In another “shocking news to no one” research project, The Delta Cost Project discovered definitive proof of what everyone in world has been thinking since the 1950’s. The report, “Trends in College Spending 1998–2008 [PDF],” concluded that colleges and universities from all over the country are literally throwing money at high end student centers and methods of increasing “comfortability” for students (and we mean literally, like administrators are actually having huge money fights). The story has been picked up by news-soup extraordinaire The Huffington Post who linked it to a New York Times article trying to explain the, ya’ know, frivolousness of American higher education.

Best quote:

“’This is the country-clubization of the American university,’ said Richard Vedder, a professor at Ohio University who studies the economics of higher education. ‘A lot of it is for great athletic centers and spectacular student union buildings. In the zeal to get students, they are going after them on the basis of recreational amenities.’”

File this your “everything you think about stuff is probably true” folder.

“It’s one of the most important and least expensive gifts you can give your children-or any loved one, for that matter.” Can you guess what “it” is? I bet you can’t!

The Israeli soldiers that took a video of themselves dancing to “Tik Tok” are now being ordered to make an anti-soldier-dancing video to educate and prevent the possible spread of military-endorsed pop music dance videos. Ynet broke the news of the new anti-soldier-dance education video. In a published statement, the IDF explains how displeased they are that their men and women in uniform are waking up in the morning feeling like P Diddy. Well, isn’t that just a bummer. I bet those soldiers are real sick of the blah, blah, blah coming from their superior officers, har har.

Important things to remember this weekend! While reading the New York Times Book Review, one might do well to remember that basically you’d want to believe the very opposite of everything that Steven Spielberg-adoring reviewer Armond White says regarding the recent history of Dreamworks, The Men Who Would Be King. Armond White: his favorite film of 2007 was The Darjeeling Limited! 2002? Brian DePalma’s Femme Fatale! We don’t even need to mention his Toy Story 3 pan, which praises Transformers 2.

Here’s a valuable lesson: If a bear enters your home and goes down into the basement, do not go down after him. The fellow from Colorado in this story certainly knows that now. It is knowledge, unfortunately, that came too late to be much help for the bear.

by Abe Sauer

20) “You’re a ugly motherfucker.”

19) “You lose it here, you’re in a world of hurt.”

18) “What’s this fucking tie business?”

17) “I’m gonna’ cut your name right into him.”

16) “We. Hit. Nothing.”

15) “That’s a bullshit psyche job. There’s two or three men out there at the most. Fuckin’ lizard.”

14) “Son of a bitch is dug in like a Alabama tick.”

13) “We’re all gonna’ die.”

12) “Come on! Do it! Do it! Come on. Come on! Kill me! I’m here! Kill me! I’m here! Kill me! Come on! Kill me! I’m here! Come on! Do it now! Kill me!”

11) “This shit makes Cambodia look like Kansas.”

10) “If it bleeds, we can kill it.”

9) “Jesus, you killed a pig… Think you coulda’ found something bigger?”

8) “You got time to duck?”

7) “I ain’t got time to bleed.”

6) “You’re ghostin’ us, motherfucker.”

5) “Maybe you better put her on a leash, agent-man.”

4) “Come on in, you fuckers. Old Painless is waitin’.”

3) “Get to da’ chaaaaaappaaaaaahhhhh!”

2) “Buncha’ slack-jawed faggots around here. This stuff will make you a god damned sexual Tyrannosaurus, just like me.”

1) “Billy! The other day I went to my girlfriend… I said, ‘You know I’d like a little pussy.’ She said, ‘Me too, mine’s as big as a house!’”

Abe Sauer is seeing Predators right now!

Gizmodo has a picture and a little more information about this strange take on going green. But until the mystery of why this thing exists is solved, we think it’s safe to speculate that it’s probably meant for capturing the local Starbucks in some kind of trendy-liberal version of The Road. Imagine a violent future where roaming militias turn local Jamba Juices and Trader Joe’s into hideouts while fighting over WiFi hotspots to maintain their doomsday blogs.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike the decision that LeBron James announced last night, which you of course already know was to leave bleak, broken Cleveland for steroidal, coke-optimistic Miami. These reasons are so familiar and obvious-and the spectacle of James spending an hour of prime time television breaking up with his hometown and referring to himself in the third person so spectacularly sorry-that I’m going to skip over all that. (Although you can click here if you want to read all the good reasons James shouldn’t have gone to Miami in one place.) The whole dubious story has been covered to death, but one notable aspect of L’Affaire L’Bron has been less remarked upon. And that is that, with three players earning near-maximum contracts and the rest of the almost entirely TBD roster comprised of the NBA’s minimum wage workers, the Miami Heat have become something like the NBA’s answer to Wal-Mart. There’s a whole other essay to write about the whys and hows of the resulting loathsomeness, but I’m happy not to write it. With the LeBron Thing blessedly over, I can now go back to caring about what I, and some of your more hardcore basketball dorks, cared about all along. That would be the NBA’s Summer League, the ragged annual tryout circuit in which the itinerant power forwards and off-brand guards who will fill out Miami’s (and other teams’) benches are currently trying to get themselves noticed. It is great, and it is also kind of sad in some ways, and it is happening right now.

