Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Ok jeg ved godt der ikke er nogen som læser denne blog. Men dette er endnu et mirakel. Som en overspringshandling sidder jeg og stener Basketball og så falder jeg over denne video: http://sports.yahoo.com/nba/blog/ball_dont_lie/post/Video-Ron-Artest-lovable-badass?urn=nba-298898. For det første er Artest endnu en af de personer som ligesom Arenas kan kaldes et mirakel. For det andet er der en lille sød pige som siger det, meget klart, det er counter-intuitivt, at der i basketball skal findes de her personer som ikke er bange for at være sig selv... og kører det til grænsen. Men for det tredje og det er sgu lidt vanvittigt, så har Skeets engang boet hos mig. Dvs. ham der har lavet videoen har faktisk boet hjemme hos mig engang.
Monday, December 20, 2010
Lidt mere Arenas, mest til mig selv. En biografi
Joke all you want about the “great shooting” of Gilbert Arenas and the way he “triggers” an offense, but when you face the dynamic the All-Star guard in the open court, it’s no laughing matter. An exciting player and unique sports personality, he has been proving himself since arriving on the scene as an underappreciated second-round pick. Now, coming off a career-threatening knee injury—and potential career-ending brush with the law—Gilbert has more to prove than ever. This is his story…
GROWING UP
Gilbert Jay Arenas, Jr. was born on January 6, 1982 in Tampa, Florida. (Click here for a complete listing of today's sports birthdays.) His mother, a teenager at the time, was unprepared for parenthood. She tried to raise Gilbert by herself in Miami but started to hang out with some unsavory types and eventually got in trouble with the police. When the authorities became aware of young Gilbert’s plight, they made arrangements to place him in foster care.
Gilbert’s dad was working in an auto parts store in Tampa when the call came. As the boy’s natural father, he had rights. Normally, the call made to him is just a cursory contact, a formality to clear the child before moving him into a new home. But Gilbert Sr. thought about his own childhood—he grew up without a father—and decided to do the right thing. He assumed sole custody of his two-year-old son. Gilbert went 20 years before he saw his mother again.
Gilbert Sr. had big dreams. A baseball star at Florida Memorial College, he walked on to Howard Schnellenberger’s University of Miami football squad as a fullback in 1980. That was the season freshman quarterback Jim Kelly became the team’s starter and the Hurricanes won the Peach Bowl. Gilbert Sr.'s sports career ended that year, however, when he injured his leg.
A tall, good-looking man, Gilbert’s father got into modeling, appearing in ads for Sears and JC Penney. He eventually found his way into acting and appeared in the first two episodes of Miami Vice. When the show became a hit, he decided to leverage his 15 minutes of fame and moved to Los Angeles to further his career. He and his son packed everything they owned into his Mazda RX-7 and headed west.
When they arrived in Hollywood, they discovered the rental market worked a little differently than in Miami. Landlords were looking for $1,000 or more up front, which was more than Gilbert Sr. had saved. The pair spent three nights sleeping in the car in a Burbank parking lot before securing a room at a YMCA.
The first order of business for Gilbert Sr. was to find a steady job. He talked up the manager of a furniture store, who couldn’t help but notice the seven-year-old kid dribbling a basketball between his legs while he waited near the car. Because his new boss was a hoops fanatic, Gilbert Sr. got the job.
Later, Gilbert Sr. landed a night job with UPS. He would work until morning, catch a couple of hours of sleep while his son was in school, and go on auditions in the evenings. He hired an agent, who helped him get bits parts in TV shows, movies and commercials (including high-paying ones for Tostitos and Pepcid AC). Gilbert Sr. was relentless in his pursuit of work. He was imaginative, too. Once he got into a softball game with the Days of Our Lives team and and launched several long home runs. Soon he was playing a fireman on the soap.
Having an actor for a father could be interesting. Gilbert once brought a friend home, and his father kept shouting, “Kick his ass!” Gilbert had to explain that his father, who was due to shoot a scene the next day in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Lionheart, was practicing his one line until he had it down perfectly.
Left to his own devices, Gilbert became the neighborhood pain in the ass, busting windows, keying cars and getting into minor trouble in a major way. He hated to be home alone and didn’t know how to unleash his boundless energy. He did well enough in school and learned how to charm his teachers with a big smile and a sly sense of humor. Still, without an outlet, Gilbert was headed for problems.
Around the age of 11, basketball replaced street football as Gilbert’s primary outlet. He played after school and, when his father left for the night shift at UPS, he would sneak out and ball it up all night. Before long, Gilbert became a familiar face on the local playgrounds. His father had an inkling of what he was doing and developed a network of friends in the area who would keep an eye on his son.
Jim Kelly, 1992 Pro Line
When the Arenas men did spend time together, their natural competitiveness came out. They often faced off in take-no-prisoners one-on-one basketball. During one game, Gilbert reached in to knock the ball away from his father, who cracked him on the hand and dislocated his finger. Watch Gilbert now and you can see that he almost never gets whistled for reaching in.
Gilbert Sr. coached a park league team, and since most of the boys were bigger and older than his son, he kept him on the bench. He explained to Gilbert that his goal was to win, not to give his son playing time. Gilbert quit, joined another team, and dropped 15 on his dad’s squad in their next meeting.
Gilbert also beat his dad at video football. When he explained the controls to his father, he neglected to enlighten him about all of the buttons. Gilbert Sr. found out, became furious and punched his son in the arm. They have never played video games again. Today, they still compete at pool, darts and dominoes.
ON THE RISE
Gilbert enrolled at nearby Birmingham High School and made the junior varsity. He was playing well, having a good time, and not taking the game too seriously—until the varsity coach cornered him to let him know he had reached his ceiling as a player.
That summer, Gilbert got up with the sun each morning and practiced until other players began showing up for games. He usually stayed at the court past dinner. In the fall, he transferred to Ulysses S. Grant High School in Van Nuys, a long bus ride away. It was worth it. The Lancers had a decent basketball team, though Grant was not a large school and its schedule included a couple of powder puff teams. Being young for his class at 14 and standing just 5-9, Gilbert did not yet have the look of a hoops superstar. He earned a starting role on coach Howard Levine’s varsity as a sophomore. Within a month, he blossomed into the best player in the league.
With a growing repertoire of slick one-on-one moves, Gilbert toyed with defenders. He could penetrate and score or pull up and hit from downtown. He was an adept passer, aggressive rebounder, and a defensive demon who could strip enemy dribblers or hammer balls back in a shooter’s face.
The game may have come naturally to Gilbert, but he was always practicing, always working on something new. He would often sneak back into his old elementary school and shoot for hours in the deserted gym. Gilbert was voted 1997 Valley Pac-8 Player of the Year as a sophomore, as well as Los Angeles All-City. He would earn these dual honors twice more, as a junior and senior.
After Gilbert’s junior year, during which he averaged just under 30 points a game, he applied to a math and science magnet school in Sylmar and joined that school’s summer league team. Now standing 6-3, Gilbert made the move to increase his level of competition. Sylmar played teams from Compton and Dominguez in the southern part of Los Angeles. Fearing he would lose his star, Levine hoped to convince Gilbert to stay at Grant. In the end, though he was accepted at Sylmar, Gilbert returned for his final season with the Lancers. (He would lead Grant to a share of the league title, while Sylmar went on to win the LA’s 3-A championship.)
At the start of Gilbert’s senior year, he wandered over to the UCLA campus and talked to the coaches. He and his dad had long dreamed of wearing a Bruins uniform. The school had shown some interest in him, and he wanted to more clarification. The deal, the Bruins told him, was that they were waiting to hear from Carlos Boozer (who eventually chose Duke). UCLA was also worried about Gilbert's attitude, believing he had run up the score on so-so opponents in high school. His academic record was a concern as well. Ultimately, the Bruins would regret their decision to pass on Gilbert. They had all sorts of trouble at shooting guard the next two years, while Gilbert torched them whenever he met them in the Pac-10.
Meanwhile, Gilbert also received solid offers from DePaul, Kansas State and Arizona. With Wildcats’ assistant Ray Tention hot on his trail, he chose to stay out west. Gilbert committed to Arizona and Lute Olson prior to his senior season at Grant, when he was still only 16-years-old. And what a season it was. Gilbert put up huge numbers, averaging 33.4 points, 7.9 rebounds, 3 assists and 4.6 steals.
Gilbert Arenas,
2003 Upper Deck Hardcourt
Gilbert joined an Arizona team that was rebuilding after losing Michael Dickerson, Mike Bibby and Miles Simon to the NBA a couple of years earlier. Olson, however, still had loads of talent, including Jason Gardner, Richard Jefferson, Loren Woods, Luke Walton and Michael Wright. The starter at shooting guard was Ruben Douglas, and Gilbert was asked to redshirt for a year. He didn’t think much of the plan. Gilbert once torched Douglas for 49 points in a high school game.
During Arizona’s informal summer games, Gilbert took nothing but pull-up jumpers. When real practices began, however, he pump-faked Douglas out of his jock. Gilbert had publicly stated that he hoped to start by the mid-point of his freshman year, and it was immediately clear that he would make good on this boast. Douglas ultimately transferred to New Mexico and topped the nation in scoring one season there.
In Gilbert's debut in an Arizona uniform, for the Blue team in the Pepsi Red-Blue pre-season scrimmage, he scored 22 points and hauled down five offensive rebounds in front of a raucous student crowd. A couple of weeks later, he was voted MVP of the pre-season NIT after pumping in 20 points and registering five steals against Kentucky in the championship game.
Gilbert's major adjustment to Division I competition was learning what to do without the ball. At Grant, he always had the rock or was always about to get it. Working off screens and getting himself open for good looks at the basket was a tough transition. When he got the ball, however, he knew what to do with it. In his first game against UCLA, Gilbert victimized the Bruins for 20 points. Days later, he was named PAC-10 Player of the Week.
Off the court, Gilbert found an interesting role with the Wildcats: class clown. He kept his teammates loose and tried to crack them up when the super-serious Olson had his back turned. It wasn’t that Gilbert did not like or respect his coach; he simply thought he could be too demanding and inflexible. Olson discouraged his freshman from showboating, insisting he display class at all times.
Olson’s wife, Bobbi, was just the opposite. The unofficial team mother, she went out of her way to make Gilbert feel at home. Coupled with the free and easy lifestyle of the Arizona campus, freshman year was as close to perfect as he could imagine.
Gilbert was an excellent fit for Arizona’s up-tempo style, and he came up big at both ends game after game. He scored 15.4 points per game on 45.3% shooting from the field. He was also a terror on defense, averaging two steals a contest.
Arizona entered the NCAA Tournament as a #1 seed, but the team was beat up from hard regular season. Jefferson was coming back from a stress fracture in his foot and was not yet playing at full speed. Woods, the key man in the middle, was sidelined by an aching back.
In their opener, the Wildcats appeared tight against Jackson State. They led by only eight points at intermission. Arizona found its rhythm in the second half, pulling away for a 71-47 win. Next up was a dangerous Wisconsin squad, which specialized in slowing down teams like the Wildcats. This the Badgers did, building a double-digit lead and thwarting every comeback attempt that Arizona could muster. Gilbert was high man with 21 points, but the Wildcats lost, 66-59. It was small consolation that the Badgers continued to roll all the way to the Final Four.
Despite Arizona's early exit during March Madness, the 2000-01 preseason polls had the Wildcats ranked among the best in the nation. Some believed they were Final Four material. Privately, the players thought they could go undefeated. Then the news about Bobbi Olson came—she was dying of cancer. The coach was devastated, as were his players. Her illness was kept out of the papers, but the team got off to a terrible start. Everyone around basketball knew something was wrong. Bobbi died on New Year’s Day.
Gilbert and his teammates chose to honor her memory by dedicating their season to her. Energized and inspired, they won 20 of their next 23 games. Gilbert was fantastic, burning opponents off the dribble and extending his range well past the the 3-point line. For the year, he upped his scoring to 16.5 ppg, and at 42.5%, he was deadly from beyond the arc. Gilbert also stepped up his defensive effort—though this was a result of being benched by Olson for poor practice habits.
Richard Jefferson, 2002 HIT
The Wildcats headed into the NCAA Tournament like a team on a mission. Gilbert was on fire in the opening game against Eastern Illinois, nailing nine of 13 shots from the field for 21 points in a 101-76 win. Next, Arizona choked off upstart Butler, 73-52. Gilbert netted 15 in the tilt, along with eight rebounds.
It looked like the championship run would end in the Sweet Sixteen against Mississippi, as the Rebels opened an 18-6 lead. But Arizona caught up early in the second half and—led by 16 points and 11 rebounds from Woods—and the Wildcats cruised to a 66-56 win. In the Midwest Final against Illinois, Gilbert scored 16 of Arizona’s first 24 points. He finished with 21. Gardner, meanwhile, hit clutch threes and foul shots in the waning minutes for an 87-81 victory. The Wildcats earned their first trip to the Final Four since their national title in 1997.
In the national semifinal, a win over Michigan State, Gilbert stunned the Spartans with six steals. On one of those thefts, Zach Randolph crashed into his chest. Two days later, when he took the floor against Duke for the championship, Gilbert was still feeling intense pain. That morning, he didn’t think he could get out of bed, much less suit up. But there was no way he was going to miss a shot at the national title.
The Wildcats and Blue Devils tangled in an exciting final, which fans in Carolina remember for the brilliant all-around performance of Shane Battier. Arizona fans still fume about because of questionable officiating. Duke guard Jason Williams played recklessly throughout the game, initiating contact at both ends of the floor, yet the referees rarely whistled him for fouls. The Blue Devils outlasted the Wildcats, 82-72.
Afterwards, Gilbert decided to enter the NBA draft, along with Jefferson, Gardner and Wright. Olson went on record saying that Gilbert was too young. But he felt that he had tested himself against the best the NCAA had to offer. To his mind, Gilbert had proved he would make a top pro.
Was Gilbert ready? Although he led Arizona in scoring, many scouts considered him too young, skinny and inexperienced to be an impact player at shooting guard and too basket-happy to play the point. When Gilbert scanned the talent available in the draft, however, he thought he might go in the lottery. It soon became clear he was wrong.
Gilbert Sr. threw a draft day party for his son in Studio City. After 20 picks had passed and his name had not been called, Gilbert called the coach who had recruited him out of high school. He wanted to know if there was any way he could undo the damage. Could someone call David Stern? Gilbert was panicked and crying—the first time he had shed tears since he was a child. That's when he heard some good news. The Golden State Warriors had taken him in the second round, with the 31st pick overall.
Gilbert collected himself and made the same prediction he had three springs earlier: I’m going to start by mid-season. Then he headed to the gym to work out.
Gilbert arrived at training camp slotted behind first-round pick Jason Richardson and backup Bob Sura. Coach Brian Winters was not a fan of underclassmen in the NBA and promised to keep Gilbert on the pine regardless of the team’s record. The rookie practiced hard, got into a handful of blowouts, learned what he could from watching, and mostly kept his opinions to himself. Besides youngsters Richardson, Larry Hughes and Antawn Jamison, the Warriors were light on talent, and Winters had a hard time coaxing big efforts out of his players. The result was a dismal 21-win season.
Gilbert stayed sharp in practice. He managed to get a key to Golden State's facility so he could work on his game at night. He also played a lot of pickup games in the local playgrounds in defiance of his $850,000 contract. Gilbert reasoned that this was the only action he would see where guys came at him ferociously. And they did. Everyone wanted a shot at NBA meat, and Gilbert obliged them.
Still, he sat. When the teams were announced for the Got Milk Rookie Game, Gilbert’s name was nowhere to be found. It frustrated him to watch the contest, mostly because he had destroyed so many of the players in college. Gilbert became even more determined to be ready when his chance finally came. (He suited up for the sophomore squad the following year and was named MVP).
2001 Sports Illustrated, Final Four issue
With Hughes struggling at the point and the playoffs out of range, Winters asked Gilbert if he would like to try his hand running the offense. He had never been interested in playing point guard, but minutes were minutes, and he had seen precious few to that point.
Learning on the job, Gilbert dished out 3.7 assists and scored over 10 points a game the rest of the way. It wasn’t always pretty. When in doubt, Gilbert just turned on the jets and outran his defenders. Sometimes he raced into traps, but at other times he created great opportunities for his teammates. When all was said and done, Gilbert finished fourth in scoring and third in assists and steals among NBA rookies—despite starting just 30 games. In those starts, he averaged 14.1 points and 5.1 assists.
During a trip to Miami for a game against the Heat during his rookie year, Gilbert finally met his mother again. He had imagined an emotional reunion, but when she introduced herself neither knew what to do or say.
Over the summer, the Warriors unloaded Hughes, Blaylock and Dean Oliver, and drafted Mike Dunleavy instead of Jay Williams—which basically gave the point guard job to Gilbert. He took a crash course in the position, watching tapes of former Wildcats Mike Bibby and Damon Stoudamire. When the 2002-03 season started, he was not only prepared to run the point, he was expecting to lead the Warriors to victory every game.
MAKING HIS MARK
With the offense now in his hands, Gilbert was very serious about his job. Happy-go-lucky off the court, he became increasingly frustrated. The Warriors lost 44 games in '02-03, and a lot were decided by the end of the second quarter. Gilbert unleashed his anger at officials, racking up a lot of technicals, but he held his tongue with teammates—though sometimes he had to take halftime showers (in full uniform) to cool off. Gilbert also smashed his share of clipboards and threw his share of chairs. Richardson nicknamed him “Baby Ron Artest.”
Gilbert appeared in all 82 contests for the Warriors and finished with excellent numbers, including 18.3 points per game and 6.3 assists. He logged nearly 3,000 minutes and answered any questions about whether he could be a productive NBA player. At season’s end, he was voted the the league’s Most Improved Player, beating out fellow point guards Chauncey Billups and Tony Parker.
Gilbert’s emergence thrilled Golden State fans—until it exposed an interesting loophole in the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement. Because he was a second-round pick, Gilbert was not only eligible for early-bird free agency, but the Warriors were not allowed to offer him more than the average salary of $4.6 million to stay in a Golden State uniform. In order to keep Gilbert, the team would have had to gut its roster. The Bay Area faithful went crazy when they found out they were likely to lose Gilbert. Many launched web sites supporting him and urging the Warriors to find a way to keep him.
Ultimately, however, it was the Washington Wizards that put the best deal on the table—six years at $65 million. Having closed the books on the Michael Jordan era, the team’s new coach, Eddie Jordan, and new GM, Ernie Grunfeld, wanted to rebuild around a nucleus of exciting young talent. Already in the fold were Hughes and Kwame Brown, the top pick in the 2001 draft. Jerry Stackhouse, recovering from knee surgery, would serve as a veteran presence once he returned to action.
Gilbert blossomed in his new surroundings in the 2003-04 campaign, scoring a triple-double in his forth game as a Wizard. His goal each time down the floor was to get into the paint and either go to the rim or dish off. He also became adept at shooting off pick-and-rolls and screens. After a couple of months, NBA defenders learned that they were better off laying back and conceding the 20-foot jumper. This is where Gilbert got into a trouble sometimes. A streaky shooter, he rarely passed when he was feeling it and subsequently took his teammates out of the offense. When the shot wasn’t there, his fellow Wizards did not always move without the ball. Coach Jordan encouraged Gilbert to think about scoring but reminded him he also had to ignite the offense in other ways.
At season’s end, the Wizards had just 25 wins, but the team’s fortunes were looking up. Hughes stayed relatively healthy and played well, Stackhouse contributed after his February return, and role players Brendan Haywood, Juan Dixon, Etan Thomas and Jarvis Hayes logged valuable minutes. Gilbert led the Wizards in scoring at 19.6 ppg and reached the 40-point plateau twice. In a game against the Lakers, he equaled the franchise mark with eight three-pointers.
