The quiet menance of the open sea.

Dwelling, re: the tandem assertion the Spurs/Tim Duncan are/is boring, yet, undeniably, excellent at the game of basketball.

Now, the world is FULL of boring people, though I suspect Duncan is not one of them. My hunch is he's just not being asked the right questions.

You know who else was unstoppable on the block, & was generally regarded as aloof?

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, that's who. Paying praise of the possible highest order, Tim Duncan's precedent may very well be Kareem. He's just so fucking effortless! Duncan even has the little baby hook.¹

Both failed to provide beat reporters w/ easy ammunition. Yet, Kareem was perceived as being a bit of the asshole, while Tim is labeled flat out dull as dirt. This hinges, I believe, on Kareem being in LA, since its super easy to hate anything Laker, & the demand for, shall we say, GLAMOUR, is higher, & also since he hung out Bruce Lee & was a Muslim, yet wouldn't provide juicy quotes for the media. Thus, he MUST be an aloof dick.

Duncan might be what Kareem would have been like if he'd stayed in Milwaukee.² Maybe. Point is, its a smaller city, & as smaller cities will do, values 'ah shucks' types, especially if those types win 50-60 games a year & are a perennial title contender.

-d.d.

¹ Tip of the hat to my pops on that one. It was his observation of Duncan's unstoppablenessnish within 5 feet of the basket that caused him to draw a comparison to Kareem, & was also him who mentioned the baby-hook. This pondering led me to consider further parallels.
² Guess here's as good a place as any: about that '71 Bucks team. 66-16 regular season record. 16-2 in the playoffs including a sweep of the Baltimore Bullets in Finals (the Bucks played in the West back then). Coach Larry Costello on Buck's chemistry:

"That was a good bunch of guys," Costello recalled then. "When we got Oscar, people wondered how we were going to handle Oscar and Kareem together but it was no problem. Oscar wanted to win a championship so bad. Kareem didn't care about the PR, Oscar maybe a little more so, but Kareem got it anyway."