Giving it the old school try

Sporting News, The, Feb 12, 1996 by Michael Wilbon

Bless their hearts for coming back. You can say Michael and Magic are addicted to professional basketball and all that accompanies it and you would be correct. But as much as they needed the NBA, basketball needed them even more. Desperately so. Bless their hearts for coming back to show a spoiled, overrated, egomaniacal generation of little brats what true greatness really is.

You know the Bulls and the Lakers are going to meet in the NBA Finals, don't you? And when it happens, I don't want to hear about it being "fixed" or how there's a "conspiracy" between the league and the TV networks.

The only conspiracy will be one of hard work, of extra practice and dedication, of gamesmanship, of loving something so dearly you work to be better at it than anybody, past or present. Did you see Magic hit those lefthanded hooks in his return against Golden State? Lefthanded hooks. Magic didn't have that in 1991. He's added more to his game in retirement than some Generation Xers have in the prime of their careers.

It's up to Michael and Magic (and Charles Barkley) to stick around long enough to teach a whole slew of twentysomething kids that having commercials and millions of dollars doesn't mean you're a great basketball player. The two conditions can be, and too often are, mutually exclusive.

When the issue arises of why the league is so bad, most people give the easy answer: expansion.

That's not it, not really. Sure, the talent pool is thinned now that there are 29 teams, but that's not the biggest problem. Michael Jordan said, "The guys, the young guys, don't know how to play now. They don't even know how to practice."

Jordan went on to point out how he can take advantage of today's young stars in part because they can't counter certain basic plays he had mastered by the time he was 26. People got all over Jordan's case for saying a year ago that the youngsters lacked professionalism. It was the truth then, and it's the truth now.

The league is less than it should be now because today's stars frequently aren't even fundamentally sound, much less great basketball players.

A coach suggests they work on something, the kid cops an attitude. Practices get interrupted by beepers and cell phones and agents who need a signature. That's why Magic couldn't coach these clowns. Sensitive to the criticism, Jordan didn't name names, but I will. A partial list has to include some of the biggest names like Derrick Coleman, Kenny Anderson, Latrell Sprewell, Shawn Kemp, Gary Payton, Vernon Maxwell, Isaiah Rider, Jamal Mashburn and Todd Day. Shawn Bradley didn't get traded because it appears he doesn't have the potential; the word is he won't pay the price to be great, like Rik Smits did.

So many of the players drafted in the lottery the last five years are much, much less than they should be. That's why the exceptions, like Shaq and Penny Hardaway and Juwan Howard stand in such stark contrast.

There was a great cry of opposition when so many of the old-school guys like Karl Malone and John Stockton, now in their mid-30s were put on the U.S. Olympic basketball team again, instead of the bright young talents. It was a good message to send to the kiddie corps: You're loud and, even worse, you're not that good.

What many of the young punks missed when they entered the league was a long apprenticeship. Larry Bird would have played a couple of more years but his back wouldn't let him. Magic contracted HIV. And Jordan, for so many reasons, retired after only nine seasons.

All at once, or close to it, the league lost its masters, the men who would teach the youngsters how to play, how to comport themselves, what steps are necessary to go from talent to greatness. Without that trinity, the youngsters ran amok. They embarrassed themselves and the league in Toronto during the World Championships, and the level of professionalism we'd become accustomed to in NBA players slipped noticeably. One of the reasons Barkley has talked so much about retirement has nothing to do with his ailments.

"Some of these young guys don't have the respect for the game they should have," he told me. "The game should be sacred."

With Jordan back in his full glory and Magic back for at least the rest of this season, the bet here is there'll be a lot less strutting from some of the youngsters who will find it pretty embarrassing to be taken to the cleaners by guys fast approaching 40.

Sprewell and Joe Smith are still trying to figure out that ball fake that Magic put on them last week in The Forum. Last Friday's game between the Bulls and Lakers should have been required viewing for anybody under 30 who thinks he's a great player. High-school coaches should have canceled practice that day and brought the players back to the gym for a screening.

Magic could miss more than four years and come back the very first night and nearly record a triple-double is absolutely a testament to his greatness, but also evidence of what is lacking in men 10 years younger than he is. Magic and Jordan aren't what they were when they met in the NBA Finals five years ago, but they're still better than everybody else.