Blazermania Books

[May 30th, 2007]

More than a few pundits are hailing Portland's luck in last week's NBA draft lottery as the return of the "Rip City" days of the '70s and '80s. While Portland looks to the future, though, two new books look to both the turnovers and slam-dunks of the Blazers' past.

Red Hot and Rollin'

In the past few years of Portland's Blazer ambivalence, it's been hard to imagine the blanket of fanaticism that covered Oregon during the team's 1977 championship run. Matt Love's anthology Red Hot and Rollin' (Nestucca Spit Press, 136 pages, $20) brings those crazy days back to life. Love and his contributors write about Blazermania as if it were an airborne disease. "Whatever anyone else says," Portland author Gina Ochsner writes in a memoir of her infected family, "such magical momentum can overtake a man and his family, a neighborhood, a city, a state; rarely, but it does."

Wedged between sentimental accounts from lifelong fans are near play-by-play accounts of the team's '77 playoff games and oral histories from all sides of the Blazermania phenomena. The breadth of experiences shared in these pages—from a North Portland club owner to an uncredentialed on-court photographer—gives Red Hot and Rollin' (the final book in Love's "Beaver State Trilogy") a populist perspective that informs readers as much about Oregon's social history as it does about basketball itself.

Rollin' includes a DVD of Don Zavin's 1978 cinéma vérité doc, Fast Break. It's a slow, meditative film centered on a long coastal bike ride with a stuttering Bill Walton and slow-motion game footage that captures basketball without the usual canonization of its stars. That lack of reverence also gives both works a sad streak, reminding us that even the greatest athletes grow old and irrelevant. But we're lucky to have a guide like Love to remind us what they were like in their prime. —CJ.

Tip Off: How the 1984 NBA Draft Changed Basketball Forever

Every Portland Trail Blazers fan older than 30 can remember where they were June 19, 1984.

God knows, I can. I screamed that the Blazers were idiots when they drafted Kentucky's injury-prone Sam Bowie over North Carolina's Michael Jordan.

It's (Chicago) Bulls-hit if any fan tells you he knew then that Jordan would become a megastar. But it's no Bull if he says he couldn't figure out why the Blazers would waste the No. 2 draft pick on an injury-riddled center.

Now there's a book timed with the May 22 NBA draft lottery that seeks to explain all about that tragic day in 1984: Tip-Off (Da Capo Press, 281 pages, $25).

Author Filip Bondy answers that question, but in a formulaic way that gives in to the temptation of all the characters and back stories in that draft, beyond Jordan. As a consequence, Tip-Off does too little, skimming the surface of the Bowie selection and other hoop tales that could be their own books. The result: a series of otherwise readable chapters if they'd been full stories for a Sunday sports section.

And then there are the book's glaring mistakes. Among those: The Blazers' old Memorial Coliseum home capacity is listed as 10,666 (it was 12,666), and the mention that John Stockton's Gonzaga University "didn't have the money of other local colleges, like Washington State or Portland" (that cash bulge and geographic reference will both be news to Pilots fans).

Tip-Off is entertaining in spots but sticks with you no better than Kiki Vandeweghe playing defense—another painful memory altogether for the over-30 Blazers fan. —HS