Gilbert Arenas, 2002 Bowman Chrome
Gilbert’s growing friendship with Hughes was another important part of his development. The NBA’s version of the “Odd Couple,” the two young stars found plenty of common ground, both on and off the court. Gilbert was the smiling, gregarious guy who wore his emotions on his sleeve. Hughes was the quiet, serious type, who liked his privacy, his family, and the occasional night out with a rap star.
They say every successful NBA team needs three go-to guys. In Gilbert and Hughes, Washington believed it had two. Prior to the 2004-05 season, Grunfeld picked up a third—another ex-Warrior, Jamison. The trio performed as hoped, with Gilbert and Jamison making the All-Star squad and Hughes leading the league in steals and being named to the NBA All-Defensive First Team. Though s everal players battled injuries—including Hughes, who missed 20 games with a broken finger, and Brown, with a broken foot—talent and teamwork steadied the boat whenever it reached troubled waters. The Wizards went 45-37 to finish with their best record in 26 years.
Gilbert ended the year averaging 25.5 points, 5.1 assists and 4.7 rebounds a game. With Hughes going for 22 a night, Washington featured the highest-scoring backcourt in the league.
Washington’s #5 seed in the playoffs earned them a shot at the young Chicago Bulls, who ambushed the Wizards in the first two games of the series. Washington came back to knot the series and seemed to have Game 5 locked up when the Bulls made a 10-0 run to even the score 110-110 with five seconds left. Gilbert responded with a dramatic buzzer-beater for the victory.
In Game 6, Gilbert was ice cold, but he made the game-turning play on defense. With two minutes left and Chicago up by four, Kirk Hinrich stole the ball from Hughes and drove the other way all alone. Gilbert broke toward his basket as soon as he saw the play developing and soared through the air to tip Hinrich's shot away. The defensive gem ignited a 7-0 run for Washington, which triumphed 94-91.
Next up were Shaquille O’Neal, Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat. Without a solid center, the Wizards were helpless against Shaq, and no one could stop Wade, either. Miami took the first three games easily. In Game 4, the Wizards found themselves on the short end again, down 13 points in the fourth quarter, their season just minutes away from its conclusion. But with one last, great gasp, Washington pulled it together and roared back into the lead—though only for a moment. The Wizards lost, 99-95.
Larry Hughes, 2001 Heritage
Gilbert and Jamison were joined for the 2005–06 season by Caron Butler, who was acquired from the Lakers for Kwame Brown. Together they formed the NBA’s top-scoring trio, with Gilbert netting 29.3 a game followed by Jamison (20.5) and Butler (17.6). Gilbert was also among the league leaders in steals and assists. Somehow, he was overlooked by the fans when the All-Star ballots were tallied. He did made it in as an injury sub for Jermaine O’Neal.
The Wizards finished strong and snagged a playoff berth with a 42–40 record. They were the highest-scoring team in the East. Unfortunately, they had to play the surging Cavaliers, a 50-win team led by LeBron James. Cleveland took a 2–1 lead in the series after Gilbert missed a game-winning 3-pointer in Game 3. He redeemed himself in Game 4 by exploding for 20 in the fourth quarter to even the series.
Alas, the Wizards couldn't hold back the Cavaliers, who took the series in six. The last two wins were one-point heartbreakers in overtime. Gilbert sent Game 6 into OT with a 30-foot buzzer-beater, but later he missed two free throws that allowed the Cavs to score the winning bucket.
Gilbert was certain that Washington was just a player or two away from having a dominant club. During the off-season, he offered to take a pay cut if the team used it to secure a key free agent or two. The team did sign two players—Darius Songaila and DeShawn Stevenson—but they were hardly difference-makers in 2006–07.
Gilbert definitely was, however. Time and again he hit long jumpers or driving layups in the waning moments of games to give the Wizards a victory, or at least keep them alive. In a December meeting with Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, Gilbert exploded for 60 points. The Wizards won 147–141 in overtime, and Gilbert smashed Earl Boykins's NBA record for points in an overtime period, dropping 16 on LA.
Performances like these enabled Gilbert to average around 30 points a game in the early going, and this proved enough for him to out-ballot Vince Carter for a starting spot in the All-Star Game. Butler, who was also having a nice year, made his All-Star Game debut as well.
As usuual, there was plenty of drama in Gilbert’s basketball life. After he was left off the roster for the FIBA World Championship, he vowed to make Team USA director Jerry Colangelo pay. When the Wizards played the Phoenix Suns, Gilbert lit them up for 54 points and glared at Colangelo throughout the game.
The season seemed to be heading in the right direction for Washington until second-half injuries began to diminish the starting five. The critical blow was a season-ending knee injury for Gilbert, suffered in an April collision with Gerald Wallace of the Charlotte Bobcats. The Wizards squeezed into the playoffs, but they were swept by the Cavs in the first round.
G’ilberts knee injury, a torn left MCL, robbed him of almost two entire seasons. He also underwent micro-fracture surgery. Gilbert made a total of 10 starts in 2007–08 and 2008–09. The Wizards did an admirable job the first year, finishing with a winning record (followed by another first-round loss to the Cavs). In year two of Gilbert’s absence, the team fell apart. Washington lost 63 games, tying the franchise record for futilty.
Caron Butler, 2007 Upper Deck
Gilbert was finally back in playing shape for the 2009–10 season. New coach Flip Saunders also had Jamison and Butler in the lineup, along with newly acquired role players Mike Miller and Randy Foye. Gilbert was getting his 20-plus a night and doing double-duty as Washington's de facto point guard, but the club was losing regularly and was mired in the Southeast Division cellar.
During the Christmas holidays, news began trickling out of the Verizon Center that Gilbert had brought three unloaded guns into the Washington locker room. Later it was revealed that he and Javaris Crittendon had been waving guns at each other in a dispute over gambling debts. This happened a month after beloved longtime owner Abe Pollin—who changed the team's name from Bullets to remove the taint of gun violence—had passed away. And of course it was not Gilbert’s first association with firearms. As a young player in Golden State, he was also caught with an improperly registered weapon in his possession.
When local cops and federal investigators got involved, Gilbert stopped talking. Prior to that, however, he had attempted to shade the incident as an all-in-fun tussle between teammates. He explained the presence of the guns—a violation of NBA rules and DC law—by saying he had brought them to work from his home in Virginia so his kids wouldn't get them. Gilbert also issued a public apology.
Bad things do happen to good people, and by all accounts Gilbert is a decent guy. The gun incident won't define him as a person or player, but it may bring him into the crosshairs of the NBA, which could use him as an example for other potential gun-toting stars. The league, in fact, suspended him indefinitely. A long suspension during a comeback season is not what Gilbert needed. Nor is a legal hassle over the morals clause in NBA playing agreements—which would give the Wizards a convenient out of a top-heavy contract.
The bigger problem for Gilbert may be DC's strict gun laws. There normally isn’t much room to manuever with authorities. There is a chance he could face jail time.
Whatever the outcome, one thing is certain. Gilbert always takes the court feeling he has something to prove. Having cemented his reputation as one of basketball’s most dynamic scorers, he must now lift a talented but often aimless club from mediocrity to the exalted status of a conference power—and live down the inevitable jokes as one of the NBA’s true gunners.
GILBERT THE PLAYER
Javaris Crittenton, 2008 Topps
Very few NBA stars can legitimately boast Gilbert's combination of skills. He has excellent range on his jumper, can nail the mid-range pull-up and can dunk over most players in the league. As a point guard, his penetrate-and-pass style works well with slashers like Antawn Jamison and Caron Butler.
Even post-surgery, Gilbert is a relentless attacker. Whether he is hot or cold, he comes at opponenets the same way. Unafraid of fellow guards, he instead studies the defensive tendencies of the forwards and centers he is likely to encounter after shaking off his primary defender. He jumps into the shot-blockers and pulls up against the wide-body defenders, ensuring him either of a trip to the foul line or an open look at the rim.
Gilbert is a smart defender who is conscious of beating his man to a spot, and he rarely reaches in to pick up cheap fouls. Most of his steals come from playing the passing lanes. He has also become adept at slapping the ball away from big men when they put it on the floor.
Gilbert has shown the ability to lead his team, but he also provide unnecessary distractions at times. No one disputes his talent. But critics question whether he has the mental make-up to win a championship.
GROWING UP
Gilbert Jay Arenas, Jr. was born on January 6, 1982 in Tampa, Florida. (Click here for a complete listing of today's sports birthdays.) His mother, a teenager at the time, was unprepared for parenthood. She tried to raise Gilbert by herself in Miami but started to hang out with some unsavory types and eventually got in trouble with the police. When the authorities became aware of young Gilbert’s plight, they made arrangements to place him in foster care.
Gilbert’s dad was working in an auto parts store in Tampa when the call came. As the boy’s natural father, he had rights. Normally, the call made to him is just a cursory contact, a formality to clear the child before moving him into a new home. But Gilbert Sr. thought about his own childhood—he grew up without a father—and decided to do the right thing. He assumed sole custody of his two-year-old son. Gilbert went 20 years before he saw his mother again.
Gilbert Sr. had big dreams. A baseball star at Florida Memorial College, he walked on to Howard Schnellenberger’s University of Miami football squad as a fullback in 1980. That was the season freshman quarterback Jim Kelly became the team’s starter and the Hurricanes won the Peach Bowl. Gilbert Sr.'s sports career ended that year, however, when he injured his leg.
A tall, good-looking man, Gilbert’s father got into modeling, appearing in ads for Sears and JC Penney. He eventually found his way into acting and appeared in the first two episodes of Miami Vice. When the show became a hit, he decided to leverage his 15 minutes of fame and moved to Los Angeles to further his career. He and his son packed everything they owned into his Mazda RX-7 and headed west.
When they arrived in Hollywood, they discovered the rental market worked a little differently than in Miami. Landlords were looking for $1,000 or more up front, which was more than Gilbert Sr. had saved. The pair spent three nights sleeping in the car in a Burbank parking lot before securing a room at a YMCA.
The first order of business for Gilbert Sr. was to find a steady job. He talked up the manager of a furniture store, who couldn’t help but notice the seven-year-old kid dribbling a basketball between his legs while he waited near the car. Because his new boss was a hoops fanatic, Gilbert Sr. got the job.
Later, Gilbert Sr. landed a night job with UPS. He would work until morning, catch a couple of hours of sleep while his son was in school, and go on auditions in the evenings. He hired an agent, who helped him get bits parts in TV shows, movies and commercials (including high-paying ones for Tostitos and Pepcid AC). Gilbert Sr. was relentless in his pursuit of work. He was imaginative, too. Once he got into a softball game with the Days of Our Lives team and and launched several long home runs. Soon he was playing a fireman on the soap.
Having an actor for a father could be interesting. Gilbert once brought a friend home, and his father kept shouting, “Kick his ass!” Gilbert had to explain that his father, who was due to shoot a scene the next day in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Lionheart, was practicing his one line until he had it down perfectly.
Left to his own devices, Gilbert became the neighborhood pain in the ass, busting windows, keying cars and getting into minor trouble in a major way. He hated to be home alone and didn’t know how to unleash his boundless energy. He did well enough in school and learned how to charm his teachers with a big smile and a sly sense of humor. Still, without an outlet, Gilbert was headed for problems.
Around the age of 11, basketball replaced street football as Gilbert’s primary outlet. He played after school and, when his father left for the night shift at UPS, he would sneak out and ball it up all night. Before long, Gilbert became a familiar face on the local playgrounds. His father had an inkling of what he was doing and developed a network of friends in the area who would keep an eye on his son.
Jim Kelly, 1992 Pro Line
When the Arenas men did spend time together, their natural competitiveness came out. They often faced off in take-no-prisoners one-on-one basketball. During one game, Gilbert reached in to knock the ball away from his father, who cracked him on the hand and dislocated his finger. Watch Gilbert now and you can see that he almost never gets whistled for reaching in.
Gilbert Sr. coached a park league team, and since most of the boys were bigger and older than his son, he kept him on the bench. He explained to Gilbert that his goal was to win, not to give his son playing time. Gilbert quit, joined another team, and dropped 15 on his dad’s squad in their next meeting.
Gilbert also beat his dad at video football. When he explained the controls to his father, he neglected to enlighten him about all of the buttons. Gilbert Sr. found out, became furious and punched his son in the arm. They have never played video games again. Today, they still compete at pool, darts and dominoes.
ON THE RISE
Gilbert enrolled at nearby Birmingham High School and made the junior varsity. He was playing well, having a good time, and not taking the game too seriously—until the varsity coach cornered him to let him know he had reached his ceiling as a player.
That summer, Gilbert got up with the sun each morning and practiced until other players began showing up for games. He usually stayed at the court past dinner. In the fall, he transferred to Ulysses S. Grant High School in Van Nuys, a long bus ride away. It was worth it. The Lancers had a decent basketball team, though Grant was not a large school and its schedule included a couple of powder puff teams. Being young for his class at 14 and standing just 5-9, Gilbert did not yet have the look of a hoops superstar. He earned a starting role on coach Howard Levine’s varsity as a sophomore. Within a month, he blossomed into the best player in the league.
With a growing repertoire of slick one-on-one moves, Gilbert toyed with defenders. He could penetrate and score or pull up and hit from downtown. He was an adept passer, aggressive rebounder, and a defensive demon who could strip enemy dribblers or hammer balls back in a shooter’s face.
The game may have come naturally to Gilbert, but he was always practicing, always working on something new. He would often sneak back into his old elementary school and shoot for hours in the deserted gym. Gilbert was voted 1997 Valley Pac-8 Player of the Year as a sophomore, as well as Los Angeles All-City. He would earn these dual honors twice more, as a junior and senior.
After Gilbert’s junior year, during which he averaged just under 30 points a game, he applied to a math and science magnet school in Sylmar and joined that school’s summer league team. Now standing 6-3, Gilbert made the move to increase his level of competition. Sylmar played teams from Compton and Dominguez in the southern part of Los Angeles. Fearing he would lose his star, Levine hoped to convince Gilbert to stay at Grant. In the end, though he was accepted at Sylmar, Gilbert returned for his final season with the Lancers. (He would lead Grant to a share of the league title, while Sylmar went on to win the LA’s 3-A championship.)
At the start of Gilbert’s senior year, he wandered over to the UCLA campus and talked to the coaches. He and his dad had long dreamed of wearing a Bruins uniform. The school had shown some interest in him, and he wanted to more clarification. The deal, the Bruins told him, was that they were waiting to hear from Carlos Boozer (who eventually chose Duke). UCLA was also worried about Gilbert's attitude, believing he had run up the score on so-so opponents in high school. His academic record was a concern as well. Ultimately, the Bruins would regret their decision to pass on Gilbert. They had all sorts of trouble at shooting guard the next two years, while Gilbert torched them whenever he met them in the Pac-10.
Meanwhile, Gilbert also received solid offers from DePaul, Kansas State and Arizona. With Wildcats’ assistant Ray Tention hot on his trail, he chose to stay out west. Gilbert committed to Arizona and Lute Olson prior to his senior season at Grant, when he was still only 16-years-old. And what a season it was. Gilbert put up huge numbers, averaging 33.4 points, 7.9 rebounds, 3 assists and 4.6 steals.
Gilbert Arenas,
2003 Upper Deck Hardcourt
Gilbert joined an Arizona team that was rebuilding after losing Michael Dickerson, Mike Bibby and Miles Simon to the NBA a couple of years earlier. Olson, however, still had loads of talent, including Jason Gardner, Richard Jefferson, Loren Woods, Luke Walton and Michael Wright. The starter at shooting guard was Ruben Douglas, and Gilbert was asked to redshirt for a year. He didn’t think much of the plan. Gilbert once torched Douglas for 49 points in a high school game.
During Arizona’s informal summer games, Gilbert took nothing but pull-up jumpers. When real practices began, however, he pump-faked Douglas out of his jock. Gilbert had publicly stated that he hoped to start by the mid-point of his freshman year, and it was immediately clear that he would make good on this boast. Douglas ultimately transferred to New Mexico and topped the nation in scoring one season there.
In Gilbert's debut in an Arizona uniform, for the Blue team in the Pepsi Red-Blue pre-season scrimmage, he scored 22 points and hauled down five offensive rebounds in front of a raucous student crowd. A couple of weeks later, he was voted MVP of the pre-season NIT after pumping in 20 points and registering five steals against Kentucky in the championship game.
Gilbert's major adjustment to Division I competition was learning what to do without the ball. At Grant, he always had the rock or was always about to get it. Working off screens and getting himself open for good looks at the basket was a tough transition. When he got the ball, however, he knew what to do with it. In his first game against UCLA, Gilbert victimized the Bruins for 20 points. Days later, he was named PAC-10 Player of the Week.
Off the court, Gilbert found an interesting role with the Wildcats: class clown. He kept his teammates loose and tried to crack them up when the super-serious Olson had his back turned. It wasn’t that Gilbert did not like or respect his coach; he simply thought he could be too demanding and inflexible. Olson discouraged his freshman from showboating, insisting he display class at all times.
Olson’s wife, Bobbi, was just the opposite. The unofficial team mother, she went out of her way to make Gilbert feel at home. Coupled with the free and easy lifestyle of the Arizona campus, freshman year was as close to perfect as he could imagine.
Gilbert was an excellent fit for Arizona’s up-tempo style, and he came up big at both ends game after game. He scored 15.4 points per game on 45.3% shooting from the field. He was also a terror on defense, averaging two steals a contest.
Arizona entered the NCAA Tournament as a #1 seed, but the team was beat up from hard regular season. Jefferson was coming back from a stress fracture in his foot and was not yet playing at full speed. Woods, the key man in the middle, was sidelined by an aching back.
In their opener, the Wildcats appeared tight against Jackson State. They led by only eight points at intermission. Arizona found its rhythm in the second half, pulling away for a 71-47 win. Next up was a dangerous Wisconsin squad, which specialized in slowing down teams like the Wildcats. This the Badgers did, building a double-digit lead and thwarting every comeback attempt that Arizona could muster. Gilbert was high man with 21 points, but the Wildcats lost, 66-59. It was small consolation that the Badgers continued to roll all the way to the Final Four.
Despite Arizona's early exit during March Madness, the 2000-01 preseason polls had the Wildcats ranked among the best in the nation. Some believed they were Final Four material. Privately, the players thought they could go undefeated. Then the news about Bobbi Olson came—she was dying of cancer. The coach was devastated, as were his players. Her illness was kept out of the papers, but the team got off to a terrible start. Everyone around basketball knew something was wrong. Bobbi died on New Year’s Day.
Gilbert and his teammates chose to honor her memory by dedicating their season to her. Energized and inspired, they won 20 of their next 23 games. Gilbert was fantastic, burning opponents off the dribble and extending his range well past the the 3-point line. For the year, he upped his scoring to 16.5 ppg, and at 42.5%, he was deadly from beyond the arc. Gilbert also stepped up his defensive effort—though this was a result of being benched by Olson for poor practice habits.
Richard Jefferson, 2002 HIT
The Wildcats headed into the NCAA Tournament like a team on a mission. Gilbert was on fire in the opening game against Eastern Illinois, nailing nine of 13 shots from the field for 21 points in a 101-76 win. Next, Arizona choked off upstart Butler, 73-52. Gilbert netted 15 in the tilt, along with eight rebounds.
It looked like the championship run would end in the Sweet Sixteen against Mississippi, as the Rebels opened an 18-6 lead. But Arizona caught up early in the second half and—led by 16 points and 11 rebounds from Woods—and the Wildcats cruised to a 66-56 win. In the Midwest Final against Illinois, Gilbert scored 16 of Arizona’s first 24 points. He finished with 21. Gardner, meanwhile, hit clutch threes and foul shots in the waning minutes for an 87-81 victory. The Wildcats earned their first trip to the Final Four since their national title in 1997.
