Birth Of The Cool
You'll know this by the third word but this is a guest post from Johnny of RBUAS, who just popped up and was like "I've got this thing." Here it is.
He came from the internet, just like the rest of them. He was in California in barren gymnasiums, making no-look passes from half court with the audacity of someone who thought he’d be the best one there back when the bus was still idling in the parking lot waiting to depart, even though sometimes he wasn’t.
He was at Michigan last year when it was bad and was supposed to be good and when it wasn’t his team because it wasn’t really anyone’s team. And this year when he stewarded a sinking raft that became a submarine lurking just below the water’s surface.
And he was there in Charlotte with eight seconds left, clapping for the ball with enough intensity to turn carbon to diamonds between his hands. Not out of routine or even because it could be no one else but because he knew exactly where he was going and that he needed to get on with it. He needed only the ball and a chance and pursued it with the sort of maniacal focus that ends with you pulling your head inside your shirt completely when you miss because it is dark in there and calm, or at least calmer than the disorienting, vertiginous return to a reality you thought you had transcended in those brilliant moments.
It was a miss that leaves with it a haunting memory; seconds that play on a loop until you fall asleep and then you see them in your dreams. But sometimes they manifest themselves in the type of theatrical vindication accompanied by a montage and a soaring, orchestral soundtrack or at least a bodacious new haircut. I think, at least.
It's technically over but let's call this an interlude.
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I think it was sometime in 2006 but all that matters is that it was years after everything happened that they said didn’t happen. Chris Webber was on The Best Damn Sports Show talking to John Salley and some men with spectacularly gelled hair who had never played basketball professionally. And then Jalen Rose appeared on screen via satellite.
Jalen and Chris existed then as they do now: in an impenetrable nebula with other wealthy people who build bowling alleys in Welsh castles and fill the moats with virgin blood and ride around on hover boards sipping Pterodactyl bone marrow straight from fossils. They were exactly where they told each other they would be.
They were there and I knew that they were there because I could see their bodies, and yet they were still mostly back in Jalen’s Dodge Shadow in jackets that were too big; half baffled that they’d made it, half amused that it had been so easy.
Chris said these things:
“Jay had old, beat up shoes, with holes in ‘em, that he would sit around cleaning with a toothbrush and white shoe polish.”
“You’d get a pizza card every day for five days … but me and Jalen would eat the same pizza, save (the cards), so the next week we could get like 15 pizzas.”
“When we were down to UCLA by 20 at halftime, Jalen came in, and Juwan said something, I might have cried, coach Fisher ain’t say nothing, and we walked right back out on the court.”
“Jalen had a green Dodge Shadow that had no back seat because all it had was speakers in the back, that one of his boys hooked up that probably was going to catch the whole car on fire, and all we would listen to was Scarface.”
“It was the best time of my life.”
When they were in that car they were in orbit, in a way, twisting the world in their palms like a tiny stone they’d found floating on their way to another galaxy. They were there and I think, sort of, they always have been.
Jalen told Bill Simmons, “When media members came into the locker room and they hear that kind of music, they’re looking at us like we’re from another planet.”
In some ways they were. Grotesquely fascinating and, in their most thrilling moments, frighteningly unstoppable. Five kids synchronize to create a monster the country struggles to interpret, let alone fathom. They can only stand and watch and listen to the noise and feel the ground shake beneath them. They were a marauding death squad worthy of a theme song and an action figure, shooting apples off each other’s heads once the curtain was drawn.
And so you can pull the banners down; burn them in an open field while orphans sing hymns around the flame. It happened. Something was there and it sort of isn’t anymore but mostly it is, like getting a tattoo of her name removed after she left you and then really left you. Bubbly, mangled flesh where a life once was. It’s gone except that you never forget the times you opened the door and she was there, just standing there, looking at you, waiting for you to let her in.
Brian’s frustration with Webber is not at all irrational. But I never knew them as something that grew, or simply emerged, and then broke everyone’s heart. I know them only filtered through the tumult and deification. Part of why I’m so capable of appreciating the Fab Five is specifically because I’m so detached. I know them through VHS recordings, retrospectives, and ultimately a reputation not so much for capturing the zeitgeist but for chewing it up and spitting it out unmistakably altered. They existed, somehow, and so that is enough for me. They are a geological force, a museum exhibit, an alien cadaver cryogenically frozen in a remote military base to be studied and dissected. It won nothing except everything that actually matters.
It is like someone saying, “So tell me what it was like when you got electricity.” This is what I know because it has always been. Long ago it was dark when the sun went down and now I plug two metal prongs into a wall and can watch infomercials on a colorful rectangle. Only rather than a lab coat they were wearing black socks and an air of magnetic irreverence. I know only what they became.
