ESPN First Take - Ray Allen Announces His Retirement From The NBA
I had to get there. I just had to get there.
The UConn women had ended Tennessee"s NCAA record 69-game home winning streak on a Saturday in early January 1996, and now I was stranded in Knoxville. A blizzard had crushed the Northeast coast with more than 2 feet of snow and a flight home was not to be found.
Bradley? Logan? Nothing. LaGuardia, Kennedy, Newark? Not a chance. No flights early Sunday. No flights late Sunday. The UConn men were scheduled to play Villanova on Monday night at Gampel Pavilion in one of the most anticipated matchups of the college season. Ray Allen was going against Kerry Kittles. I just had to be there.
On Monday, Scott Gray and Meghan Pattyson, who had broadcast the game, and I finally finagled a flight to Albany. The snow wasn"t as bad farther north and inland. We rented a car at the airport to get back as quick as we could. The closer we drew to Connecticut the higher the snowbanks grew and somewhere amid those snowbanks in the Berkshires we found out the game had been postponed 24 hours.
I would get to Gampel after all. A few years later, Ray Allen, who officially retired from basketball Tuesday at age 41 with an inspired letter to his 13-year-old self, would take on the nickname of the character he played in Spike Lee"s 1998 movie. Allen wasn"t Jesus Shuttlesworth of "He Got Game" yet, but there was a growing, almost mystical draw to this military man"s kid out of South Carolina.
That jump shot, man, it was beautiful. That jump shot was a magnet, a magnet great enough to first draw fans from all over Connecticut and eventually great enough draw the awe of the basketball world.
Allen"s 2,973 regular-season three-pointers stand as the most in NBA history. The three-pointer he so dramatically hit to force overtime in Game 6 of the NBA Finals and preserve the path to the Miami Heat"s 2013 title will go down in history as his grandest.
Among the appropriate tributes Tuesday from Jim Calhoun, Geno Auriemma, Kevin Ollie and NBA commissioner Adam Silver, Stephen Curry, one of two or three others who could challenge for such a lofty title, called Allen, "The greatest shooter to play the game."
This is Rembrandt talking about Michelangelo, folks.
Yet the greatest shooter to play the game missed his first three shots against Villanova that night in 1996. Calhoun took him out for a minute, reminding him he couldn"t win the game in the first 30 seconds. Allen had spent the previous day watching the snow fall outside his apartment window and watching a VCR tape of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. He was over-revved. When he re-entered the game, he was spectacular. He hit nine of the next 10 shots. He hit four threes in a row. My jaw dropped again and again and again. Allen was unstoppable in scoring 22 points in the final 16 minutes of the first half.
There may have been better halves by a UConn player over the decades, but only Caron Butler"s second half in the NCAA Elite Eight against Maryland in 2002 comes to mind. After UConn had beaten Villanova, Calhoun called Allen the best player in the country. He called Allen the best player he had ever coached.
There were times when I wrote something that demonstrated basketball acumen short of, oh, James Naismith, that Calhoun was known to refer to me as "a hockey guy." He was right. I had covered the NHL for two decades before becoming The Courant"s sports columnist late in 1995. I had fallen away from the game, missed important chunks of basketball while chasing pucks in Winnipeg and Quebec.
Yet growing up in Rhode Island, dating from the 1960s, there also was no bigger college basketball fan. I"d score every Providence College game off the radio. For years from Lenny Wilkens to Ernie D. and Marvin Barnes, I followed PC religiously. Later at college, I carried my love of the sport to covering Missouri during a period when the Tigers advanced to the Elite Eight. Heck, even had a girlfriend dump me for one of the starters.
Jimmy Walker was my guy, my idol. The top pick of the 1967 NBA draft, ahead of other legendary guards like Earl Monroe and Walt Frazier, he was the only New England college player ever to go No. 1.
Jimmy Walker made me love the game as a kid. Ray Allen made me fall in love with the game again as a man. He turned me from a hockey guy into a basketball guy. That night against Villanova, the love was sealed.
Precious few things in life are perfect.
Ray Allen"s jump shot was one of them.
In 2011, when Allen was about to break Reggie Miller"s record for NBA three-pointers, I asked Kemba Walker what he saw in Allen"s jumper.
"What do I see?" said Walker, who has gone from UConn to become one of the NBA"s top guards. "He don"t miss. That"s what I see."
I love that answer.
Over the years, I asked Calhoun, Howie Dickenman, Tom Moore, Scott Burrell and a few others about Allen"s shot. They talk about how he was able to quickly find his balance. How he keeps his shot pocket so tight. How he is so shot-ready with his body square to the hoop. How he has such great legs that help him elevate effortlessly. How, as a high school player his shot had too flat of a trajectory, but his mechanics from his toes to his fingertips had become flawless.
You listened and you felt like you were standing at a museum with them as they were dissecting the nuances of a great portrait hanging on the wall.
Yet each of them would always return to the process that so relentlessly drove Allen. Compulsion for perfection. Pursuit of perfection. Chase of perfection. Obsession for perfection. Those were the words they used and it always ended with perfection. From his summer training, to shooting at specific spots on the floor, to the pregame nap, to the pregame meal of chicken and white rice, to shaving his head, the relentless routine, the inexorable drive to leave nothing to chance.
He may have been Jesus Shuttlesworth, but the jealous ones who viewed him only as the lucky recipient of G*d-given talent did not please him.
"An insult," Allen told Jackie McMullen, then of the Boston Globe, in 2008 when he helped lead the Celtics to the NBA championship. "G*d could care less whether I can shoot a jump shot."
Auriemma, whose 11 NCAA national championships are more than any coach in the men"s or women"s game, says he brings up Allen to his players. His message is nobody worked harder at practice. Nobody got up more shots when no one else was around. In his retirement letter to himself in The Players" Tribune, Allen repeated that G*d will give you a lot in life but he won"t give you your jump shot.
"The secret is there is no secret," Allen wrote.
Twenty years have passed since Ray Allen made me fall in love with college basketball again. I have passed on that love. I have a son who plays at prep school and will play small college basketball. He needed only two words to describe Ray Allen: "Great man." I need only two words to send him a reminder to work hard, to shoot more, to prepare endlessly.
Ray Allen.
As a dad, I can use no more powerful words.
That"s why I hoped that after sitting out since 2014, Allen would come back to play a final season. Burrell, as close to Allen as anybody, was convinced he"d still light it up. If he had signed with one of the contenders, nobody"s going to convince me Ray Allen, at 41, wouldn"t have hit the three to win the 2017 NBA Finals.
He wasn"t Jesus. He was the most-prepared man in the room. That was enough for miracles to happen.
Source: http://www.courant.com/sports/uconn-mens-basketball/hc-jacobs-column-ray-allen-1103-20161102-story.html
No comments:
Post a Comment