Kiwi's Night

Whenever someone refers to me as a journalist, I cringe. I know what real journalists have to do; I did it myself for a year in grad school. It could mean spending six hours on the phone making 43 calls just to get one quote for an article that turns out to be absolute crap, but you gotta hand your editor something. It could mean roaming the streets of random neighborhoods you’ve never been in before looking for man-on-the-street interviews. That’s real work; that’s “it doesn’t matter how hard you work, you’re still depending on other people to do your work for you” kinda work; that’s the toughest kinda work. I don’t do that kinda work right now, nor do I wanna do that kind of work. Your mind is always on the job; you’re on call 24-7-365. I have the utmost respect for real journalists; I am not one of them.

More than that, though, journalism is about telling stories. The first draft of history, as I’m sure a million journalism professors have said in their opening remarks to a 101 class. When it comes to sports, sure, journalists are there to cover the game: who won, by how much, who scored the most points/goals and so on.  But more than that, sports reporters are intrigued by the storylines: How is an ankle injury affecting the star athlete? Who is the unsung hero? Can David slay Goliath?

I’m not interested in that. I mean I am, but I care more about calling games. It’s why I love the D-League Showcase so much – not because I might be getting a glimpse at the next Jeremy Lin or Danny Green, but because I have been able to call 10 games in four days in each of the last two Showcases. I love being able to watch and talk basketball. I love tracking how a team’s shooting percentage rises and dives throughout the course of a game. I love calculating a team’s defensive rebounding percentage at the end of quarters (getting a little Vinnie Paz here with the repetition of the opening phrase of a sentence). Basketball is my favorite sport; I love the way they dribble it up and down the court.

Journalists love stories. I love reading stories, but I love the actual games more. While I enjoy reading players’ backstories when I prepare for a game, I love the fact that all of that takes a backseat when the ball is tipped. It’s all about what you’re doing right now in a game, background be damned. The rock doesn’t discriminate.

All that said (how about that for an extremely long intro- welcome to Backpack Basketball, baby!), what happened on the night of December 12, 2013, at the Dignity Health Event Center in Bakersfield, Calif., deserves to be told.

The play-by-play guy in me will tell you that Kiwi Gardner came off the Santa Cruz Warriors’ bench with his team trailing the Bakersfield Jam 88-71 with 9:15 remaining in the fourth quarter to score 23 points and lead the Warriors to a 112-106 victory. The play-by-play guy in me would tell you that Gardner went 9-10 from the floor and 2-2 from beyond the arc. The play-by-play guy in me would tell you that the Santa Cruz Warriors improved to 6-2 as a result, winning their second of three games on a five-game road trip.

But Kiwi’s night deserves more than that. This game – and Kiwi’s performance – was so good and so memorable that I’ve known from the moment that game ended that I would write a story on it. I’ll do my best.

I’m not going to give you Kiwi’s whole background story- that’s not my story to tell (but for reference, Sam Laird’s Mashable piece on Gardner at the beginning of the season – before this game against Bakersfield happened – is a pretty damn good starting point). So this is where and how I’ll start it:

I can’t honestly say I thought something like this was going to happen the first time I saw Kiwi play in person; I didn’t think he was going to make the Santa Cruz Warriors. Not because I had insider info or anything – I clearly didn’t – but because my snap judgment of a guy who shrugged his shoulders after a teammate messed up one of his dimes at a local tryout as he was playing with dudes he was a million times better than was completely off. After watching two minutes of this local Santa Cruz tryout on Oct. 6, 2013, I sent a text to PR director Matt De Nesnera: No way Kiwi makes the team, IMO. He hasn’t contested one shot (It was either one or two jump shots in question, far from a realistic sample size. I guess I was just trying to be Hot Take Kev. Also, De Nesnera did not respond and is not culpable in any sense). I regret a lot of things I have said and done in my life, but not so much from a professional standpoint. That text I sent to Matty Q (our affectionate nickname for De Nesnera), however, is something I definitely wish I could take back. I wish I could say I was on the Gardner hype train from minute one, but that would be a lie. If Kiwi ever reads this article, my response to him would be, “my bad, bruh.” I judged a book by a false cover, and boy was I wrong.

Because the first thing you learned about Kiwi Gardner in the locker room is that he’s one helluva teammate. From the first preseason game, he was the first one off the bench to side-bump Seth Curry after one of his three-pointers or high-five Cameron Jones after nailing a pull-up jumper from 18 feet. The second thing you learned about Kiwi Gardner is that he plays his ass off on defense. If you have the ball, he’ll crowd you so hard that Catholic school teachers would tell him to make room for Jesus. Some guys might not be happy that they’re in the D-League, thinking that they should be in the NBA; Kiwi was THRILLED to be on the Santa Cruz Warriors, like nobody I had seen before.

And, although he hadn’t seen the court a whole lot in the first couple of weeks of the season, Kiwi had shown signs in the limited minutes he had been out there that he could produce at the D-League level. Kiwi’s first-ever field goal in a regular season D-League game came when he successfully challenged the Reno Bighorns’ DeQuan Jones – a guy with 63 games of NBA experience with the Orlando Magic in 2012-13 – at the rim and finished over him for an and-1 layup. Yes, it was garbage time and the bucket was meaningless, but it was still an impressive display of athleticism that let people know Kiwi could do exceptional things athletically beyond the high school level.

