This entire blog post is actually about people blowing out their knees at bad times, but more of that in a second. First, an update on NBA Finals analysis:
The Lakers are the most inept team in the final minutes of games. I don't care if Kobe is 0-76,595...he should probably be the ONLY person touching the ball. Maybe playing defense, too. Oh, wait, he is. Oops. And why were the Grizzlies dumb for trading Gasol, again? Aside from it letting Hakim Warrick flourish offensively, he's clearly proving that he isn't exactly the kinda big man you add to win a championship. He's more passive-aggressive than most Europeans. Yeah numbers numbers...but all I care is what people do in the final minutes. The Lakers haven't really gotten this down yet in the series, and they were just lucky to come out with the W tonight...and in reality, David Stern fixed this series to go to 7, so we needn't be surprised.
Coming up tomorrow (or honestly, whenever I feel like sitting my behind down at my slow ass computer this week) will be my overly early and inaccurate 2008-09 NCAA men's basketball preview, made semi-legit since the NBA Early Entry Withdrawal deadline is tomorrow (today?) at 4pm (aka a great day to laugh at people who think leaving school to be a potential late second round pick is a good idea). At this point, I'm just waiting on the Carolina trio. Joe Alexander officially decided to stay in today, draining WVU's championship hopes. Smart move though...he's coming off a hot tournament where he managed not to look awkward, clunky, lost, or anything else people probably would have associated with him pre-Huggy Bear era. I was just looking forward to the Pitt kids crying another year.
But on the saddest note of the draft, a part that makes me forget how angry I am at 95% of the guys who declared (particularly ones whose first names start with "Mario" and end with "Chalmers"), news was released late tonight that everyone's favorite Kansas State punching bag, William Henry Walker, injured his knee, YET AGAIN. All the details are murky...but it insinuates it's another ACL tear, and that he'll be pulling out of the draft.
I've had issues with Bill all season. I wondered where he disappeared to mentally most games, why he got so fat, how jealous he was of Lil' Mike, blah blah...but I love the kid. LOVE HIM. I've always felt he'd make a better pro than Orange Juice Mayonnaise (less of an arsenal of skills, but lower expectations...Bill would shock people, while Juice would just disappoint). I defend him, his decisions, and his future to the end, even back when everyone else forgot who he ever was.
I wrote the following about Billy as part of my anger-inducing non-fiction piece about why the world sucks for po' folk, and it feels appropriate to share tonight. These are my words, and I will murder you if you try to steal them for your own. Seriously. I will find you! DON'T TEST ME! Yes, it's Really Long, but it's worth it, whether or not you know who Bill or what basketball is. I even made Maggie sniffle a bit over this.
It’s early on a Saturday evening in late March 2008, and the #11 seed Kansas State Wildcats are peeling themselves off the Qwest Center floor that the #3 seed Wisconsin Badgers just stomped them into during the second round of the 2008 NCAAs. As per 2007-08 K-State post-game routine, freshman forward phenom bookends Michael Beasley and Bill Walker are sitting dejectedly in the locker room, mulling over another loss, and getting pummeled with questions as to whether or not they’ll enter the NBA draft.
Though they shake the inquiries off each time with a standard “I’m-not-in-the-mood-to-discuss-this-since -you-already-know-the-answer-anyways” response, nearly everyone who followed this duo – from Manhattan, Kansas to Manhattan, New York – knows the answers (“Yes” and “Yes”), and whether they are the right decisions (“Of course!” to Beasley; a range of “Hell no!”’s and “Uhhhh…”’s to Walker).
The supporting evidence is simple – Beasley is coming off one of the best statistical seasons any single human being has ever had in sports, shattering college basketball and Sportscenter appearance records. He was the leader on a hapless Kansas State team full of scrubs, torn ACLs, guys who would be good someday, and guys who would never contribute at all. With the exception of a 5 point aberration against Xavier, a game where he left his regular playing shoes in Kansas, Beasley’s 33 game college career is an endless highlight reel of powerful breakaway dunks, effortless finger-rolls in traffic, swishing three-pointers, screaming chest thumps, and royal purple flooding the court that made fans and NBA teams at the bottom of the standings smile and swoon. His ever-present electric dimpled smile, sleepy green eyes, and the constant joke on the tip of his tongue will perfectly complement whatever sneaker and sports energy drink he chooses to endorse for millions.
And then there’s Bill Walker. Once a YouTube video dunking deity. Once thought to be the second best high school basketball player in the nation. Once rumored to actually be a better pro prospect than his last superstar teammate at North College Hill High School, OJ Mayo. Once expected to be the savior and star of Kansas State basketball.
Now, just a dude nobody really wants to take a chance on. Someone who people say scowls too much – an angry, scrunched up frown that further darkens his already dark brown face. Someone who is apparently not allowed to emotionally display the frustration that the world and life has caused him.
The person who was once the most athletic, exciting forward to watch play is now watching the most athletic, exciting forward to watch play. After tearing his ACL for the second time in January 2007, Walker has come back as a “has been”, a “never will be”, and only a “maybe” for the risky types. No longer able to rely on those hops that once made him famous, he became an afterthought, another one of the four cheerleaders on the court, as per team basketball regulations, watching Beasley.
Of course, not many afterthoughts average 16 points and 6 rebounds in their first full season after a major knee injury. And anyone who remotely followed K-State basketball understood that most of those 21 wins came from the statistical support Beasley received from Walker – and that a good chunk of their 12 losses were the result of statistical and mental disappearances by him. The defining moment, the moment his NBA future may have finally slipped down a drain, was a 34 minute, 1 point, 0-14 nightmare against the Texas Longhorns on ESPN’s Big Monday – a game attended, watched, and drooled over by NBA scouts for the numerous NBA prospects dribbling a basketball on a court at one time.
