The Next Best Thing
It was in the summer of 1985 that I saw two-time All-American forward Kenny Walker standing in line at our local K-Mart, towering above the other patrons, a blue light mere inches from his head. I still recall the profound feeling I had at the time even though it’s been 25 years, because the moment was formative. It was more than just the awe of a star-struck 10 year old seeing a celebrity in the flesh for the first time. It was the beginning of a personal awakening of something fundamental about class and achievement and a first revelation, however indefinable at the time, about the game I would come to love more than any other.
When I told the kids the next day at my new school — preppy Glendover elementary where the children of privilege went, along with my small cadre of misfit kids from the university graduate student housing along one far edge of the district line — the news was not received with the stunned reverence I had expected, but was instead dismissed in a single stroke by Sean Osborne, my first nemesis, with a sneering, “What were you doing at K-Mart?”
While the sting of that first of many rejections at the hands of the ruling class certainly does linger, the memory of Walker’s wide, knobby shoulders and bespectacled visage, his hair not yet at all-time-classic-fade heights, is much more vivid in my mind than that fleeting moment of childhood angst. Part of it is that I was just beginning what has since become a deep love affair with Kentucky basketball, and college hoops more generally. Growing up in Lexington, falling in love with basketball is just what you do. There, learning the names of the players past and present — from the mightiest All-American to the lowliest of bench warmers — is akin to what learning the names of U.S. presidents or memorizing the haphtarah might be in other places: a rite of passage, even a solemn duty.
But while my indoctrination into Big Blue Nation had begun, I still had a few solid years of GI Joe vs. Cobra and Me vs. Sean Osborne before I’d really get to be the obsessive of later years, poring over box scores for patterns in the madness and begging my parents to stay up late to watch LeRon Ellis awkwardly posting up dudes in the Great Alaska Shootout. Man, did I hate LeRon Ellis.
Youthful ambivalence long passed, what strikes me now as most important about witnessing Kentucky’s second all-time leading scorer buying toilet paper or whatever it was at our family’s discount shopping location was not that I had seen a god cavorting with the rabble, but that it actually de-mystified the whole thing for me. Seeing someone who was merely a television icon to my nascent fan self, who was already a living, breathing legend in my hometown, standing there, in front of me, at K-Mart, brought the whole thing down to me, made me feel closer to the game and closer to the program than going to a game and sitting in the nosebleeds ever could, or did. It made me see, even at 10, that All-World Kenny Walker was at a basic level just a guy, too, another broke ass student who needed basic necessities for his dorm room.
It’s this personal, man-of-the-people-who-matter connection to the stars on the court that still pushes much of the appeal of college basketball, especially behind the scenes. Fans in many cases understand that we watch our teams knowing that we are seeing future blinged out professionals plying their trade in goofy, overly fitting college uniforms, that we are cheering on basketball mercenaries whose attendance at Hometown U is mandated, not chosen.
And now that hoops postmodernism has compressed the three-year college stint into a single, jam-packed season, swapping a slowly-developing-to-maturity Kenny Walker for one-and-done petulant supernova stars like Demarcus Cousins, fans have grown to accept this, too. Because for that one year at least, we still revel in watching our basketball boys become basketball men, coltish teen talents growing up before our eyes. The allure of the BMOC is still powerful for fans and aficionados, and is college basketball’s deep, humming engine, powering those who play the game right to the greatest heights and chewing up those who won’t.
It’s an especially reverent sentiment for the pundits, bloggers and other junkies who make up college basketball’s intelligentsia. These are the folks for whom the importance of the first word in scholar-athlete is always overemphasized and who, despite a certain reluctant resignation to the realities of the modern system, could be said to be the sport’s conservative wing. To them, college basketball is special because it keeps its rules mostly rigid, because of its amateurism. Basketball is, at its core, despite so many cosmetic changes and social impacts, still the bounce-pass, Wooden “Pyramid of Success,” picket fence play game they fell in love with. Certainly, it’s closer to that ideal than the NBA is.
Sure, they’ll columnize from time to time about how players should be paid for their efforts or how the NCAA is ham-handed in its enforcement, but that represents more an affinity for the players and coaches they cover than a true acceptance of the current murky life-state of college basketball. It’s the “family values” of hoopsdom.
Because however much they may appreciate their subjects, the basketball literati are uneasy with rooting on what they see increasingly as players gaming the system or prospects they view as pawns of a system that games itself. John Wall, Kentucky’s marvelous point guard last season, is an illustration of how the dark side of worshipping the gentleman-soldier basketball ethos can play out.
The consensus top professional prospect in high school as a senior, lightning fast and possessing of preternatural instincts on the court, Wall was considered a once-in-a-generation talent at the point position, and was deemed as much by writers and coaches alike. No less an authority than North Carolina head coach Roy Williams labeled Wall the best point guard prospect he’d seen since Jason Kidd.
But if his on-court abilities were without question, Wall had plenty of detractors concerning his character and background. No one had any illusions that Wall would play only a single year in college, or that the only reason he’d play even that lone season was because of the NBA’s draft eligibility requirements. This fed right into the stereotype of the apathetic college attendee, despite Wall’s own pronouncements of his desire to fulfill a promise made to his deceased father that he would attend college.
Indeed, beyond even the subtle disparagement that he was a one-year rent-a-player, the pieces of Wall’s life off the court began to paint a picture that was easy for non-Kentucky fans and the basketball media to swallow whole. First, it was widely speculated that Wall could and would be persuaded to attend a specific school based on outside factors and influences, from the schools’ shoe contracts to his AAU coaches to his ailing mother. When Wall extended his recruitment to see more options, something any player is well within his rights to do, he was seen to be doing so only for more attention, a common assessment among impatient fans and media angling for a scoop.
