27-Dec-2011 - Fans’ Notes, Rapturous and Otherwise

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At least that’s how it used to work. As the N.B.A. finally begins another season, it is playing through the hangover of a lockout, an oddly voided trade and reverberations from the LeBron James Decision. Fans are steamed about all that and more, but in the information age knowing whom to blame requires a Ph.D. in information tracking. The more you learn the less clear kids nfl jerseys it is whom to root for. The simple days of identifying heroes at a glance are over, despite what you may read in two new books that long for a time when being a sports fan meant dispensing with shades of gray. The tones taken by Scott Raab in “The Whore of Akron” and Harvey Araton in “When the Garden Was Eden” couldn’t be more different, however. Whereas Mr. Araton’s authoritative look at the title-winning New York Knicks of the 1970s struggles to stay clear-eyed while reverent, Mr. Raab’s hate letter to LeBron James is comically bloody minded. Mr. Raab, a native of Cleveland and a staff writer for Esquire, is a powerful storyteller in full command of his game. That game is assassinating the character of James, a player he once revered, for the crime of insufficient loyalty to Mr. Raab’s beloved Cleveland Cavaliers. His rage comes in layers and waves. “When he wore a Yankees cap to Jacobs Field,” Mr. Raab writes of James, “for the opener of a playoff series between the Tribe and the Yankees in 2007 — and was interviewed during the game on national television, still wearing the cap — I wrote him off as worthless scum.” Mr. Raab is incensed that every other Cleveland fan is not also incensed. It is inconceivable to him that James could be both a decent person and an unabashed Yankees fan. The book’s subtitle may be “One Man’s Search for the Soul of LeBron James,” but missing is meaningful new insight into this player who left the Cavaliers in Authentic nfl jerseys 2011 for the Miami Heat. Mr. Raab set out to follow James’s first season with the Heat, but his reputation as a hater preceded him, which meant he had precious little access. He reports on incidents as seen from the stands and heard in Miami diners, and at one point recounts a hilarious Valium- and Vicodin-induced “conversation” with a dog named Pip. The book is far more about Mr. Raab than about James, but Mr. Raab has plenty of his own drama to supply: a bully from a broken home, he later dealt drugs by the pound to bikers in Texas. We learn about his various medical challenges and more than you would expect about his sex life. Little is held back, and it’s all a wonderfully immoderate read. Yet while he may think he’s making an ironclad case against the man he calls “every inch a prima donna” and “a player who cared nothing for the fans and the town,” it’s too one-dimensional to be convincing. This raises the question of whether he chose to focus on James to enlighten, to grieve or to attract the millions of LeBron -bashers who might be shopping for books. In contrast to the rabble-rousing Mr. Raab, Mr. Araton, a sports reporter and columnist for The New York Times since 1991, is a veritable scholar of the Knicks of the Willis Reed, Dave DeBusschere, Walt Frazier and Bill Bradley era. When Reed dragged NHL jerseys his torn hip muscle onto the court for Game 7 of the 1970 N.B.A. finals against the Lakers, Mr. Araton, then a high school senior, was in such a Knicks-obsessed frenzy he could scarcely tolerate human companionship. He drank in the greatest game in New York basketball history not at Madison Square Garden but on the north shore of Staten Island in a parked 1961 Mercury Comet. He was joined only by Marv Albert’s voice on the radio and a bag of chips. “The car battery had burned out by halftime,” he writes, “but so had the Lakers.” That year was a tricky one to turn 18. As if Vietnam and its draft weren’t enough, the Kent State shootings took place just four days before Game 7 .

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