Mikan drills.  I did them forever.  Left hand.  Right hand.  Off one foot.  Off the other.  The narrative I pursued was clear.  I first rolled a ball on the floor.  Then I learned to catch and pass, dribbled up and down the driveway with my head buried like an ostrich, but then, like a long-necked bird, I learned to run with the ball, head up, eyes toward the Pacific.

I was also tall, always on the back row for class pictures: a bully on the playground.  Then I quit growing.  The story was done, and I didn’t know it; so I started throwing up shots in the lane, not even looking at the rim, trying to be like Antawn Jamison, a magician, or a man without a position, which means I had no boundaries–and, by the time I tried out for the high school team, I no longer knew what I wanted to be.  I wasn’t NVA, Vietcong, or South Vietnamese.  I was just human, like Antawn, looking for some way to exist on into the future.  I wound up evaporating into the rafters, disappearing from the court like morality in times of war.

Thing was, I wasn’t the only one lost in the humidity, not sweating but melting into oblivion.

Look at this year’s NBA All-Star rosters.  On the two squads, there were only five “true” centers, and even that seems debatable when to reach five one must include Tim Duncan, Al Horford, and Pau Gasol.  If one counts non-centers, then there were only ten guys with low post scoring games in the traditional sense: Garnett, Howard, Bosh, Lee, Horford, Duncan, Nowitzki, Stoudamire, Gasol, Randolph, and Kaman, and that list is not in stone.  In an age when everything from weight-training programs to hormones in the milk we drink makes the human race bigger, stronger, and taller than ever before, why are there fewer “great” big men than ever in the history of basketball?  What makes this even stranger is that it’s not like teams are winning championships without low post scorers.  The decade’s past champions had at their foundations Shaq, Tim Duncan, Rasheed Wallace, and Kevin Garnett.  Just last year, the future of the big man tradition, Dwight Howard, finished runner-up, and Kobe Bryant won his first title without Shaq but with the aid of Pau Gasol; so obviously big men still matter.  The old rules still apply, no matter how many times one makes the case that the League boils down to Kobe, Wade, LeBron, and ‘Melo, or MVPs won by Steve Nash.  The team with a tried and true low post threat is the team that stands the greatest chance of postseason success.

People will say the rules changed.  People will say that America went into the jungle playing one game and came out knowing another, that the war in Vietnam was some out of body experience that allowed 18 year olds’ souls to walk around unshielded by flesh, peering into Uncle Ho Chi Minh’s tunnels as if they were Paris’ underpants and were redefining the ways in which life recycles itself.  And, maybe they did just that, but as far as I can tell human life still begins when sperm hits egg.  Knock down all the bowling pins, raze the earth and all its rice paddies, and the ball still comes back by way of unseen mechanisms.  The pins still get reset.  The rules don’t change–we just think they do, having watched too many news reels, too many highlight reels, and we convince ourselves that, yeah, the world was some new beast after Michael Jordan soared through it.

Every war since Vietnam is viewed as some strange continuation of that war in Southeast Asia’s paradigm.  We can’t escape it, just like in The Big Lebowski, the ashes keep blowing back in the faces of the pallbearers.  How many times since Michael Jordan won six championships has the line “the Next Jordan” been uttered?  With reckless abandon, the comparisons are now automatic, not even thought out in detail, and quite possibly redundant.  While I quit Mikan drills and practiced Jamison circus shots, I also let my tongue wag, and my tongue became the tail that wagged the dog.  I, along with a whole generation of basketball dreamers, gave into the Sports Center highlights and believed the rules that rotate the world changed.  We no longer believed in the necessity of big men.

Bowling balls revolve because they’re round, not cause they’re communist or capitalist, but because they’re round.  Anomalies do not make precedent.  Just because Jordan could stand at one end of the lane and blow down pins does not mean the best way to get a strike is not by bowling ball, so why did everyone believe it was?  One could argue that the rules began to change in all our minds as Magic, a 6′9″ behemoth playing point guard, and Bird, a 6′9″ sharp shooter, sparked the change in how we perceive basketball warfare, as they battled from east coast to west coast on the black and white chess board of the very gray Korean War, but Magic had Kareem and Bird  had McHale and Parrish.  Jordan was not accompanied by dominant low post players.  Jordan severed the heads of low post players, dropping bombs on them as if they were Cambodia.  MJ won more titles than Ewing, Robinson, and Olajuwon combined, and an entire generation became scared to invest themsevles in the time consuming conflicts of the lane, emphasizing its poorly chosen adjective–foul–more than anything.

When rules disappear, nihilists are born; only once the rules are gone, what laws and institutions does a nihilist have to reject.  In a sense, after nihilists win out, they lose the opportunity for rebellion that defines them, except they are still able to abolish their own identity, which is why every time I see Rashard Lewis launch a three-pointer I picture a ferret in a bathtub, biting at George Mikan’s balls.  There’s a reason people always question Dirk Nowitzki’s toughness; his fadeaway, as a seven-footer, while unguardable, is self-castration.  The world is truly topsy-turvy when Kobe Bryant does a better Hakeem Olajuwon impression than Kevin Garnett, whose patented turnaround baseline jumper resembles Michael Jordan’s Tet Offensive and not Kareem’s helicopter sky hook.

Yet, the Dude abides.

The Milwaukee Bucks have won ten out of their last eleven games, with wins over Charlotte, New Orleans, Miami, Atlanta, Cleveland, and Boston, all of whom possess records within a game or two of .500 (or better).  Fewer franchises in the NBA have won championships than any other professional sports league, and the Milwaukee Bucks are one of them; yet the franchise’s name is associated with floundering, despite a more heroic history than most.  Ask most NBA fans to name a player on the Bucks roster, and they’ll probably scratch their heads–clueless.  Then the names will come to them like some obscure German electronica band assembled from nihilists: John Salmons, Brandon Jennings, and Carlos Delfino.  If they’re more out of the loop, then they might mention Michael Redd, and then upon hearing that he’s injured again, groan as if they just opened an envelope holding a severed toe.  What most fans do not realize is that despite Jordan’s haunting brilliance the rules did not change.

The Bucks are not fifth in the East because Brandon Jennings dropped 55 earlier in the year, traded with the Bulls for Salmon, or pillaged the Detroit Pistons in the offseason.  The Bucks lurk in the Eastern Conference Playoff standing like a bum that capitalism can’t shake because their 7-foot first pick in the 2005 draft has endured the negligence of All-Star voters and the oversimplifying, by Sports Center anchors, of his game as merely Australian to average 16.2 ppg, 10.4 rpg, and 2.5 bpg (second only to Dwight Howard’s 2.8 bpg).  Andrew Bogut is the rug that really ties the room together, and, without him, the Milwaukee Bucks would not be a legit dark horse threat in this year’s NBA Playoffs.

Stranger: Take it easy, Dude.  I know that you will.

The Dude: The Dude abides.

Stranger: The Dude abides.  I don’t know about you, but I take comfort in that.  It’s good knowin’ he’s out there; the Dude takin’ it easy for all us sinners…shh I sure hope he makes it to the Finals.

From Mikan to westward wagon and  tumbleweed to Dwight Howard and even Andrew Bogut every generation endures the chaos of its day by relying on those who stay steady in the storm, and, in basketball, the steady ones tend to be the tall ones.