When, as a senior, Wall was cited for a misdemeanor of breaking into an unoccupied house with a few high school friends — something plenty of non-future NBA megastars do every day in this country — it was reported across the college basketball universe, more evidence of a system gone rotten. Then, when Wall was penalized by the NCAA with a three-game suspension for improper benefits because an advisor and family friend had covered costs for an unofficial visit to Kentucky a year before, all this stuff added up, conveniently fitting Wall into an archetype of the spoiled, craven, manipulated, short-sighted, tainted basketball commodity. He became the embodiment of what was wrong with the process, all before he stepped foot on the court for his first college game.
More personally (and much less frequently mentioned), Wall sounded like the myriad other kids who grew up working class black in the South, dropping “ain’ts” and “don’ts” in clunky, untidy ways. His quiet confidence and fundamental shyness allowed a winking punditry to lump him in with the group of talented but troubled point guards harnessed by Kentucky coach John Calipari into professional basketball assassins.
So, while plenty hyped for his basketball-playing ability, Wall entered college with a stigma already thoroughly attached. It might seem logical in some ways for this all to have happened, and some will argue it was justified, given the facts. But it’s instructive to match Wall’s situation against the synecdoche that is this year’s top incoming freshman, Harrison Barnes.
Barnes is this season’s can’t-miss prospect, a 6’8” wunderkind with talent coming out his pores. But he’s no John Wall, you see. Because Barnes, as is invariably reported by a breathless hoops cognoscenti, is the son of educators, one who plays the saxophone and sings in the choir. Mostly unreported (but frequently alluded to) is how he’s already unrepentantly confident and articulate in a way Wall was not, fond of ribbing reporters and answering questions in ways other than the learned platitudes of most top prep prospects. This stuff is manna for the literati who drive the college hoops narrative.
In many ways Barnes is the anti-Wall. Barnes narrowed his college search early and signed without drawn-out fanfare with blueblood North Carolina, sating the annual rush to anoint the new best thing ever, and appearing to sublimate his ego in doing so. Barnes comes to North Carolina an academic sophomore thanks to college AP credits, and he fills a need for the Tarheels, who lacked a dominant swingman in their stable of blue-chip players. For his basketball brilliance — and I’ll say it, equally as much for his biography — Barnes was tabbed by the media as a preseason first-team All-American, something that has never happened before for a freshman player, remarkable when you consider the wave of talented newcomers to hit college basketball in the last decade.
But despite their obvious differences in off-court background and demeanor, just how different are Wall and Barnes as prospects? Truthfully, not very.
Like Wall, Barnes was expected to be the first overall pick in next year’s NBA draft before he played a minute of collegiate ball. He is — like Wall — a one-year wonder, a star from Day 1 and freshman savior of a now-languishing basketball power.
Does this mean Barnes is undeserving of his accolades? No. Does it mean Wall did not get enough credit for his acumen and talents? Not necessarily. What it does mean is something less tangible but more insidious in college basketball.
I do not refer to racism, as Barnes is also African-American. This is about class, and about a mythology in the game that won’t die, despite the parade of kids who have used college basketball as a minor league showcase for their professional dream. To the writers, Barnes represents a Platonic ideal of the scholar-athlete; a throwback to the golden era of college hoops the college intelligentsia pine for. Unlike Wall, as they see it, he’s not just another cipher for the underbelly of the game. Barnes is different: cleaner, safer.
On the court, Wall was that rarest of things — the can’t miss prospects who didn’t miss. From hitting a game-winning jumper in his first game to cementing his spot atop the NBA Draft queue, Wall was everything he was supposed to be in basketball, except a problem. He never really struggled. A 3.5 GPA student, Wall was exemplary in his one year at Kentucky both on the court and in the classroom, a good kid who worked hard at his game and his studies.
Barnes, thus far this early season, has struggled mightily on the court. Whether that is because of the pressure of his advance billing or is just the way most freshman react to the uptick in opponent is impossible to know, but he’s hardly earned his All-American status thus far. This doesn’t mean Barnes is bad at basketball or at life, but it means maybe there are other reasons Barnes was so readily anointed.
And with furrowed brow, the basketball brain trust is clearly aware. Jeff Goodman, the often intentionally contentious college basketball writer for FOX Sports, was one of the few national writers who picked Wall the preseason national player of the year last season. He also selected Barnes as such this season. Goodman has already had to pen one story defending the choice, and will certainly be hounded by fans should Barnes continue to perform at sub-stratospheric levels.
As if on cue, next Saturday wobbly-legged North Carolina plays host to Kentucky in Chapel Hill. With Wall already plying his trade in the NBA, many eyes will be on the new young stud in town and how he responds to the biggest test of his, and his team’s, young season to date. A year ago around this time, Wall blew away a national TV audience and attendant media with a glorious performance against North Carolina, cementing his position as the top collegiate player. Barnes will have the same opportunity to jumpstart his reputation.
But if he does not, it will be interesting to see whether the illuminati of college basketball are willing to acknowledge their rush to judgment for what it is — hoops conservativism — or whether they instead turn on an 18-year-old freshman who was anointed by grown men as the new gold standard of the scholar-athlete before he ever stepped onto campus, all the while surveying the landscape for the next golden boy to save college basketball from itself.
Originally from Kentucky, JL Weill now writes from Washington, DC. His take on politics, culture and sports can be found at The New Deterrence and on Twitter.