Fantastic Card of the Night: Supersonics at Your Service

Has there ever been a more self-reflexive team card? This could only be topped by the Utah Jazz striking up the band with a few guys strung out on heroin in the background, or the Orlando Magic sawing each other in half in front of a group of bored kids. Actually, you know what they should do. They should make a subset of Team Tableaus, where the team has to act to out the team name. I see the Trail Blazers in furs and pelts, getting high out in the woods with Sacagawea, Golden State Warriors fucking each other up on the streets of 1970s New York City...wait, wrong Warriors...Knicks crowding a back room all dandied up with watch fobs and pince-nez, slapping each other on the backs and surrounded by servants, Chicago Bulls in black and white striped shirts and red ascots 'round their necks, fleeing for their lives down Michigan Avenue. You get the idea.

I wouldn't be surprised if you could have found this image on the inside of a matchbook, or on a male escort postcard tacked to the inside of a public phone booth in London. Seriously, the only thing that's missing is that the team isn't wearing tuxedos. Slick Watts is wearing his headband and wristbands, the white guys all have bushy mustaches, and Bill Russell's out front like Ricardo Montalban from Fantasy Island.

Hello all you foxy ladies. If there's anything you need--anything at all--just call upon my team of Supersonics. They're here for your pleasure and convenience. Spencer! Archie! Slick! Help make our beautiful guests a little more comfortable. I'm Bill Russell, but you can call me Captain Wonderful. Next stop: your wildest, most basketball-related fantasies.

By the way, do you think Slick Watts wore his headband and wristbands at all times, on and off the court? I'm thinking the answer is Yes, with a capital 'Y.' And by 'at all times' I'm including when he showered, slept (hair net and oven mitts for protection), sat in jury duty, bought groceries, built computers in his garage with his dorky friends and attended black tie events with other pillars of the community.

I mean, they were the source of his powers, right?

Foots Walker and the Mystery of Discovery

I'm fairly confident I have a firm grasp on the way the world works. Let me rephrase that. I was fairly confident. Now I'm not so sure. I found this 1981-82 card of Foots Walker today at the White Plains show in White Plains, New York, and it's existence, well really the existence of Foots Walker himself, has thrown my understanding of the world under the bus.

I get it that basketball players of the Seventies and early Eighties had crazy nicknames. Many players were naked without them. I'm thinking of Nate 'Tiny' Archibald, Earl 'Slick' Watts, Lloyd 'World B.' Free. And now Clarence 'Foots' Walker.

But what I don't get is: why 'Foots'? Shouldn't it be 'Feet'?

Or is it a sociopolitical reference that I'm not reading?

Needless to say, my view of the world has changed now that I know Foots was on the scene this whole time.


Unfrozen Caveman Basketball Player

I bought a lot of mid-Seventies basketball cards at the show. And while nearly every African-American player sported Artis Gilmore-mutton chops and Afro, most of the white players were shaggy, but rarely was there any facial hair besides the odd mustache. Which brings up Mike Newlin. Stare into his eyes, if just for a few seconds–they're surprisingly similar to those of Steve Guttenberg. It begs the question: Before Police Academy, before Cocoon, and before Diner, was Steve Guttenberg an unfrozen caveman baller playing under the assumed name 'Mike Newlin'?