Though Philadelphia Sixers provocateur Joel Embiid’s biting tongue is similar to those of the NBA trash-talking greats — guys like Gary Payton and Michael Jordan — he also masterfully employs a tool those guys could not: Twitter.
Before a game earlier this season against Pistons rival Andre Drummond, Embiid tweeted, “I own a lot of real estate in @andredrummondd head and I’m on my way to build more.” His post included a misspelled tag, emojis of houses to signify real estate, and an emoji of his own face. The hashtags #Bum and #TheProcess made cameos, too. If Embiid hopes to build up the Sixers one win at a time, he’s equally keen on cutting down his opponents with frequent, ruthless insults.
Today’s crop of NBA players invoke trash talk and showmanship that is as important as the game itself. Look no further than the Draymond Green, one of the league’s most popular antagonists, who traded verbal blows with teammate Kevin Durant following a loss this year. Durant chided Green for not being more aware and passing him the ball at the end of regulation, to which Green fired back, “You’re a b*tch and you know you’re a b*tch,” among other words.
That reportedly escalated into the locker room and led to a one-game suspension of Green. Though Green apologized and Durant was quick to forgive, the exchange spoke to the messy prospect of balancing on-the-court relationships with off-the-court embitterment. After all, as has been widely reported by NBA media, it was Durant who only a year earlier had allegedly created fake social media accounts in order to combat people who posted unsavory things about him online.
While the rising popularity of the NBA among younger fans is good, it also means that players are becoming brands and feel the urge to defend their actions at all costs. Thus begs the question: To whom are these players talking? As Russell Westbrook incisively declared in February 2018, “Trash talk can be Twitter, social media, Instagram. It’s all type of stuff, but it’s not trash talk. Real trash talk was back in the ‘80s, ‘90s.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFCr1_Mn-aA
Indeed, two miles removed from New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Arnie Segarra waxes nostalgic about the glory days of West 4th Street’s The Cage, the long-running spectacle of pick-up basketball where the best of New York have convened. Former NBA like players Anthony Mason, Stephon Marbury, and Kenny Anderson all got their starts there, as did legions of players who were equally talented but not lucky enough to catch breaks. Segarra likens its players to Roman gladiators who, once victorious, looked down at their enemies with cold, heartless stares.
“You know when players flex their muscles after dunking on someone?” Segarra asks. “That’s where it comes from. Same thing. You get on the court, someone’s gonna test your manhood, your toughness.”
Bobbito Garcia, a filmmaker and DJ whose streetball documentary Doin’ It in the Park has become a modern reference point, credits New York City with raising the culture of trash talk. There’s physical survival, that is being able to stay on the court game after game, but there’s also New York City as a place of incredible entertainment, in which skill and showmanship persist in a dazzling array for the spectators. Sometimes, these verbal insults lead to fights, which spectators equally appreciate.
“I’m a culprit of many of the fights,” Melshawn Scott, who has been coming to The Cage since 1990, says unapologetically. “I always get fouled. But now you always have new guys making calls. You’re a new guy, you’re not a veteran, so how the f*ck are you gonna make this call? Nobody touched you. You got your shot blocked.”
While the urge to say something back looms, younger players don’t have the confidence to do so. Nigel Williams, who grew up in Harlem, is used to the bullying that comes with being a newcomer. The first time he showed up at The Cage several years ago, he waited his turn on the sidelines, an ungenerous few inches from the actual court. Game after game he waited, and when it finally came his turn, he was bumped by some veterans.
“Yo, yo, we got next,” Williams told them.
“Man, you gotta earn your name,” they told him. By the time he actually got on the court, they put a 6’7 player on the 5’11 Williams and the veterans didn’t relent. “Man, you’ve been waiting for hours. Let me see something, lefty,” they said.
“It was one of the toughest twenty minutes I ever played,” Williams admits.
But the ever-adamant Williams kept coming back, developing what he calls a “sneaky” style of trash talk. Just like his favorite NBA player, Rockets star James Harden, he likes to whisper in an opponent’s ear before whizzing by them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K70VvU3IUqA
Uptown in Harlem at the famed Rucker Park on 155th Street, the entertainment is pure, rousing joy, and the trash talk historically lethal. Bob McCullough, a prominent player in the ’60s and ’70s, reminisces about a time watching streetball legend Pee Wee Kirkland and future NBA player Charlie Scott square off in front of a rabid crowd in 1972.
Scott began the game by scoring back-to-back shots over Kirkland’s teammate. Kirkland, ever the instigator, told his teammate, “Charlie ain’t that good. Check up on him.”
