RAY ALLEN GOES TO THE HEAT

Steve don't be so modest, you wrote for Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, interviewed Red Auerbach and had that Schick Award named after you....you blow away Jackie Mac as a knowledgeable writer and you know when to shut up.

cowens/oldschool wrote:Steve don't be so modest, you wrote for Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, interviewed Red Auerbach and had that Schick Award named after you....you blow away Jackie Mac as a knowledgeable writer and you know when to shut up.

That's not what my mother says.

RosalieTCeltics wrote:I wish I could help you but I don't eat beef!!!! Not because I don't like it, but it doesn't like me! Wish I could tell you. Best barbeque is Blue Ribbon, in Arlington and Newton, absolutely awesome. My husband and son love it there. that's the best I can do!!!!Sorry.

thanks Rosie, so what is your opinion of men? in my limited knowledge, I only visit Boston 2-3 times a year, the best burger I've had is at Jerry Remys Sports Bar right by Fenway Park.....thats a serious great burger, actually all the food is great, but I don't know if its the best....wonder if Jackie Mac knows?

steve3344 wrote:

cowens/oldschool wrote:Steve don't be so modest, you wrote for Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, interviewed Red Auerbach and had that Schick Award named after you....you blow away Jackie Mac as a knowledgeable writer and you know when to shut up.

That's not what my mother says.

what was the name of that Schick Award? tell that story

worcester wrote:Even funnier Steve!

You want something funny? This is funny:


Arthur is 90 years old. He's played golf every day
since his retirement 25 years ago.

One day he arrives home looking downcast.

"That's it," he tells his wife, "I'm giving up golf. My
eyesight has gotten so bad that once I've hit the
ball I can't see where it went."

His wife sympathizes and makes him a cup of tea.
As they sit down she says, "Why don't you take my
brother with you and give it one more try."

"That's no good" sighs Arthur, "your brother's a
hundred and three. He can't help."

"He may be a hundred and three," says the wife,
"but his eyesight is perfect."

So the next day Arthur heads off to the golf course
with his brother-in-law.

He tees up, takes an almighty swing and squints
down the fairway.

He turns to the brother-in-law. "Did you see the ball?"

"Of course I did!" replied the brother-in-law. "I have
perfect eyesight."

"Where did it go?" says Arthur.

"I don't remember."

cowens/oldschool wrote:

steve3344 wrote:

cowens/oldschool wrote:Steve don't be so modest, you wrote for Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, interviewed Red Auerbach and had that Schick Award named after you....you blow away Jackie Mac as a knowledgeable writer and you know when to shut up.

That's not what my mother says.

what was the name of that Schick Award? tell that story

Gotta run out for awhile. Maybe later.

Rosie Steve really did all those things, I gave out disc's of his interview with Red at one of our last parties I believe the one at No Name. At the previous party,the Bulls playoff game on big screen TV at Pofessor Thoms in 09 in NYC Steve showed all who came a picture of the award he gave Magic in 88 I believe when he still worked at SI.....didn't mean to confuse you, I wasn't joking.

well actually were some silly jokes in there, but Steve was a legit member of media before he gave it up to go back in music business.

....and Red Auerbach could curse

.....hehehe me too

actually Rosie I believe your friend bobc33 has a copy of that Red interview, you should request that from him whenever you guys meet and that guy can eat like a horse!!

RosalieTCeltics wrote:Well, I am impressed Steve. Red was quite a character, and I am sure he could curse with the best of them, but he was one hell of a coach and mentor.
I loved the guy!

I am honored to be a part of such great group of guys on this site. You keep me informed and best of all, laughing!

Rosalie - Send me a private message with your address if you want and I'll mail you a cd with my interview with Red. It was done in early '82 when I was researching my statistical system for rating basketball players (the only major sport that didn't have one at the time, and it was '82, not '88 Cow). Thought the Celtic fans I met on this board would want to hear it so I gave out the Red interview discs at a NY party Sam organized three or four years ago to the members we had there and I showed the pic of me handing Magic Johnson the first trophy. By the way, Bird came in second that year, which as a Celtic fan I wasn't thrilled about but there was nothing I could do about it. The numbers didn't lie. In addition to Red I also interviewed Hubie Brown, Jack Ramsay, Pat Riley and Stan Albeck at the time to get feedback from a variety of hoop experts to bounce my theories off. Jack Ramsay gave me the ultimate compliment and said, "For a system based purely on stats it's the best one I've ever seen." And I've got that on tape! Being that I was a huge fan of Bill Walton, those '77 and '78 Blazers and of Jack as an amazing coach, I got a real kick out of that. Hubie Brown took the interview request the most seriously, even requesting my notes a day in advance so he could be more prepared to talk with me. And Red, with his philosophy of "statistics are for losers" I thought would be a real challenge because that's what my system was based on but he was great - gracious with his time, insightful, sarcastic, informative and funny with his comments on some other teams' players. It was a real treat to talk with him. Pat Riley was also great though he had a polar opposite view on one aspect of my system than Red did. As to the question whether they thought, in this kind of statistical rating system, should an assist be rated the same as a basket? Riley said yes, absolutely. Red said "Hell no, the idea is to put the ball in the hole!"

