Men's Journal

Photo credit: illustration by Victor Juhasz

White NBA fans yearn for the salad days of the Bird era, when being slow and looking really bad in shorts didn’t matter. And nowhere is this longing more evident than in each year’s draft.

By Matt Taibbi

The NBA draft is almost here, which means it’s time for one of America’s most cherished religious traditions: the middle-aged Caucasian male’s annual wait-in-vigil for the resurrection of Larry Bird. It’s a beautiful, sentimental occasion, not unlike Linus’s breathless pining for the elusive Great Pumpkin, only it takes place not in a pumpkin patch but in Madison Square Garden. The Great White Hope never arrives — and won’t this year, no matter how much ink Tyler Hansbrough’s “mental toughness” gets before the draft — but it’s still a terrific time for white people to get to know one another, exchange their hopes and dreams, and celebrate their heritage.

There are about a dozen rules of white basketball, but if you can remember the gist of the first two, you’re doing all right. They are:

1. There is no “next Larry Bird.”

2. Go back to Rule 1.

Racial shame is a terrible thing. It’s tremendously embarrassing to white people that even after massacring a whole continent of Native Americans, nuking the Japs, and establishing the most awesomely greedy political superpower in world history, they still get laughed at when they play on the skins team in urban pickup games. It’s the one problem they haven’t been able to overcome with bombs or money. And once you’ve had to suffer through the experience of watching Rob Kurz try to hang with KG, even going to the moon somehow feels like a hollow achievement — or worse, a desperate attempt to compensate. At least during the Bird era white people had one guy who could actually play. So every year the draftniks frantically pump up another White Hope — and then every year we end up watching Adam Morrison get his jock handed to him on the perimeter by middling black players like Jacque Vaughn and Kelenna Azubuike.

There’s a real science to all this ritualized longing. Virtually every year the same types of white players are force-fed into the same slots in the draft. In fact, if you hold onto the following guide and X out the specific names, you can reuse it every year to predict which players will go when. See for yourself if it isn’t true.

Picks 1–6: The Euro savior. One of the funniest things about the Great White Hope religion is seeing just how deeply White America’s basketball inferiority complex is ingrained. It’s been so long since there’s been a truly great white American player that most people have been conditioned to believe that if being a white basketball player weren’t already burden enough, being a white American basketball player is somehow even worse.

For some inexplicable reason American basketball fans fully expect white Euros to be more likely to have the skill and toughness required to compete in the NBA. They ascribe some kind of magical power to places like Split and Zagreb and Brcko, with their undersized Skoda cars, bad haircuts, and nightmarishly dorky pop bands like Thompson. Protected from invading black players by mountain ranges to the east and north and by the Adriatic Sea to the west, the Euro — in particular the Yugo Euro — is raised in a kind of crucible of extreme white uncoolness that is believed to give him an edge on the court. Among other things, he doesn’t grow up with the trauma of being dunked on by crowds of doubled-over-laughing black kids in Fubu shirts. He’s more likely to grow up wondering why God didn’t drown the Bosnians in the flood.

Every year some gangly Euro with Beatle hair and grape-sized back zits is hyped all the way into the upper tier of the draft, very often into the top five or six. Bricklaying peroxided malcontent Darko Milicic is only the most famous of these beneficiaries of white draft inflation; there’s a pretty long list even beyond him, including all-time bust Nikoloz Tskitishvili, girl-named three-point specialist Andrea Bargnani, and current over hyped Knick/eventual injury washout Danilo Gallinari.

With very rare exceptions (in particular, 2001 No. 3 pick Pau Gasol), these guys all proved to be overdrafted by at least five and usually more like 10 spots. This year’s entry is Spanish point guard Ricky Rubio, a lock to go in the top five despite the fact that he (a) doesn’t move all that well laterally, an odd quality in a franchise point guard; (b) is built like a balsa-wood airplane; and (c) is an absolute dead ringer, right down to the enormo-isosceles nose and the Peter Tork haircut, for gawky Comedy Central beach-weakling Demetri Martin. Martin may be funny, but I can’t see paying him $6 million a year to stay in front of Rajon Rondo.

Picks 6–11: The “underrated” overrated American college star. This is more like an every-other-year occurrence: A famously overhyped white college basketball star comes out in the draft and is initially (and usually, it turns out, correctly) dismissed by pro scouts as too lumbering and unathletic to play the NBA game. But then as the draft approaches, Conventional Wisdom begins to whisper: “Hey, [overrated white guy X ] might be a steal at the end of the top 10. He’s got some underrated qualities.” It’s at this point that a lot of the dreaded racial code words start to slip out, words like “intangibles” (which really means “not as selfish as those shoot-first black players”), “work ethic” (“he’s in the gym practicing the two-hand bounce pass while the black players are out chasing tail”), “high skill level” (“was not born with the black man’s raw talent but works hard at the things that can be worked on”), and “coachable” (“not Isaiah Rider”).