More meaningful minutes for Kiwi came in Santa Cruz’s next game against Reno – in Nevada on the first game of that five-game road trip that would later take the Sea Dubs to Bakersfield. The Bighorns could not miss in their home-opener, exploding for 48 points in the second quarter and 76 in the first half. Down large late in the fourth quarter, Santa Cruz head coach Casey Hill inserted Kiwi into the lineup. The Sea Dubs didn’t really come close to winning, but Kiwi scored eight points and dished out two assists in five minutes off the bench and Santa Cruz ended up only losing by seven points in a game that the ‘Horns thoroughly dominated. While Santa Cruz lost, the Warriors outscored Reno 20-9 over the final three minutes while Kiwi was on the floor. Hey, this Kiwi Gardner kid could be a real firestarter off the bench.

As the team was getting ready to head to Bakersfield a couple of days later, word got out that the Memphis Grizzlies wanted to work out Seth Curry. While this could mean more playing time for Kiwi as the No. 3 point guard option behind Curry and the veteran Moe Baker, the Oakland kid appeared a little uneasy. As we all trudged out of the Lakers’ practice facility (the team decided to stay a night in the LA area before driving to Bakersfield), the team found out about the news.

“Hey man, Kiwi’s shook!” then-Santa Cruz big man Dewayne Dedmon joked to Curry. “You gotta give him a pump-up speech or something!” (this quotation, along with the following ones, is not 100 percent accurate, but it went something like this).

“Yeah man, give me some words of encouragement!” Kiwi said to Steph’s younger brother, I think only half-kidding.

“You’re good man, just do you,” Seth said and smiled before heading into a different van to be taken to LAX.

That little vignette aside, any questions that may have lingered about Kiwi’s confidence and readiness to step into a bigger role (Seth ended up returning before the next game, so it didn’t matter a whole lot at the moment anyways) were quickly answered the next day at practice in Bakersfield when he brazenly challenged Cameron Jones, one of the best shooters on the team, to a three-point shooting contest.

Apparently he had enough of his teammates’ playful ribbing that his outside jumper wasn’t a strength of his, so it was time to prove the guys wrong.

It was a pretty simple contest: Take five threes from the right wing. Whoever makes more wins 50 bucks. Kiwi was first to bat.

He hit all five. Guys were going crazy with each ensuing triple that Kiwi drilled.

Cam hit his first two shots before missing the third. Kiwi subsequently ripped off his practice jersey and aimlessly ran full speed around the Dignity Health Event Center in pure joy, shouting at the top of his lungs.

“Y’all thought I couldn’t shoot! What now?!” was more or less the rallying cry from Camp Gardner.

Dedmon was egging him on all the whole time, as he had become known to do in those days before he earned his spot in the NBA. “Yeah, do you Kiwi!”

The rest of the team was doubled over in laughter, watching Kiwi bounce around the place talking trash to nobody in particular. Hilton Armstrong could hardly breathe he was laughing so hard before finally saying, “Man I love having Kiwi on this team!”

Backpack Basketball: A Re-Introduction

Well hello again. For those of you who have been putting your life on hold since my last post until now, you probably could have beaten Wintermute from Neuromancer in a wall-staring contest. But fear not, because I have returned to resurrect the blog (for now, and probably for no longer than part of the summer, but hey, maybe I’ll keep it going longer than the expected 12 minutes).

The reason I started Backpack Basketball was to make myself feel like I was doing something productive in the midst of a quarter-life crisis where I thought I shot myself in the foot career-wise. Didn’t look like I was going to make much of a living in this sports media thang.

Luckily, my “the world is going to end” moment lasted all of 24 hours. Literally one day after my big proposal didn’t fly, I was offered a blogging job for the Pac-12 official website (Sam Silverstein/Kirk Reynolds ’16: Change We Can Believe In). One month after that, I got hooked up with a play-by-play gig for Serra HS football (what up, Alan Epstein?). Then I got a weekly sit-down interview thingy with David Shaw for the football season a month after that (all praise Bud Anderson, and Khari Jones for Deity while I’m at it).

And then the big mama came- radio play-by-play for the Santa Cruz Warriors of the NBA Development League (Kirk Lacob/Andrew Loomis, rock on). Don’t get me wrong- I love every job that pays me and am grateful for all the work I have been allowed to do, but for an aspiring radio play-by-play broadcaster, this was the holy grail. I get to do at least 50 games a year of a very high level of basketball? And I get to spend a couple of weeks in Reno interspersed throughout the year???? Hell yeah. I lucked out bigtime.