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This is not that team; it is not any team and I have no idea what it will be and for that reason I love it. It is not peculiar or compellingly flawed or even one of Beilein’s self-effacing, limitation embracing West Virginia teams. It is just a thing that is constantly turning into another thing and we see it happen in Jon Horford moving through the lane in what seems like a single step and in laser-precise backdoor bounce passes. In Tim Hardaway Jr. launching three pointers undaunted by distance or obstruction, knowing only of a force that overcomes his entire body and having no desire to suppress it, and a confidence that builds like a tidal wave in the distance and leaves in its wake snapped umbrellas and a 900-win coach’s emasculated smile after barely managing to make it out of there alive.
It is a team at once starkly pragmatic and gleefully ambitious, a kid posing in the mirror in its dad’s fatigues from Vietnam when no one’s home. It is proud and quietly defiant; it is something where things shouldn’t be. If the Fab Five was a seismic force capable of shifting the earth on its axis, this is a plant growing from the fractured pavement.
They came from the internet, obscure aside from their lineage and some of them, for a time, with hair like members of 60’s British rock bands. They are here now and they will be here and I am watching it happen.
Johnny used to write stuff like this at RBUAS before everything became too depressing. He met Lloyd Carr once because Carr liked what he wrote.
You can take quotes -- even accurate ones -- and create an impression that is perhaps more exaggerated than the subjects intended. That has certainly occurred, and was all I meant. It seems to me they have a storyline they are looking to maintain.
I'm just not fond of creating a fictionalized persona around a real person, especially one so young and still active in the situation in which they are being mythologized. That's all I was saying, in response to claims that no one can dislike this without being a random hater or a philistine or something. We can argue about how we understand various actions and statements but in the end, it's just our opinion. When you dress it up as you did, it makes it seem far more like the truth.
March 29th, 2011 at 11:33 PM ^
I'm going to attempt to be as concise as possible in explaining perhaps my biggest "problem" with the work in question.....
If you were to take, "Birth of the Cool," and flip the tenor of the piece from positive to negative, it would be a hitjob; wherein you would ascribe "negative" fictitious thoughts and motivations to players in an effort to make them look bad. Instead of writing a hitjob, you've written a fluff piece.
A fluff piece makes a player look good, so fans will (probably) like it, along with the writer, while a hitjob makes a player look bad, so fans will likely hate both the piece, and the writer. Regardless, they are two sides of the same ugly coin. Your piece is the "positive" version of a Drew Sharp column.
Whether the work is positive or negative matters not, if it is written in this manner, it's trite.
March 29th, 2011 at 11:14 PM ^
TheLastHoke is slowly becoming my favorite poster on this board.
Dude's been bringin' it lately.
March 30th, 2011 at 11:15 AM ^
I'm amazed s/he knew to take that name in Aug 2008. Or maybe I just lack imagination.
March 30th, 2011 at 11:18 AM ^
If you had enough points, you were able to change your name after the coaching search. I'm not sure what the point cutoff was or if the ability to make the change is still available.
March 29th, 2011 at 11:49 PM ^
awful.
garbled.
trite.
there is such a thing as artistic license (Grant Hill calls it licentia poetica).
folks have been using it for years.
different strokes and such.
hey, if you're going to give someone a hard time for being overwrought, you might want to stay away from the phrase "sans the verbosity."
March 29th, 2011 at 10:22 PM ^
When did I use the term, "overwrought?"
Also, I don't think you know what "verbose" means.
March 30th, 2011 at 12:11 AM ^
I don't say this often, but: YOU ARE AN ASS.
Yes, I was yelling.
It's really clever of you, critiquing the guest writer. We all showed up to hear your opinion, but I'm sure you knew that already.
/s
i would like to know more about these pizza cards
Wow, I'm ashamed to say this is the first I've read of Johnny. The boy can write! I just read another post of his about Denard, and there was a line that goes something like this: "He kneels in the end zone as if God was up there tapping his watch and Denard is apologizing for taking so long." Or this: "Trying to describe how fast Denard is is like trying to explain what a mountain looks like to a blind person."
I read a lot of really great prose and this it.
Johnny really met Lloyd once? Llyod read Johnny's stuff? Thats so sick.
Man that will get you jacked up.
My dad and I watched a handful of Michigan's games throughout the second half of the year...just when they were heating up. Then the Fab 5 doc came out and we watched bits and pieces of that together.
My dad is the reason I'm a fan of Michigan sports. He's a man who didn't even attend the school yet has been going to football games since he was ten years old. He taught me the words to "the Victors" when I was like 7, and yet have not been able to watch football games together for the last three years due to his disdain for Coach Rod and my urging of him to be patient and start to believe. We obviously had minimal interest in the basketball team until recent years.
But this basketball season allowed my dad and I to sit down together and be completely behind the Wolverines for the first time since the 2007 Capital One Bowl. I sat back and heard him tell me stories about how Jordan Morgan reminds him of Juwan Howard and how soft we used to make Michigan State look. My most pleasant memory is when we were lounging on the couch watching the Tennessee game and cackling with knowing glee after Novak hit those outside-NBA-range threes.
who negs everyone who says something positive about this post?
what an ass.
Thanks. I like to read sometimes. I guess other do not like this. They neg, when some say they do like.