steve3344 wrote:

RosalieTCeltics wrote:Well, I am impressed Steve. Red was quite a character, and I am sure he could curse with the best of them, but he was one hell of a coach and mentor.
I loved the guy!

I am honored to be a part of such great group of guys on this site. You keep me informed and best of all, laughing!

Rosalie - Send me a private message with your address if you want and I'll mail you a cd with my interview with Red. It was done in early '82 when I was researching my statistical system for rating basketball players (the only major sport that didn't have one at the time, and it was '82, not '88 Cow). Thought the Celtic fans I met on this board would want to hear it so I gave out the Red interview discs at a NY party Sam organized three or four years ago to the members we had there and I showed the pic of me handing Magic Johnson the first trophy. By the way, Bird came in second that year, which as a Celtic fan I wasn't thrilled about but there was nothing I could do about it. The numbers didn't lie. In addition to Red I also interviewed Hubie Brown, Jack Ramsay, Pat Riley and Stan Albeck at the time to get feedback from a variety of hoop experts to bounce my theories off. Jack Ramsay gave me the ultimate compliment and said, "For a system based purely on stats it's the best one I've ever seen." And I've got that on tape! Being that I was a huge fan of Bill Walton, those '77 and '78 Blazers and of Jack as an amazing coach, I got a real kick out of that. Hubie Brown took the interview request the most seriously, even requesting my notes a day in advance so he could be more prepared to talk with me. And Red, with his philosophy of "statistics are for losers" I thought would be a real challenge because that's what my system was based on but he was great - gracious with his time, insightful, sarcastic, informative and funny with his comments on some other teams' players. It was a real treat to talk with him. Pat Riley was also great though he had a polar opposite view on one aspect of my system than Red did. As to the question whether they thought, in this kind of statistical rating system, should an assist be rated the same as a basket? Riley said yes, absolutely. Red said "Hell no, the idea is to put the ball in the hole!"

you forgot to mention the name of that award? it came to me, it was the Schick Pivotal Player Award, sponserd by Schick, who paid the NBA, they're so about money....you need a PR rep, obviously your too lazy to do it yourself.

Steve,

I'm glad the subject of your interview with Red has been raised. I never thought you got enough credit for (1) managing to interview Red and (2) being kind enough to share that interview with us. The fault probably lies largely with me, although we were all on BDC back then. I really enjoyed the results of your efforts, and I'm sure others did too.

Moreover, if people knew more about your vast experience in the entertainment industry—especially in producing shows and records/disks and befriending industry luminaries—they'd find it all immensely impressive. Which reminds me, have any more inroads been made with your project involving Janis' music? (And, folks, I'm not talking about Janis the neighborhood butcher's daughter.)

Sam

Sam how many guys do you know that created a rating system, sold it to the NBA and then gave the first years award to Magic Johnson? and was disappointed that it wasn't his favorite player that won.

Cow,

The answer would be, "One." I'd be interested in what has happened to the system since it was sold to the NBA. Is it still in use, or has it been incorporated or expanded into another system, or what? Is an annual award still based on the system? From what little I know, Steve's process of developing the system (particularly his consultation with some of the giants in the game) is fascinating.

Sam

sam wrote:Cow,

The answer would be, "One." I'd be interested in what has happened to the system since it was sold to the NBA. Is it still in use, or has it been incorporated or expanded into another system, or what? Is an annual award still based on the system? From what little I know, Steve's process of developing the system (particularly his consultation with some of the giants in the game) is fascinating.

Sam

Since you and Cowens both brought it up I'll provide a little background. I started trying to come up with a good rating system for NBA players in 1981 because all we had back then was USA Today every Tuesday listing all the stats they kept track of, about 15 categories, most good, some bad. I decided what was needed was ONE NUMBER that took into consideration all of those categories, weighted for their importance and, obviously plus or minus if they were good or bad stats, multiplied by the number assigned to each category - from a minus 1 to a plus 3 with some halves and three-quarters thrown in, divided by minutes played and multiplied by 48. I spent about six months fooling around with it and like I said, during that time I decided to talk to Red, Hubie Brown, Pat Riley, Jack Ramsay and Stan Albeck (Albeck because he was the coach of our local New Jersey Nets and I wanted a bunch of different opinions). Other than Albeck the others were no-brainers as to their basketball acumen which is why I chose them.

