An Extremely Reflective Meditation on Tonight’s Mavs/Spurs Game in Three Parts, One Not Like the Others

(The following is a guest post by the great Bethlehem Shoals, one of the guys behind Free Darko. He’s also one of the authors of FreeDarko Presents…The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, a celebration of “liberated fandom” and the only book that has ever, and will ever, tell you the perfect replica jersey to wear to a Civil War reenactment. Get it now. The post’s co-author, Amelia Abreu, grew up here, and used to write for the Dallas Observer.)

Bethlehem Shoals: It’s a stretch to say that the Mavs have the Spurs right where they want them. Monday’s unfortunate outcome proved that the Spurs can ball just fine without Manu, thank you, and will now and forever be able to lock down almost any collection of scorers when the moon is full. But with the series headed back to Dallas, tied 1-1, the Mavs should be feeling pretty darn good about themselves right about now. Not because they stole one from San Antonio on the road, thus giving them some mathematically encouraging chance of advancing. No, the Mavericks should be relieved that they’re back where they belong in the order of the universe: feisty, possibly crazy, underdogs staring down their own imminent death. With that one win, the Mavs went from failed empire to lovable insurgents. Just like things used to be.

That trip to the Finals, the upset at the hands of Nellie and his banshee Warriors, last season’s unceremonious loss to a Hornets team they were expected to unmask … all this was a bad dream, an attempt to be something this franchise never could be. Think about the wild ride that preceded it: A tech zillionaire purchases one of the most benighted franchises in all of pro sports. He enlists the services of the most certifiably weird head coach the league has ever seen. And then, together with a giant jump-shooting German, an alt-rock Canadian point guard, a stoic swingman left over from the Perot years, and anyone else the owner felt like throwing money at, they set out to conquer the league. They had some epic shoot-outs with the Kings, another arriviste squad with some weird ideas about style. Cuban continued to be, depending on how you saw it, the most entertaining or the most meddlesome owner this side of Jerry Jones. It was like Three J’s never happened.

Amelia Abreu: In 1992, I was a sixth grader in a Dallas public school, which had mandated ethnic/racial quotas as per the now obsolete desegregation order. (Barefoot Sanders was a name we heard a lot.) What the 30 percentiles each of Black, white, and Hispanic/Latino, and the 10 percent of Asian/other sixth grade girls could agree on was the dreaminess of Jason Kidd’s flat top and green eyes, and his sleekness on the court as an indicator of great things to come. The two presents I remember from that birthday are a Kidd #5 jersey and a scandalously dark tube of lip gloss.

The commercial the Mavs ran that year was a very simple chant of “I’m a Dallas Mavericks fan!” This, of course, was an incredulous claim to make, even to a sixth grader. Who could express something so simplistic about a franchise so silly, so tumultuous, so frivolous with promise? About an operation run by a man in a silly cowboy hat who was actually related to Mary Kay? I grew up in Casa View, so I was not a stranger to drug problems and squandered hopes. (The father of one of the more mean girl white girls at my school was a contractor who painted Mary Kay’s house!) The coverage of the Mavericks on local news, dominated by Roy Tarpley’s troubles with the law and those pain-in-the-ass mandatory minimums were not just sympathetic, they were resonant. Of course you would want the Mavericks to win, but life was complicated; you had to look at the bigger picture.

For years, people (mostly Germans) have asked me if Dallas was like Dallas, the television show. All I knew about the show was the theme song, which one associates with bed time when their bed time was 9 PM. Last year a friend of mine and I watched the first two seasons of it over a long weekend, and all the sudden, I was ready to answer, “Why, yes!” The show was shot on location for the first six seasons, which means you see a lot of downtown/”urban” Dallas when it still had the pretense and sheen of the late 1970s. That staged hustle n’ bustle as seen on the show seems so true to what people of my parents’ generation say about those years, but they also concede that it was all bound to end. (“When Reagan shut down the mental hospitals, downtown Dallas got scary!” my mom always says.)

Dallas’ moral character seems pretty hinged on false starts and abrupt stops.

Bethlehem Shoals: Then one day, it was over. Steve Nash was put out to pasture—or rather, to Phoenix, where he and Mike D’Antoni conspired to run like hell and make the league that much more fun. Nellie, we all know what happened to him. Before we knew it, Dirk was hanging out in the paint acting tough, the team shed both its edge and its looseness, and Avery Johnson had a franchise that had only ever known dismay and/or excess marching in formation like little baby Spurs. Except it wasn’t meant to be, even once they acquired Jason Kidd, now the doyen of all point guards (incidentally, that Devin Harris kid they swapped for Kidd made an appearance on the East’s All-Star team this year). So Avery left town, Carlisle came ’round, and the Mavs set about finding who they were. And as luck would have it, they stumbled right into the familiar, if perilous, past.

Look at this team as a running, jumping embodiment of everything the Mavs have ever been. There’s Josh Howard, an outspoken, moody talent whose public admission of weed smoking makes him like a more mild, less depressing, Roy Tarpley. Kidd himself, back not to deliver a ring, but to bring a little joy back to a city he left too soon. Dirk, the ultimate symbol of those wild Don Nelson years. And, in Jason Terry, the kind of feisty bastard whose animation rights would be worth millions to a bygone age of Disney. This roster might as well be a compilation: “Mavs, Then and Now,” that you throw on because you’ll hate yourself if you do and probably feel just as bad if you don’t. Most importantly, no longer are they San Antonio lite. This team, even if their season is almost over, is Dallas to the core.