Thanks for the post, Johnny. Sorry you're getting attacked for just doing what you do. I'd like to see more here, but I won't blame you if you decide to just keep it on your own blog next time.
Come on.
He wrote something. He put it up for public consumption. Some people didn't like it, me included. It happens.
More people seem to have liked it. It's not like he's getting raked over the coals. When Brian posts things people don't like/disagree with, they voice it. This no different.
No need to White Knight for him.
People are obviously free to express their opinions, but they should probably stick to his writing style or the piece itself rather than calling Johnny a bandwagon jumper or a 13 year old girl. I like his writing, so hey I'm gonna White Knight a little if I feel like it.
He should have kept it in his head.
They just don't laugh.
..that it didnt at all mention the album "The Cool" which I for some reason thought it would upon reading the title *sigh*
Other than that I thought it was wonderful terrific and thank you for the great read!
Miles Davis yo
Lupe Fiasco yo
You don't seem to get it.
or I do yet still try to get that album across?
March 30th, 2011 at 11:22 AM ^
I'm square, but wikipedia tells me I take your side in this.
goddamn, but i miss johnny.
Johnny's a good writer in need a good editor.
I dunno, if you don't like his writing I would hate to hear what kind of writing you do like.
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<br>Great piece Johnny, as always. I find it odd some people equate frequency of writing about a team w devotion level.
Bunch of Steinbeck Hemmingways here.
Great post - first time reading Johnny's work, and it was a fun read. Not sure if the emotional heft hit me, but still a fine bit of writing. Nice to have a different voice here every once and a while (though I love Brian. But not in that way. Unless he's not against it...)
What a nice surprise on a rainy Tuesday. Hoping a solid football season will inspire you to breathe new life into RBUAS. Until then, I guess Twitter will have to do. Follow Johnny: http://twitter.com/#!/rbuas
Personally, I love Johnny's style of writing and I wish he wrote much, much more. I have legitimately teared up at a number of his posts.
March 29th, 2011 at 11:08 PM ^
I think Johnny's style is effective largely because his postings are infrequent. The heroism and poetic wax would get old if it wasn't spaced out.
that is all.
your writings help color the weave that is the fabric of Michigan, look forward to reading you again...
Thank you for that. I still cling to anything that brings back the emotion of the season. I dont want it to be over =(
March 29th, 2011 at 10:11 PM ^
Awesome! Too bad there are a bunch of turds in the punch bowl. Be miserable somewhere else.
March 29th, 2011 at 10:18 PM ^
This reminded me of the Afghan Whigs. Don't forget the alcohol.
I'm not a critic so I either like something when I read it or I don't. I liked this.
March 29th, 2011 at 10:23 PM ^
The fact that these pop up out of nowhere makes the experience that much better. Thanks RBUAS!
March 29th, 2011 at 10:32 PM ^
March 30th, 2011 at 12:12 AM ^
Had an awesome idea behind it, but was written terribly. It's like the author came so close to making a point so many times but then just stopped and switched to something else. That and the fact that not a single sentence made sense in context with the one before and after it make it read like a LSD inspired ramble. You kinda understand what the author was going for, but in the end none of it made any sense at all.
You're welcome to disagree with me, but like Johnny, I'm just speaking my mind
At times this was very entertaining, but there was nothing there to really tie everything together. If there was an actual point that the writer was trying to hammer home, it got lost in a sea of grandiosity and obscure mixed metaphors.
I'm not saying this guy is incapable of writing something good (I've read some of his good work at RBUAS), but this piece just didn't do it for me. The sheer usage of a bunch of different colorful analogies doesn't mean that the writing was well-thought-out as a whole. I think the writer allowed himself to get pulled in too many different directions.
/iknowi'mnotperfecteither
March 30th, 2011 at 12:15 AM ^
Thanks Johnny, love your writing.
I won't comment on your writing style - others can do that. I do have to comment on one thing, though:
Part of why I’m so capable of appreciating the Fab Five is specifically because I’m so detached.
You think you can, but I'm skeptical. if you didn't actually experience them as a fan, I don't think you can really understand what they were like. It's like trying to understand Beatlemania in retrospect. Some things just happen and you had to be there to "get it." (And I'm not sure if Brian fully "got" them either, since he doesn't seem to be that into basketball.) The Fab Five are the reason why many people became Michigan fans. They tapped into something deep.
For me it's the '69 OSU game. I know the facts inside and out, but I'll never "get" that game on the same level as someone who lived through it.
This is an excellent point. The Fab Five made me want to go to Michigan. And the '69 analogy is really a good one- I watch documentaries about M football, and wish I could've been there, as there just doesn't seem to be a way to properly grasp it, having not even been born at the time.
March 30th, 2011 at 12:50 AM ^
Loved it, Johnny. I find all of the hating on this thread about your work to be a bit baffling and trite. I also find it comical that someone seemed to go through and neg every post praising the OP. I love the style, love the point of view expressed in this piece, and am pleased Brian was gracious enough to put this on the main page. Kudos all around.
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