You love to hear the stories again and again. The potential of basketball players with cocaine problems or, less exotic, alcoholism or a heart condition or the victims, in some way, of something tragic.
Michael Ray Richardson could have been as good as Magic Johnson.
Roy Tarpley could have been as good as Moses Malone.
The potential of Len Bias, drafted between Brad Daugherty and Chris Washburn in 1986, grows with each passing year from his fatal cocaine overdose. Perhaps Bias, an especially athletic small forward, could have eventually become the Celtic’s answer to James Worthy. But he could have also joined Washburn, Tarpley, and William Bedford as lottery picks from that draft whose careers were swiftly ruined by cocaine. Or he might have had a fairly long but anonymous career like Wayman Tisdale or Armen Gilliam – the no. 2 picks in the 1985 and 1987 drafts respectively.
Eight of ESPN’s ’30-for-30’ podcasts relate to basketball, and four of these concern premature deaths of basketball players: There is the obligatory Bias one. There’s also Hank Gathers, who collapsed on the court and died from heart failure in 1990 as a college senior, and Ben Wilson, a high school senior, who was shot outside his high school in 1984. Another documentary is about New Jersey Nets shooting guard and Eastern European NBA pioneer Drazen Petrovic, who died in a car accident in 1993.
As for the other three b-ball documentaries, one is about Allen Iverson’s infamous high school bowling alley brawl, one is about Chris Herren’s various drug addictions, and one is about Magic Johnson’s HIV announcement. Just one film is actually about the excitement and drama of basketball games, a movie about Reggie Miller and the Indiana Pacers battling the Knicks in two very close mid-90’s playoffs series.
More is also written about tragedies and ‘what-if’s’ in basketball than what did happen.
In 1997, Tim Duncan entered the NBA from Wake Forest where, for three years, basketball pundits pegged him as the surefire no. 1 overall pick, a franchise player that would quickly join the NBA’s elite. For the next sixteen years, Duncan has perfectly met – and arguably exceeded – these enormous expectations.
There has not been one biography written of Duncan, unquestionably one of the dozen greatest players of all-time.
There also, more incredibly, is not a single Moses Malone biography. Malone in 1974 went straight to the ABA from high school, after growing up in poverty in Virginia. He played for about ten different professional teams, but also won three MVPs, was the cornerstone of one the greatest teams ever – the 1983 Sixers; and was singular in his rebounding tenacity and low-post game. Visiting the Harold Washington library in downtown Chicago, I would be absolutely delighted to comb through their surprisingly extensive basketball library and come across something as anodyne as Rebound: The Rise of Moses Malone.
Instead, when I went to the library, I picked up, Swee’pea And Other Playground Legends: Tales of Drugs, Violence, and Basketball, a book written in 1991 by John Valenti, a reporter at New York Newsday. “Swee’pea” is Lloyd Daniels. Daniels spent four or so exceedingly uneventful years in the NBA. At the time of the book’s publication, he had not made the NBA.
Even with a presumed audience out there fascinated with the apocryphal, stat-less world of New York City basketball and the stories of youth and talent squandered, I still don’t understand why someone wrote an entire book about Lloyd Daniels. Daniels was a great New York City “playground” basketball player, who also could not read, was addicted to freebasing cocaine, was shot multiple times and nearly killed at 20, and is the answer to a somewhat important NCAA men’s basketball history question (Who really caused the downfall of Jerry Tarkanian’s Nevada-Las Vegas program).
Daniels grew up without a father and his mother died from uterine cancer when he was three. He floated between relatives, began dealing and taking drugs at 13, went to four different high schools, and dropped out of high school in the 11th grade….to go to college at UNLV. Given his lack of a diploma and obvious inability to do college work, Daniels was briefly routed to a junior college in California, but UNLV’s scheme to get him eligible for college fell apart in February of 1987.
That’s when – in an image captured on video (it’s not internet available but is partly shown in a 2011 HBO documentary about the UNLV basketball program) – Daniels was arrested trying to buy $20 worth of crack from an undercover police officer at a Vegas crack house. The recording shows Daniels drugged out and handcuffed in a leather jacket, UNLV sweatshirt…and N.C. State Wolfpack hat evenly striding to the paddy wagon. Two days later Tarkanian said that Daniels would never play for UNLV.
