Bread City Basketball


The Lost Logo of the 1975 Giants
February 4, 2012, 12:41 pm
Filed under: Bread City, Football, New York City | Tags: 1970s Culture, New York City History, New York Giants, Super Bowl XLVI

In 1975, the New York Giants were a team without a country. They were in the wilderness. Their stadium in New Jersey was still being constructed, and the Yankees (the Giants’ old landlord) had kicked them out to do renovations.

So the Giants had no place to play home games, and to make matters worse, they were terrible. Facing an uncertain future, the team did the only thing they could do. They designed a new logo: an italics-mixed-case-disco-racing-stripe-NY emblem of questionable decision-making. It was the NFL uniform equivalent of a drunk tattoo. It was awesome. And it only lasted for that single season.

The Giants ended up playing through the year at Shea Stadium in Queens. In 1976, the team moved in to their home at the Meadowlands, and wasted no time in changing to a logo that was NY/NJ-neutral. It was their banner through two epic Super Bowl victories. Here’s to one more: BEAT NEW ENGLAND!

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Best Side
February 1, 2012, 9:14 am
Filed under: Bread City, New York City, Photography, Poetry | Tags: Food, New York City Culture, West Side

Hot bowl of pastina,
23rd Street and the river.
Subway grime patina,
shout to chopped liver.

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photo by Stephan Alessi

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GREAT JAMS: SPOTTIE
January 30, 2012, 12:39 pm
Filed under: Bread City, College Basketball, Music, Sports Photography | Tags: Great Jams, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble


Hypnotic Brass Ensemble – Spottie

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photo via TGA

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BILL BRADLEY: BASKETBALL POET
January 24, 2012, 9:46 am
Filed under: Basketball, Bread City, History, New York Knicks, Sports Photography | Tags: 1970s NBA, Basketball History, Bill Bradley, Princeton Bulldogs

What attracted me was the swish, the sound of the dribble, the feel of going up in the air. You don’t need eight others, like in baseball. You don’t need any brothers or sisters. Just you. I wonder what the guys are doing back home. I’d like to be there, but it’s as much fun here, because I’m playing. It’s getting dark. I have to go back for dinner. I’ll shoot a couple more. Feels good. A couple more.
- From A Sense of Where you Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton, by John McPhee

The Knicks stole Bill Bradley in the 1965 NBA Draft. There was no frozen envelope, just a now-obscure rule known as the Territorial Pick. Between 1950 and 1966, NBA teams had first dibs on drafting any college player within 50 miles.

Bradley had graduated from Princeton as the Associated Press Player of the Year, the NCAA Tournament’s Most Outstanding Player, and a two-time First Team All-American. And since Princeton, New Jersey is 1 mile closer to New York City than to Philadelphia, the Knicks were able to scoop Bradley away from the 76ers as a Territorial Pick.

The rest is history: Bradley played with New York for his entire basketball career – save for one season with Olimpia Milano – and his #24 jersey was retired by the Knicks in 1984.

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Woody Allen on Earl Monroe
January 20, 2012, 9:15 am
Filed under: Basketball, Bread City, Journalism, New York Knicks, Sports Photography | Tags: 1970s Culture, 1970s NBA, Basketball History, Earl Monroe, New York City History, Woody Allen

“What makes Monroe different is the indescribable heat of genius that burns deep inside him. Some kind of diabolical intensity comes across his face when he has the ball. One is suddenly transported to a more primitive place…It’s amazing, because the audience’s “high” originates inside Monroe and seems to emerge over his exterior.
- Woody Allen, Sport Magazine, Nov. 1977.

Allen is sent by the once-great Sport to interview Earl Monroe for a cover story. But Pearl never shows and Allen is left to make small talk with “Earl’s lady.” A true fan, Woody swallows the snub and writes a great profile of the arthritic Knicks captain anyway, full of signature wit and basketball wisdom.

I read a transcript of the article once before, but never saw the original scans until yesterday, thanks to the excellent Oakley & Allen. True holy grail status! Check it out.

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THE GOLDEN AGE OF CENTERS
January 18, 2012, 6:07 am
Filed under: Art, Bread City, Photography, Shaq | Tags: 1990s Aesthetics, 1990s NBA, Basketball History, Hakeem Olajuwon

They just don’t make stock photo backdrops like they used to.

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Every Basketball Court in Manhattan
January 10, 2012, 6:55 am
Filed under: Art, Basketball, Bread City, New York City, Photography | Tags: Google Satellite View, Jenny Odell, Photography

Jenny Odell makes collages from Google Maps’ satellite view mode, like the digital print entitled Every Basketball Court in Manhattan. She writes, “From this view, the lines that make up basketball courts… become like hieroglyphs that read: people were here.”

There are at least 100 in this image. Still, there’s no way she got them all. My favorite courts are somehow obscured. Some are partially hidden from view in chain-link rooftop domes. Others are concealed below the West Side Highway, so safe from the elements that you can play a pick-up game in a hurricane. And many are simple backboards in schoolyards without lines or marks.

But Odell is right about one thing: The court is a record. There are no written accounts or pick-up game historians. The physical court itself is the only proof we have of what happened there.