It’s my time in the D-League that has sort of re-spawned Backpack Basketball. I have completed two seasons of broadcasting in the D-League, and sometime during the second season, one of the many loyal Santa Cruz Warriors fans suggested that I put my recorded halftime interviews online (what’s good, Idris Nolan). I had also been thinking about putting other interviews up there as well, so I was thinking I should blog it up again. And hey, the D-League, to some extent, is Backpack Basketball- a bunch of under-the-radar dudes with loads of talent (though I guess backpack MCs don’t necessarily want to go mainstream or make it to the big leagues). So, why not restart this bad boy?

So let me quickly backtrack in case you’re not familiar with the term “backpack.” It refers to underground hip-hop artists, and from there, definitions are amorphous. The best way I can put it is by using one of those certain statements that I forgot the name to that they teach you in school: All backpack rappers are underground rappers, but not all underground rappers are backpack rappers (you have to be considered to be on some conscious tip to be considered backpack, from what I remember). Honestly, I don’t even know if that term is used anymore since I haven’t had a keen ear to the underground in a minute, but I’ll use it here.

So, what shall you expect from the new Backpack Basketball? First off, let me tell you what not to expect. I’m not using this blog to “make it big” or “dish the scoop”. I may work in sports media, but I am far from a journalist. Going to grad school in journalism, I know what a real journalist is. It’s someone to be respected for doing a thankless and extremely difficult and mostly low-paying job; trust me, I’m no journalist. My job is easy, really. I don’t have to deal with people being afraid to talk to me or editors pressing me to press a source for hard news. You want real journalism? Don’t come here (I can see my Medill instructors shaking their heads in disgust).

I’m also not that negative of a person when it comes to my opinions. My feeling is, and especially since I’m not paid to give critiques, that I don’t really have much business criticizing an athlete or musician on their craft when they’re about a million times the athlete or musician than I’ll ever be. But hey, I’ll give you a little bonus for this post. Here’s my Edward Norton bathroom scene in 25^th Hour list to satisfy the Negative Nancy in all of us:

          San Jose being denied the rights to the Oakland A’s by the San Francisco Giants: I’m actually fuming as I type this sentence. Want to get me riled up? Just mention the phrase “territorial rights” in front of me. This citizen of San Jose is not property of San Francisco, foo. And here’s a personal guarantee: I will never pay for a ticket to a Giants game as long as those territorial rights are in place (but the ballpark is nice as hell, so I wouldn’t mind someone taking me out to one of those games provided they pay for my ticket, my parking and my food and drink).
·         People referring to San Francisco as “the city”: Where else in the world is the second-largest city in a 50-mile radius referred to as “the city?” San Jose is the 10^th-largest city in the nation, has well more than 100,000 more people than San Francisco and is much bigger in physical size (#factsonly), but supposedly San Francisco is the end-all, be-all. I know San Francisco has more of a downtown feel and more “culture,” as folks like to say; whatever, base your rationale on esoteric definitions (are you noticing a theme yet?). 
·         The Tuck Rule Game: 12 years have healed a lot of wounds, but I personally felt wronged by that playoff game in Foxboro. I know the date Jan. 19, 2002, as well as I know my birthday.
·         The criticism LeBron James received for going to Miami and “The Decision”: Don’t start with me.
·         People who say LeBron James isn’t clutch when he passes the ball in crunch time when it’s a better basketball play: Not much else explanation needed here.
·         The Shell gas station car wash: This thing broke down midway through my wash that I paid $7 for, meaning it didn’t do the air-dry thing and left all sorts of water streaks on my car. I was supposed to meet up with my Lyft mentor so I could start getting paid to drive, but these water marks made my car look disgusting so I had to get my whip waxed for $54.99 to undo what this drive-through car wash did to the Civic. Weak sauce. I broke one of my plastic cups in disgust in the aftermath.
·         The Machine: Maybe one day I’ll rage against it.

Here’s something else you shouldn’t expect from Backpack Basketball: perfect grammar. I proofread and fact check every weekday and whenever I have Pac-12 work on the weekends, so if I were to painstakingly read through this thing prior to every post, I would quickly lose interest. I’m trying to enjoy myself with this blog while somewhat providing a service, so I’m not going to bother myself with doing extra work on something that I don’t get paid for. Remember: I ain’t no journalist (full disclosure: I read through this once just to make sure everything was Gucci). Also, this is gonna be super low-tech, so don't expect any fancy-shmansy stuff.

Ok… so what can you expect? Hopefully, if I don’t get lazy during the basketball season (and, well, I probably will get lazy during the basketball season on everything that isn’t calling Santa Cruz Warriors games, provided I’m lucky enough to have the gig for a third year), I’ll post my pregame interviews with coaches and halftime interviews with players. I might even post some of my calls if something catches my family.

“But it’s not D-League season, Kevo. What are you going to do?”

Glad you asked. In the meantime, I’ll post a reflection or two from the past couple of seasons, do some music blogging, and whatever else strikes my fancy. I have a couple of articles thought out already, but the execution of them will take a bit. So yeah, a lot of underground music and underground hoops (and maybe some above-the-ground stuff as well). Backpack basketball, if you will.

And oh yeah, you can also expect a whole lot of parenthetical phrases (it’s sort of a thing). I also like using capital letters in my heds, to the dismay of news outlets across America.