As the Blake Griffin machine continues to evolve into a variation of ballooned stats located somewhere on the brink of a stratosphere we have yet to actually experience, the player that is Blake Griffin has also began to take a formal shape with the us, the fans, with the writers, with the opposition scouts, and with Billy Crystal.
The player that is Blake Griffin was a hobbled, broken, deflated potential athlete playing for the worst sports franchise in the world. He was a college basketball star whose future stock was ice skating across a North Dakota pond as the spring season thawed it before the summer bloom of the NBA’s finest sprung into light.
Months before the Griffin Machine was toiling the hardwoods in NBA arenas coast-to-coast, I was working an AAU tournament at the Hanger Athletic Xchange in Los Angeles. The tournament featured some of the finest future college basketball stars around. On the final night of the tournament, I was helping set up for our final video of the night. I was pulling players for interviews. Things were pretty normal, run of the mill sports business. Until of course, John Wall walked in. He hovered like a perfectly cut steel tower into his own galaxy, his physique a more chiseled and filled out version.
A superstar. The swagger said it all.
Wall had arrived just moments before his AAU team, D-One Sports, took the floor to play. The gym was hot, LA was in the grips of a nasty summer heat wave, and Wall’s arrival made it worse as the media and fans swarmed in his direction. It was just a lot of people moving , a lot of energy, it was heating the gym. When he settled in, he did so underneath the opposite basket of the media herd. I was on the far side of all courts, one of the HAX employees walked over, smiled at me, and then opened the garage doors in hopes of creating some sort of breeze channel.
That’s a superstar. That’s a superstar that’s in his summer.
I have no idea what Blake Griffin was doing that night, I can only guess that he and enigmatic gasmask veiled trainer Frank Matrisciano were working out at the evening’s dying shaft, likely located on some jagged rocky incline just north of Maverick’s Beach, and just slightly above Satan’s cottage.
That same summer often reminded me of several scenes from Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam movie that analogously and symbolically placed a very hot urban summer along side a popularized media sensation killer: the two kind of paralyzed the community. Los Angeles was kids running under hoses, the homeless laid out on Laundromat floors, and the bourgeoisie wiping beads of sweat from their foreheads while fanning themselves with magazines.
And you had Lebron James embarking on a moment that would polarize the sports nation and subjugate the concept of hometown loyalty. Lebron didn’t forge a new path for player loyalty; he merely exploited its current state of affairs. But his brazen, maverick and insensitive way of doing such aroused bitterness and hostility, it was the genesis of every bar conversations antagonist.
What we know about John Wall, and what we know about Lebron James, is what we are just now beginning to learn about Blake Griffin. And considering the current state of NBA affairs, that may well be the most important aspect about him.
Yesterday morning on the Mason and Ireland show on ESPN710 Los Angeles, John Ireland remarked that the recent incident between Lamar Odom and Blake Griffin was spawned from Griffin going too hard for a rebound during the last 9 seconds of the game. Ireland’s justification for this was that players have an unwritten rule between one another to slow down when games have been decided in an effort to prevent injuries. The show then went into a commentary that this could change the way they all view Griffin (negatively). With respect to written eloquence and sophistication and professionalism, Ireland is a Lakers blowhard that should likely be put to sleep with a few other media members that trade journalistic insincerity and disillusionment for media credentials. Not even Kobe bought that stock, and he is as much a Laker loyalist as anyone in history.
So Blake Griffin the player, we know him. Betting his stat-line in Vegas has to come with very small returns. But Blake Griffin the person? What are we learning?
Griffin’s account of the incident between himself and Odom revolves around the idea that he (and really any player) should go hard every waking moment on the floor. The counter is that there is an unwritten rule for going easy in decided games to prevent injuries, which for consistency, we will call the Ireland Dictum.
Lets just hypothetically decide that Griffin was drunk on his own arrogance and decided to dump his last beer all over the Ireland Dictum. What would this say about him now? Do we judge him now differently because we suspect that his motivation for going hard every play is to pad his own stats? He’s clearly a competetive player, I don’t think it’s a far stretch to say that every great (and competitive) player has cared about stats. Caring about stats is only an issue when it affects your team play; not when you go hard for a missed free throw. I care about how my shirts fit when I leave the house. For many players, their stats are their shirts, its what they wear when they are away from the arena. I will go one further than that, however, and say that I believe the shirt that Griffin wears when he is away from the arena is the shirt that has him go hard on every play, every rep, every sprint, and every film study session. Its not the shirt of swagger or pregame dance routines. Its the shirt of a cold blooded winner. And any assumption that stat lines aren’t important is insanely naive, Mr. Ireland. The Clippers are getting more national play over that double-double stat-line than they ever have before. And the fans love it. And his teammates love it. And, its winning games. And, going hard every play, well that’s just the antithesis of all things Clippers.
Griffin has made slight remarks here and there about staying a Clipper and winning a title. It would be the greatest achievement in sports history by some accounts, you know, bringing a title to the worst sports franchise from Los Angeles to the Bad News Bears first half of the movie team. That’s a part of his character we have yet to discover. And its possibly the essential part. He’s came around and risen from the ranks of the questionable Greg Oden health purgatory, to the potential to change the landscape of the game in far more ways than statistical: 1) Effort 2) Loyalty (two items that have definitely been questioned, see Lebron quitting against the Celtics for number 1). The fact that he goes hard every play gives me a good idea he won’t quit during a playoff game.
That summer night at the Hanger Athletic Xchange, I left something out. A text I got.
“Cory, who is your pick for ROY???”
I replied:
“John Wall”
Maybe Griffin has changed our perception of the NBA far more than we even realize at this juncture.
By Cory Hedgepeth @Surfelport
