LeBron, Wade, and Bosh joined the Heat together. But is "friendly" necessarily a bad thing?
Magic, Bird, and Jordan would have never played with each other. They said so themselves, and there's no reason to suggest otherwise. As the story goes, they were too preoccupied with trying to beat the other than to ever think of joining them. Fair enough.
From 1985 until the end of their careers, Magic and Bird had a friendly rivalry. They were cordial but still wanted to beat each other. Magic also wanted desperately to play with Bird -- in the 1992 Olympics. Battling chronic back problems, Bird had planned on foregoing the 1992 Olympic games. It was Magic that talked him into it. He was intrigued by the idea of playing with a comparably talented player who also exhibited the same competitive drive that separated him from the rest of his Laker teammates. Jordan called the Olympic experience, "The time of his life." Every member of the team relished the opportunity to play with teammates who pushed them everyday at practice.
Competitiveness is something we as fans often overlook. Great players, and teams for that matter, often get bored playing against inferior competition. Before this year, LeBron and Wade never played with anyone in their life that approached their skill set. The daily competition in practice will make them better players, in a way that competing against each other every so often couldn't.
That's not to say I agree with their decision to join the Heat. I still would have much rather seen them as the best player on two different teams. But the notion that one of them would have to scale down their game to accommodate the other has already been proven wrong. In fact, Wade and LeBron are better players this year than they were last year. I think just being around the other has brought out the best in them.
While never actualized, even members of the 1992 Dream Team recognized the vast potential of teaming up. LeBron and Wade were accused of lacking competitiveness because they took the dream of the 1992 Olympic squad and made it an NBA reality.
We may have all been wrong. The Heat may have done the competitive thing. They just did it in a way that the previous generation of players would have never conceived. 

The Rise And Fall Of Converse

Converse has become somewhat of an afterthought in today's NBA, but the impact the shoe has had on the game is undeniable. The marriage between Converse and basketball was a product of good timing and geographic proximity. In 1908, founder Marquis M. Converse started his business in Malden, Massachusetts. By 1915, Converse was designing shoes for the newly popular game of basketball, invented in the southwest city of Springfield less than 25 years earlier. Malden was within Springfield's sphere of influence, and no doubt, their proximity played a large role in Converse's pioneering decision to create a market for basketball shoes.
Converse of course had some help, in the form of professional basketball player Charles H. "Chuck" Taylor, the eventual namesake of the Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars. Taylor was first introduced to the shoe in 1918, while playing professional basketball in Ohio. In 1921, he began endorsing Converse, promoting the shoe while conducting basketball clinics across the country. As the nation's interest in basketball began to take off in the 1930s, Converse became the standard issue basketball shoes for numerous high school and college teams across the country. Leading to many players of my generation to ponder: how could they possibly have played in those things?
Julius Erving was the fist superstar who endorsed Converse, wearing the shoe through out his exhilarating ABA days and into the NBA in the early 1980s. Despite Erving's marketability, ABA basketball, and even the NBA in the early 80s failed to capture a national audience. The arrival of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson would change everything, including Converse's marketing campaign.
In honor of the Super Bowl bonanza surrounding their commercials, here's one of the most popular NBA commercials ever: Larry and Magic team up to promote the multi-colored shoe called The Weapon, in Converse's "Choose Your Weapon" campaign.



The commercial emphasized the perceived differences between the two. Bird, playing alone in his rural Indiana hometown is approached by the flashy Johnson, who arrived in a limousine. Talking on the set, the two found out they were more similar than they could have ever imagined. Both grew up poor, in blue collar families who preached hard work. Both approached basketball and leadership with the same unwavering intensity.
Johnson and Bird were originally opposed to the idea of appearing in a commercial together. The Lakers and Celtics were mortal enemies, a predisposition that extended to the players of each team. Lakers players were especially perturbed that Magic was fraternizing with the reigning MVP of the league, who had defeated them in the NBA Finals the year before.
Magic and Larry's new found relationship off the court, as you can imagine, didn't spill over into the games. They remained as competitive as ever. In fact, Magic got his revenge the next year when the Lakers defeated the Celtics in six games to win the title.
This commercial was crucial not only from a marketing standpoint, but for forging a relationship between two competitors who mutually respected each other's game but were otherwise very distant. The "Choose Your Weapon" ad also spawned the commercial below, so take the bad with the good.



Converse went on to further their success with Larry's Johnson's "Grandmama" ads of the 90s, and then fail miserably with Latrell Sprewell. They paved the way for marketing basketball players. Their efforts would eventually lead to their demise. Nike signed Michael Jordan and have been firmly in control of the basketball shoe market since.
The story ends predictably, Converse was bought out by Nike in 2003. But Converse's Chuck Taylor All Stars and basketball tradition remain intact.