I sold it to the NBA in '82 right around the time I gave out the first award myself to Magic. The following year Schick paid money to the NBA to sponsor it, it was out of my hands at the time, and the NBA decided to alter my formula a bit without my consultation or approval (not that they needed to) and made some changes that I didn't agree with - for awhile they made teams' wins part of the equation which I disagreed with - but they kept the same philosophy of using one number to simplify a lot of sometimes misleading stats to show who - with just one number - were really the best players in the game. The proof that what I came up with worked was the top players at the time, according to my formula, were Magic, Bird, Moses Malone, Kareem, Julius Erving, etc., etc. The cream rose to the top. And it was the first time the NBA had a statistical system like that. Baseball had Total Average (thanks to Tom Boswell), the NFL had their new quarterback rating system but basketball just had a jumble of different categories of stats we all saw in USA Today once a week and it was a bit difficult to get a quick grasp of someone's overall ability before having a system that combined all the stats to spit out just one number.

Since it was just based on stats, my formula obviously had its flaws which I freely brought up with Red and the others I talked with - the most important stat defensively is one the NBA STILL doesn't keep track of: the ability to deny your opponent the ball. I guess they now keep track of how many points per possession are allowed when individuals are on the court so they're making progress in that area and they have the +/- but they didn't have that until a decade or so ago. I had the idea for a one number system over 30 years ago and decided to work on coming up with something that I thought did the job.

One other thing - even though I was an intense Celtic fan (and Laker hater), it was really fun meeting Magic (he was 23 at the time and starting his fourth season) and he was terrific. Got to spent about fifteen or twenty minutes with him before a game (when the Lakers came in to play the Nets) while giving him his trophy and he wanted to know everything about it, looked over my research and checked out the list of the top 50 in the league, and also wanted to know what feedback I got from his coach plus the others. GREAT guy. But everybody knows that about him.

In the years following Schick sponsoring it I never thought about it much after that since I was so busy in the music business as a critic and then a concert promoter (even when I worked on that new system I was spending 95% of my time on music and 5% on sports) but it's nice to see a lot of new formulas and systems pop up like PER and others. Before '82 basketball had nothing. One thing that frustrated me while I was doing my research was they didn't keep turnovers until 77-78 and offensive rebounds, steals or blocks weren't kept until the 73-74 season so it was virtually impossible to compare players from earlier eras.

Anyway, this has gone much longer than I intended but I just wanted to elaborate a bit on what both Sam and Cowens had brought up and wanted me to comment on.

So now onto more important things: bring back Stiemsma!

Steve, thanks for the story. Great stuff.

Outside

Steve, one of the patients I saw for years was Jerry Wexler, VP of Atlantic Records who coined the term Rhythm and Blues while writing for Billboard. Alas, he was a Knicks fan, but what interesting stories he told about the music business. One day he came into the office and said (at age 82) that he'd just opened his mailbox and found in it a check from Clairol for $84,000. He'd penned the phrase "You make me feel like a natural woman" for Aretha's song, and when Clairol used it in a national ad campaign, that was his share of the royalty.

He produced one of Bob Dylan's later albums which won a Grammy and said that Dylan liked to travel on tour with his dog. Trouble was that the higher class hotels didn't allow dogs, so that much to the consternation of his fellow band members, they stayed in Motel 6's and others of that ilk.

Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin were, he said, the three geniuses he said he worked with in his career - and he had signed and produced many huge acts including Wilson Pickett ( a wild man who got into a fist fight with Percy Sledge in studio that Jerry had to break up), Solomon Burke, Carla Thomas, Otis Redding ( a prince of a guy and very intelligent), Led Zepplin (that really helped Atlantic's bottom line), Dr. John, and Dire Straits to name but a few.

Aretha was perhaps his favorite as he did fifteen albums with her. It frustrated Jerry to no end that she wouldn't do all the songs he found for her, including Let It Be which the Beatles wrote specifically for her and Son of a Preacher Man.

He found Under the Boardwalk for the Drifters which they didn't want to do, but he said, "Unless you do it we're not going to do another album." They did, and it was one of their biggest hits.