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Helmets and Gloves
January 6, 2012, 2:49 pm
Filed under: Bread City, Hockey, Photography | Tags: Polaroid Photography, Violence in sports

For a century now, in hockey, the possibility of having to engage in a fist-fight with a bad character has been the primary deterrent preventing this or that player from trying to hurt an opponent on the other team.
- Nick Paumgarten for The New Yorker, 12/7/11

But what happens when the player you want to hurt is wearing the same color jersey?

This isn’t about hockey equipment. This is about middle-class omertá, and what happens after practice.

In high school locker rooms everywhere, teammates strip their pads down to helmets and gloves, and beat the hell out of each other while the rest of the team watches.

Sometimes it’s a way of settling disputes. Sometimes it’s a way of enforcing team rules. Sometimes it’s just because teenagers like to fight. Either way, helmets and gloves is a bona fide subculture-within-a-sport. It has its own codes of conduct and is a universal experience within North American high school hockey culture. The pads all smell the same. The coaches all look the other way. And it remains a secret.

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photo by Mrs. Toews

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The Secret File
November 1, 2011, 8:56 am
Filed under: Bread City, Photography, Poetry | Tags: Ana Kras

New York cops in Jersey
and girls who never smile:
there’s something going on there
that’s in a secret file.

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photo by Ana Kras

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CARNIES
October 28, 2011, 9:53 am
Filed under: Basketball, Bread City, Journalism, Photography | Tags: Carnies, David Foster Wallace, Harpers Magazine, Illinois State Fair

All the carny game barkers have headset microphones; some are saying “Testing” and reciting their pitch lines in tentative warm-up ways. A lot of the pitches seem frankly sexual: You got to get it up to get it in. Take it out and lay ‘er down, only a dollar. Make it stand up. Two dollars, five chances. Make it stand up. Rows of stuffed animals hang by their feet in the booths like game put out to cure. It smells like machine grease and hair tonic down here…
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David Foster Wallace, Harpers Magazine, 09/94

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photo by Sam Quinn

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REVISIONIST HISTORY
October 25, 2011, 10:30 am
Filed under: Art, Basketball, Bread City | Tags: Basketball Art, Bryant Gumbel, David Stern, George Thompson, Painting, Racism in sports

The image of a Klansman playing basketball popped into George “Ewok” Thompson’s head fully-formed, like an image in a dream.

What emerged was a series of paintings titled Revisionist History. Thompson (who came up as a graffiti artist) takes the race issues underlying professional basketball, and blows them up huge with confrontational irony.

Earlier this month, Bryant Gumbel called the lockout as he saw it, claiming that commissioner David Stern “has always seemed eager to be viewed as some kind of modern plantation overseer, treating NBA men as if they were his boys.” It’s weird that people find this sort of commentary shocking, when racism is the white noise underlying basketball at every level. George Thompson takes the sentiment, and runs it through a science fiction ringer.

The classical execution of these paintings only adds to their surreality. Whether it’s a portrait of a masked Klansman in the triple-threat position, or posing behind a biblical sky, the striking images create a thought-provoking alternate reality.

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LIBRARY SWAG
September 26, 2011, 7:41 am
Filed under: Bread City, Fiction | Tags: Book Covers, Elmore Leonard, Swag

Never say more than is necessary.
- Elmore Leonard

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WOODY AND THE KNICKS
September 20, 2011, 8:58 am
Filed under: Basketball, Bread City, History, Movies, New York Knicks | Tags: 1970s NBA, Basketball Archeology, Basketball History, Bill Bradley, Earl Monroe, New York City History, Walt Frazier, Woody Allen

In 1971 I wrote and shot a scene for Annie Hall involving the Knicks and Earl The Pearl. I was extolling the concept of the physical over the cerebral, so I wrote a fantasy basketball game in which all the great thinkers of history – Kant and Nietzsche and Kirkegaard – played against the Knicks. I cast actors who looked like those philosophers to play those roles and they played against the real Knicks. We used the players on the team at that time including Earl, Bill Bradley and Walt Frazier, and we shot it inside Madison Square Garden after the last game of the season. Of course the Knicks were smooth and beat the philosophers easily; all their cerebration was impotent against the Knicks. But I cut the scene from the picture, not because it didn’t come out but because I had to keep the picture moving and it was too much of a digression. It didn’t break my heart not to use it in the film. I always feel that anything I cut out of a film is always a mercy killing.
- Woody Allen, The Observer Sport Monthly, 1/6/02

Another example of the profound cultural impact the Knicks had on New York during the early 1970s. Willis Reed and company brought pro hoops to the forefront of the city’s popular consciousness for the first time, winning two championships along the way. Before then, the NBA wasn’t really legit in NYC, and people only cared about college ball.

It was the most volatile era in New York’s modern history. A time of grime and racial tension. Crime skyrocketing. Junkies ruling the parks. Student protestors and construction workers brawling on Wall Street. The South Bronx burning down to rubble. Cops with German Shepherds patrolling the graffiti-covered subway cars.

And yet amidst all the antipathy, the entire city was united in its passion for the Knicks. It wasn’t because of one or two individual players. It was because together, the Knicks’ game aesthetically complemented New York so perfectly. A melting pot of styles, races, and personalities that melded to form an unstoppable team. Flashy at times, but blue collar at heart, with a deep bench that could outlast top-heavy teams like Wilt Chamberlain’s Lakers.

All that remains of Woody Allen’s 1971 Knicks footage is the still frame below. It was used as a lobby card during Annie Hall‘s original theatrical run. According to Allen, the rest of the scene was destroyed.

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