So because I would love to be done with the squirm-inducing synergistic fuckery of LeBron’s hour-long press conference, and in part because these peripheral guys are more interesting than anyone whose nickname is “King,” let’s talk about the NBA’s working class strivers (note: not really working class) for a minute.

One longshot in particular came to mind as I made my way through the Summer League rosters. That’s Shawne Williams, a recently indicted former first round pick who averaged 5.5 points per game for Charlotte’s entry in the Orlando Summer League. If you’ll pardon the flashback, here’s how I know him.

I was a couple weeks shy of being laid off by Topps when I drove to White Plains, New York back in July of 2006 for the NBA Rookie Shoot. That means that I was still the back content editor for the trading card company, and I was there to conduct brief interviews with the rising NBA rookies in attendance. For their part, the rookies were there to get their photos taken for their first basketball cards. Lost in a management-mandated extra-large polo shirt emblazoned with the Topps logo-the inappropriate sizing was presumably designed to ensure that no one confused me with LaMarcus Aldridge or other draftees-I spent the day wandering around, shagging rebounds for a few players and conducting short, rote interviews of the type that would yield trading card-appropriate information. Shawne Williams was, like every other player I met at that event-with the exception of Tyrus Thomas (so immature as to be nervous-making) and Jordan Farmar (so cocky as to actually be a cock)-seemingly a nice enough kid. Williams wasn’t as self-possessed as your Dee Browns or Shelden Williams’ or Randy Foyes-by the way, what a freaking terrible draft-but I remember him being likable, if seemingly a little shell-shocked by the admittedly shell-shocky ordeal of being photographed a few thousand times and then being quizzed by a 160-pound person in a 260-pound person’s shirt about the experience.

Williams, at the time of our brief conversation, was 20 years old, and the Indiana Pacers had just made him the 17th player chosen in the 2006 NBA Draft. In so doing, they also made him a millionaire. Given that Williams never made much of an impact in the NBA-and double-given that he was indicted for his part in a Memphis codeine-syrup ring back in January-that pick looks pretty bad today.

Williams’ thumbnail player biography is not impressive: he bombed out with Indiana, was jettisoned to Dallas, then saw his salary cap figure traded to New Jersey, which told him not to bother even showing up for practice. His personal police blotter is notably more memorable, although his run-ins with the law track pretty well with the sort of trouble that you’d imagine a suddenly very rich kid with very limited life skills getting into.

There are some differences-most 21-year-olds pulled over for dumb traffic violations can’t proffer their basketball card as a form of ID, and it’s hard to justify not showing up for a court date whether you’re an athletic wing player or druggy-but-once-promising starlet or anyone else. And then there’s the arrest for alleged codeine-related demi-kingpinnery. Williams was quickly indicted along with 24 others in the Memphis Police Department’s anti-sizzurp campaign, dubbed “Operation Lockdown.” Sizzurp being, as you’ve probably heard, the single biggest law-enforcement problem in Memphis.

Take all that together, and you’ve got what looks very much like a portrait of a solid gold knucklehead. As such, there’s not really much reason to be excited to see that Shawne Williams has surfaced-alongside ur-washout Darius Miles and a host of other refugees from The Island of Lost Athletic Wing Players-on the Charlotte Bobcats Bad News Bearsian NBA Summer League squad.

But I was glad to see him there all the same. Much more so than the NBA itself, the endearingly ragged and casual-unto-goofy Summer League was built for players like Shawne Williams. And while it’s hard to imagine anyone needing the Summer League more than Williams, there are dozens of players there who need it every bit as much.