Scott dead-eyed Kirkland and said, “Why don’t you come and check me?” The crowd ooohed in antagonistic fervor, as a challenge had been issued.
Kirkland guarded Scott, who dribbled the ball with his right, switched to the left like he was about to drive, and then made a jump shot inches within Kirkland’s face. This shut Kirkland up, albeit only briefly — he scored a valiant 35 points to Scott’s 42.
Scott, talking over the phone, reveals another instance in which he and Julius Erving matched up against Kirkland and Joe Hammond. A pro at the time, Scott came to Rucker with his girlfriend to watch the newly-signed Erving compete and was goaded by Kirkland on the sidelines.
“I had to accept that, especially in front of my girl, my God,” Scott recalls. “At the end of the game, I remember one of [Kirkland’s] guys came up to me and told me that I better not come up to 116th street or I’m a dead man.”
“It’s not like it used to be,” Sherman Anthony says back downtown. For the last thirty-odd years, Anthony, also known as “Sherm-Ice” or “Commish,” has been the unofficial mayor of West 4th Street. “A lot of the guys out here now wouldn’t have been able to play in the ‘80s and the early ‘90s. If you weren’t good or a regular or a regular didn’t bring you to play, you couldn’t go on. We didn’t allow it.”
Anthony oversees the pick-up games from late morning until tournament play at 4 p.m. His first order of business, each time, is to make sure the Next Up list is signed. The second is generating nicknames. “I give everyone names,” he says proudly.
The spread of nicknames is good ‘ol fun, but perhaps it also diverts from Sherm-Ice’s platitude of “It ain’t like it used to be,” which other members of the old guard also believe. Little do they realize that their censure of today’s game is also a form of trash talk. For Sherm-Ice and others, the street’s brand of talk was a fierce and formative precursor to success, one that players took into the big times, if they were lucky to get there.
Rod Strickland was one such success story. Hailing from the Mitchel Houses in the Bronx, he used to tour New York City boroughs from sunrise to sundown with current NBA player Kyrie Irving’s father, Drederick, looking for pick-up games. Strickland was talented enough to make it in the NBA, and in his career, he played for the Spurs, Blazers, and Wizards. Now a coach, Strickland tries to remain agnostic and non-partisan on the issue of trash talk, but he just as soon cycles through some of the biggest instigators of it that he’s played against: Tim Hardaway, Gary Payton, Kevin Garnett.
“I remember later in my career,” Strickland says. “J.R. Smith talked to me like I have never been talked to before in any basketball game in my life. I was the old guy and he was trying to bully me. And, I don’t know, I might’ve elbowed him and we went back and forth. He called me, ‘Old ass. Motherf**cker.’ I ended up going back at him, revisited my youth a little bit.
“I will say this, though” Strickland adds. “He came up to me while I was coaching in Memphis years later and apologized. That was cool.”
When asked if there is a code by which younger players respect the older ones, Strickland says, “Well, there should be one. But I don’t know. When I was young in the league I had some words with John Stockton and Isiah [Thomas]. But I’ve always been respectful to the older guys. I can’t see myself talking reckless to the older guys in the league unless they were talking reckless to me.”
That kind of edification begins on the ground floor. Sherm-Ice and another member of the old guard, Doc — who on the court call themselves, respectively, Jordan and Pippen — have become bridges between the older generation and the younger one. Despite Doc’s assertion that we’re now playing in a Steph Curry era in which everyone stays behind the three-point line on a fast break or Sherm-Ice’s observations of dwindling competition, both have long been instrumental in identifying opportunities for emerging youth.
In the mid-90s, as Smush Parker was coming of age in The Cage, Doc occasionally banned him from playing because his grades were bad. Today, Butterz is a 14-year-old Albanian to whom Doc and Sherm have taken a liking given the level of respect he returns to the older guard. For his efforts, he was recently given tickets to Madison Square Garden.
“It’s a haven,” Segarra says of The Cage. Though he sees trash talk as a necessary armor, a natural defense used in pursuit of greater glory, he also sees it as an expression of family.
But a final memory comes floating back to Segarra. It’s of a quarterfinals game hosted in the old Madison Square Garden against the famed Boys’ High of Brooklyn. After a tooth-and-nail fight, Boys’ High sneaks away with the win, leaving the young Arnie devastated. Segarra flashes to thirty years later, when a man and his son randomly approach him on the street.
“I played for Boys’ High. We beat you that day,” the man says. The boy, parroting his father, cries out, “My daddy beat you! Haha!” Arnie, ever the sport, leans into the boy and delivers the verbal blow before walking away: “Yeah, but your daddy remembered me, didn’t he?”
