|
Web Exclusives: Tooke's Take October 9, 2002: The name of the game is Team Princeton play beats professional ball by a fundamental marginAs I watched the U.S. men's basketball team implode in the FIBA World Championships, I was again reminded of what an excellent education in fundamental basketball I received by watching Princeton play from 1994 to 1998. The feeling was especially strong when Argentina, a team that plays with the timing and precision of the Vienna Philharmonic, repeatedly embarrassed America's superior athletes with backdoor cuts and excellent low-post passing. The US-Argentina game was a clinic on basketball the way it was meant to be played, and it took me back to both the UCLA upset and the Tigers' subsequent run to a top-10 ranking. Those seasons are the only reason I'm a basketball fan. Although the players on those teams were far more talented than most people think, Princeton won most of its games because it had a team in every sense of the word. Players moved without the ball. Guards rebounded. The center passed. Everyone played defense. In fact, those teams are why I find it so hard to watch today's NBA. Everything that's wrong with the world's greatest basketball league was neatly summarized for me when no team could find a spot for Steve Goodrich '98. Every time I watch another 20-year-old phenomenon diddle around in the low post while his four teammates stand and wait for his ill-advised shot, I think of Steve's prescient passing, and I turn off the TV. It also doesn't help that the two teams I find easiest to watch, Sacramento and New Jersey, (both of which, by the way, run modified versions of the Princeton offense) lost in consecutive rounds of the playoffs to a team whose success depends exclusively on owning the rights to the world's largest human. * * * I'm particularly glad to be reminded of those Princeton teams because this has been a terrible summer to be a sports fan. The talk of a baseball strike exposed everything I hate about professional sports, and the Chris Webber story (he, along with several of his Michigan teammates, are accused of accepting large sums of money from a booster) is casting a long shadow over college athletics. Attending a Red Sox game now costs an average of $40, before you buy food and overpriced beer. The worst tickets to the NBA rookie game are almost $100. If you want season tickets in a large-market NFL town, you'd better be prepared to wait several years and spend at least four grand. So I instead remember spending less than the cost of a movie ticket
to see Princeton-Penn at the Palestra. I remember a crowd more animated
than you'd ever see at a NBA arena, and a game more focused, passionate,
hard-fought, and professional, than in the world's greatest
league. Sometimes I think about how those games saddled me with
such unrealistic expectations - it's hard to recognize greatness
when you're young, and even harder to appreciate it. So these days,
when I see a team such as Argentina, I try to both enjoy the moment
and tip my hat to the group of guys who first showed me why an adult
should bother caring about sports.
You can reach Wes at cwtooke@princeton.edu
|