He’s still a “maybe” because of moments like his first half of NCAA tournament basketball, while he, not Beasley, pushed the Wildcats to an upset victory over his former superstar teammate OJ Mayo’s #6 seed USC Trojans with 17 first half points. He’s still a “maybe” because while he’s not quite the explosive dunker and slasher he once was, he’s worked on developing his weaknesses, particularly outside shooting, to try to compensate for the fact that he never will be the person everyone expected him to be, and to develop new expectations for who he can be. But most people who have a chance to make a difference in his future don’t have any desire to make him a pro. He is an expired product, and wasn’t consumed while still fresh.
But all of that? Strictly on-court hoops logic, reasons scouts and coaches and blog writers and TV personalities will give when they say why or why not these were good decisions for Mike Beasley and Bill Walker.
Since 1971, the NBA has implemented two very significant rules in determining eligibility for the entering the NBA. The first, the result of a complicated legal battle over young ABA star Spencer Haywood, overturned the original rule that a player couldn’t enter the NBA until his college class graduated. Known simply as the hardship rule, players who clearly had the talent and skills for the NBA level and a need for the NBA paycheck could forego their remaining amateur eligibility and turn pro. Worked great for everyone, too – the league received a quicker influx of exciting talent, often coming from those streets of America’s inner cities. The kids from the streets of America’s inner cities received the rich man’s paycheck for their performances, allowing them to help themselves, their families, and anyone else they could dole their money out to.
The second rule, an attempt to curb a glut of straight-to-the-NBA-from-high-school mistakes in the late 90s and early 2000s, stipulated that a player must be 19 years old by draft year’s end, and his high school class must be one year removed from their graduation. Essentially, everyone has to attend college, or get very creative, for at least a year. Again though, it’s worked great for nearly everyone – college programs are getting at least a year out of guys who probably would have never entered a classroom, the NBA and the potential NBA players are getting a year of maturity and experience that can make huge differences in their career acceleration.
Both of these rules might ruin Bill Walker’s life. Long and complicated story short, Walker found out at the start of the 2006-07 school year that he was no longer eligible to play high school ball, due to some odd and inexplicable school system glitch that never transferred credits he earned years ago at a different school. Any other time prior to that year, no big thing – he’d finish whatever was left so he could graduate early, and then enter the NBA draft and get paid. It was at the prime of hype in his young ball career, and there was no question whichever lucky loser of a lottery team needed a small forward would gladly call his name to come shake David Stern’s hand.
But it was right after the first NBA draft since 1971 that barred high school players from entering, and Walker would have to wait until at least the 2008 NBA draft to even get whiff of the league. He managed to graduate high school early, enroll at Kansas State to be eligible for the winter sports semester, play a couple great games, and blow out his knee in a two month span, thus starting the downward spiral of his once sure-thing NBA career.
Many athletes have suffered similar harsh fates that ended their careers and potential careers early, but for someone who comes from extreme poverty like Walker, this fate is something he can’t accept. He has a single mother working for scraps at hardware stores that he wants to provide for. He grew up in a home so physically distraught by poverty that he writes the address on his shoes every game to remind himself and the world who doesn’t quite understand that he’s refusing to accept this fate because he simply can’t go back. He was supposed to make it out, and everything now sucking him back are forces beyond his control. He is being punished for simply existing, always being in the wrong place at the wrong time despite making all the right decisions.
Walker knows that he is risking never getting a guaranteed contract, risking foregoing his remaining college eligibility and easy chance at a degree to fall back on, risking everything he has on a hunch that somebody still thinks he can be that amazing player he had the potential to be. If he doesn’t do it, he risks tearing another knee ligament or breaking a bone or statistical disappointments that will just send those NBA scouts further away. He risks having to scrap in minor leagues, overseas, working harder than he should have to so that he doesn’t have to go back to that house in West Virginia that he fears more than never making the NBA. He risks continuing to live in the poverty he’s already been in for over 20 years.
Meanwhile, Michael Beasley is being handed the world, and he doesn’t even really need it. Sure, his mother embodies a fairly common ghetto story by being a high school dropout with five kids by four different men, but she’s managed to pull herself together to provide a fairly stable, middle-class life for her herd of children, even moving the entire clan out to Kansas when he started school in fall 2007. Beasley himself lives a very cushy life, also calling his very well-to-do former AAU coach Curtis Malone a second father, and living with Malone’s family in their plush suburban Maryland pad during all non-Kansas State time.
Beasley doesn’t really need that NBA paycheck just yet. It’s just being handed to him, and sure, why not, he’ll cash it today. Walker is desperate for it. It may be his last chance at a decent paycheck in life, a paycheck that could revitalize his current family and stabilize his future one.
It’s hard to call Bill Walker’s decision to enter the NBA draft early crazy when it may be his last shot at ending his family’s financial hardships. How many of those scouts and coaches and blog writers and TV personalities who say Beasley would be crazy to stay and Walker crazy to go have any idea what it’s like to be poor, to be blessed with some extraordinary talent that you have a chance to harness and ride out of poverty, to only see your lone opportunity to end your suffering slip away, moment by waking moment?
It’s never crazy to do whatever you have to do to try and provide.
So Bill, we'll hope for better news tomorrow, kid. Nobody wants the enduring image of your career to be you peeing in towels.
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