Basketball: Good game gone bad

If you bring a little imagination to bear, it's still just possible to visit The Goat basketball court at the Harlem end of Central Park, look beneath the thin carpet of autumn leaves, and see a place still sizzling with the promise of summer, when the crowded concrete plot is a showy staging ground for urban dreams of fame and riches, most of them doomed.

For New York's schoolyard hoopsters, this is Ground Zero - a hallowed spot where generations of the city's kids, most of them poor and black, have come to perfect the in-your-face, elbows-and-attitude style of the modern game.

And if you want to understand what went wrong two weeks ago at the infamous Pistons-Pacers NBA game, when a foul prompted a riot that ended with players piling into the stands and beating the bejazus out of fans, Goat Park is a great place to start.

Ride the bus uptown, take a seat, and simply watch. You'll learn a few things, not just about basketball, but about sport in America and why that free-wheeling melee should have come as no surprise.

Basketball is supposed to be a team endeavour, one in which the individual star pours passion and talent into a group effort. Thing is, these days it's nothing of the sort. The action at Goat Park, where the next generation polishes its moves, makes the point just like the man it was named after.

In the late 60s and 70s, this was Earl "the Goat" Manigault's undisputed domain. He could have played with the NBA and made millions - nobody doubts that. The Goat's exploits, and his money-making hustles, remain the stuff of legend.

There was the time, for example, he collected hundreds of dollars in bets by leaping effortlessly beyond the bounds of imagination and placing a quarter atop the hoop's backboard.

And then there were his trademark double dunks, when he would slam the ball through the ring, grab it again on the way down, and pull off an improbable second dunk before his feet touched the ground.

Heroin, repeated arrests, jail terms and a compulsion to squander every opportunity that came his way meant that Manigault never moved beyond the playground circuit, the sand-lot arenas that are the backdrop for the movie White Men Can't Jump.

By 1995, at the age of 57 and finally free of his addiction, he was working as a drug counsellor when the accumulated ravages of a lifetime's bad choices stopped his heart for good. But at the park that bears his name, the Goat's legacy and bad-boy reputation live on.

Star quality! enthused a lanky 17-year-old called Omar, who probably should have been in school, but was chasing an NBA dream instead.

Like the other teens who drifted in as the shadows lengthened, he had come with his ball and a showboat's desire to be admired. The Goat? he said, Great before his time.

It was a curious appraisal, but a telling one. In Manigault's era, the pro squads still clung to the notion that what they were playing was a team sport. A one-man band like Manigault just wouldn't have fitted in. Too many allowances would have been needed to see him remain in any starting squad.

In those days, run-ins with the police weren't tolerated by the teams' owners and managers. Nor were guys who wouldn't pass - glory hogs who played for themselves alone. He would have been bad for the franchise, bad for the team, bad for the game, or so the logic would have gone. Dump him.

Today, well, things have changed, and it's a sure bet that, somehow, the rules and mores of the sport would be bent every which way in order to see the likes of the Goat suited up. Actually, they wouldn't need to be twisted all that much.

T HE proof is Ron Artest, arguably the NBA's best defender and the Pacer at the centre of that infamous Pistons free-for-all. While he has been banned for the rest of the season and will forfeit as much as $30 million in game payments and bonuses, you get the impression from his subsequent interviews that the expulsion doesn't much bother him.

He's too cool for that, cocky as a punk defendant mouthing off at the judge who has just sentenced him. Artest can't quite see what all the fuss is about.

"I'm not killing anybody," Artest protested. "I'm not kicking anybody." No, just king-hitting fans he believed had thrown beer over him after that foul-inspired slugging match broke out under the hoop. As the video replays showed, he socked the wrong ones anyway.

But, hey, what's the diff? As his aggrieved team-mates whined in the ghetto slang that is now the standard argot of the NBA, the fans were the real culprits. No NBA star worth his gold chains can tolerate the indignity of being dissed.

Or take the ferociously intense Latrell Sprewell, who six years ago tried to choke his then-coach at California's Golden State Warriors. He was suspended - and promptly snapped up by the New York Knicks, where he mostly stayed out of trouble before moving on to the Minnesota Timberwolves.

With courtside seats going for US$500 a game and venues like the cavernous Madison Square Garden stadium sold out years in advance, no management is going to squander a drawcard that can keep those blue-chip boxes filled.

But a team player? Not Sprewell, not for a moment. Like the kids at Goat Park who yearn for the NBA greatness that the odds say they will never achieve, when Sprewell takes the court, every element of his blazing style screams that he is playing only for himself.

For that he earns around US$14 million a year, a tidy sum, but last month, he was whining that it was little short of an insult. "I can't even afford to feed my family," he complained.

The Bulls' Eddy Curry recently lamented that his $78 million contract was much less than he deserved. Is that an overvaluation? Not if the US Olympic squad's performance in Athens is any indication.

The overpaid, indulged and feted big-shots strolled into the competition convinced that the rest of the world was their doormat, played as NBA-style showponies - and promptly had those smug smiles smeared by the likes of Yugoslavia, whose players still remember the definition of the word team.

Artest exemplifies the philosophy of the one-man team better than any other modern hoopster. While he grew up in a high-rise slum across the East River in Queens, he also made the pilgrimages to Goat Park. The look-at-me attitude that goes with the location has never faded.

J UST four games into the current season, Artest announced that he wanted time off to promote his sideline career as a rap artist and hip-hop impresario. When his club balked, he acted up in a variety of ways, most notably by pulverising a TV camera on his way to the locker room.

The fine was $100,000, but he laughed it off. And why not? That sum represented his pay cheque for just two games.

At Goat Park, the kids who admire Artest's outlaw elan made excuses. Roy, a 14-year-old with a talent for hitting long-distance three-pointers, echoed his heroes and blamed the fans. They should know their place, he said, and million-dollar fines tacked on to ticket prices would help them to learn it.

Others found alternate reasons to cut the star some slack. Basketball wasn't the only sport with player problems, another noted. During the summer, pitcher Frank Francisco of the Texas Rangers took exception to a heckler and frisbeed a folding a metal chair into the crowd, breaking a woman's nose.

As for record-breaking San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds, he is openly contemptuous of the bums on seats that pay his salary.

He couldn't care if they come or not, he has said, since he plays for his own satisfaction.

Then there is ice hockey, which often seems like professional wrestling with skates. I went to a fight the other night, the old joke goes, and a hockey game broke out.

All that said and acknowledged, the cancer eating at professional basketball still seems especially virulent.

Over the past year, in addition to Artest's repeated outrages, the public has been treated to the lurid details of Laker Kobe Bryant's sex life and rape case, and the usual gang-banger arrests, serial sex scandals

Sports stars don't have to be saints. Babe Ruth was no angel off the field, and no one now holds his taste for booze and broads against him. But then the Babe was a team guy and it was his slugging that an upcoming generation tried to emulate.

At Goat Park, though, it's the style as well as the skill. Like it or not, until someone in a position of authority restores a focus on game, not gangsta, the NBA's problems will continue.

In the meantime, pity the Goat's latest brood of ghetto kids, who have never had the chance the marvel at the exploits of a hero who can teach them any better.

Roger Franklin is the Herald's correspondent in New York