In the national semifinal, a win over Michigan State, Gilbert stunned the Spartans with six steals. On one of those thefts, Zach Randolph crashed into his chest. Two days later, when he took the floor against Duke for the championship, Gilbert was still feeling intense pain. That morning, he didn’t think he could get out of bed, much less suit up. But there was no way he was going to miss a shot at the national title.
The Wildcats and Blue Devils tangled in an exciting final, which fans in Carolina remember for the brilliant all-around performance of Shane Battier. Arizona fans still fume about because of questionable officiating. Duke guard Jason Williams played recklessly throughout the game, initiating contact at both ends of the floor, yet the referees rarely whistled him for fouls. The Blue Devils outlasted the Wildcats, 82-72.
Afterwards, Gilbert decided to enter the NBA draft, along with Jefferson, Gardner and Wright. Olson went on record saying that Gilbert was too young. But he felt that he had tested himself against the best the NCAA had to offer. To his mind, Gilbert had proved he would make a top pro.
Was Gilbert ready? Although he led Arizona in scoring, many scouts considered him too young, skinny and inexperienced to be an impact player at shooting guard and too basket-happy to play the point. When Gilbert scanned the talent available in the draft, however, he thought he might go in the lottery. It soon became clear he was wrong.
Gilbert Sr. threw a draft day party for his son in Studio City. After 20 picks had passed and his name had not been called, Gilbert called the coach who had recruited him out of high school. He wanted to know if there was any way he could undo the damage. Could someone call David Stern? Gilbert was panicked and crying—the first time he had shed tears since he was a child. That's when he heard some good news. The Golden State Warriors had taken him in the second round, with the 31st pick overall.
Gilbert collected himself and made the same prediction he had three springs earlier: I’m going to start by mid-season. Then he headed to the gym to work out.
Gilbert arrived at training camp slotted behind first-round pick Jason Richardson and backup Bob Sura. Coach Brian Winters was not a fan of underclassmen in the NBA and promised to keep Gilbert on the pine regardless of the team’s record. The rookie practiced hard, got into a handful of blowouts, learned what he could from watching, and mostly kept his opinions to himself. Besides youngsters Richardson, Larry Hughes and Antawn Jamison, the Warriors were light on talent, and Winters had a hard time coaxing big efforts out of his players. The result was a dismal 21-win season.
Gilbert stayed sharp in practice. He managed to get a key to Golden State's facility so he could work on his game at night. He also played a lot of pickup games in the local playgrounds in defiance of his $850,000 contract. Gilbert reasoned that this was the only action he would see where guys came at him ferociously. And they did. Everyone wanted a shot at NBA meat, and Gilbert obliged them.
Still, he sat. When the teams were announced for the Got Milk Rookie Game, Gilbert’s name was nowhere to be found. It frustrated him to watch the contest, mostly because he had destroyed so many of the players in college. Gilbert became even more determined to be ready when his chance finally came. (He suited up for the sophomore squad the following year and was named MVP).
2001 Sports Illustrated, Final Four issue
With Hughes struggling at the point and the playoffs out of range, Winters asked Gilbert if he would like to try his hand running the offense. He had never been interested in playing point guard, but minutes were minutes, and he had seen precious few to that point.
Learning on the job, Gilbert dished out 3.7 assists and scored over 10 points a game the rest of the way. It wasn’t always pretty. When in doubt, Gilbert just turned on the jets and outran his defenders. Sometimes he raced into traps, but at other times he created great opportunities for his teammates. When all was said and done, Gilbert finished fourth in scoring and third in assists and steals among NBA rookies—despite starting just 30 games. In those starts, he averaged 14.1 points and 5.1 assists.
During a trip to Miami for a game against the Heat during his rookie year, Gilbert finally met his mother again. He had imagined an emotional reunion, but when she introduced herself neither knew what to do or say.
Over the summer, the Warriors unloaded Hughes, Blaylock and Dean Oliver, and drafted Mike Dunleavy instead of Jay Williams—which basically gave the point guard job to Gilbert. He took a crash course in the position, watching tapes of former Wildcats Mike Bibby and Damon Stoudamire. When the 2002-03 season started, he was not only prepared to run the point, he was expecting to lead the Warriors to victory every game.
MAKING HIS MARK
With the offense now in his hands, Gilbert was very serious about his job. Happy-go-lucky off the court, he became increasingly frustrated. The Warriors lost 44 games in '02-03, and a lot were decided by the end of the second quarter. Gilbert unleashed his anger at officials, racking up a lot of technicals, but he held his tongue with teammates—though sometimes he had to take halftime showers (in full uniform) to cool off. Gilbert also smashed his share of clipboards and threw his share of chairs. Richardson nicknamed him “Baby Ron Artest.”
Gilbert appeared in all 82 contests for the Warriors and finished with excellent numbers, including 18.3 points per game and 6.3 assists. He logged nearly 3,000 minutes and answered any questions about whether he could be a productive NBA player. At season’s end, he was voted the the league’s Most Improved Player, beating out fellow point guards Chauncey Billups and Tony Parker.
Gilbert’s emergence thrilled Golden State fans—until it exposed an interesting loophole in the NBA’s collective bargaining agreement. Because he was a second-round pick, Gilbert was not only eligible for early-bird free agency, but the Warriors were not allowed to offer him more than the average salary of $4.6 million to stay in a Golden State uniform. In order to keep Gilbert, the team would have had to gut its roster. The Bay Area faithful went crazy when they found out they were likely to lose Gilbert. Many launched web sites supporting him and urging the Warriors to find a way to keep him.
Ultimately, however, it was the Washington Wizards that put the best deal on the table—six years at $65 million. Having closed the books on the Michael Jordan era, the team’s new coach, Eddie Jordan, and new GM, Ernie Grunfeld, wanted to rebuild around a nucleus of exciting young talent. Already in the fold were Hughes and Kwame Brown, the top pick in the 2001 draft. Jerry Stackhouse, recovering from knee surgery, would serve as a veteran presence once he returned to action.
Gilbert blossomed in his new surroundings in the 2003-04 campaign, scoring a triple-double in his forth game as a Wizard. His goal each time down the floor was to get into the paint and either go to the rim or dish off. He also became adept at shooting off pick-and-rolls and screens. After a couple of months, NBA defenders learned that they were better off laying back and conceding the 20-foot jumper. This is where Gilbert got into a trouble sometimes. A streaky shooter, he rarely passed when he was feeling it and subsequently took his teammates out of the offense. When the shot wasn’t there, his fellow Wizards did not always move without the ball. Coach Jordan encouraged Gilbert to think about scoring but reminded him he also had to ignite the offense in other ways.
At season’s end, the Wizards had just 25 wins, but the team’s fortunes were looking up. Hughes stayed relatively healthy and played well, Stackhouse contributed after his February return, and role players Brendan Haywood, Juan Dixon, Etan Thomas and Jarvis Hayes logged valuable minutes. Gilbert led the Wizards in scoring at 19.6 ppg and reached the 40-point plateau twice. In a game against the Lakers, he equaled the franchise mark with eight three-pointers.
Gilbert Arenas, 2002 Bowman Chrome
Gilbert’s growing friendship with Hughes was another important part of his development. The NBA’s version of the “Odd Couple,” the two young stars found plenty of common ground, both on and off the court. Gilbert was the smiling, gregarious guy who wore his emotions on his sleeve. Hughes was the quiet, serious type, who liked his privacy, his family, and the occasional night out with a rap star.
They say every successful NBA team needs three go-to guys. In Gilbert and Hughes, Washington believed it had two. Prior to the 2004-05 season, Grunfeld picked up a third—another ex-Warrior, Jamison. The trio performed as hoped, with Gilbert and Jamison making the All-Star squad and Hughes leading the league in steals and being named to the NBA All-Defensive First Team. Though s everal players battled injuries—including Hughes, who missed 20 games with a broken finger, and Brown, with a broken foot—talent and teamwork steadied the boat whenever it reached troubled waters. The Wizards went 45-37 to finish with their best record in 26 years.
Gilbert ended the year averaging 25.5 points, 5.1 assists and 4.7 rebounds a game. With Hughes going for 22 a night, Washington featured the highest-scoring backcourt in the league.
Washington’s #5 seed in the playoffs earned them a shot at the young Chicago Bulls, who ambushed the Wizards in the first two games of the series. Washington came back to knot the series and seemed to have Game 5 locked up when the Bulls made a 10-0 run to even the score 110-110 with five seconds left. Gilbert responded with a dramatic buzzer-beater for the victory.
In Game 6, Gilbert was ice cold, but he made the game-turning play on defense. With two minutes left and Chicago up by four, Kirk Hinrich stole the ball from Hughes and drove the other way all alone. Gilbert broke toward his basket as soon as he saw the play developing and soared through the air to tip Hinrich's shot away. The defensive gem ignited a 7-0 run for Washington, which triumphed 94-91.
Next up were Shaquille O’Neal, Dwyane Wade and the Miami Heat. Without a solid center, the Wizards were helpless against Shaq, and no one could stop Wade, either. Miami took the first three games easily. In Game 4, the Wizards found themselves on the short end again, down 13 points in the fourth quarter, their season just minutes away from its conclusion. But with one last, great gasp, Washington pulled it together and roared back into the lead—though only for a moment. The Wizards lost, 99-95.
Larry Hughes, 2001 Heritage
Gilbert and Jamison were joined for the 2005–06 season by Caron Butler, who was acquired from the Lakers for Kwame Brown. Together they formed the NBA’s top-scoring trio, with Gilbert netting 29.3 a game followed by Jamison (20.5) and Butler (17.6). Gilbert was also among the league leaders in steals and assists. Somehow, he was overlooked by the fans when the All-Star ballots were tallied. He did made it in as an injury sub for Jermaine O’Neal.
The Wizards finished strong and snagged a playoff berth with a 42–40 record. They were the highest-scoring team in the East. Unfortunately, they had to play the surging Cavaliers, a 50-win team led by LeBron James. Cleveland took a 2–1 lead in the series after Gilbert missed a game-winning 3-pointer in Game 3. He redeemed himself in Game 4 by exploding for 20 in the fourth quarter to even the series.
Alas, the Wizards couldn't hold back the Cavaliers, who took the series in six. The last two wins were one-point heartbreakers in overtime. Gilbert sent Game 6 into OT with a 30-foot buzzer-beater, but later he missed two free throws that allowed the Cavs to score the winning bucket.
Gilbert was certain that Washington was just a player or two away from having a dominant club. During the off-season, he offered to take a pay cut if the team used it to secure a key free agent or two. The team did sign two players—Darius Songaila and DeShawn Stevenson—but they were hardly difference-makers in 2006–07.
Gilbert definitely was, however. Time and again he hit long jumpers or driving layups in the waning moments of games to give the Wizards a victory, or at least keep them alive. In a December meeting with Kobe Bryant and the Lakers, Gilbert exploded for 60 points. The Wizards won 147–141 in overtime, and Gilbert smashed Earl Boykins's NBA record for points in an overtime period, dropping 16 on LA.
Performances like these enabled Gilbert to average around 30 points a game in the early going, and this proved enough for him to out-ballot Vince Carter for a starting spot in the All-Star Game. Butler, who was also having a nice year, made his All-Star Game debut as well.
As usuual, there was plenty of drama in Gilbert’s basketball life. After he was left off the roster for the FIBA World Championship, he vowed to make Team USA director Jerry Colangelo pay. When the Wizards played the Phoenix Suns, Gilbert lit them up for 54 points and glared at Colangelo throughout the game.
The season seemed to be heading in the right direction for Washington until second-half injuries began to diminish the starting five. The critical blow was a season-ending knee injury for Gilbert, suffered in an April collision with Gerald Wallace of the Charlotte Bobcats. The Wizards squeezed into the playoffs, but they were swept by the Cavs in the first round.
G’ilberts knee injury, a torn left MCL, robbed him of almost two entire seasons. He also underwent micro-fracture surgery. Gilbert made a total of 10 starts in 2007–08 and 2008–09. The Wizards did an admirable job the first year, finishing with a winning record (followed by another first-round loss to the Cavs). In year two of Gilbert’s absence, the team fell apart. Washington lost 63 games, tying the franchise record for futilty.
Caron Butler, 2007 Upper Deck
Gilbert was finally back in playing shape for the 2009–10 season. New coach Flip Saunders also had Jamison and Butler in the lineup, along with newly acquired role players Mike Miller and Randy Foye. Gilbert was getting his 20-plus a night and doing double-duty as Washington's de facto point guard, but the club was losing regularly and was mired in the Southeast Division cellar.
During the Christmas holidays, news began trickling out of the Verizon Center that Gilbert had brought three unloaded guns into the Washington locker room. Later it was revealed that he and Javaris Crittendon had been waving guns at each other in a dispute over gambling debts. This happened a month after beloved longtime owner Abe Pollin—who changed the team's name from Bullets to remove the taint of gun violence—had passed away. And of course it was not Gilbert’s first association with firearms. As a young player in Golden State, he was also caught with an improperly registered weapon in his possession.
When local cops and federal investigators got involved, Gilbert stopped talking. Prior to that, however, he had attempted to shade the incident as an all-in-fun tussle between teammates. He explained the presence of the guns—a violation of NBA rules and DC law—by saying he had brought them to work from his home in Virginia so his kids wouldn't get them. Gilbert also issued a public apology.
Bad things do happen to good people, and by all accounts Gilbert is a decent guy. The gun incident won't define him as a person or player, but it may bring him into the crosshairs of the NBA, which could use him as an example for other potential gun-toting stars. The league, in fact, suspended him indefinitely. A long suspension during a comeback season is not what Gilbert needed. Nor is a legal hassle over the morals clause in NBA playing agreements—which would give the Wizards a convenient out of a top-heavy contract.
The bigger problem for Gilbert may be DC's strict gun laws. There normally isn’t much room to manuever with authorities. There is a chance he could face jail time.
Whatever the outcome, one thing is certain. Gilbert always takes the court feeling he has something to prove. Having cemented his reputation as one of basketball’s most dynamic scorers, he must now lift a talented but often aimless club from mediocrity to the exalted status of a conference power—and live down the inevitable jokes as one of the NBA’s true gunners.
GILBERT THE PLAYER
Javaris Crittenton, 2008 Topps
Very few NBA stars can legitimately boast Gilbert's combination of skills. He has excellent range on his jumper, can nail the mid-range pull-up and can dunk over most players in the league. As a point guard, his penetrate-and-pass style works well with slashers like Antawn Jamison and Caron Butler.
Even post-surgery, Gilbert is a relentless attacker. Whether he is hot or cold, he comes at opponenets the same way. Unafraid of fellow guards, he instead studies the defensive tendencies of the forwards and centers he is likely to encounter after shaking off his primary defender. He jumps into the shot-blockers and pulls up against the wide-body defenders, ensuring him either of a trip to the foul line or an open look at the rim.
Gilbert is a smart defender who is conscious of beating his man to a spot, and he rarely reaches in to pick up cheap fouls. Most of his steals come from playing the passing lanes. He has also become adept at slapping the ball away from big men when they put it on the floor.
Gilbert has shown the ability to lead his team, but he also provide unnecessary distractions at times. No one disputes his talent. But critics question whether he has the mental make-up to win a championship.
En helt, hverken mere eller mindre.
Lidt fra og om Gilbert Arenas. Den mand er ganske enkelt et mirakel, intet mindre. Manden er en basketball spiller i NBA, der havde 3-4 fantastiske sæsoner på et lorte hold. Som bloggede om alt mellem himmel om jord. Som tillod sig at have idiosynkrasier, og som ikke var flov over det. Som dyrkede sit spil med ægte dedikerethed, ingen lykke der, ingen latterlig tale om passion, også det, men mere end det. En tragedie, ikke så meget fordi han krydsede en streg, for ærlig talt havde han krydset den mange gange før, men fordi filmen knækkede lidt for ham. Og den knækkede mest af alt fordi han fløj højt, blev skadet, blev deprimeret og derefter tog et par pistoler med i omklædnings rummet og måske, måske ikke pegede dem mod en eller anden. Men nu er han blevet traded til Orlando Magic. Ikke et af mine ynglingshold, men det var hans gamle hold heller ikke (jeg hader begge holds dragter, de er blå og kolde.) og det bliver Orlando heller aldrig. Derfor kan jeg jo godt holde med dem alligevel, der er alligevel ingen af topholdende som er fede. Lakers har Kobe og kobe må man respektere, men ligefrem holde med ham? Niks. Miami har de tre store og Wade er fed, lebron kan jeg overhoved ikke blive fascineret af og Bosh er ordinær, men god. Boston, de er for fede og de har virkelig et hold. Orlando, har Howard, et fysisk monster med absolut ingen moves, men nu har de altså også Gilbert Arenas og det er ganske fucking fedt... jeg håber, for historien om en helt, at han vinder et mesterskab, eller to og smasker lebron og kobe på vejen. Det ville være fedt.
Lakers har også Phil Jackson og bare lige for at påpege hvorfor man ikke kan undgå at elske amerikansk sport så tjeck den her bog ud (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sacred-Hoops-Spiritual-Lessons-Hardwood/dp/1401308813/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1292895621&sr=1-1), Phil Jackson = The Zen master & det er fanme ikke for sjovt og han er ikke for sjov, han er tværtimod den absolut mest vindende træner de sidste 15 år.
Et par citater fra Phil "I gave it my body and mind, but I have kept my soul." "Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the Me for the We."
# "Once you've done the mental work, there comes a point you have to throw yourself into the action and put your heart on the line. That means not only being brave, but being compassionate towards yourself, your teammates and your opponents."
# "If you meet the Buddha in the lane, feed him the ball."
# "Like life, basketball is messy and unpredictable. It has its way with you, no matter how hard you try to control it. The trick is to experience each moment with a clear mind and open heart. When you do that, the game--and life--will take care of itself."
# "Approach the game with no preset agendas and you'll probably come away surprised at your overall efforts."
Her er en artikel fra Esquire, og lidt forskellige citater, pranks og lign og et link til hans blog på nba.com http://www.nba.com/blog/gilbert_arenas.html#061019_01. Og lad mig lige nævne hvorfor han er et mirakel, et af mine mirakler, sådan et som giver håb i mørket. Det er han fordi han er basketball spiller og prankster, en rigtig prankster laver ikke sine pranks de gængse steder, niks han dukker op de mærkeligste steder og får på en eller anden mærkelig måde skabt sig en niche hvor han kan få lov. En rigtig prankster kommer som regel også ud i noget tragisk og selskabt, det er en del af miraklet.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12185-2005Apr23.html
We can't remember Gilbert Arenas without remembering some of the pranks he pulled on teammates during his time in D.C. We do that in the next installment of Gilbert Arenas Tribute Day.http://www.bulletsforever.com/2010/12/20/1887057/gilbert-arenas-tribute-day-remembering-arenas-pranks
I understand what people think because of the perception of me. They read the funny stuff, like me taking a crap in [teammate] Andray Blatche's shoes. But nobody is going to ask what Andray did to deserve it.
So I was sitting in my house playing Halo and I'm looking at my surveillance camera and I see Dominic and Nick creep up to my property all decked out. They parked across the street and they're running towards my house wearing masks and helmets. They came around the side of the house, jumped the wall, and came in through the garage. But by the time they did all that, I already was out of the house and jumped the other wall. They were in the house looking for me and I was across the street flattening their tires so when they decided to leave they'd be on flats. They looked around the house and couldn't find me so they came outside and saw me across the street flattening their tires. I called my friend and had him come pick me up and take me back to the house.