“Swee’pea,” called that because he looks like the Olive Oil female character from Popeye (Ravaged by drugs or no, Daniels is one of the strangest looking people I have ever seen, especially with the receding hair line of many 40 year-old men when he was 15), spent his next two years being given opportunities to keep playing basketball and squandering them because of his drug habit and a general lack of any discernible maturity. In 1989, at the age of 22, Daniels was shot multiple times because of a drug debt and came extremely close to dying.
The idea of Daniels is, if nothing else, the idea of another time and another world. A man whose greatness as a basketball player was confirmed not by sophisticated Zach Lowe break downs or Synergy sports shooting charts, but wild west-like storytelling of his brilliant passing or unstoppable streak shooting on NYC playgrounds. Daniels was also a product of the 80’s urban ghetto, when there was literally twice or more in recorded criminal violence incidents than today, fueled by the sale and use of crack cocaine.
I learned a little bit about Daniels life, and nothing about his basketball playing from this book. I could probably read in one 30-minute bus ride the entirety of passages in this book that describe Daniels playing the game of basketball, the whole reason why we’re writing and reading a story about this guy in the first place. In an article for N+1 a few years ago, Richard Beck made the point that books about rap music leap into sociological analyses regarding hip-hop and never bother describing the music itself. The same observation can be made that this book, and other journalism of the genre, including these ESPN documentaries, never describe basketball itself.
Daniels was famously called “Magic Johnson with a jump shot” but this was not so much a description but a superlative nickname, like calling Dwight Howard “Superman.” Given his lack of a sustained high school, much less college, record, there are few stats or awards or other such measurements to really go by, so a description of how he played would have been necessary. We do learn he had great court vision, had a native wisdom about floor spacing, and was a great outside shooter. In other words, Daniels, like Magic or Bird, was not so much an athletic super freak but a basketball savant.
Valenti surmising Daniel’s basketball skills like this is totally fascinating stuff that’s not at all pushed. The obvious question: How he could be such an intelligent basketball player and such a dumb student? How is his brain wired – or how did his environment conspire – to make him so smart at one facet of life (strictly basketball? Was he good at other spatial reasoning/activities involving quick reflexes?) and so dumb at another (schoolwork….the normative measures then and now in society, basically, of intelligence).
Valenti almost cruelly keeps reminding us of his illiteracy, without really elaborating on why Daniels’ many hangers-on don’t do more about this problem. He avoided high school the same way I would avoid a welding class; there’s just no way he could do the work and it would be really embarrassing to try.
Of course, just like I don’t I need to learn welding, Daniels also didn’t think he needed to learn basic schoolwork. Besides basketball, Daniels was also a drug dealer and all-around con artist of some success.
But Daniels and I are different people with, um, different thoughts and feelings. If Valenti fails at describing Daniels the basketball player, he fails more fundamentally at describing the moods and motivations of the person. There are broad sociological brush strokes about growing up poor in the ghetto and little reportorial eye for detail. When details emerge they are fairly jarring: Valenti hems and haws about why Daniels had problems at Oak Hill Academy, a prep school in SW Virginia, that was one of several HS ‘basketball factories’ that promised to give Daniels the discipline he needed to get into college. Finally, Valenti casually admits that one of Daniels’ problems at Oak Hill was that he chronically stole from other player’s dorm rooms
The most vivid description of the kind of man we’re dealing with comes on page 242, when Valenti pieces together what precipitated his shooting:
…In reality, Lloyd said, he had been drinking Olde English with his aunt, Sherry Baptiste, and had decided he want to get high. So he went out on the block and, down around the corner of Frances Lewis, he found a young kid, maybe sixteen years selling crack. Lloyd walked over to him and demanded his goods. When the kid refused, Lloyd, who had done this several times before, beat the shit out of him – and stole his crack, about $100 worth.
Like the lack of basketball stats or basketball footage, there is a real lack of Daniels the person. The truth seems that Daniels is, well, a bad person. That he steals, and destroys not just himself but others with his drug dependency.
A problem with basketball writing, sociology, American liberalism, etc. etc. is that there is little reconciliation of the broadly bizarre hand Daniels has been dealt in life and how Daniels elected to play this hand.
We know full well about Beat one – the hand Daniels has been dealt: His extraordinarily disadvantaged upbringing juxtaposed to his incredible skill and interest in basketball. That is all obviously fascinating, almost like science fiction: Would you trade away having parents and a basic floor of money growing up for Magic Johnson-like basketball skills? How many people say yes to that?
But Beat two, who Lloyd Daniels is as a person and what choices he could make, what agency he had in this science fiction scenario, is the messy reality of life that these kind of symbolic representations of ghetto basketball heroes fall damningly short of capturing.