Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Crawford and Calabro


4:07 pm I-90 Westbound - I am waiting for Jamaal Crawford to come on the Kevin Calabro Show. I can’t hear the open they play for him because I am in a tunnel. It is a snippet of some kind of game broadcast. I am out of the tunnel. Calabro thanks the New York Knicks, so it must have been from a game when Crawford was in NYC. It was the game Crawford scored 52 points. Jim Moore is in studio too. Moore asks Crawford, what was it like to score 52 points in one game? Crawford says, it was the best game I ever played. I scored 42 straight points.

4:13 pm Rainier Avenue – I can tell they are having a great time. Crawford says to Calabro, you are the best in the business. Calabro says, thanks. You always come up and say hi when I am doing a game you’re in, but Stuckey doesn’t come up to me and say hi. Crawford says, Stuckey isn’t really a Seattle guy. He’s from Kent. Calabro says, yeah Kent is more of an outlying suburb. They talk about Seattle ball players. Moore says to Crawford, I remember picking you up at Rainier Beach and driving over to the P-I Sports Star of the Year dinner. I can’t remember what year that was, but it was between you and Doug Wrenn. Crawford says, yep.

4:17 pm East Madison Street – I am thinking about who played ball with Crawford back in the day. No one mentions where Doug Wrenn is now. Not that they should. Crawford played with my good friend Jacob in middle school and they played with Ronald Preston. Wrenn was like Preston’s sidekick. Yesterday Jacob and I talked about what happened to Preston.

Yesterday – We sat on Jacob’s parent’s front porch. I say, what happened to Ronald? He died 6 years ago, Jacob says. There used to be a sign that was a memorial for Preston that hung at the corner of Union and Martin Luther King. Something happened to Preston between middle school and high school. Something happened to Wrenn between college and prison. What I am trying to say is that Preston was the best at his craft when he was at Meany Middle School, but somehow Crawford became the ten-year NBA veteran.

In 2005 I walked around NYC for a few days. As I walked, I saw these Crawford life-size posters plastered all over.

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KryptoNate and Gary Washburn on a plane


Today Gary Washburn posted a story @ seattlepi.com about Nate Robinson. The game certainly seems to be going international. The best players from Europe come here, but now the best players from the U.S. are starting to jump across the pond too. Apparently KryptoNate is thinking seriously about going to Greece.

Is Washburn working for the P-I again? Did he ever leave? Did he get paid for the story? Is the P-I paying their reader bloggers? Their reader bloggers are being featured a lot lately. It seems like they are often placed front and center much like a regular columnist.

Note: Gary Washburn is @ The Boston Globe now. Last June, I sat near him on a Southwestern flight from Seattle to Oakland. Before we took off, he was talking really in-depthly on his cell phone to someone about Michael Jackson. When I got off the plane, Don Wakamatsu was buying a ticket in front of me at he BART station across from the big grey concrete block where the Raiders and Athletics play.

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