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Image is everything Anthem interpretation epitomizes NBA's problems
Poor David Stern. He had to spend All-Star Weekend fielding all those belligerent questions about the state of the NBA. Yet no one posed the commish the most burning query of all: What in the name of Francis Scott Key was Jessica Simpson doing singing The Star-Spangled Banner? Talk about a league with an image problem. One of the great All-Star Weekend moments -- greater even than Magic Johnson's 22 assists in 1984 or Spud Webb's victory in the '86 slam-dunk contest -- was Marvin Gaye's rendition of the national anthem at the '83 game in Los Angeles. (You can find it on The Master, Gaye's four-CD boxed set.) Gaye sang it with no accompaniment but a metronomic backbeat. He took his sweet, sweet time with it. (I challenge my colleague Paul Zimmerman, who times the national anthem at every NFL game he attends, to find more than a handful of other Banners that clocked in at more than three minutes.) Out on the floor the players tried to be stoic, but Marvin soon had them bobbing to the rhythms he had unlocked in that old warhorse. Fans listened, rapt, except for a scattering of squealing females. My own spine still tingles when I recall the hushed way he echoed "what so proudly we hailed." And I'll be doggone (to borrow a phrase) if Julius Erving didn't ride the voice of that son of a preacher man to the MVP award that day. Here's the thing: In 1983 most of America was ready for Marvin's anthem. By then we no longer regarded inspired innovation of any sort as an assault on our values, the way so many people did when Jose Feliciano, at the height of the Vietnam era, tried out his own unorthodox Star-Spangled Banner on a World Series crowd in 1968. One of the reasons the NBA flourished through the 1980s and most of the '90s was that we were ready for it, too. We were ready for the intimacy and individuality of its game -- for the artistry and majesty of its young, wealthy and, yes, black players. Marvin got just right the self-assurance the league was beginning to feel back then. It had put behind it the travails of the late 1970s. And it had no compunction about showcasing individuals who did things that weren't subject to replication. (Remember the voice at the end of those "It's Fantastic!" PSAs? "The previous announcement has been furnished by the NBA and its players." The "... and its players" part was revolutionary for a pro sports league.) You couldn't fake that authenticity. You didn't have to graft it onto a rickety marketing campaign. Magic and Larry, Doc and Kareem, eventually Michael and Charles and Isiah, all were Marvins, after a fashion -- master stylists in an idiom for which they'd been favored with a remarkable aptitude. But when the Doctor uncorked a move, he didn't go out and cut a record to celebrate it. Grover Washington did that for him. I'd argue that today's NBA suffers less from the extracurricular poetry of Allen Iverson, Jason Kidd and Shaquille O'Neal than from their unwillingness to simply let their games do the talking. The NBA prospered in that perfect place between Iverson's trashy lyrics and the overscrubbed vocal stylings of Jessica Simpson. A place where Marvin's '83 All-Star Banner rests. Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure, which will be published in January 2002 by Warner Books. Send comments to thehooplife@aol.com.
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