Paul Shirley graduated from Iowa State in 2001; now he plays basketball for the Phoenix Suns, a team which is arguably the best basketball team on the planet right now. He’s the 12th man on a 12 man team, so he doesn’t actually play very much. This means, apparently, that he has time to blog.
And man, someone needs to sign this guy to a book deal, unless he’s ghostwritten. I hope he isn’t. I’m surprised this stuff is getting onto NBA.com — he’s unrelentingly blunt about the opposition, life as a 12th man, all that fun stuff.
We started off like a ball of fire, making up for our errant shots in Atlanta several fold. The Bobcats, on the other hand, were flailing away at the exact opposite end of the spectrum. They looked like a CBA team —fitting, since their arena and fans fit that mold. In the early going, Charlotte was nearly as inept as the Hawks were the night before. Jason Kapono started off on about a 1 for 10 tear and it appeared that the rout was on. I began considering the possibility that there could very well be a bit of playing time in the offing and started paying at least cursory attention to what was going on in timeouts, in case Coach D’Antoni said something like, “From now on tonight, everyone will be shooting with his left hand. Deviation from this plan of attack will result in castration immediately following the game.” I would really hate to miss one of those instructions, come out firing, and because of my own mental lapse, ruin the rest of my life.
The style’s rough enough so that I kinda think it really is him writing it. Good for him.
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Good for catching Shirley’s blog. I hadn’t read it until I watched Woody Paige and Skip Bayless on ESPN2’s Cold Pizza Friday morning. They were relentlessly bashing Shirley for his comments about Magic Johnson and the tongue-in-cheek observation that there were three white players on the Memphis Grizzlies. Paige and Bayless were completely out of line (for what it’s worth, I’m black and I wasn’t offended). Support Shirley now before he’s silenced!!!!
Good idea, actually. I’m writing an email to NBA.com telling ’em how much I enjoy the guy.
I just gave this heads-up to Eric McErlain, who’s Offwingopinion.com directed his readers to your discovery of Paul Shirley:
Shirley admits in his Saturday morning entry that “the censors are on the case” and that “a whole chunk of [his] writing came up missing”: Sure enough, look at the apparently controversial Magic Johnson passage.
Here is the original Shirley entry from March 23rd, 1:20 a.m. (as re-posted by Tskalidis of Hoopsworld.com):
“Toward the end of the work-out, we were joined by assistant trainer Mike Elliott, who was in a self-improvement mode as well. Soon after Mike burst onto the scene, we changed the channel of the television nearest us to the same one being viewed by Big Earv (and I mean Big: regarding the progression of HIV, someone must have been misleading us back in high school health class). He was watching a program that was counting down the NBA
The HIV comment _is_ a bit flip and definitely out of character compared to the rest of Shirley’s blog. Sometimes a little editing is a _good_ thing.