When they left the house, they stole my daddy's toaster! I like making toast! So I told them, Since you don't want to give my toaster back, it's war.
EDIT: User ThaCaronic pointed out that I left off the culmination of this epic tale. Because no story is complete without an appearance by Andray Blatche's chubby cousin.
I told them, Since you don't want to give my toaster back, it's war. He wanted his stuff back, I wanted my stuff back so I told them that we were going to have a paintball shootout.
We all went to the store like Sports Authority and bought all these paintball guns, like eight or nine new ones (because I already had three), then we bought the CO2 cartridges and like 12,000 paintballs and I even bought a couple paintball grenades.
We tried to make the teams fair.
It was Nick and Dominic and then Nick recruited last year's rookie, Andray Blatche. I thought Andray had enough of the pranks, but I guess he didn't. Andray brought his two friends, to make it five on their team.
My team was me, my friend John and three guys who were at my house hooking up stereo equipment.
So we finished buying everything and were in the store parking lot and Nick was mad that I had all the CO2 so he started to take some of mine. I was like, "Put the CO2 down or I'm going to shoot you with the paintball gun." But then he realizes I'm really going to shoot him with the paintball gun, and he puts it back. "You see what happens when you follow directions" But as I'm closing the trunk with the CO2 in it, he takes some and tries to jump in Dominic's car. I said, "Dominic, do not close that door." Nick is screaming, "Close the door Dominic! Close the door!" So Dominic left the door open. I go to Nick, "You have three seconds to put the CO2 back. One! Two!" He started to scramble to put it back and I got him anyway. I got him like six times. So he's laying in the car all mad saying, "I don't want to play no more."
So the war is still on.
I tell them that the shootout is planned for 12 o'clock midnight in my backyard because it's pure black back there. You can't see nothing. So I tell them, "12 o'clock, be in my backyard and we're going at it five on five."
We're putting all our stuff together at my place and they're putting their stuff together at their place but they are having trouble with it so I have my boy John and my other teammate Adam to go over to their place and have them help them fix their guns. And when John and Adam showed up at their place they tried to ambush them, thinking that I was going to come too. But I wasn't. So John and Adam had to run out of there.
So it's like 11:10 at night and all you here are paintball hitting the windows. POOM. POOM. POOM. POOM. POOM. They were already in the backyard. They showed up an hour early.
So we hurried up and put on all of our gear and snuck outside through some of the vents in the house.
And then we had a nice, good old paintball shootout in the dark.
They ran out of CO2 pretty quick because my team had most of it so one of Andray's friends yells, "Aww, it's not fair!" and they started to bail and jumped back over the wall. But one the kids was a little too heavy. His name is Jamar. That's 'Dray's cousin. Jamar couldn't get over the wall because Jamar has been eating one too many Twinkies.
So Jamar got stuck in my yard with the five of us. We gave him the chance to walk out like a man, or cry like a girl. He did both. He cried like a little girl while he was walking and running while we were shooting paintballs at him. I told him, "Hey, come in the lion's den, you're bound to get hit."
They said that he got hit so many times that he had trouble putting his clothes on the next day.
We played for about an hour and a half. I haven't had that much fun in a long time. What people don't realize is that when you're in the NBA, you lose stuff like that. You're not in there with kids, you're in there with grown men that have families. By having these young kids on the team, it's fun for me because I get to have that childhood that I lost. I lost it when I came into the NBA when I got picked No. 31 because I was so determined to be the best that I didn't get to actually have fun having fun, if that makes sense.
That's the moral of the story: I had fun.
Et par qoutes: http://www.gilbertology.net/quotes/
10. "Congratulations! You get to go into the mind of me, Gilbert Arenas, of the Washington Wizards. Good luck."
This was the first line from Arenas' first blog entry on NBA.com. Even at the beginning, he knew that anyone who dared to read his thoughts was in for a wild ride, and indeed we were.
9. "i wake up this morning and seen i was the new JOHN WAYNE..lmao media is too funny."
Arenas' first tweet after news broke about his gun scandal Like the first line from his blog, his first tweet after gun-gate gave us a pretty good idea that things were only going to go downhill from there.
8. "I told them to cut the leg off a couple times. You know, cut it off and then bring it back to me when it was all healed. Because, you know, Heather Mills on Dancing with the Stars, she had that leg. I was saying I could borrow one of those and finish out the season. But they wasn't going for that."
Arenas describing his somewhat ill-conceived plan on his blog to get back on the court after his first surgery.
7. "When coach said after we get the rebound to get the ball to me, from there I knew the shot I was going to take. I just feel so comfortable taking that shot because I practice it. It's not a rushed shot. You know, it's a great shot for me.
Like I said, I'm 8-for-8 for this year on anything behind the 30-foot line and I feel comfortable shooting that.
I mean, because I know I'm going to shoot it, he's still in retreat. You know, if I know I'm going to shoot it, I'm always more dangerous than the defender."
When Arenas was in full-attack mode, he knew how to put his defenders on retreat in almost any situation, even in final moments of the game. His description of how he created space for his game-winning shot on his blog gave us the best window into his attack mentality.
6. "Before, in Eddie's offense, because it was made for the 3s and the 4s, I took a lot of wild shots, fastbreak threes. But since I have the ball more, I probably don't need to do that," he said. "I plan on taking less than 100 threes. I'm not going to be a three-point shooter this year. I worked most of the year on mid-range jumpers."
Arenas on his new role in Flip Saunders' offense. He took 181 threes in 32 games that season.
5. "They read the funny stuff, like me taking a crap in [teammate] Andray Blatche's shoes. But nobody is going to ask what Andray did to deserve it. You read about it because that's when I'm at my goofiest, when I'm around my teammates. I don't get in trouble outside of this building. You are not going to catch me drinking and driving, or picking up prostitutes. People don't see what my teammates see, the guy who is in here three times a day working out. That's the guy they don't see."
The last great quote from Arenas. In fairness, we really didn't hear enough about his incredible work-ethic or how he avoided some of the pitfalls of the NBA nighlife. But seriously, how can we focus on that when he's talking about taking a crap in someone's shoe?
4. "They told me that I might have won. They was 95 percent sure that I won, but they still didn't know yet, they were still calculating the numbers.
They said, 'We're 95 percent sure that you overtook Vince Carter.'
So I woke my daughter up and we started dancing.
She was crying because she was still sleepy, but I considered it laughing."
Arenas on his blog, showing off his parenting skills after learning he had been named to the starting lineup for the 2007 All-Star Game.
3. "The hibachi is coming to a city near you. I'm cooking chicken and shrimp, but if you want to throw a double team my way, filet mignon gets cooked too."
Arenas on his blog, after his Hibachi nickname caught on with the public.
2. "i guess everyone wants me to act like the rest of the nba twitters players...(i bought a shirt today from the mall)(practice was tough 2 (coach said he likes my high socks lol lol)(we had a close game today) is that really who u wanna follow..sounds a little boring to me"
Gilbert Arenas summing up what makes him different and what endears him to fans better than any of us ever could on Twitter.
1. "My swag was phenomenal."
Arenas after draining a buzzer-beater to defeat the Bucks. If there were four words more apt at describing Arenas at the peak of his talents, I haven't heard them.
ABSTRACT: A pseudo-psychotherapeutic assessment that attempts to shed light on the eclectic nature and unique brain chemistry of the NBA's most unheralded superstar.
SUBJECT: Gilbert Arenas
AGE: 24
HEIGHT: 6'4"
WEIGHT: 210
OCCUPATION: Point guard, Washington Wizards, National Basketball Association
OCCUPATIONAL FUNCTION
To dictate and maintain the flow of the game; to get the ball to the bigs; to shoot when he can, from wherever he can, which is pretty much wherever he wants; to run an offense formulated around him, in particular his physical strength, his inherent toughness, and his desire to take the big shot (see complicating factor 5, below).
ACHIEVEMENT LEVEL
Fourth in the league in scoring last year (twenty-nine points per game); second in three-pointers made; led his employer, a perennial league doormat, to the playoffs for the second straight year--this time while averaging a league-high thirty-four points postseason.
SYMPTOMS
Never stops training (never), never leaves his hotel room while on the road, starts ridiculously ambitious collections he cannot possibly finish, goes to extreme lengths to keep others from leaving him voice-mail messages, sleeps on a couch even while at home, maintains grudges for self-motivation, formulates grandiose architectural plans, fights dirty with coworkers, crushes his opponents in Xbox without remorse.
COMPLICATING FACTORS
1. Subject was not selected until the second round of the 2001 NBA draft.
2. Despite previously noted achievements, subject was left off the 2006 All-Star team initially and the U. S. national team.
3. Subject plays (excellent) basketball in what is otherwise a football city.
4. Subject works in the shadows of more visible, highly marketable players throughout the league.
5. Subject ended last season by uncharacteristically choking on two free throws against the Cleveland Cavaliers after playing LeBron James to a standstill for six games.
PRELIMINARY DIAGNOSIS
Hypercompetitiveness syndrome tempered by disruptive patterns of obsessively focused semipointless addictions, masochistic recreational-wrestling tendencies, a sociopathic room-service addiction, and a demonstrated case of manufactured-nemesis dependence.
ENTRY 1: SUBJECT REPORTS A DREAM
SUBJECT: Lately I've been dreaming I'm playing basketball on a desert island.
OBSERVER: Like in the middle of the ocean? With palm trees?
SUBJECT: Yeah, playing full court, a real game. That's all there is on the island--just the court, water lapping right up to the edge of the blacktop. It's just water all out there. Deep. Then I notice there are fans out in the waves, circling us.
OBSERVER: What are they doing? Swimming?
SUBJECT: They're watching. Riding Jet Skis, lying on floats out there in the waves. Swimming, too, I guess. But a long way out. What do you think that means? I've been asking people.
OBSERVER: Maybe you want a little distance. Or you feel surrounded.
SUBJECT: Yeah. The other dream I've been having is my teeth falling out. But that just means that someone is stabbing me in the back. So I know that one.
ENTRY 2: SUBJECT'S PEER-ASSESSMENT METHODOLOGY
I was taught that you find out who players are just like how you find out about dogs. If you have a litter of dogs and you put them in the dark, put them in a corner, and you shake your keys, whatever dogs come to those keys, them's the ones you want. They're curious. They want to know what's going on. They're ready. They're fighting. The ones who sit in the corner, they're afraid. They don't have the heart. That's how I look at people. You put them in a situation and see how they act. Some of these great stars in the league, some of them are scared to take big shots. Some of them are scared to fail. Some of them don't have the heart. You start seeing it and you start picking at it. Other people--like Earl Boykins, he's a fourth-quarter player. Ben Gordon is a fourth-quarter player. The fourth-quarter player is the one you want. Me, I'm gonna shoot that shot every time. Every time.
ENTRY 3: OFF-SEASON TRAINING HABITS OBSERVED
The Wizards' strength coach feeds the subject the ball, off both makes and misses, which aren't many. He shoots from beyond the three-point arc, stringing together nine made shots in a row at one point, then twelve. Later, from a full four paces farther back, he makes fourteen in a row. That, it should be noted, is a heave. The subject is expressionless when the ball goes in. The loose upward thrust of his body, the calibrated arc, the soft thwick of the net--it does not seem to please him or affirm anything about what he is doing. But missing, even once, makes him wince. Missing twice makes him tilt his head, as if the world were presenting him with a puzzle, a slight recalibration that needs to be made. When he reaches a thousand shots, he turns, smiling and loose, and fires at every basket in the gym from that one spot--twenty-eight feet, then twenty feet, then fifty and at least sixty and fifty and twenty again. He makes four out of six.
ENTRY 4: SELF-IMPOSED ISOLATING TENDENCIES
OBSERVER'S NOTE: In five seasons in the NBA, first with Golden State and now the Wizards--forty-one road games per year, plus exhibition trips and, more recently, the playoffs--the subject estimates that he has left his hotel room a total of six times, and only in L. A., where he grew up.
I think it came from my first year. I was so depressed that I wasn't playing that I didn't want to go out. I'm gonna stay and do sit-ups or jumping jacks. And I'm not gonna come out. Not till morning. There's nothing out there for me. I don't know those cities. I don't know where to go. I don't have any people. Other guys will be out, the steak house, the clubs, just rollin'. Me, I'm fine. Time is falling off. Sun's coming up. I'm doing more sit-ups than the night before. I'll watch three or four movies. I'll watch infomercials. The last thing I bought was this colon cleanser. I just got talked into it. I'm like, Man, he makes it sound so good.
ENTRY 5: SELF-PERCEPTION OF OCCUPATIONAL ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES
When I go into the ring, I know every team and what those players do. I don't pay attention to the guards. Get those bigs. Okay, this one takes charges, so I have to stop and pull. I've got to trick him. Or, say, Alonzo--he loves to block shots, so I'm going to jump into him every time. I have to think: How many fouls does Shaq have? Two in the first period? Okay, no one else is going to get that next foul on him. Our bigs--they're going to jump away from Shaq. So all right, let me go in there and get hammered. That's okay--I like the contact. Then that's three fouls, and I don't have to worry about him until after halftime. I would run into anything. Once that ball goes up, I don't feel none of that. I'm ready to get dirty. Let's play a little dirt.
ENTRY 6: THE SUBJECT OBSERVED IN OBSESSIVE MODALITY
It is Wednesday, the day after movies are traditionally released on DVD, and the subject piles up purchases at a local video store. He collects with no particular agenda in mind. He's just hungry for more. He grabs the new releases first, two and three at a time, piling them against his chest like a stack of library books. He is not picky. On this day his haul includes The Libertine, The Matador, Basic Instinct 2, three submarine movies, a dance movie, two romances, and a handful of comedies. As the stack grows higher, he slows. How many does he plan to buy today? "I usually stop when I get to here," he says, holding a finger to his chin.
He doesn't know when he will watch them, or even if he ever will. Back at home, in the supremely carpeted media room of his cozy, overcouched theater, he has a hard drive capable of holding more than ten thousand titles. Ask him and he'll tell you he wants them all. All the movies. Ever.
"I have so much entertainment going on in my house that I don't need to go out," he explains. "I don't need to go to the movies if I own all these movies. I don't need to go out to a game because I've got all these video games. I don't have to leave my house to have a conversation because I just hop online and have fun with my friends, talk trash, and do whatever we're gonna do right there."
ENTRY 7: EARLY FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE (GETTING CLOTHESLINED BY A BENCHWARMER)
The guy who helped my career out, truthfully--it's hard to believe--was Marc Jackson from Philly. Not the guard Mark Jackson. The big Marc Jackson. The year after he signed his contract with Golden State, he wasn't playing, either, so we'd come to the gym, eight o'clock, and we'd play full-court one-on-one. Me, him, and Dean Oliver. We'd play twenty-one, one-on-one, two-on-one, full-court one-on-one. From eight until practice started. Three hours. Every day. Every time we drove past him, he'd clothesline us. He was like, "Well, you're in the NBA now. You're going to feel pain." He just hammered us every day. So I learned how to be tough. And once I started playing, I was like, Okay, I'm used to this already.
ENTRY 8: UNUSUAL SLEEPING RITUALS
SUBJECT [interviewed while playing two-man Halo in his bedroom]: You can't see very good. I'll sit down on the floor if you want.
OBSERVER: No, I can tell you like to play on the bed. I'll stay here.
SUBJECT: I just started sleeping in this bed after three years. I used to sleep over there.
OBSERVER: Where? On the couch?
SUBJECT: Yeah. I trained myself to sleep on the couch.
OBSERVER: Why would you do that?
SUBJECT: You know.
OBSERVER: Not really.
SUBJECT: I don't like women all up on me, touching me. So I get up and go.
OBSERVER: Yeah?
SUBJECT: Then they get up and go. [Subject points to the video-game screen.] Stay there. Wait for me behind that door.
OBSERVER: What door?
SUBJECT: [shaking his head]: I discovered that women don't like that much.
ENTRY 9: EARLY FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE (GETTING SCHOOLED BY THE GLOVE)
It's my first year, and I'm finally starting to play. I'm getting comfortable. I'm averaging, as a starter, sixteen, six, and six. And then I run up against Gary Payton. First time in my career I'm happy to get subbed out of a game. That's when he was still the Glove, and he's just doing everything, anything. He's posting up our big. He's grabbing and pulling the ball. Any time he gets close to me, I'm picking the ball up. He's just got me screwed up. So he has eighteen points in the first period. And he comes up to me, he's like, "Rookie, you're lucky I'm not an A. I. type of player or I'd have forty on you." And coach subs me out. BRRRRR. [Note: Subject does an excellent imitation of a buzzer.] Woo! I run off the court and I'm like, "Oh, my God. Eighteen points! I'm glad I'm out. All right, Bobby Sura. Go get 'em, tiger." I never said one word to G. P. But now, after that game, I got him every time. I think it's something in my mind about what he did to me that first year. He embarrassed me so bad. As soon as he thinks about sticking me, I go at him. I know he's slower than me, so I have to take advantage of that. That's my mentality: This is your chance.
ENTRY 10: EXPLORATION OF ABERRANT CLUTCH PERFORMANCE
OBSERVER: In between those free throws against the Cavs, LeBron came over, pressed his hand against your chest, and said something to you. What did he say?
SUBJECT: He said, "If you miss this shot, you know who's gonna hit the game winner."
OBSERVER: What went through your mind?
SUBJECT: I wasn't even thinking about it. Like, I heard him. But I don't miss free throws. That's the thing: I never miss free throws at the end. And this was a big free throw. The first one, I shot it, and I went, like, What? That wasn't me. It reminded me of this movie I saw where a kid is controlling the ball from the stands. All of my balls hit the front or back of the rim--nothing ever to the left or right.
OBSERVER: In the middle of all that, you're thinking about the mechanics?
SUBJECT: Yeah.
ENTRY 11: SUBJECT'S PERCEIVED IMPORTANCE OF CATHARTIC VIOLENCE IN A TEAM SETTING
We have a couple of players who are very aggressive, like Awvee Storey. You know, when you have aggressive people, they have to relieve some of that. And I'm one of those people. I don't care--I wrastle. Wrestling. Hurting. I'll bite, punch him in the side. I'll say, Look, you punch me in the stomach once, I'll punch you in the stomach once. We'll see who falls on the floor first. It's like: No punching in the face. No chest and ribs. We don't hurt each other. I mean, a couple of rug burns here or there. I remember one day, he laid on top of me and was pinching my nose so hard that it bruised. For two days, it was just burgundy. He was calling me Rudolph. Me and him, we can't be in the same room. Our personalities clash because he's a bully and I don't like being bullied by anybody.
ENTRY 12: COMPETITIVE RESPONSE OBSERVED (OFF COURT)
The subject is playing NBA 2K6 on Xbox 360 in the players' lounge at the Verizon Center before going in for yet another off-season shooting session. He's come an hour before the gym opens, as usual, and in these moments he will take on all comers at Xbox. He won't just beat you. He will beat you by as many points as you want. Just name the amount. He treats it like a golf handicap. For this game, he's giving away two hundred points to his friend John, who has flown in from L. A. for a visit. It's the Cavs versus the Wizards all over again, except this time Gilbert has the Cavs.
He knows every kink of NBA 2K6--and how to exploit it. He has shifted LeBron to guard and put his team in a game-long full-court press. He is playing against his video-game self and doesn't like the way John is using him. "You gotta get me square to the basket," he says as the Game Gilbert misses a shot from twelve feet. "You gotta get two point guards in there."
There's a minute and a half left, and Real Gilbert is up by 191. Then Game Gilbert gets a steal and throws a long pass--only to have LeBron pick it off. "Sorry, Gilbert," says Gilbert. "You can't stop the King."
