The start of a new year is always a good time to watch football and settle old scores, so let’s get to it. I have some serious grudges to grind at the end of a foul year like 2000. It was not so much a bad year as a deeply Wrong one—but to make a list of reasons why it was Wrong would torture us all & only double the suffering.
I have old scores to even with all manner of people: Brent Musburger, Lyle Lovett, Lawyers, foreigners, Pit bulls, Russian Pimps, and the whole Los Angeles Police Department. There are rotten people everywhere.
My grudge against Brent Musburger has been smoking on a personal back burner for many years—since the early 1980s, in fact, when Brent was covering the NBA finals for CBS-TV, and it involves the word “downtown.”
That is when Musburger changed the language of sportswriting forever when he came up with the ignorant notion that any basketball player firing off a long three-point shot is shooting from “downtown.” (Celtics announcer Johnny Most might have coined the “downtown” trademark in the 1960s, but it was Musburger who beat it to death.)
I still hear in my dreams the wild stupid gibberish coming out of that yo-yo’s mouth every time Nate McMillan or Dennis Johnson drilled one of those long flat three-pointers.
“All the way from downtown,” Brent would scream, “another one from Downtown!”
It drove me mad then, & it still does every time one of those fools blurts it out. It was quickly picked up and adopted by a whole generation of half-bright TV commentators every night of the bloody season. It has become part of the Lexicon now, & it will not be easy to correct.… In gyms & Coliseums all over America (even in Greece or Korea), wherever basketball as we know it is played, there will be some howling Jackass braying “From downtown! Another three-pointer! Is this a great country, or what?”
It is the Curse of Musburger, another dumb and relentless squawk from the world of baseball writers.
“Going downtown” has more than one meaning—from going to work at 66 Wall Street in New York to anal rape in Alcatraz—but it always means going to a busy place, for good or ill. The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang says it’s “where the action is”—a noisy, crowded place with many intersections & tall buildings & freaky-looking strangers.
Indeed we all know that place. We see it every night on ESPN & on the hardwood at Boston Garden.… It’s that violent little place just under the glass on a big-time Basketball court where tall brutes slam each other around like crazed fish. They call it “Rebounding.”
Downtown is where you score—not somewhere out in the wilderness, where people are far apart & not much happens. You don’t fire a long jump shot from Downtown, you fire it into Downtown. The Real definition of “Taking it downtown” is to suddenly drive to the basket & into a cluster of 7-footers who seem to have you sealed out—like Allen Iverson launching himself at Robinson & Duncan & dunking it over them. To think Otherwise would be to think like a Baseball Writer, or like Brent Musburger.
He is a creepy bugger, for sure. I saw him whooping it up in the Superdome last week. He was hanging with some kids at the Saints-Rams game, acting like Mr. Rogers.
Which is not a bad thing, necessarily, but it will get on your nerves in a hurry if you’re drunk. The last time I saw Brent socially was in the dinner lounge at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas. I was dining with my old friend Jimmy the Greek & some women who said they were traveling with (famous fight promoter) Bob Arum, when Musburger came up to our table & started abusing the Greek in a loud voice about something Jimmy had said on the air about him.… We had a very prominent table, as the Greek always did, so I had him thrown out.
“What’s wrong with that bum?” Jimmy asked. “He acts this way every time he gets around the Champ. I should have him killed.”
He signaled for the maitre d’, but one of the women stopped him. Later that night a man was stabbed to death in the parking lot by a Sonny Liston fan.
The real definition of “downtown,” back then, was wherever Muhammad Ali was at the time—which is still true: I saw him with the Mayor in Times Square on New Year’s Eve. The Champ always draws a crowd.
—January 1, 2001