Yukon Boy—
Wait a minute. You’re not exactly slogging off toward Yellowknife with the medicine to break the cholera epidemic here. You’re in Vermont or, as we like to call it, the Freeze-Dried East Side, deep in the macramé tundra. Were you a forest ranger when you were in college? Did you have to climb the trees into which people—God knoweth why—tossed used Pampers, and do it so that the raccoons wouldn’t choke to death on them? I thought not. I still think the East is up for grabs, largely because I’ve become a real believer in Jason Kidd, who seems to have a lot of essential Earvinness to him, at least in the way that he seems to make the game revolve around him. What he needs is one decent deep shooter and, with Kerry Kittles missing and Keith Van Horn suddenly afflicted with invisibility, he doesn’t have one. (I keep waiting for Van Horn’s shorts to run down the floor by themselves, the way Claude Rains’ pants did.) Either that, or he needs big numbers out of Kenyon Martin who, bad-ass yellow boy or not, seems to be quite content to be flexing his way into an early summer. Still, I think it goes seven, and I think Kidd will have the make-or-break shot somewhere down the line.
However, I know it’s a PR move to make us forget that nasty domestic-violence incident out in Phoenix, but he should leave his son at home now. I hate the whole kid thing. I hate it when sportswriters use their kids to explain how tough things are for the fans, and I hate it when columnists argue that their views on say, the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments have changed “since my son/daughter” was born, and I hate it when children are used by cheap pols—and this means you, Bubba—to take another whack at our ability to govern ourselves. Do I want my kids to grow up in a violent world? No. I also would like them to grow up under a functioning Bill of Rights. Sorry, lad. I’ll believe in Nene when I see him, and you can have Yao Ming right now. I’ll ride with Chris Wilcox, who has picked absolutely the best possible time to begin his professional career. I know there’s more than a little streak of xenophobe in me every year, long about draft time, and I’m prone to Pearl Washington’s assessment of one of his opponents as a “CNP”—Can Not Play. Nevertheless, if Nene is Olajuwonesque, then I am the Czar of all the Russias. As for the idiot TV schedule, we lost that war 40 years ago. It is always amusing, however, to hear the various network drones talk about the “effect” of the long layoff on that game that they are televising, as though a hurricane had struck since the last game, and as though it wasn’t their autonomic greed that caused the delay in the first place. Ah, but Walton’s back. There’s that. Is he at least called Walter (The Great) Magnifico? Can he saw someone in half?
Give my regards to White Fang.
Logically positive,
Pierce