As the game ticks down, the Cavs and Gilbert--Real Gilbert--are up by 201. John has the ball and is running the clock down for the final shot. At the last second, Antawn Jamison flips in a layup that makes it 331-132. John screams, circling the room, knocking magazines here and there. The man just got beat by 199 points and is ecstatic. Gilbert shakes his head.
ENTRY 13: CONSTRICTED DIETARY HABITS
On the road, I eat hamburgers every day. The team tries to get me to eat differently, but no. Burgers, burgers, burgers. I like burgers. McDonald's burgers. Wendy's burgers. Burger King burgers. There's this one place in Canada--I even look at the schedule to find out when we play there--best burger I've ever tasted. Real soft and sweet. I ate twelve of them in one night.
ENTRY 14: TRAINING HABITS (NOCTURNAL)
It is 10:15 P.M., and the subject phones the Wizards' strength coach to ask him to open up the Verizon Center. He then sets out from his home, driving the thirty-five minutes through the light nighttime traffic. He does this often enough that it feels routine. But he's not going there now to shoot or dribble or even touch a ball. He wants nothing more than the familiarity of running the stairs in his home arena--the skit-skit-skit of his feet on the cement treads, the bass line of his own breathing, the deep ache of muscles tested once more--until the hours have passed.
He doesn't care what the clock says. He doesn't care what other players are doing just then. He cares only about filling the time. It's night, remember, a while before midnight, a time when most people his age, most people with his sort of money and cars and good looks, are drawn to the expansive and throbbing possibilities of clubs, parties, concerts. Gilbert shows no sign of that pull. He is simply dealing with time. There is so much of it in the NBA. It's the thing that surprised him the most when he came into the league. There's practice at 1:00, there's a game at night, and that's it. Even though it's late, there are so many hours left to fill until he will find sleep on the couch in his bedroom that night.
ENTRY 15: SELF-IMPOSED COMMUNICATION BARRIERS
When I get a new cell phone, first thing I do is turn it off and call from my house phone and leave stupid little messages to myself. Like: "It's me." "It's me." "This is Gilbert." "It's me." "It's Gilbert." I just fill it up, so no one can leave messages. If you don't, you leave for an hour and thirteen people have called. So there are thirteen new messages you have to listen to and it's like, Oh, man. I don't feel like hearing people's stories. Most people love leaving messages that they don't want to tell you in person. So I cut that off.
ENTRY 16: SELF-MOTIVATIONAL MECHANISMS
The subject steps out of his dressing closet holding a list he keeps there of every player in the 2001 NBA draft who was selected ahead of him. All thirty. He runs his fingers down the page. He has scratched out each player who is no longer in the league. "Hmpff," he says, pausing on a name. "I got to get the pencil out. Utah. Raul Lopez? Ain't seen him much lately."
ENTRY 17: EARLY FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE (FINANCIAL HUMILITY)
I never look at my check. I learned that lesson my first year. I got my first stub, and it said $16,000. And I'm like, "That's what I'm talking about! I'm rich!" And I'm dancing and having fun, and then something told me to look over at Antawn Jamison's stub. It said $360,000. I look back at mine: sixteen. Three hundred and sixty thousand?! That's my whole year right there--in one check! So I asked Bobby Sura, "Man, how much you make?" Bobby Sura said, "Mine says $5 million. I get mine up front." I'm like, Whoa. I never looked again. Not once. Not even tried.
ENTRY 18: ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS OF OBSESSIVE BEHAVIOR
The subject has a five-and-a-half-foot-tall safe in his basement full of jerseys of great NBA players past and present. They're all signed, too. Each of them is in a plastic bag, each numbered and cataloged. Tracy McGrady? Got him. Home and away. Hedo Turkoglu? Got him, too. There are so many jerseys packed into this safe that the plastic packages tumble out when he opens it, like a sight gag in a sitcom. There must be a thousand. It is a collection he started only a year ago. Now they come in two, three, five a day.
The subject harbors plans to build a basketball court made of glass. He doesn't know where he will build it. He doesn't know when. But the plan is to showcase these jerseys behind the glass. There will even be a mirror behind each jersey so that you can see the back of it. When the subject realized that the court floor wouldn't be big enough to hold the burgeoning collection, he decided to make the walls glass, too. And the ceiling. "When I realized I could do the ceiling," he says, "that made me feel good." More than anything, it seems to soothe him to think about building this house of glass, which he imagines wrapping him in some way, buffering him in a museumlike calm.
ENTRY 19: SUBJECT HAS AN IDEA FOR A SHOE COMMERCIAL
You know how I always throw my jersey into the stands after a game? In Washington, they just go crazy for it. So in this commercial, that's what I'm gonna do with my shoes. I've just hit a game winner, and I throw these shoes. Everyone starts to react, and you see everything in slow motion. Everyone's pushing, shoving, doing whatever it takes to try to get to these shoes. People from the 400 level, they're jumping off the ledge, they're missing the pile, hitting nothing but chairs, and you can just see in people's faces like, Ooooh, that hurt. While all this stuff's going on, one of the shoes pops out of the crowd, and a little girl gets it and she takes off. A couple of people see she has it, and they start chasing her, and she's looking back running--and then she gets clotheslined by a kid in a wheelchair. So he picks the shoe up and says--he's gonna have the only line in there--"They said I couldn't get it. Heh. Impossible is nothing." And then he rolls off.
CONCLUSION:
The subject presents divergent sets of behaviors that suggest traditional pathologies, and their concurrent presence--well, that might make you think he's flat crazy. But there is no acceleration to his madness, no manic upward slope, no crashing depressive spiral. The collections, the isolation, the aggressive tendencies, the endless training--they focus him, shield him from distractions, toughen him up. And while all that may make him a little nutty, it also makes him really, really good.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/sports/ESQ1106gilbert#ixzz18hlukBRy
Lakers har også Phil Jackson og bare lige for at påpege hvorfor man ikke kan undgå at elske amerikansk sport så tjeck den her bog ud (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sacred-Hoops-Spiritual-Lessons-Hardwood/dp/1401308813/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1292895621&sr=1-1), Phil Jackson = The Zen master & det er fanme ikke for sjovt og han er ikke for sjov, han er tværtimod den absolut mest vindende træner de sidste 15 år.
Et par citater fra Phil "I gave it my body and mind, but I have kept my soul." "Good teams become great ones when the members trust each other enough to surrender the Me for the We."
# "Once you've done the mental work, there comes a point you have to throw yourself into the action and put your heart on the line. That means not only being brave, but being compassionate towards yourself, your teammates and your opponents."
# "If you meet the Buddha in the lane, feed him the ball."
# "Like life, basketball is messy and unpredictable. It has its way with you, no matter how hard you try to control it. The trick is to experience each moment with a clear mind and open heart. When you do that, the game--and life--will take care of itself."
# "Approach the game with no preset agendas and you'll probably come away surprised at your overall efforts."
Her er en artikel fra Esquire, og lidt forskellige citater, pranks og lign og et link til hans blog på nba.com http://www.nba.com/blog/gilbert_arenas.html#061019_01. Og lad mig lige nævne hvorfor han er et mirakel, et af mine mirakler, sådan et som giver håb i mørket. Det er han fordi han er basketball spiller og prankster, en rigtig prankster laver ikke sine pranks de gængse steder, niks han dukker op de mærkeligste steder og får på en eller anden mærkelig måde skabt sig en niche hvor han kan få lov. En rigtig prankster kommer som regel også ud i noget tragisk og selskabt, det er en del af miraklet.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12185-2005Apr23.html
We can't remember Gilbert Arenas without remembering some of the pranks he pulled on teammates during his time in D.C. We do that in the next installment of Gilbert Arenas Tribute Day.http://www.bulletsforever.com/2010/12/20/1887057/gilbert-arenas-tribute-day-remembering-arenas-pranks
I understand what people think because of the perception of me. They read the funny stuff, like me taking a crap in [teammate] Andray Blatche's shoes. But nobody is going to ask what Andray did to deserve it.
So I was sitting in my house playing Halo and I'm looking at my surveillance camera and I see Dominic and Nick creep up to my property all decked out. They parked across the street and they're running towards my house wearing masks and helmets. They came around the side of the house, jumped the wall, and came in through the garage. But by the time they did all that, I already was out of the house and jumped the other wall. They were in the house looking for me and I was across the street flattening their tires so when they decided to leave they'd be on flats. They looked around the house and couldn't find me so they came outside and saw me across the street flattening their tires. I called my friend and had him come pick me up and take me back to the house.
When they left the house, they stole my daddy's toaster! I like making toast! So I told them, Since you don't want to give my toaster back, it's war.
EDIT: User ThaCaronic pointed out that I left off the culmination of this epic tale. Because no story is complete without an appearance by Andray Blatche's chubby cousin.
I told them, Since you don't want to give my toaster back, it's war. He wanted his stuff back, I wanted my stuff back so I told them that we were going to have a paintball shootout.
We all went to the store like Sports Authority and bought all these paintball guns, like eight or nine new ones (because I already had three), then we bought the CO2 cartridges and like 12,000 paintballs and I even bought a couple paintball grenades.
We tried to make the teams fair.
It was Nick and Dominic and then Nick recruited last year's rookie, Andray Blatche. I thought Andray had enough of the pranks, but I guess he didn't. Andray brought his two friends, to make it five on their team.
My team was me, my friend John and three guys who were at my house hooking up stereo equipment.
So we finished buying everything and were in the store parking lot and Nick was mad that I had all the CO2 so he started to take some of mine. I was like, "Put the CO2 down or I'm going to shoot you with the paintball gun." But then he realizes I'm really going to shoot him with the paintball gun, and he puts it back. "You see what happens when you follow directions" But as I'm closing the trunk with the CO2 in it, he takes some and tries to jump in Dominic's car. I said, "Dominic, do not close that door." Nick is screaming, "Close the door Dominic! Close the door!" So Dominic left the door open. I go to Nick, "You have three seconds to put the CO2 back. One! Two!" He started to scramble to put it back and I got him anyway. I got him like six times. So he's laying in the car all mad saying, "I don't want to play no more."
So the war is still on.
I tell them that the shootout is planned for 12 o'clock midnight in my backyard because it's pure black back there. You can't see nothing. So I tell them, "12 o'clock, be in my backyard and we're going at it five on five."
We're putting all our stuff together at my place and they're putting their stuff together at their place but they are having trouble with it so I have my boy John and my other teammate Adam to go over to their place and have them help them fix their guns. And when John and Adam showed up at their place they tried to ambush them, thinking that I was going to come too. But I wasn't. So John and Adam had to run out of there.
So it's like 11:10 at night and all you here are paintball hitting the windows. POOM. POOM. POOM. POOM. POOM. They were already in the backyard. They showed up an hour early.
So we hurried up and put on all of our gear and snuck outside through some of the vents in the house.
And then we had a nice, good old paintball shootout in the dark.
They ran out of CO2 pretty quick because my team had most of it so one of Andray's friends yells, "Aww, it's not fair!" and they started to bail and jumped back over the wall. But one the kids was a little too heavy. His name is Jamar. That's 'Dray's cousin. Jamar couldn't get over the wall because Jamar has been eating one too many Twinkies.
So Jamar got stuck in my yard with the five of us. We gave him the chance to walk out like a man, or cry like a girl. He did both. He cried like a little girl while he was walking and running while we were shooting paintballs at him. I told him, "Hey, come in the lion's den, you're bound to get hit."
They said that he got hit so many times that he had trouble putting his clothes on the next day.
We played for about an hour and a half. I haven't had that much fun in a long time. What people don't realize is that when you're in the NBA, you lose stuff like that. You're not in there with kids, you're in there with grown men that have families. By having these young kids on the team, it's fun for me because I get to have that childhood that I lost. I lost it when I came into the NBA when I got picked No. 31 because I was so determined to be the best that I didn't get to actually have fun having fun, if that makes sense.
That's the moral of the story: I had fun.
Et par qoutes: http://www.gilbertology.net/quotes/
10. "Congratulations! You get to go into the mind of me, Gilbert Arenas, of the Washington Wizards. Good luck."
This was the first line from Arenas' first blog entry on NBA.com. Even at the beginning, he knew that anyone who dared to read his thoughts was in for a wild ride, and indeed we were.
9. "i wake up this morning and seen i was the new JOHN WAYNE..lmao media is too funny."
Arenas' first tweet after news broke about his gun scandal Like the first line from his blog, his first tweet after gun-gate gave us a pretty good idea that things were only going to go downhill from there.
8. "I told them to cut the leg off a couple times. You know, cut it off and then bring it back to me when it was all healed. Because, you know, Heather Mills on Dancing with the Stars, she had that leg. I was saying I could borrow one of those and finish out the season. But they wasn't going for that."
Arenas describing his somewhat ill-conceived plan on his blog to get back on the court after his first surgery.
7. "When coach said after we get the rebound to get the ball to me, from there I knew the shot I was going to take. I just feel so comfortable taking that shot because I practice it. It's not a rushed shot. You know, it's a great shot for me.
Like I said, I'm 8-for-8 for this year on anything behind the 30-foot line and I feel comfortable shooting that.
I mean, because I know I'm going to shoot it, he's still in retreat. You know, if I know I'm going to shoot it, I'm always more dangerous than the defender."
When Arenas was in full-attack mode, he knew how to put his defenders on retreat in almost any situation, even in final moments of the game. His description of how he created space for his game-winning shot on his blog gave us the best window into his attack mentality.
6. "Before, in Eddie's offense, because it was made for the 3s and the 4s, I took a lot of wild shots, fastbreak threes. But since I have the ball more, I probably don't need to do that," he said. "I plan on taking less than 100 threes. I'm not going to be a three-point shooter this year. I worked most of the year on mid-range jumpers."
Arenas on his new role in Flip Saunders' offense. He took 181 threes in 32 games that season.
5. "They read the funny stuff, like me taking a crap in [teammate] Andray Blatche's shoes. But nobody is going to ask what Andray did to deserve it. You read about it because that's when I'm at my goofiest, when I'm around my teammates. I don't get in trouble outside of this building. You are not going to catch me drinking and driving, or picking up prostitutes. People don't see what my teammates see, the guy who is in here three times a day working out. That's the guy they don't see."
The last great quote from Arenas. In fairness, we really didn't hear enough about his incredible work-ethic or how he avoided some of the pitfalls of the NBA nighlife. But seriously, how can we focus on that when he's talking about taking a crap in someone's shoe?
4. "They told me that I might have won. They was 95 percent sure that I won, but they still didn't know yet, they were still calculating the numbers.
They said, 'We're 95 percent sure that you overtook Vince Carter.'
So I woke my daughter up and we started dancing.
She was crying because she was still sleepy, but I considered it laughing."
Arenas on his blog, showing off his parenting skills after learning he had been named to the starting lineup for the 2007 All-Star Game.
3. "The hibachi is coming to a city near you. I'm cooking chicken and shrimp, but if you want to throw a double team my way, filet mignon gets cooked too."
Arenas on his blog, after his Hibachi nickname caught on with the public.
2. "i guess everyone wants me to act like the rest of the nba twitters players...(i bought a shirt today from the mall)(practice was tough 2 (coach said he likes my high socks lol lol)(we had a close game today) is that really who u wanna follow..sounds a little boring to me"
Gilbert Arenas summing up what makes him different and what endears him to fans better than any of us ever could on Twitter.
1. "My swag was phenomenal."
Arenas after draining a buzzer-beater to defeat the Bucks. If there were four words more apt at describing Arenas at the peak of his talents, I haven't heard them.
ABSTRACT: A pseudo-psychotherapeutic assessment that attempts to shed light on the eclectic nature and unique brain chemistry of the NBA's most unheralded superstar.
SUBJECT: Gilbert Arenas
AGE: 24
HEIGHT: 6'4"
WEIGHT: 210
OCCUPATION: Point guard, Washington Wizards, National Basketball Association
OCCUPATIONAL FUNCTION
To dictate and maintain the flow of the game; to get the ball to the bigs; to shoot when he can, from wherever he can, which is pretty much wherever he wants; to run an offense formulated around him, in particular his physical strength, his inherent toughness, and his desire to take the big shot (see complicating factor 5, below).
ACHIEVEMENT LEVEL
Fourth in the league in scoring last year (twenty-nine points per game); second in three-pointers made; led his employer, a perennial league doormat, to the playoffs for the second straight year--this time while averaging a league-high thirty-four points postseason.
SYMPTOMS
Never stops training (never), never leaves his hotel room while on the road, starts ridiculously ambitious collections he cannot possibly finish, goes to extreme lengths to keep others from leaving him voice-mail messages, sleeps on a couch even while at home, maintains grudges for self-motivation, formulates grandiose architectural plans, fights dirty with coworkers, crushes his opponents in Xbox without remorse.
COMPLICATING FACTORS
1. Subject was not selected until the second round of the 2001 NBA draft.
2. Despite previously noted achievements, subject was left off the 2006 All-Star team initially and the U. S. national team.
3. Subject plays (excellent) basketball in what is otherwise a football city.
4. Subject works in the shadows of more visible, highly marketable players throughout the league.
5. Subject ended last season by uncharacteristically choking on two free throws against the Cleveland Cavaliers after playing LeBron James to a standstill for six games.
PRELIMINARY DIAGNOSIS
Hypercompetitiveness syndrome tempered by disruptive patterns of obsessively focused semipointless addictions, masochistic recreational-wrestling tendencies, a sociopathic room-service addiction, and a demonstrated case of manufactured-nemesis dependence.
ENTRY 1: SUBJECT REPORTS A DREAM
SUBJECT: Lately I've been dreaming I'm playing basketball on a desert island.
OBSERVER: Like in the middle of the ocean? With palm trees?
SUBJECT: Yeah, playing full court, a real game. That's all there is on the island--just the court, water lapping right up to the edge of the blacktop. It's just water all out there. Deep. Then I notice there are fans out in the waves, circling us.
OBSERVER: What are they doing? Swimming?
SUBJECT: They're watching. Riding Jet Skis, lying on floats out there in the waves. Swimming, too, I guess. But a long way out. What do you think that means? I've been asking people.
OBSERVER: Maybe you want a little distance. Or you feel surrounded.
SUBJECT: Yeah. The other dream I've been having is my teeth falling out. But that just means that someone is stabbing me in the back. So I know that one.
ENTRY 2: SUBJECT'S PEER-ASSESSMENT METHODOLOGY
I was taught that you find out who players are just like how you find out about dogs. If you have a litter of dogs and you put them in the dark, put them in a corner, and you shake your keys, whatever dogs come to those keys, them's the ones you want. They're curious. They want to know what's going on. They're ready. They're fighting. The ones who sit in the corner, they're afraid. They don't have the heart. That's how I look at people. You put them in a situation and see how they act. Some of these great stars in the league, some of them are scared to take big shots. Some of them are scared to fail. Some of them don't have the heart. You start seeing it and you start picking at it. Other people--like Earl Boykins, he's a fourth-quarter player. Ben Gordon is a fourth-quarter player. The fourth-quarter player is the one you want. Me, I'm gonna shoot that shot every time. Every time.
ENTRY 3: OFF-SEASON TRAINING HABITS OBSERVED
The Wizards' strength coach feeds the subject the ball, off both makes and misses, which aren't many. He shoots from beyond the three-point arc, stringing together nine made shots in a row at one point, then twelve. Later, from a full four paces farther back, he makes fourteen in a row. That, it should be noted, is a heave. The subject is expressionless when the ball goes in. The loose upward thrust of his body, the calibrated arc, the soft thwick of the net--it does not seem to please him or affirm anything about what he is doing. But missing, even once, makes him wince. Missing twice makes him tilt his head, as if the world were presenting him with a puzzle, a slight recalibration that needs to be made. When he reaches a thousand shots, he turns, smiling and loose, and fires at every basket in the gym from that one spot--twenty-eight feet, then twenty feet, then fifty and at least sixty and fifty and twenty again. He makes four out of six.
