(no subject)
I've been keeping a casual eye on the ABA for a couple years, inspired by the league's expansion philosophy ($50,000 a team, anyone can buy one, half the league will be defunct by the end of the season). Most of the real fun is in tracking the team names, which run the gamut from ridiculous to insane (with logos and Web sites to boot, naturally). It's fourth-tier semi-pro basketball. Nobody minds if the angry panther on your splash page only growls half the time.
Anyway. While researching the most recent failed ABA experiments (a dozen teams that started the season in November - a dozen! - have now bid the ABA farewell), I came across the greatest minor league basketball team name of all time.
The Atlanta Krunk Wolverines.
The Atlanta Krunk Wolverines started life as the Charlotte Krunk. The Charlotte Krunk once posted the following on its site:
How tall are you?
The Charlotte Krunk are still looking for players. Preferably 6'8" and up. Contact Coach Floyd via email.
The Charlotte Krunk, to no one's surprise, made it a month and a half in the ABA before folding. But the team's owner, Duane "Spyder" Hughes, was not to be deterred. Somehow he managed to get the CBA to accept the Krunk as expansion members in 2007. On top of that, their Wikipedia entry contains the greatest unsourced statement of all time: "One of the more recognizable faces on The Atlanta Krunk will be that of former Maryland player Nik Caner-Medley."
Fuckin' sign me up! Wildly unlikable, whiny, preppy, shoulda-gone-to-Duke ex-Terrapin Nik Caner-Medley, embodying the spirit of krunk and historically African-American education?
I got thinking tonight after the Syracuse game (about which I could write a novel, but I'll spare you). The vast majority of college players never make it to the NBA. They either move back home and sell cars or go bounce around the Midwest playing for 400 people in a high school gym or they go to Europe, like onetime Syracuse center Craig Forth, who's now tooling around Slovakia learning how to sing songs about a "horse doing unmentionables to the cart it was pulling" and blogging about it.
Or they join the Atlanta Krunk Wolverines. When you think about it, a mediocre D-I basketball career is like any other useless degree you earn in college (doubly so for the dreaded "Sports Management" or "Physical Education" majors). When graduation comes, you spend a bewildering amount of time thinking WHAT THE HELL AM I GOING TO DO NOW and generally being inconsolable and fatalistic. I doubt Terrence Roberts spent much time tonight in the Carrier Dome wondering whether cute girls would ever want to date him or how he was going to pay off all those student loans, but the insecurity has to be universal. There's a whole lot of uncertainty ahead for dozens of 22-year-old guys who are on national TV pretty much constantly right now; three months from now they'll be practically obscure, and a year from now you'll be hard-pressed to remember anybody on the Wisconsin Badgers besides Alando Tucker.
So I'm a little surprised that the ABA and its ilk haven't caught on. They're us. They're playing in our failed cities in front of disinterested families, the elderly, and the unemployable, in roughly the same set of circumstances in which "WCW Power Hour" used to tape, but there's something incredibly inspiring about all these guys with little or no hope of ever boxing out Amare Stoudemire, still plugging away at this thing. At some point, almost everybody realizes that they're not quite as good at the thing they thought they were good at, but minor-league basketball is the living embodiment of that gradual decline. It doesn't matter if the panther growls or not. It doesn't matter if Nik Caner-Medley doesn't know how to define "krunk." Nothing else really needs to be said. They're us. We're them. The Krunk shall rise again.
Anyway. While researching the most recent failed ABA experiments (a dozen teams that started the season in November - a dozen! - have now bid the ABA farewell), I came across the greatest minor league basketball team name of all time.
The Atlanta Krunk Wolverines.
The Atlanta Krunk Wolverines started life as the Charlotte Krunk. The Charlotte Krunk once posted the following on its site:
How tall are you?
The Charlotte Krunk are still looking for players. Preferably 6'8" and up. Contact Coach Floyd via email.
The Charlotte Krunk, to no one's surprise, made it a month and a half in the ABA before folding. But the team's owner, Duane "Spyder" Hughes, was not to be deterred. Somehow he managed to get the CBA to accept the Krunk as expansion members in 2007. On top of that, their Wikipedia entry contains the greatest unsourced statement of all time: "One of the more recognizable faces on The Atlanta Krunk will be that of former Maryland player Nik Caner-Medley."
Fuckin' sign me up! Wildly unlikable, whiny, preppy, shoulda-gone-to-Duke ex-Terrapin Nik Caner-Medley, embodying the spirit of krunk and historically African-American education?
I got thinking tonight after the Syracuse game (about which I could write a novel, but I'll spare you). The vast majority of college players never make it to the NBA. They either move back home and sell cars or go bounce around the Midwest playing for 400 people in a high school gym or they go to Europe, like onetime Syracuse center Craig Forth, who's now tooling around Slovakia learning how to sing songs about a "horse doing unmentionables to the cart it was pulling" and blogging about it.
Or they join the Atlanta Krunk Wolverines. When you think about it, a mediocre D-I basketball career is like any other useless degree you earn in college (doubly so for the dreaded "Sports Management" or "Physical Education" majors). When graduation comes, you spend a bewildering amount of time thinking WHAT THE HELL AM I GOING TO DO NOW and generally being inconsolable and fatalistic. I doubt Terrence Roberts spent much time tonight in the Carrier Dome wondering whether cute girls would ever want to date him or how he was going to pay off all those student loans, but the insecurity has to be universal. There's a whole lot of uncertainty ahead for dozens of 22-year-old guys who are on national TV pretty much constantly right now; three months from now they'll be practically obscure, and a year from now you'll be hard-pressed to remember anybody on the Wisconsin Badgers besides Alando Tucker.
So I'm a little surprised that the ABA and its ilk haven't caught on. They're us. They're playing in our failed cities in front of disinterested families, the elderly, and the unemployable, in roughly the same set of circumstances in which "WCW Power Hour" used to tape, but there's something incredibly inspiring about all these guys with little or no hope of ever boxing out Amare Stoudemire, still plugging away at this thing. At some point, almost everybody realizes that they're not quite as good at the thing they thought they were good at, but minor-league basketball is the living embodiment of that gradual decline. It doesn't matter if the panther growls or not. It doesn't matter if Nik Caner-Medley doesn't know how to define "krunk." Nothing else really needs to be said. They're us. We're them. The Krunk shall rise again.