When he cut Solomon Burke's first record in a little 4 track studio in NYC, Solomon heard that it was snowing back in Philly and told Jerry he had to rush back. Why? Because he had a job as a snow plow operator making $6.00 an hour.

worcester wrote:Steve, one of the patients I saw for years was Jerry Wexler, VP of Atlantic Records who coined the term Rhythm and Blues while writing for Billboard. Alas, he was a Knicks fan, but what interesting stories he told about the music business. One day he came into the office and said (at age 82) that he'd just opened his mailbox and found in it a check from Clairol for $84,000. He'd penned the phrase "You make me feel like a natural woman" for Aretha's song, and when Clairol used it in a national ad campaign, that was his share of the royalty.

He produced one of Bob Dylan's later albums which won a Grammy and said that Dylan liked to travel on tour with his dog. Trouble was that the higher class hotels didn't allow dogs, so that much to the consternation of his fellow band members, they stayed in Motel 6's and others of that ilk.

Bob Dylan, Ray Charles, and Aretha Franklin were, he said, the three geniuses he said he worked with in his career - and he had signed and produced many huge acts including Wilson Pickett ( a wild man who got into a fist fight with Percy Sledge in studio that Jerry had to break up), Solomon Burke, Carla Thomas, Otis Redding ( a prince of a guy and very intelligent), Led Zepplin (that really helped Atlantic's bottom line), Dr. John, and Dire Straits to name but a few.

Aretha was perhaps his favorite as he did fifteen albums with her. It frustrated Jerry to no end that she wouldn't do all the songs he found for her, including Let It Be which the Beatles wrote specifically for her and Son of a Preacher Man.

He found Under the Boardwalk for the Drifters which they didn't want to do, but he said, "Unless you do it we're not going to do another album." They did, and it was one of their biggest hits.

When he cut Solomon Burke's first record in a little 4 track studio in NYC, Solomon heard that it was snowing back in Philly and told Jerry he had to rush back. Why? Because he had a job as a snow plow operator making $6.00 an hour.

Always considered Jerry Wexler one of the all-time greatest record producers and was very sad when he passed away some years ago. I got to promote concerts with a lot of the people you mentioned - Dylan in 1999 plus Ray Charles (six shows in '94) many shows with Solomon Burke and Wilson Pickett and did a benefit concert with Robert Plant in 2006 for a favorite musician of both of ours - Arthur Lee from the band Love - when Arthur was dying of leukemia with no health insurance and Robert flew over from England at his expense (I offered to pay his airfare and hotel out of the ticket revenue but he refused, saying more money would go to Arthur that way so Robert wound up PAYING approximately $10,000 out of his pocket to sing at a benefit show). That show is mentioned on Arthur Lee's wikipedia page as well as Robert Plant's.

Good for you Steve, doing the benefit concert.

worcester wrote:Good for you Steve, doing the benefit concert.

It raised $100,000 for Arthur's medical expenses and unfortunately he was too sick to come to the show. He was in a hospital in Memphis at the time and we hoped he could come to NY and maybe take a bow onstage and say a few words but he was too sick to travel. And he passed away about six weeks after the show. But I was told by his manager that it really picked his spirits up in his final days to see all the photos online of all the musicians who played the show, read the reviews (Rolling Stone wrote an absolute rave) and know a good chunk of his hospital bills would get paid. Arthur's album Forever Changes with his band Love was one of the records that changed my life when I was a teenager. In Rolling Stone's 2003 issue of the 500 Greatest Albums of All-Time (and I got to be one of the voters) it came in at #40. I was fortunate to promote a bunch of concerts with Arthur Lee & Love in the '90's and early 2000's (one had them co-headlining with the Zombies) and it was great to know him and work with him.

I know this is a Celtics forum but for those uninitiated to the genus of the band Love, here is one of their signature songs that was performed at the benefit, here done by Arthur in London about a couple years before he passed away. It's one of the reasons Robert Plant and I were such huge fans growing up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBD8hh7t_Uk

Back to hoops - how scary now are the Heat with both Ray Allen AND Rashard Lewis. I know Lewis was a huge disappointment this past year but the guy signed for the minimum and I bet he can still hit a clutch three. Plus he's 6'10". He was a joke at nearly 20 million a year but at $1.4 mil he's a steal.

Well let me tell you about her, the way she cried...

#40, Wow! I loved "Little Red Book" and "message to Pretty"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYNPWMku5KU

Five years in jail for a soul so sensitive as Arthur's. Such a pity.

Regarding Rashard, why can't we get guys like him for $1.4M?

worcester wrote:Well let me tell you about her, the way she cried...

#40, Wow! I loved "Little Red Book" and "message to Pretty"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYNPWMku5KU

Five years in jail for a soul so sensitive as Arthur's. Such a pity.

Regarding Rashard, why can't we get guys like him for $1.4M?

Because we can't virtually guarantee him a championship (which would be his first). Or two.