Filed under: Basketball, Bread City, Madison Square Garden, New York City, New York Knicks, Video | Tags: Basketball Documentary, Jeremy Lin, Linsanity
via Got’em Coach a.k.a. the director.
Filed under: Basketball, Bread City, Endangered Aesthetics, Michael Jordan | Tags: 1990s Aesthetics, Ephemera, Nostalgia, Outkast, Valentine's Day
Nothing says love like these deadstock Michael Jordan valentines, whether he’s dunking through the stratosphere or standing in front of a dead tree. Circa early 90s, when cool was king.
Filed under: Architecture, Art, Basketball, Bread City, History, Journalism, Photography, War | Tags: Basketball Archeology, Basketball History, Iraq
I. American troops play basketball in Saddam Hussein’s occupied Birthday Palace. Tikrit, Iraq, 2004.
original photo by Paolo Woods
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II. The 1948 Summer Games in London was the first and only time that Iraq fielded an Olympic basketball team. They sustained five of the tournament’s worst defeats. Iraq lost to China, Korea, the Philippines, and Chile by an average of 86 points per game. The United States won gold.
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III. “The next week, back in Baghdad, I had a whiskey one evening with the Time bureau manager and a pair of reporters and told them about the killings at the basketball game… The bureau manager lit another cigarette as we sat in silence for a moment. ‘And especially, basketball being a pro-Western sport was nonsense,’ he said. ‘Iraqis have been playing basketball for fifty years, since long before all this. They love it.’”
– From The End of Major Combat Operations, by Nick McDonnell
photo by Richard Mosse
Filed under: Bread City, Football, New York City | Tags: 1970s Culture, New York City History, New York Giants, Super Bowl XLVI
In 1975, the New York Giants were a team without a country. They were in the wilderness. Their stadium in New Jersey was still being constructed, and the Yankees (the Giants’ old landlord) had kicked them out to do renovations.
So the Giants had no place to play home games, and to make matters worse, they were terrible. Facing an uncertain future, the team did the only thing they could do. They designed a new logo: an italics-mixed-case-disco-racing-stripe-NY emblem of questionable decision-making. It was the NFL uniform equivalent of a drunk tattoo. It was awesome. And it only lasted for that single season.
The Giants ended up playing through the year at Shea Stadium in Queens. In 1976, the team moved in to their home at the Meadowlands, and wasted no time in changing to a logo that was NY/NJ-neutral. It was their banner through two epic Super Bowl victories. Here’s to one more: BEAT NEW ENGLAND!
Filed under: Bread City, New York City, Photography, Poetry | Tags: Food, New York City Culture, West Side
Hot bowl of pastina,
23rd Street and the river.
Subway grime patina,
shout to chopped liver.
photo by Stephan Alessi
Filed under: Bread City, College Basketball, Music, Sports Photography | Tags: Great Jams, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble
Hypnotic Brass Ensemble – Spottie
photo via TGA
Filed under: Basketball, Bread City, History, New York Knicks, Sports Photography | Tags: 1970s NBA, Basketball History, Bill Bradley, Princeton Bulldogs
What attracted me was the swish, the sound of the dribble, the feel of going up in the air. You don’t need eight others, like in baseball. You don’t need any brothers or sisters. Just you. I wonder what the guys are doing back home. I’d like to be there, but it’s as much fun here, because I’m playing. It’s getting dark. I have to go back for dinner. I’ll shoot a couple more. Feels good. A couple more.
- From A Sense of Where you Are: Bill Bradley at Princeton, by John McPhee
The Knicks stole Bill Bradley in the 1965 NBA Draft. There was no frozen envelope, just a now-obscure rule known as the Territorial Pick. Between 1950 and 1966, NBA teams had first dibs on drafting any college player within 50 miles.
Bradley had graduated from Princeton as the Associated Press Player of the Year, the NCAA Tournament’s Most Outstanding Player, and a two-time First Team All-American. And since Princeton, New Jersey is 1 mile closer to New York City than to Philadelphia, the Knicks were able to scoop Bradley away from the 76ers as a Territorial Pick.
The rest is history: Bradley played with New York for his entire basketball career – save for one season with Olimpia Milano – and his #24 jersey was retired by the Knicks in 1984.