Remember how guys like Bobby Hurley (No. 7, 1993), Eric Montross (9, 1994), Bryant “Big Country” Reeves (6, 1995), Luke Jackson (10, 2004), and J.J. Redick (11, 2006) were going to prove the scouts wrong and become “productive NBA players”? Didn’t exactly turn out that way, did it? This year we have Hansbrough, a severely undersize power forward with stubby arms and the intense pinkish face of a cop’s son who has racked up more racial code-word clichés than any college player in recent history. He is the first ever with a real chance of scoring a “scrappy,” a “like a coach on the floor,” a “plays with heart,” a “competes hard,” and a “does all the little things to help his team win” all in the same draft scouting report. At this writing he’s expected to go in the late 20s, if not the second round, but it says here that by draft day he’ll have crept into the 7–11 range, and that by next year he’ll be on the bench waving a towel next to Josh McRoberts or Robert Swift.

Picks 25–60: The “next Steve Nash.” White people everywhere were energized by the sudden rise to basketball megastardom of soft-spoken Canadian Steve Nash, whose move to Phoenix earlier this decade gave whitey an exciting new role in the modern game. The Mike D’Antoni Suns were a high-flying, fast-breaking terror of freakish athletes, and Nash ran the show, setting up Amare’s windmill jams with pinpoint passes. White people watched this and gushed with imagined-from-a-distance racial solidarity, much as they did when they watched corny black-white buddy movies such as 48 Hrs. and Lethal Weapon and Fled.

And just as they did after Larry Bird supposedly made it to the NBA mountaintop on the strength of his legendary practice habits, white people looked at Steve Nash’s “unselfishness” and concluded that any short white guy who was content to pass a lot could be the “next Steve Nash.” So draftniks started scouring the college ranks for shaggy-looking pass-first white point guards. They could be foreign (Sergio “Spanish Chocolate” Rodriguez, No. 27 in 2006) or American (Jared Jordan, 45 in 2007), but they almost always went either in the second round or at the very end of the first. Notoriously, the Suns, who ought to have known better, last year used a second-round pick to choose a “next Steve Nash,” Goran Dragic, to back up the current Steve Nash, and that move has been a disaster.

This year’s prospect is Matt Bouldin, the third stubby-legged, shaggy-haired “next Steve Nash” produced by the mysterious White Hope–ist cult known as Gonzaga, after Dan Dickau (28 in 2002) and Blake Stepp (58 in 2004). (John Stockton also famously went to Gonzaga, but he’s in a category of his own.) White people love Gonzaga. Its status as a hardworking underdog mid-major that can sometimes knock off the big schools when they’re sleeping mirrors the way white people view themselves in the black-dominated basketball world. And all those goofy-ass Robby Benson haircuts are like the white version of neck tats.

Some other categories of famously overdrafted white players: The second comings. Adam Morrison, another member of the Gonzaga cult, was picked third in 2006 after being touted as the “next Larry Bird” — an assessment that almost certainly had more to do with his hideous garbage-collector mustache than his notches-below-Jamal-Crawford on-court game. Now he’s the perennial NBA leader in being whacked in the nose with dunked basketballs. Before him were Christian Laettner (No. 3, 1992) and Keith Van Horn (2, 1997), who also both bumped up a few notches in the draft because people momentarily lost their minds and forgot Rule 1.

The legacies. Mike Dunleavy Jr. (No. 3, 2002) heads the list of white guys overhyped because of their NBA player dads — a roster that includes all of the Barrys, current NBA “intangibles” leader Luke Walton, quintessential ’80s–’90s journeyman Danny Schayes, and current D-league wanderer Coby Karl. Of course the most appallingly overdrafted NBA legacy of all time was Danny Ferry, son of onetime NBA center Bob Ferry. Danny went No. 2 to the Clippers in 1989, then spent the rest of his career rapidly going bald while guys like Yinka Dare swatted his glacially slow three-point shots into the 15th row.

Whitequatch. This is the white basketball player who has never actually been seen in the wild but is drafted anyway on the strength of some internet write-up, published in Serbo-Croatian, describing an exhibition game played in the Katyn Forest using a human head for a ball. Every year there is at least one, usually in the 25–45 range, and they have all been busts: Pavel Podkolzin, Joel Freeland, Maciej Lampe, Martynas Andriuskevicius, Ante Tomic. The only Whitequatch whose career is still viable is Ukrainian mystery man Kyrylo Fesenko, who is reportedly just now learning to communicate with coaches in the Utah Jazz organization through a series of grunts and throat clicks.

The irony of all this pining is that the expansion of basketball abroad means there are more good white players than ever. José Calderón and Pau Gasol lead a great class of Spaniards, there are the 2004-gold medal Argentines led by Manu Ginóbili, and there are some pretty okay Americans, from Jason Kapono to David Lee to Spencer Hawes to Chris Kaman. But for all those players, there’s no Larry Bird to offset the agony white people feel when they see LeBron James power-dunking on the carrot head of goofy-ass figure-of-fun Brian Scalabrine. There are some pains that just can’t be hoped away.

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This article originally appeared in the June 2009 issue of Men’s Journal.

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