ENTRY 4: SELF-IMPOSED ISOLATING TENDENCIES
OBSERVER'S NOTE: In five seasons in the NBA, first with Golden State and now the Wizards--forty-one road games per year, plus exhibition trips and, more recently, the playoffs--the subject estimates that he has left his hotel room a total of six times, and only in L. A., where he grew up.
I think it came from my first year. I was so depressed that I wasn't playing that I didn't want to go out. I'm gonna stay and do sit-ups or jumping jacks. And I'm not gonna come out. Not till morning. There's nothing out there for me. I don't know those cities. I don't know where to go. I don't have any people. Other guys will be out, the steak house, the clubs, just rollin'. Me, I'm fine. Time is falling off. Sun's coming up. I'm doing more sit-ups than the night before. I'll watch three or four movies. I'll watch infomercials. The last thing I bought was this colon cleanser. I just got talked into it. I'm like, Man, he makes it sound so good.
ENTRY 5: SELF-PERCEPTION OF OCCUPATIONAL ROLE AND RESPONSIBILITIES
When I go into the ring, I know every team and what those players do. I don't pay attention to the guards. Get those bigs. Okay, this one takes charges, so I have to stop and pull. I've got to trick him. Or, say, Alonzo--he loves to block shots, so I'm going to jump into him every time. I have to think: How many fouls does Shaq have? Two in the first period? Okay, no one else is going to get that next foul on him. Our bigs--they're going to jump away from Shaq. So all right, let me go in there and get hammered. That's okay--I like the contact. Then that's three fouls, and I don't have to worry about him until after halftime. I would run into anything. Once that ball goes up, I don't feel none of that. I'm ready to get dirty. Let's play a little dirt.
ENTRY 6: THE SUBJECT OBSERVED IN OBSESSIVE MODALITY
It is Wednesday, the day after movies are traditionally released on DVD, and the subject piles up purchases at a local video store. He collects with no particular agenda in mind. He's just hungry for more. He grabs the new releases first, two and three at a time, piling them against his chest like a stack of library books. He is not picky. On this day his haul includes The Libertine, The Matador, Basic Instinct 2, three submarine movies, a dance movie, two romances, and a handful of comedies. As the stack grows higher, he slows. How many does he plan to buy today? "I usually stop when I get to here," he says, holding a finger to his chin.
He doesn't know when he will watch them, or even if he ever will. Back at home, in the supremely carpeted media room of his cozy, overcouched theater, he has a hard drive capable of holding more than ten thousand titles. Ask him and he'll tell you he wants them all. All the movies. Ever.
"I have so much entertainment going on in my house that I don't need to go out," he explains. "I don't need to go to the movies if I own all these movies. I don't need to go out to a game because I've got all these video games. I don't have to leave my house to have a conversation because I just hop online and have fun with my friends, talk trash, and do whatever we're gonna do right there."
ENTRY 7: EARLY FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE (GETTING CLOTHESLINED BY A BENCHWARMER)
The guy who helped my career out, truthfully--it's hard to believe--was Marc Jackson from Philly. Not the guard Mark Jackson. The big Marc Jackson. The year after he signed his contract with Golden State, he wasn't playing, either, so we'd come to the gym, eight o'clock, and we'd play full-court one-on-one. Me, him, and Dean Oliver. We'd play twenty-one, one-on-one, two-on-one, full-court one-on-one. From eight until practice started. Three hours. Every day. Every time we drove past him, he'd clothesline us. He was like, "Well, you're in the NBA now. You're going to feel pain." He just hammered us every day. So I learned how to be tough. And once I started playing, I was like, Okay, I'm used to this already.
ENTRY 8: UNUSUAL SLEEPING RITUALS
SUBJECT [interviewed while playing two-man Halo in his bedroom]: You can't see very good. I'll sit down on the floor if you want.
OBSERVER: No, I can tell you like to play on the bed. I'll stay here.
SUBJECT: I just started sleeping in this bed after three years. I used to sleep over there.
OBSERVER: Where? On the couch?
SUBJECT: Yeah. I trained myself to sleep on the couch.
OBSERVER: Why would you do that?
SUBJECT: You know.
OBSERVER: Not really.
SUBJECT: I don't like women all up on me, touching me. So I get up and go.
OBSERVER: Yeah?
SUBJECT: Then they get up and go. [Subject points to the video-game screen.] Stay there. Wait for me behind that door.
OBSERVER: What door?
SUBJECT: [shaking his head]: I discovered that women don't like that much.
ENTRY 9: EARLY FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE (GETTING SCHOOLED BY THE GLOVE)
It's my first year, and I'm finally starting to play. I'm getting comfortable. I'm averaging, as a starter, sixteen, six, and six. And then I run up against Gary Payton. First time in my career I'm happy to get subbed out of a game. That's when he was still the Glove, and he's just doing everything, anything. He's posting up our big. He's grabbing and pulling the ball. Any time he gets close to me, I'm picking the ball up. He's just got me screwed up. So he has eighteen points in the first period. And he comes up to me, he's like, "Rookie, you're lucky I'm not an A. I. type of player or I'd have forty on you." And coach subs me out. BRRRRR. [Note: Subject does an excellent imitation of a buzzer.] Woo! I run off the court and I'm like, "Oh, my God. Eighteen points! I'm glad I'm out. All right, Bobby Sura. Go get 'em, tiger." I never said one word to G. P. But now, after that game, I got him every time. I think it's something in my mind about what he did to me that first year. He embarrassed me so bad. As soon as he thinks about sticking me, I go at him. I know he's slower than me, so I have to take advantage of that. That's my mentality: This is your chance.
ENTRY 10: EXPLORATION OF ABERRANT CLUTCH PERFORMANCE
OBSERVER: In between those free throws against the Cavs, LeBron came over, pressed his hand against your chest, and said something to you. What did he say?
SUBJECT: He said, "If you miss this shot, you know who's gonna hit the game winner."
OBSERVER: What went through your mind?
SUBJECT: I wasn't even thinking about it. Like, I heard him. But I don't miss free throws. That's the thing: I never miss free throws at the end. And this was a big free throw. The first one, I shot it, and I went, like, What? That wasn't me. It reminded me of this movie I saw where a kid is controlling the ball from the stands. All of my balls hit the front or back of the rim--nothing ever to the left or right.
OBSERVER: In the middle of all that, you're thinking about the mechanics?
SUBJECT: Yeah.
ENTRY 11: SUBJECT'S PERCEIVED IMPORTANCE OF CATHARTIC VIOLENCE IN A TEAM SETTING
We have a couple of players who are very aggressive, like Awvee Storey. You know, when you have aggressive people, they have to relieve some of that. And I'm one of those people. I don't care--I wrastle. Wrestling. Hurting. I'll bite, punch him in the side. I'll say, Look, you punch me in the stomach once, I'll punch you in the stomach once. We'll see who falls on the floor first. It's like: No punching in the face. No chest and ribs. We don't hurt each other. I mean, a couple of rug burns here or there. I remember one day, he laid on top of me and was pinching my nose so hard that it bruised. For two days, it was just burgundy. He was calling me Rudolph. Me and him, we can't be in the same room. Our personalities clash because he's a bully and I don't like being bullied by anybody.
ENTRY 12: COMPETITIVE RESPONSE OBSERVED (OFF COURT)
The subject is playing NBA 2K6 on Xbox 360 in the players' lounge at the Verizon Center before going in for yet another off-season shooting session. He's come an hour before the gym opens, as usual, and in these moments he will take on all comers at Xbox. He won't just beat you. He will beat you by as many points as you want. Just name the amount. He treats it like a golf handicap. For this game, he's giving away two hundred points to his friend John, who has flown in from L. A. for a visit. It's the Cavs versus the Wizards all over again, except this time Gilbert has the Cavs.
He knows every kink of NBA 2K6--and how to exploit it. He has shifted LeBron to guard and put his team in a game-long full-court press. He is playing against his video-game self and doesn't like the way John is using him. "You gotta get me square to the basket," he says as the Game Gilbert misses a shot from twelve feet. "You gotta get two point guards in there."
There's a minute and a half left, and Real Gilbert is up by 191. Then Game Gilbert gets a steal and throws a long pass--only to have LeBron pick it off. "Sorry, Gilbert," says Gilbert. "You can't stop the King."
As the game ticks down, the Cavs and Gilbert--Real Gilbert--are up by 201. John has the ball and is running the clock down for the final shot. At the last second, Antawn Jamison flips in a layup that makes it 331-132. John screams, circling the room, knocking magazines here and there. The man just got beat by 199 points and is ecstatic. Gilbert shakes his head.
ENTRY 13: CONSTRICTED DIETARY HABITS
On the road, I eat hamburgers every day. The team tries to get me to eat differently, but no. Burgers, burgers, burgers. I like burgers. McDonald's burgers. Wendy's burgers. Burger King burgers. There's this one place in Canada--I even look at the schedule to find out when we play there--best burger I've ever tasted. Real soft and sweet. I ate twelve of them in one night.
ENTRY 14: TRAINING HABITS (NOCTURNAL)
It is 10:15 P.M., and the subject phones the Wizards' strength coach to ask him to open up the Verizon Center. He then sets out from his home, driving the thirty-five minutes through the light nighttime traffic. He does this often enough that it feels routine. But he's not going there now to shoot or dribble or even touch a ball. He wants nothing more than the familiarity of running the stairs in his home arena--the skit-skit-skit of his feet on the cement treads, the bass line of his own breathing, the deep ache of muscles tested once more--until the hours have passed.
He doesn't care what the clock says. He doesn't care what other players are doing just then. He cares only about filling the time. It's night, remember, a while before midnight, a time when most people his age, most people with his sort of money and cars and good looks, are drawn to the expansive and throbbing possibilities of clubs, parties, concerts. Gilbert shows no sign of that pull. He is simply dealing with time. There is so much of it in the NBA. It's the thing that surprised him the most when he came into the league. There's practice at 1:00, there's a game at night, and that's it. Even though it's late, there are so many hours left to fill until he will find sleep on the couch in his bedroom that night.
ENTRY 15: SELF-IMPOSED COMMUNICATION BARRIERS
When I get a new cell phone, first thing I do is turn it off and call from my house phone and leave stupid little messages to myself. Like: "It's me." "It's me." "This is Gilbert." "It's me." "It's Gilbert." I just fill it up, so no one can leave messages. If you don't, you leave for an hour and thirteen people have called. So there are thirteen new messages you have to listen to and it's like, Oh, man. I don't feel like hearing people's stories. Most people love leaving messages that they don't want to tell you in person. So I cut that off.
ENTRY 16: SELF-MOTIVATIONAL MECHANISMS
The subject steps out of his dressing closet holding a list he keeps there of every player in the 2001 NBA draft who was selected ahead of him. All thirty. He runs his fingers down the page. He has scratched out each player who is no longer in the league. "Hmpff," he says, pausing on a name. "I got to get the pencil out. Utah. Raul Lopez? Ain't seen him much lately."
ENTRY 17: EARLY FORMATIVE EXPERIENCE (FINANCIAL HUMILITY)
I never look at my check. I learned that lesson my first year. I got my first stub, and it said $16,000. And I'm like, "That's what I'm talking about! I'm rich!" And I'm dancing and having fun, and then something told me to look over at Antawn Jamison's stub. It said $360,000. I look back at mine: sixteen. Three hundred and sixty thousand?! That's my whole year right there--in one check! So I asked Bobby Sura, "Man, how much you make?" Bobby Sura said, "Mine says $5 million. I get mine up front." I'm like, Whoa. I never looked again. Not once. Not even tried.
ENTRY 18: ADDITIONAL OBSERVATIONS OF OBSESSIVE BEHAVIOR
The subject has a five-and-a-half-foot-tall safe in his basement full of jerseys of great NBA players past and present. They're all signed, too. Each of them is in a plastic bag, each numbered and cataloged. Tracy McGrady? Got him. Home and away. Hedo Turkoglu? Got him, too. There are so many jerseys packed into this safe that the plastic packages tumble out when he opens it, like a sight gag in a sitcom. There must be a thousand. It is a collection he started only a year ago. Now they come in two, three, five a day.
The subject harbors plans to build a basketball court made of glass. He doesn't know where he will build it. He doesn't know when. But the plan is to showcase these jerseys behind the glass. There will even be a mirror behind each jersey so that you can see the back of it. When the subject realized that the court floor wouldn't be big enough to hold the burgeoning collection, he decided to make the walls glass, too. And the ceiling. "When I realized I could do the ceiling," he says, "that made me feel good." More than anything, it seems to soothe him to think about building this house of glass, which he imagines wrapping him in some way, buffering him in a museumlike calm.
ENTRY 19: SUBJECT HAS AN IDEA FOR A SHOE COMMERCIAL
You know how I always throw my jersey into the stands after a game? In Washington, they just go crazy for it. So in this commercial, that's what I'm gonna do with my shoes. I've just hit a game winner, and I throw these shoes. Everyone starts to react, and you see everything in slow motion. Everyone's pushing, shoving, doing whatever it takes to try to get to these shoes. People from the 400 level, they're jumping off the ledge, they're missing the pile, hitting nothing but chairs, and you can just see in people's faces like, Ooooh, that hurt. While all this stuff's going on, one of the shoes pops out of the crowd, and a little girl gets it and she takes off. A couple of people see she has it, and they start chasing her, and she's looking back running--and then she gets clotheslined by a kid in a wheelchair. So he picks the shoe up and says--he's gonna have the only line in there--"They said I couldn't get it. Heh. Impossible is nothing." And then he rolls off.
CONCLUSION:
The subject presents divergent sets of behaviors that suggest traditional pathologies, and their concurrent presence--well, that might make you think he's flat crazy. But there is no acceleration to his madness, no manic upward slope, no crashing depressive spiral. The collections, the isolation, the aggressive tendencies, the endless training--they focus him, shield him from distractions, toughen him up. And while all that may make him a little nutty, it also makes him really, really good.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/sports/ESQ1106gilbert#ixzz18hlukBRy
Sunday, December 19, 2010
How to play Guitar by David Fair
How to play Guitar
by David Fair
I taught myself to play guitar. It’s incredibly easy when you understand the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string father out by the tuning end it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That’s all there is to it. You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that’s pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you’d still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.
Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But he thing to remember is it’s your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of the same thickness on so he wouldn’t have so much to worry about. What ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same.
Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But that absurd. How could it be wrong? It’s your guitar and you’re the one playing it. It’s completely up to you to decide hoe it should sound. In fact I don’t tune by the sound at all. I wind the strings until they’re all about the same tightness. I highly recommend electric guitars for a couple of reasons. First of all they don’t depend on body resonating for the sound so it doesn’t matter if you paint them. As also, if you put all the knobs on your amplifier on 10 you can get a much higher reaction to effort ratio with an electric guitar than you can with an acoustic. Just a tiny tap on the strings can rattle your windows, and when you slam the strings, with your amp on 10, you can strip the paint off the walls.
The first guitar I bought was a Silvertone. Later I bought a Fender Telecaster, but it really doesn’t matter what kind you buy as long as the tuning pegs are on the end of the neck where they belong. A few years back someone came out with a guitar that tunes at the other end. I’ve never tried one. I guess they sound alright but they look ridiculous and I imagine you’d feel pretty foolish holding one. That would affect your playing. The idea isn’t to feel foolish. The idea is to put a pick in one hand and a guitar in the other and with a tiny movement rule the world.
by David Fair
I taught myself to play guitar. It’s incredibly easy when you understand the science of it. The skinny strings play the high sounds, and the fat strings play the low sounds. If you put your finger on the string father out by the tuning end it makes a lower sound. If you want to play fast move your hand fast and if you want to play slower move your hand slower. That’s all there is to it. You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that’s pretty limiting. Even if you took a few years and learned all the chords you’d still have a limited number of options. If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.
Traditionally, guitars have a fat string on the top and they get skinnier and skinnier as they go down. But he thing to remember is it’s your guitar and you can put whatever you want on it. I like to put six different sized strings on it because that gives the most variety, but my brother used to put all of the same thickness on so he wouldn’t have so much to worry about. What ever string he hit had to be the right one because they were all the same.
Tuning the guitar is kind of a ridiculous notion. If you have to wind the tuning pegs to just a certain place, that implies that every other place would be wrong. But that absurd. How could it be wrong? It’s your guitar and you’re the one playing it. It’s completely up to you to decide hoe it should sound. In fact I don’t tune by the sound at all. I wind the strings until they’re all about the same tightness. I highly recommend electric guitars for a couple of reasons. First of all they don’t depend on body resonating for the sound so it doesn’t matter if you paint them. As also, if you put all the knobs on your amplifier on 10 you can get a much higher reaction to effort ratio with an electric guitar than you can with an acoustic. Just a tiny tap on the strings can rattle your windows, and when you slam the strings, with your amp on 10, you can strip the paint off the walls.
The first guitar I bought was a Silvertone. Later I bought a Fender Telecaster, but it really doesn’t matter what kind you buy as long as the tuning pegs are on the end of the neck where they belong. A few years back someone came out with a guitar that tunes at the other end. I’ve never tried one. I guess they sound alright but they look ridiculous and I imagine you’d feel pretty foolish holding one. That would affect your playing. The idea isn’t to feel foolish. The idea is to put a pick in one hand and a guitar in the other and with a tiny movement rule the world.
Captain Beefheart's 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing
Budding guitarists take note.
1. Listen to the birds
That's where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren't going anywhere.
2. Your guitar is not really a guitar
Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you're good, you'll land a big one.
3. Practice in front of a bush
Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn't shake, eat another piece of bread.
4. Walk with the devil
Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the "devil box." And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you're brining over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.
5. If you're guilty of thinking, you're out
If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.
6. Never point your guitar at anyone
Your instrument has more clout than lightning. Just hit a big chord then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field.
7. Always carry a church key
That's your key-man clause. Like One String Sam. He's one. He was a Detroit street musician who played in the fifties on a homemade instrument. His song "I Need a Hundred Dollars" is warm pie. Another key to the church is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf's guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty — making you want to look up her dress the whole time to see how he's doing it.
8. Don't wipe the sweat off your instrument
You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.
9. Keep your guitar in a dark place
When you're not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don't play your guitar for more than a day, be sure you put a saucer of water in with it.
10. You gotta have a hood for your engine
Keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house, the hot air can't escape. Even a lima bean has to have a piece of wet paper around it to make it grow.
--------------------------
This sound advice can be found in the book Rolling Stone's Alt-Rock-A-Rama (1996) which includes an article written by John McCormick about Moris Tepper.
"Though they bear numbers, they are not arranged heirarchically — each Commandment has equal import."
1. Listen to the birds
That's where all the music comes from. Birds know everything about how it should sound and where that sound should come from. And watch hummingbirds. They fly really fast, but a lot of times they aren't going anywhere.
2. Your guitar is not really a guitar
Your guitar is a divining rod. Use it to find spirits in the other world and bring them over. A guitar is also a fishing rod. If you're good, you'll land a big one.
3. Practice in front of a bush
Wait until the moon is out, then go outside, eat a multi-grained bread and play your guitar to a bush. If the bush doesn't shake, eat another piece of bread.
4. Walk with the devil
Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the "devil box." And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you're brining over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.
5. If you're guilty of thinking, you're out
If your brain is part of the process, you're missing it. You should play like a drowning man, struggling to reach shore. If you can trap that feeling, then you have something that is fur bearing.
6. Never point your guitar at anyone
Your instrument has more clout than lightning. Just hit a big chord then run outside to hear it. But make sure you are not standing in an open field.
