the smell of burt’s bees and dignity-anemia and credit cards
Just after that, the half ended, but not before Battier was tempted by a tiny act of basketball selfishness. The Rockets’ front office has picked up a glitch in Battier’s philanthropic approach to the game: in the final second of any quarter, finding himself with the ball and on the wrong side of the half-court line, Battier refuses to heave it honestly at the basket, in an improbable but not impossible attempt to score. He heaves it disingenuously, and a millisecond after the buzzer sounds. Daryl Morey could think of only one explanation: a miss lowers Battier’s shooting percentage. “I tell him we don’t count heaves in our stats,” Morey says, “but Shane’s smart enough to know that his next team might not be smart enough to take the heaves out.”
3 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Post a comment
HTML allowed:
This article made me want to like Shane
Battier but didn’t make me like him.
I am puzzled by not being taken in by
the strange combination of self-awareness,
workmanlike effort, grit, strange waves
of skin on the top of head, and so on.
Comment by lex delecti — 2/18/2009 @ 10:00 pm
it made me like him but mostly because he seems deeply unhappy. plus i give it up for dudes with unattractive scalps. i think his low Q rating has something to do with his awful surfer dude-francophone naming situation.
Comment by ptb — 2/19/2009 @ 11:59 am