First this happened.
Then this happened.
The Mikki Moore era is about to begin. Alert your local reptile dealer!
This from John Eligon’s great little New York Times feature from 2006.
Growing up in Gaffney, S.C., Moore, a self-professed country boy, used to find snakes in his grandmother’s backyard. When he returned home for the summer while at the University of Nebraska, his chores included baling hay. That often put Moore in close contact with snakes, but they did not faze him.
“I knew the only thing they could do was bite you,” he said.
It may be only natural that one of Moore’s hobbies is collecting snakes.
The 7-foot, 225-pound Moore owns five snakes: two albino Burmese pythons (one nine feet long, the other four), a nine-foot Colombian red tail boa constrictor and two six-foot corn snakes. About once a week, he feeds them rats, which he buys at pet stores.
Each of his snakes has an aquarium at his home. He handles them but does not let them loose because he doesn’t want them to bother his girlfriend, who lives with him, or his 9- and 6-year-old daughters, who are often with him during the off-season.
Moore, 31, who has played on seven N.B.A. teams and lives in Gaffney in the off-season, has not allowed his nomadic life to stop him from being with his snakes.
He ships them between homes via Alaska Airlines, which transports them in sacks that resemble pillow cases. (Yes, Moore has seen the movie “Snakes on a Plane” and he assures you that such a debacle could not happen in real life.)
Moore’s passion for snake collecting is better known than the hobby he calls his true love: collecting and restoring vintage cars. He owns five: 1964 and ’65 Chevrolet Impalas, a ’70 Oldsmobile Delta 88 and two convertibles, a ’67 Lincoln Continental and a ’63 Ford Galaxy.
Moore said he believed that having snakes in his home was no more dangerous than sky diving or bungee jumping. Still, there are limitations to Moore’s love of reptiles.
Although his right arm and shoulder bear a tattoo of a venomous king cobra, that is as close as he will come to owning one.
As Moore said, “I don’t do poisonous.”
More about Moore here.
That incredulous looking point guard is headed to the Kings for a second-round pick.
On a completely unrelated note, everybody should check out Michael Lewis’ New York Times Magazine story about Shane Battier, the Houston Rockets and statistical analysis in the NBA. It’s been making the rounds on the Internet over the past few days. While the theories in it may seem a bit strange, especially when applied to basketball, it’s a pretty good read.
Here’s a pretty funny nugget. Apparently Rockets GM and ex-Celtics employee Daryl Morey witnessed some, well, interesting on-court strategy a few years ago.
There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one: by doing what’s best for himself, the player nearly always also does what is best for his team. “There is no way to selfishly get across home plate,” as Morey puts it. “If instead of there being a lineup, I could muscle my way to the plate and hit every single time and damage the efficiency of the team — that would be the analogy. Manny Ramirez can’t take at-bats away from David Ortiz. We had a point guard in Boston who refused to pass the ball to a certain guy.” In football the coach has so much control over who gets the ball that selfishness winds up being self-defeating. The players most famous for being selfish — the Dallas Cowboys’ wide receiver Terrell Owens, for instance — are usually not so much selfish as attention seeking. Their sins tend to occur off the field.
It is in basketball where the problems are most likely to be in the game — where the player, in his play, faces choices between maximizing his own perceived self-interest and winning. The choices are sufficiently complex that there is a fair chance he doesn’t fully grasp that he is making them.
First the above happened. Then Boston College beat Duke. I was lucky enough to be in attendance at Conte Forum Sunday.
While I understand the blather about Boston being a PRO SPORTS TOWN, the place was rocking. Whether that atmosphere can be recreated is unclear, but the Eagles join fellow ACC school Wake Forest as the only team in the country this year to defeat both Duke and UNC.
Paul Pierce (18 points), Kevin Garnett (12 points) and Ray Allen (8 points) all saw plenty of action in the All-Star game, but the weekend belonged to Shaquille O’Neal and Kryptonate. So I’ll leave you with this:
Nice win for the C’s. A victory tonight would give ‘em a huge boost heading into the break.
Speaking of which, lucky for Boston, there appears to be no break for Ray Allen. From Marc Spears of the Globe:
NEW ORLEANS – With his right hand wrapped in black tape, Ray Allen looked more like he was getting ready for a boxing match than recovering from a basketball game. But despite missing the second half of the Celtics’ 89-77 win over the Hornets last night with a hyperextended right thumb, the All-Star guard hopes he will return tonight at Dallas.
Allen was injured in the first quarter when his thumb got caught in the jersey of teammate Kendrick Perkins. After scoring 1 point and not making a field goal in 19 minutes, Allen left for good with 8:01 left in the second quarter because he couldn’t hold onto the ball. Allen was replaced at the start of the second half by Gabe Pruitt.
Allen said he still had soreness after the game. While coach Doc Rivers doesn’t think he will play tonight, Allen plans to test his thumb in a pregame workout.
“I’m going to get out there, work out, and see how it feels,” said Allen. “I’ve had jammed fingers before. But I think the thumb, I wouldn’t say it’s jammed but it’s sprained. I never really had sprained fingers, but jammed fingers. Never my thumb.”
