Today, FreeDarko is shutting off the lights. It’s been moribund for a few months, and I haven’t followed it closely in some time, but its archives contain some very sharp writing about basketball. It was sports writing that was written neither for or by meatheads, which is a great and noble thing.
FreeDarko’s status as a publishing collective is, I suppose, now in doubt. They followed up their Almanac with an Encyclopedia which covers some of the game’s esoterica. It is much like the first book. The writing is fine, if sometimes too familiar to me – I’ve already read Breaks of the Game – and the design is delicious. Jacob Weinstein has done tremendous illustrations for this volume.
This book completely obviates Bill Simmons’ recent book. They both cover the same territory in between their orange and blue covers — only FreeDarko does so more quickly and with better design and footnotes. The essays vary in prose quality, and some of it’s purple as a Kings’ jersey. Here’s a description of Jordan’s style:
To say that Jordan had a playground-style game was to suppose it could be contained or assigned its own argot. Jordan jetted up the court, around, over, and through defenders, with an organic, ecstatic ease that made of mockery of “moves.” The ball leapt out of Jordan’s hands as if imbued with his spirit, understanding for the first time what the rest of its life would be like. The burnished fadeaway that would later become MJ’s calling card, that ultimate beam of reckoning, was yet years away.
That last sentence is a three metaphor pileup. But the occasional overreach is a fair price to pay for basketball writing done by culture critics. The book offers unique takes on the old Celtics, Chamberlain, and the ’07 Suns.