7. Always carry a church key
That's your key-man clause. Like One String Sam. He's one. He was a Detroit street musician who played in the fifties on a homemade instrument. His song "I Need a Hundred Dollars" is warm pie. Another key to the church is Hubert Sumlin, Howlin' Wolf's guitar player. He just stands there like the Statue of Liberty — making you want to look up her dress the whole time to see how he's doing it.
8. Don't wipe the sweat off your instrument
You need that stink on there. Then you have to get that stink onto your music.
9. Keep your guitar in a dark place
When you're not playing your guitar, cover it and keep it in a dark place. If you don't play your guitar for more than a day, be sure you put a saucer of water in with it.
10. You gotta have a hood for your engine
Keep that hat on. A hat is a pressure cooker. If you have a roof on your house, the hot air can't escape. Even a lima bean has to have a piece of wet paper around it to make it grow.
--------------------------
This sound advice can be found in the book Rolling Stone's Alt-Rock-A-Rama (1996) which includes an article written by John McCormick about Moris Tepper.
"Though they bear numbers, they are not arranged heirarchically — each Commandment has equal import."
Sunday, December 5, 2010
Participatroy Video
http://deepdishwavesofchange.blogspot.com/2010/05/interview-with-pv-sateesh-participatory.html
http://www.scribd.com/doc/12956925/Philip-Pocock-Collaborative-Documentary-Datatecture-1980
http://documentation.leisa.info/tools/guides.html
Jeg vil med det samme sige, at det er svært at finde teknikker af seriøs karakter. Så snart de specefikke teknikker bliver formuleret, bliver det nemt at se hvor det kan gå galt. Teknikker kan ikke redde os og er aldrig uden farer. Men sådan er det nu engang.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/12956925/Philip-Pocock-Collaborative-Documentary-Datatecture-1980
http://documentation.leisa.info/tools/guides.html
Jeg vil med det samme sige, at det er svært at finde teknikker af seriøs karakter. Så snart de specefikke teknikker bliver formuleret, bliver det nemt at se hvor det kan gå galt. Teknikker kan ikke redde os og er aldrig uden farer. Men sådan er det nu engang.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
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- On the Absolute, Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth
- Minnesota Declaration
On the Asolute, the Sublime and Ecstatic Truth
This text was first published at ARION 17.3 Winter 2010
ON THE ABOSLUTE, THE SUBLIME, AND ECSTATIC TRUTH
by WERNER HERZOG
(Translated by Moira Weigel)
[This text was originally delivered by Werner Herzog as a speech in Milano, Italy, following a screening of his film “Lessons of Darkness”on the fires in Kuwait. He was asked to speak about the Absolute, but he spontaneously changed the subject to the Sublime. Because of that, a good part of what follows was improvised in the moment.]
The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor.
—Blaise Pascal
The words attributed to Blaise Pascal which preface my film Lessons of Darkness are in fact by me. Pascal himself could not have said it better.
This falsified and yet, as I will later demonstrate, not falsified quotation should serve as a first hint of what I am trying to deal with in this discourse. Anyway, to acknowledge a fake as fake contributes only to the triumph of accountants.
Why am I doing this, you might ask? The reason is simple and comes not from theoretical, but rather from practical, considerations. With this quotation as a prefix I elevate [erheben] the spectator, before he has even seen the first frame, to a high level, from which to enter the film. And I, the author of the film, do not let him descend from this height until it is over. Only in this state of sublimity [Erhabenheit] does something deeper become possible, a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual. Ecstatic truth, I call it.
After the first war in Iraq, as the oil fields burned in Kuwait, the media—and here I mean television in particular—was in no position to show what was,beyond being a war crime, an event of cosmic dimensions, a crime against creation itself. There is not a single frame in Lessons of Darkness in which youcan recognize our planet; for this reason the film is labeled “science fiction,” as if it could only have been shot in a distant galaxy, hostile to life. At its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the film met with an orgy of hate. From theraging cries of the public I could make out only “aestheticization of horror.” And when I found myself being threatened and spat at on the podium, I hit upon only a single, banal response. “You cretins,” I said, “that’s what Dante did in his Inferno, it’s what Goya did, and Hieronymus Bosch too.” In my moment of need, without thinking about it, I had called upon the guardian angels who familiarize us with the Absolute and the Sublime.
The Absolute, the Sublime, the Truth . . . What do these words mean? This is, I must confess, the first time in my life that I have sought to settle such questions outside of my work, which I understand, first and foremost, in practical terms.
By way of qualification, I should add at once that I am not going to venture a definition of the Absolute, even if that concept casts its shadow over everything that I say here. The Absolute poses a never-ending quandary for philosophy, religion, and mathematics. Mathematics will probably come closest to getting it when someone finally proves Riemann’s hypothesis. That question concerns the distribution of prime numbers; unanswered since the nineteenth century, it reaches into the depths of mathematical thinking. A prize of a million
dollars has been set aside for whoever solves it, and a mathematical institute in Boston has allotted a thousand years for someone to come up with a proof. The money is waiting for you, as is your immortality. For two and a half thousand years, ever since Euclid, this question has preoccupied mathematicians; if it turned out Riemann and his brilliant hypothesis were not right, it would send unimaginable shockwaves through the disciplines of mathematics and natural science. I can only very vaguely begin to fathom the Absolute; I am in no position to define the concept.
THE TRUTH OF THE OCEAN
FOR NOW, I’ll stay on the trusted ground of praxis. Even if we cannot really grasp it, I would like to tell you about an unforgettable encounter I had with Truth while shooting Fitzcarraldo. We were shooting in the Peruvian jungles east of the Andes between the Camisea and Urubamba rivers, where I would later haul a huge steamship over a mountain. The indigenous people who lived there, the Machiguengas, made up a majority of the extras and had given us the permit to film on their land. In addition to being paid, the Machiguengas
wanted further benefits: they wanted training for their local doctor and a boat, so that they could bring their crops to market a few hundred kilometers downriver themselves, instead of having to sell them through middlemen. Finally, they wanted support in their fight for a legal title to the area between
the two rivers. One company after another had seized it in order to plunder local stocks of wood; recently, oil firms had also been casting a greedy eye on their land.
Every petition we entered for a deed vanished at once in the labyrinthine provincial bureaucracy. Our attempts at bribery failed, too. Finally, having traveled to the ministry responsible for such things, in the capital city of Lima, I was told that, even if we could argue for a legal title on historical and cultural grounds, there were two stumbling blocks. First, the title was not contained in any legally verifiable document, but supported only by hearsay, which was irrelevant. Second, no one had ever surveyed the land in order to provide a recognizable border.
To the latter end, I hired a surveyor, who furnished the Machiguengas with a precise map of their homeland. That was my part in their truth: it took the form of a delineation, a definition. I’ll admit, I quarreled with the surveyor. The
topographic map that he furnished was, he explained, in certain ways incorrect. It did not correspond to the truth because it did not take into account the curvature of the earth.
In such a little piece of land? I asked, losing patience. Of course, he said angrily, and pushed his water glass toward me. Even with a glass of water,you have to be clear about it, what we’re dealing with is not an even surface. You should see the curvature of the earth as you would see it on an ocean or a lake. If you were really able to perceive it exactly as it is—but you are too simple-minded—you would see the earth curve. I will never forget this harsh lesson.
The question of hearsay had a deeper dimension and required research of an entirely different kind. [Arguing for their title to the land] the Indians could only claim that they’d always been there; this they had learned from their grandparents. When, finally, the case appeared hopeless, I managed to get an audience with the President, [Fernando] Belaúnde. The Machiguengas of Shivankoreni elected two representatives to accompany me. [In the President’s office in Lima] when our conversation threatened to come to a standstill, I presented Belaúnde with the following argument: in Anglo-Saxon law, although hearsay is generally inadmissible as evidence, it is not absolutely inadmissible. As early as 1916, in the case of Angu vs. Atta, a colonial court in the Gold Coast (today Ghana) ruled that hearsay could serve as a valid form of evidence.
That case was completely different. It had to do with the use of a local governor’s palace; then, too, there were no documents, nothing official that would have been relevant. But, the court ruled, the overwhelming consensus in hearsay that countless tribesmen had repeated and repeated, had come to constitute so manifest a truth that the court could accept it without further restrictions. At this, Belaunde, who had lived for many years in the jungle, fell quiet. He asked for a glass of orange juice, then said only Good god, and I knew that we had won him over. Today the Machiguengas have a title to their land; even the consortium of oil firmsthat discovered one of the largest sources of natural gas [in the world] directly in their vicinity respects it.
The audience with the President granted yet another odd glimpse into the essence of truth. The inhabitants of the village of Shivakoreni were not sure whether it was true that on the other side of the Andes there was a monstrously large body of water, an ocean. In addition, there was the fact that
this monstrous water, the Pacific, was supposedly salty.
We drove to a restaurant on the beach a little south of Lima to eat. But our two Indian delegates didn’t order anything. They went silent and looked out over the breakers. They didn’t approach the water, just stared at it. Then one
asked for a bottle. I gave him my empty beer bottle. No, that wasn’t right, it had to be a bottle that you could seal well. So I bought a bottle of cheap Chilean red, had it uncorked, and poured the wine out into the sand. We sent the bottle to the kitchen to be cleaned as carefully as possible. Then the men
took the bottle and went, without a word, to the shoreline. Still wearing the new blue jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts that we had bought for them at the market, they waded in to the waves. They waded, looking over the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, until the water reached their underarms. Then, they took a taste of the water, filled the bottle and sealed it carefully with a cork.
This bottle filled with water was their proof for the village that there really was an ocean. I asked cautiously whether it wasn’t just a part of the truth. No, they said, if there is a bottle of seawater, then the whole ocean must be true as well.
THE ASSAULT OF VIRTUAL REALITY
FROM THEN on, what constitutes truth—or, to put it in much simpler form, what constitutes reality—became a greater mystery to me than it had been. The two intervening decades have posed unprecedented challenges to our concept of reality.
When I speak of assaults on our understanding of reality, I am referring to new technologies that, in the past twenty years, have become general articles of everyday use: the digital special effects that create new and imaginary realities in the cinema. It’s not that I want to demonize these technologies; they have allowed the human imagination to accomplish great things—for instance, reanimating dinosaurs convincingly on screen. But, when we consider all the possible forms of virtual reality that have become part of everyday life—in the Internet, in video games, and on reality TV; sometimes also in strange mixed forms—the question of what “real” reality is poses itself constantly afresh.
What is really going on in the reality TV show Survivor? Can we ever really trust a photograph, now that we know how easily everything can be faked with Photoshop? Will we ever be able to completely trust an email, when our twelveyear-old children can show us that what we’re seeing is probably an attempt to steal our identity, or perhaps a virus, a worm, or a “Trojan” that has wandered into our midst and adopted every one of our characteristics? Do I already exist somewhere, cloned, as many Doppelgänger, without knowing anything about it?
History offers one analogy to the extent of [change brought about by] the virtual, other world that we are now being confronted with. For centuries and centuries, warfare was essentially the same thing, clashing armies of knights, who fought with swords and shields. Then, one day, these warriors found
themselves staring at each other across canons and weapons. Warfare was never the same. We also know that innovations in the development of military technology are irreversible. Here’s some evidence that may be of interest: in parts of Japan in the early seventeenth century, there was an attempt to do
away with firearms, so that samurai could fight one another hand to hand, with swords again. This attempt was only very short-lived; it was impossible to sustain.
A couple of years ago, I came to grasp how confusing the concept of reality has become, in a strange way, through an incident that took place on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. A friend was having a little party in his backyard—barbecued steak—it was already dark, when, not far away, we heard a few gunshots that nobody took seriously until the police helicopters showed up with searchlights on and commanded us, over loudspeakers, to get inside the house. We sorted out the facts of the case only in retrospect: a boy, described by witnesses as around thirteen or fourteen years of age, had been loitering, hanging around a restaurant about a block away from us. As a couple exited, the boy yelled, This is for real, shot both with a semi-automatic, then fled on his skateboard. He was never caught. But the message [Botschaft] of the madman was clear: this here isn’t a videogame, these shots are for real, this is reality.
AXIOMS OF FEELING
WE MUST ask of reality: how important is it, really? And: how important, really, is the Factual? Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges. If only the factual, upon which the so-called cinéma vérité fixates, were of significance, then one could argue that the vérité—the truth—at its most concentrated must reside in the telephone book—in its hundreds of thousands of entries that are all factually correct and, so, correspond to reality. If we were to call everyone listed in the phone book under the name “Schmidt,” hundreds of those we called would confirm that they are called Schmidt; yes, their name is Schmidt.
In my film Fitzcarraldo, there is an exchange that raises this question. Setting off into the unknown with his ship, Fitzcarraldo stops over at one of the last outposts of civilization, a missionary station:
Fitzcarraldo: And what do the older Indians say?
Missionary: We simply cannot cure them of their idea that ordinary life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.
The film is about an opera being staged in the rainforest; as you’ll know, I set about actually producing opera. As I did, one maxim was crucial for me: an entire world must undergo a transformation into music, must become music; only then would we have produced opera. What’s beautiful about opera is that reality doesn’t play any role in it at all; and that what takes place in opera is the overcoming of nature. When one looks at the libretti from operas (and here Verdi’s Force of Destiny is a good example), one sees very quickly that the story itself is so implausible, so removed from anything that we might actually experience that the mathematical laws of probability are suspended. What happens in the plot is impossible, but the power of music enables the spectator to experience it as true.
It’s the same thing with the emotional world [Gefühlswelt] of opera. The feelings are so abstracted; they cannot really be subordinated to everyday human nature any longer, because they have been concentrated and elevated to the most extreme degree and appear in their purest form; and despite all that we perceive them, in opera, as natural. Feelings in opera are, ultimately, like axioms in mathematics, which cannot be concentrated and cannot be explained any further. The axioms of feeling in the opera lead us, however, in the most secret ways, on a direct path to the sublime. Here we could cite
“Casta Diva” in Bellini’s opera Norma as an example.
You might ask: why do I say that the sublime becomes accessible to us [lit. “experience-able”; erfahrbar] in opera, of all forms, considering that opera did not innovate in any essential way in the twentieth century, as other forms took its place? This only seems to be a paradox: the direct experience of the sublime in opera is not dependent on further development or new developments. Its sublimity has enabled opera to survive.
ECSTATIC TRUTH
OUR ENTIRE sense of reality has been called into question.
But I do not want to dwell on this fact any longer, since what moves me has never been reality, but a question that lies behind it [beyond; dahinter]: the question of truth. Sometimes facts so exceed our expectations—have such an unusual, bizarre power—that they seem unbelievable.
But in the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft. In this context I see the quotation from Blaise Bascal about the collapse of the stellar universe not as a fake [“counterfeit”; Fälschung], but as a means of making possible an ecstatic experience of inner, deeper truth. Just as it’s not fakery when Michelangelo’s Pietà portrays Jesus as a 33-year-old man, and his mother, the mother of God, as a 17-year-old.
However, we also gain our ability to have ecstatic experiences of truth through the Sublime, through which we are able to elevate ourselves over nature. Kant says: The irresistibility of the power of nature forces us to recognize our physical impotence as natural beings, but at the same time discloses our capacity to judge ourselves independent of nature as well as superior to nature . . . I am leaving out some things here, for simplicity’s sake. Kant continues: In this way nature is not estimated in our aesthetic judgment as sublime because it excites fear, but because it summons up our power (which is not of nature) . . .
I should treat Kant with the necessary caution, because his explanations concerning the sublime are so very abstract that they have always remained alien to me in my practical work. However, Dionysus Longinus, whom I first came to know while exploring these subjects, is much closer to my heart, because he always speaks in practical terms and uses examples. We don’t know anything about Longinus. Experts aren’t even sure that that’s really his name, and we can only guess that he lived in the first century after Christ. Unfortunately, his essay On the Sublime is also rather fragmentary. In the earliest writings that we have from the tenth century, the Codex Parisinus 2036, there are pages missing everywhere, sometimes entire bundles of pages. Longinus proceeds systematically; here, at this time, I cannot even start in on the structure of his text. But he always quotes very lively examples from literature. And here I will, again, without following a schematic order, seize upon what seems most important to me.
What’s fascinating is that, right at the beginning of his text, [Longinus] invokes the concept of Ecstasy, even if he does so in a different context than what I have identified as “ecstatic truth.” With reference to rhetoric, Longinus says: Whatever is sublime does not lead the listeners to persuasion but to a state of ecstasy; at every time and in every way imposing speech, with the spell it throws over us, prevails over that which aims at persuasion and gratification. Our persuasions we can usually control, but the influences of the sublime bring power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer . . . Here he uses the concept of ekstasis, a person’s stepping out of himself into an elevated state—where we can raise ourselves over our own nature— which the sublime reveals “at once, like a thunder bolt.”1 No one before Longinus had spoken so clearly of the experience of illumination; here, I am taking the liberty to apply that notion to rare and fleeting moments in film.
He quotes Homer in order to demonstrate the sublimity of images and their illuminating effect. Here is his example from the battle of the gods:
Aidoneus, lord of the shades, in fear leapt he from his throne and cried aloud, lest above him the earth be cloven by Poseidon, the Shaker of Earth, and his abode be made plain to view for mortals and immortals—the dread and dank abode, wherefor the very gods have loathing: so great was the din that arose when the gods clashed in strife.
Longinus was an extraordinarily well-read man, one who quotes exactly. What is striking here is that he takes the liberty of welding together two different passages from the Iliad. It is impossible that this is a mistake. However,
Longinus is not faking but, rather, conceiving a new, deeper truth. He asserts that without truth [Wahrhaftigkeit] and greatness of soul the sublime cannot come into being. And he quotes a statement that researchers today ascribe either to Pythagoras or to Demosthenes:
For truly beautiful is the statement of the man who, in response to the question of what we have in common with the gods, answered: the ability to do good [Wohltun] and truth.
We should not translate his euergesia simply with “charity,” imprinted as that notion is by Christian culture. Nor is the Greek word for truth, alêtheia, simple to grasp. Etymologically speaking, it comes from the verb lanthanein,“to hide,” and the related word lêthos, “the hidden,” “the concealed.” A-lêtheia is, therefore, a form of negation, a negative definition: it is the “not-hidden,” the revealed, the truth. Thinking through language [im sprachlichen Denken], the Greeks meant, therefore, to define truth as an act of disclosure—a gesture related to the cinema, where an object is set into the light and then a latent, not yet visible image is conjured onto celluloid, where it first must be developed, then disclosed.
The soul of the listener or the spectator completes this act itself; the soul actualizes truth through the experience of sublimity: that is, it completes an independent act of creation. Longinus says: For our soul is raised out of nature
through the truly sublime, sways with high spirits, and is filled with proud joy, as it itself had created what it hears.
But I don’t want to lose myself in Longinus, whom I always think of as a good friend. I stand before you as someone who works with film. I would like to point out some scenes from another film of mine as evidence. A good example
would be The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner where the concept of ecstasy already shows up in the title.
Walter Steiner, a Swiss sculptor and repeat world champion in ski-flying, raises himself as if in religious ecstasy into the air. He flies so frightfully far, he enters the region of death itself: only a little farther, and he would not land on the steep slope, but rather crash beyond it. Steiner speaks at the end of a young raven, which he raised and which, in his loneliness as a child, was his only friend. The raven lost more and more feathers, which probably had to do with the feed that Steiner gave him. Other ravens attacked his raven and, in the end, tortured him so frightfully that young Steiner had only one choice: Unfortunately, I had to shoot him, says Steiner, because it was torture to watch how he was tortured by his own brothers because he could not fly any more. And then, in a fast cut, we see Steiner—in place of his raven—flying, in a terribly aesthetic frame, in extreme slow motion, slowed to eternity. This is the majestic flight of a man whose face is contorted by fear of death as if deranged
by religious ecstasy. And then, shortly before the death zone—beyond the slope, on the flat, where he would be crushed on impact, as if he had jumped from the Empire State Building to the pavement below—he lands softly, safely, and a written text is superimposed upon the image.
The text is drawn from the Swiss writer Robert Walser and
it reads:
I should be all alone in this world
Me, Steiner and no other living being.
No sun, no culture; I, naked on a high rock
No storm, no snow, no banks, no money
No time and no breath.
Then, finally, I would not be afraid any more.
NOTE
1. hupsos de pou kairiôs exenechthen ta te pragmata dikên skêptou panta dieforêsen . . . “Sublimity flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt” (1.4).
Minnesota Declaration
Truth and fact in documentary cinema "LESSONS OF DARKNESS".
1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999
Werner Herzog
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- On the Absolute, Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth
- Minnesota Declaration
On the Asolute, the Sublime and Ecstatic Truth
This text was first published at ARION 17.3 Winter 2010
ON THE ABOSLUTE, THE SUBLIME, AND ECSTATIC TRUTH
by WERNER HERZOG
(Translated by Moira Weigel)
[This text was originally delivered by Werner Herzog as a speech in Milano, Italy, following a screening of his film “Lessons of Darkness”on the fires in Kuwait. He was asked to speak about the Absolute, but he spontaneously changed the subject to the Sublime. Because of that, a good part of what follows was improvised in the moment.]
The collapse of the stellar universe will occur—like creation—in grandiose splendor.
—Blaise Pascal
The words attributed to Blaise Pascal which preface my film Lessons of Darkness are in fact by me. Pascal himself could not have said it better.
This falsified and yet, as I will later demonstrate, not falsified quotation should serve as a first hint of what I am trying to deal with in this discourse. Anyway, to acknowledge a fake as fake contributes only to the triumph of accountants.
Why am I doing this, you might ask? The reason is simple and comes not from theoretical, but rather from practical, considerations. With this quotation as a prefix I elevate [erheben] the spectator, before he has even seen the first frame, to a high level, from which to enter the film. And I, the author of the film, do not let him descend from this height until it is over. Only in this state of sublimity [Erhabenheit] does something deeper become possible, a kind of truth that is the enemy of the merely factual. Ecstatic truth, I call it.
After the first war in Iraq, as the oil fields burned in Kuwait, the media—and here I mean television in particular—was in no position to show what was,beyond being a war crime, an event of cosmic dimensions, a crime against creation itself. There is not a single frame in Lessons of Darkness in which youcan recognize our planet; for this reason the film is labeled “science fiction,” as if it could only have been shot in a distant galaxy, hostile to life. At its premiere at the Berlin Film Festival, the film met with an orgy of hate. From theraging cries of the public I could make out only “aestheticization of horror.” And when I found myself being threatened and spat at on the podium, I hit upon only a single, banal response. “You cretins,” I said, “that’s what Dante did in his Inferno, it’s what Goya did, and Hieronymus Bosch too.” In my moment of need, without thinking about it, I had called upon the guardian angels who familiarize us with the Absolute and the Sublime.
The Absolute, the Sublime, the Truth . . . What do these words mean? This is, I must confess, the first time in my life that I have sought to settle such questions outside of my work, which I understand, first and foremost, in practical terms.
By way of qualification, I should add at once that I am not going to venture a definition of the Absolute, even if that concept casts its shadow over everything that I say here. The Absolute poses a never-ending quandary for philosophy, religion, and mathematics. Mathematics will probably come closest to getting it when someone finally proves Riemann’s hypothesis. That question concerns the distribution of prime numbers; unanswered since the nineteenth century, it reaches into the depths of mathematical thinking. A prize of a million
dollars has been set aside for whoever solves it, and a mathematical institute in Boston has allotted a thousand years for someone to come up with a proof. The money is waiting for you, as is your immortality. For two and a half thousand years, ever since Euclid, this question has preoccupied mathematicians; if it turned out Riemann and his brilliant hypothesis were not right, it would send unimaginable shockwaves through the disciplines of mathematics and natural science. I can only very vaguely begin to fathom the Absolute; I am in no position to define the concept.
THE TRUTH OF THE OCEAN
FOR NOW, I’ll stay on the trusted ground of praxis. Even if we cannot really grasp it, I would like to tell you about an unforgettable encounter I had with Truth while shooting Fitzcarraldo. We were shooting in the Peruvian jungles east of the Andes between the Camisea and Urubamba rivers, where I would later haul a huge steamship over a mountain. The indigenous people who lived there, the Machiguengas, made up a majority of the extras and had given us the permit to film on their land. In addition to being paid, the Machiguengas
wanted further benefits: they wanted training for their local doctor and a boat, so that they could bring their crops to market a few hundred kilometers downriver themselves, instead of having to sell them through middlemen. Finally, they wanted support in their fight for a legal title to the area between
the two rivers. One company after another had seized it in order to plunder local stocks of wood; recently, oil firms had also been casting a greedy eye on their land.
Every petition we entered for a deed vanished at once in the labyrinthine provincial bureaucracy. Our attempts at bribery failed, too. Finally, having traveled to the ministry responsible for such things, in the capital city of Lima, I was told that, even if we could argue for a legal title on historical and cultural grounds, there were two stumbling blocks. First, the title was not contained in any legally verifiable document, but supported only by hearsay, which was irrelevant. Second, no one had ever surveyed the land in order to provide a recognizable border.
To the latter end, I hired a surveyor, who furnished the Machiguengas with a precise map of their homeland. That was my part in their truth: it took the form of a delineation, a definition. I’ll admit, I quarreled with the surveyor. The
topographic map that he furnished was, he explained, in certain ways incorrect. It did not correspond to the truth because it did not take into account the curvature of the earth.
In such a little piece of land? I asked, losing patience. Of course, he said angrily, and pushed his water glass toward me. Even with a glass of water,you have to be clear about it, what we’re dealing with is not an even surface. You should see the curvature of the earth as you would see it on an ocean or a lake. If you were really able to perceive it exactly as it is—but you are too simple-minded—you would see the earth curve. I will never forget this harsh lesson.
The question of hearsay had a deeper dimension and required research of an entirely different kind. [Arguing for their title to the land] the Indians could only claim that they’d always been there; this they had learned from their grandparents. When, finally, the case appeared hopeless, I managed to get an audience with the President, [Fernando] Belaúnde. The Machiguengas of Shivankoreni elected two representatives to accompany me. [In the President’s office in Lima] when our conversation threatened to come to a standstill, I presented Belaúnde with the following argument: in Anglo-Saxon law, although hearsay is generally inadmissible as evidence, it is not absolutely inadmissible. As early as 1916, in the case of Angu vs. Atta, a colonial court in the Gold Coast (today Ghana) ruled that hearsay could serve as a valid form of evidence.
That case was completely different. It had to do with the use of a local governor’s palace; then, too, there were no documents, nothing official that would have been relevant. But, the court ruled, the overwhelming consensus in hearsay that countless tribesmen had repeated and repeated, had come to constitute so manifest a truth that the court could accept it without further restrictions. At this, Belaunde, who had lived for many years in the jungle, fell quiet. He asked for a glass of orange juice, then said only Good god, and I knew that we had won him over. Today the Machiguengas have a title to their land; even the consortium of oil firmsthat discovered one of the largest sources of natural gas [in the world] directly in their vicinity respects it.
The audience with the President granted yet another odd glimpse into the essence of truth. The inhabitants of the village of Shivakoreni were not sure whether it was true that on the other side of the Andes there was a monstrously large body of water, an ocean. In addition, there was the fact that
this monstrous water, the Pacific, was supposedly salty.
We drove to a restaurant on the beach a little south of Lima to eat. But our two Indian delegates didn’t order anything. They went silent and looked out over the breakers. They didn’t approach the water, just stared at it. Then one
asked for a bottle. I gave him my empty beer bottle. No, that wasn’t right, it had to be a bottle that you could seal well. So I bought a bottle of cheap Chilean red, had it uncorked, and poured the wine out into the sand. We sent the bottle to the kitchen to be cleaned as carefully as possible. Then the men
took the bottle and went, without a word, to the shoreline. Still wearing the new blue jeans, sneakers, and T-shirts that we had bought for them at the market, they waded in to the waves. They waded, looking over the expanse of the Pacific Ocean, until the water reached their underarms. Then, they took a taste of the water, filled the bottle and sealed it carefully with a cork.
This bottle filled with water was their proof for the village that there really was an ocean. I asked cautiously whether it wasn’t just a part of the truth. No, they said, if there is a bottle of seawater, then the whole ocean must be true as well.
THE ASSAULT OF VIRTUAL REALITY
FROM THEN on, what constitutes truth—or, to put it in much simpler form, what constitutes reality—became a greater mystery to me than it had been. The two intervening decades have posed unprecedented challenges to our concept of reality.
When I speak of assaults on our understanding of reality, I am referring to new technologies that, in the past twenty years, have become general articles of everyday use: the digital special effects that create new and imaginary realities in the cinema. It’s not that I want to demonize these technologies; they have allowed the human imagination to accomplish great things—for instance, reanimating dinosaurs convincingly on screen. But, when we consider all the possible forms of virtual reality that have become part of everyday life—in the Internet, in video games, and on reality TV; sometimes also in strange mixed forms—the question of what “real” reality is poses itself constantly afresh.
What is really going on in the reality TV show Survivor? Can we ever really trust a photograph, now that we know how easily everything can be faked with Photoshop? Will we ever be able to completely trust an email, when our twelveyear-old children can show us that what we’re seeing is probably an attempt to steal our identity, or perhaps a virus, a worm, or a “Trojan” that has wandered into our midst and adopted every one of our characteristics? Do I already exist somewhere, cloned, as many Doppelgänger, without knowing anything about it?
History offers one analogy to the extent of [change brought about by] the virtual, other world that we are now being confronted with. For centuries and centuries, warfare was essentially the same thing, clashing armies of knights, who fought with swords and shields. Then, one day, these warriors found
themselves staring at each other across canons and weapons. Warfare was never the same. We also know that innovations in the development of military technology are irreversible. Here’s some evidence that may be of interest: in parts of Japan in the early seventeenth century, there was an attempt to do
away with firearms, so that samurai could fight one another hand to hand, with swords again. This attempt was only very short-lived; it was impossible to sustain.
A couple of years ago, I came to grasp how confusing the concept of reality has become, in a strange way, through an incident that took place on Venice Beach in Los Angeles. A friend was having a little party in his backyard—barbecued steak—it was already dark, when, not far away, we heard a few gunshots that nobody took seriously until the police helicopters showed up with searchlights on and commanded us, over loudspeakers, to get inside the house. We sorted out the facts of the case only in retrospect: a boy, described by witnesses as around thirteen or fourteen years of age, had been loitering, hanging around a restaurant about a block away from us. As a couple exited, the boy yelled, This is for real, shot both with a semi-automatic, then fled on his skateboard. He was never caught. But the message [Botschaft] of the madman was clear: this here isn’t a videogame, these shots are for real, this is reality.
AXIOMS OF FEELING
WE MUST ask of reality: how important is it, really? And: how important, really, is the Factual? Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges. If only the factual, upon which the so-called cinéma vérité fixates, were of significance, then one could argue that the vérité—the truth—at its most concentrated must reside in the telephone book—in its hundreds of thousands of entries that are all factually correct and, so, correspond to reality. If we were to call everyone listed in the phone book under the name “Schmidt,” hundreds of those we called would confirm that they are called Schmidt; yes, their name is Schmidt.
In my film Fitzcarraldo, there is an exchange that raises this question. Setting off into the unknown with his ship, Fitzcarraldo stops over at one of the last outposts of civilization, a missionary station:
Fitzcarraldo: And what do the older Indians say?
Missionary: We simply cannot cure them of their idea that ordinary life is only an illusion, behind which lies the reality of dreams.
The film is about an opera being staged in the rainforest; as you’ll know, I set about actually producing opera. As I did, one maxim was crucial for me: an entire world must undergo a transformation into music, must become music; only then would we have produced opera. What’s beautiful about opera is that reality doesn’t play any role in it at all; and that what takes place in opera is the overcoming of nature. When one looks at the libretti from operas (and here Verdi’s Force of Destiny is a good example), one sees very quickly that the story itself is so implausible, so removed from anything that we might actually experience that the mathematical laws of probability are suspended. What happens in the plot is impossible, but the power of music enables the spectator to experience it as true.
It’s the same thing with the emotional world [Gefühlswelt] of opera. The feelings are so abstracted; they cannot really be subordinated to everyday human nature any longer, because they have been concentrated and elevated to the most extreme degree and appear in their purest form; and despite all that we perceive them, in opera, as natural. Feelings in opera are, ultimately, like axioms in mathematics, which cannot be concentrated and cannot be explained any further. The axioms of feeling in the opera lead us, however, in the most secret ways, on a direct path to the sublime. Here we could cite
“Casta Diva” in Bellini’s opera Norma as an example.
You might ask: why do I say that the sublime becomes accessible to us [lit. “experience-able”; erfahrbar] in opera, of all forms, considering that opera did not innovate in any essential way in the twentieth century, as other forms took its place? This only seems to be a paradox: the direct experience of the sublime in opera is not dependent on further development or new developments. Its sublimity has enabled opera to survive.
ECSTATIC TRUTH
OUR ENTIRE sense of reality has been called into question.
But I do not want to dwell on this fact any longer, since what moves me has never been reality, but a question that lies behind it [beyond; dahinter]: the question of truth. Sometimes facts so exceed our expectations—have such an unusual, bizarre power—that they seem unbelievable.
But in the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth—a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft. In this context I see the quotation from Blaise Bascal about the collapse of the stellar universe not as a fake [“counterfeit”; Fälschung], but as a means of making possible an ecstatic experience of inner, deeper truth. Just as it’s not fakery when Michelangelo’s Pietà portrays Jesus as a 33-year-old man, and his mother, the mother of God, as a 17-year-old.
However, we also gain our ability to have ecstatic experiences of truth through the Sublime, through which we are able to elevate ourselves over nature. Kant says: The irresistibility of the power of nature forces us to recognize our physical impotence as natural beings, but at the same time discloses our capacity to judge ourselves independent of nature as well as superior to nature . . . I am leaving out some things here, for simplicity’s sake. Kant continues: In this way nature is not estimated in our aesthetic judgment as sublime because it excites fear, but because it summons up our power (which is not of nature) . . .
I should treat Kant with the necessary caution, because his explanations concerning the sublime are so very abstract that they have always remained alien to me in my practical work. However, Dionysus Longinus, whom I first came to know while exploring these subjects, is much closer to my heart, because he always speaks in practical terms and uses examples. We don’t know anything about Longinus. Experts aren’t even sure that that’s really his name, and we can only guess that he lived in the first century after Christ. Unfortunately, his essay On the Sublime is also rather fragmentary. In the earliest writings that we have from the tenth century, the Codex Parisinus 2036, there are pages missing everywhere, sometimes entire bundles of pages. Longinus proceeds systematically; here, at this time, I cannot even start in on the structure of his text. But he always quotes very lively examples from literature. And here I will, again, without following a schematic order, seize upon what seems most important to me.
What’s fascinating is that, right at the beginning of his text, [Longinus] invokes the concept of Ecstasy, even if he does so in a different context than what I have identified as “ecstatic truth.” With reference to rhetoric, Longinus says: Whatever is sublime does not lead the listeners to persuasion but to a state of ecstasy; at every time and in every way imposing speech, with the spell it throws over us, prevails over that which aims at persuasion and gratification. Our persuasions we can usually control, but the influences of the sublime bring power and irresistible might to bear, and reign supreme over every hearer . . . Here he uses the concept of ekstasis, a person’s stepping out of himself into an elevated state—where we can raise ourselves over our own nature— which the sublime reveals “at once, like a thunder bolt.”1 No one before Longinus had spoken so clearly of the experience of illumination; here, I am taking the liberty to apply that notion to rare and fleeting moments in film.
He quotes Homer in order to demonstrate the sublimity of images and their illuminating effect. Here is his example from the battle of the gods:
Aidoneus, lord of the shades, in fear leapt he from his throne and cried aloud, lest above him the earth be cloven by Poseidon, the Shaker of Earth, and his abode be made plain to view for mortals and immortals—the dread and dank abode, wherefor the very gods have loathing: so great was the din that arose when the gods clashed in strife.
Longinus was an extraordinarily well-read man, one who quotes exactly. What is striking here is that he takes the liberty of welding together two different passages from the Iliad. It is impossible that this is a mistake. However,
Longinus is not faking but, rather, conceiving a new, deeper truth. He asserts that without truth [Wahrhaftigkeit] and greatness of soul the sublime cannot come into being. And he quotes a statement that researchers today ascribe either to Pythagoras or to Demosthenes:
For truly beautiful is the statement of the man who, in response to the question of what we have in common with the gods, answered: the ability to do good [Wohltun] and truth.
We should not translate his euergesia simply with “charity,” imprinted as that notion is by Christian culture. Nor is the Greek word for truth, alêtheia, simple to grasp. Etymologically speaking, it comes from the verb lanthanein,“to hide,” and the related word lêthos, “the hidden,” “the concealed.” A-lêtheia is, therefore, a form of negation, a negative definition: it is the “not-hidden,” the revealed, the truth. Thinking through language [im sprachlichen Denken], the Greeks meant, therefore, to define truth as an act of disclosure—a gesture related to the cinema, where an object is set into the light and then a latent, not yet visible image is conjured onto celluloid, where it first must be developed, then disclosed.
The soul of the listener or the spectator completes this act itself; the soul actualizes truth through the experience of sublimity: that is, it completes an independent act of creation. Longinus says: For our soul is raised out of nature
through the truly sublime, sways with high spirits, and is filled with proud joy, as it itself had created what it hears.
But I don’t want to lose myself in Longinus, whom I always think of as a good friend. I stand before you as someone who works with film. I would like to point out some scenes from another film of mine as evidence. A good example
would be The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner where the concept of ecstasy already shows up in the title.
Walter Steiner, a Swiss sculptor and repeat world champion in ski-flying, raises himself as if in religious ecstasy into the air. He flies so frightfully far, he enters the region of death itself: only a little farther, and he would not land on the steep slope, but rather crash beyond it. Steiner speaks at the end of a young raven, which he raised and which, in his loneliness as a child, was his only friend. The raven lost more and more feathers, which probably had to do with the feed that Steiner gave him. Other ravens attacked his raven and, in the end, tortured him so frightfully that young Steiner had only one choice: Unfortunately, I had to shoot him, says Steiner, because it was torture to watch how he was tortured by his own brothers because he could not fly any more. And then, in a fast cut, we see Steiner—in place of his raven—flying, in a terribly aesthetic frame, in extreme slow motion, slowed to eternity. This is the majestic flight of a man whose face is contorted by fear of death as if deranged
by religious ecstasy. And then, shortly before the death zone—beyond the slope, on the flat, where he would be crushed on impact, as if he had jumped from the Empire State Building to the pavement below—he lands softly, safely, and a written text is superimposed upon the image.
The text is drawn from the Swiss writer Robert Walser and
it reads:
I should be all alone in this world
Me, Steiner and no other living being.
No sun, no culture; I, naked on a high rock
No storm, no snow, no banks, no money
No time and no breath.
Then, finally, I would not be afraid any more.
NOTE
1. hupsos de pou kairiôs exenechthen ta te pragmata dikên skêptou panta dieforêsen . . . “Sublimity flashing forth at the right moment scatters everything before it like a thunderbolt” (1.4).
Minnesota Declaration
Truth and fact in documentary cinema "LESSONS OF DARKNESS".
1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999
Werner Herzog
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