* * *

Although he was inconsistent in college and invisible in the NBA, Williams has been a dazzling basketball player in his young life. He starred on the national champion Laurinburg Prep team that finished its 2004–05 season at 40–0 and ranked ahead of an Oak Hill Academy team that featured Kevin Durant and Ty Lawson (as well as unanimously loathed lady-punching ex-Syracuse guard Eric Devendorf, if that matters).

After that, Williams spent a year not really being coached by John Calipari at Memphis before being drafted into the pros. He then made unimaginably good money for not-playing in the NBA and dealing with what was presumably a non-stop death-stare from Indiana GM and basketball-legend-who-looks-like-an-old-lesbian Larry Bird. Williams’ career stats are certainly not very good, but his relative goodness as a player is hard to assay. This is because Williams has played so little high-level basketball. It’s also because we know so little about what kind of player Williams ever was or could’ve become, as well as about the various things that prevented him from getting there.

In his Memphis mug shot, Williams looks tired and heavy. He hadn’t played in a pro basketball game for over a year, but neither the harsh cop-shop lighting nor his athletic inactivity quite explains the palpable weariness in that shot. Of all the failures in that 2006 Draft-this would be a good spot to remind readers that unfortunately mustachioed Lakers bench lump Adam Morrison was the third overall pick-Williams suddenly had become the most serious and sad.

You’d have to work pretty hard to project that recognition onto Williams’ scared/sad face-I’d imagine he had more on his mind than his already dubious basketball legacy-but at some level Shawne Williams probably knew that photo was the end for him. Even before the arrest and indictment, Williams was plunging into the disdain-tinged anonymity that awaits athletic washouts.

Sports fans know what happens to Shawne Williamses once they stop being the most special people in the room-they disappear. When the athletic promise is dispelled, the narrative trail goes dead. There can be exceptions if the failure to deliver is dramatic enough-here, for instance, is what former NCAA champion and NBA lottery pick Ed O’Bannon is up to these days-but in sports, for the most part, “Where Are They Now?” is a rhetorical question. That mug shot and his hollow “I’ve really grown up a lot” quotes from a month before his arrest were to be the last we heard of Shawne Williams.

Of course, the person/player must go on living even after the greater sports fan world stops caring. He could go to jail for associating with the sort of visionaries who see a lucrative high in a bottle of Dimetapp or he could sign with a team in Europe, make a bunch of money and learn a foreign language. He could open a barbershop or restaurant or he could coach; he finds God or loses God; he looks-back-and-laughs or ferments in all that curdled narcissism. It all happens off camera, and it changes nothing.

The moral to Shawne Williams’ story is already written, regardless of how the middle chapters fill in. As a fan, the ending is yours to pick, not his: he’s a sad story or another goofball tragically unprepared for failure or a pampered kid never previously required not to be lazy or a nice enough guy surrounded by bad influences or a helpless/hapless product of a rotten environment or the exploitative amateur sports machine. Whatever works for you.

I can’t say that I’m pulling for Shawne Williams any more or less than I pull for anyone who has fucked up and must stop fucking up. I met him once for ten minutes and we talked about breakfast cereal and coach Rick Carlisle’s emphasis on defense. I have no real emotional stake in this. I have no idea what it’s like to be Shawne Williams, or what Shawne Williams is like. I can tell you that I seriously doubt Williams makes the Bobcats-he gets in trouble a lot and also got fat, and in most cases just one of those is enough to keep someone off a team’s roster. (Usually.) But his longshot presence on Charlotte’s Summer League roster is a hint at what makes the Summer League so weirdly inspiring and great. It provides a home for the NBA’s homeless and a modicum of hope for its hopeless, if only for a little while and if only through turning them loose in way-too-watchable pickup-style games. Given the fact that he seemingly never quite developed into anything but an object lesson in the weaknesses of the NBA’s Rookie Transition Program, letting Shawne Williams play this summer is probably the kindest thing the NBA can do for him.

Summer League basketball is very little like NBA basketball, but it is also very purely and very enjoyably basketball. There are coaches on the sidelines, including a notable crop of here-they-are-now ex-players looking to get in on coaching’s ground floor, but for the most part the players just play. It’s really as close to watching pro players in a playground game as most fans will ever get, and as such is generally worth the $14.95 it costs to watch the games online.

The Summer League’s ostensible purpose is to evaluate talent, and despite the fact that its games bear little resemblance to actual NBA games, it kind of works. Summer League players do get jobs off their Summer League showings, although those jobs are more frequently in Italy or Greece or Spain than in Indianapolis or Phoenix or Oklahoma City. (Note: in the backwards cosmology of pro basketball, the latter are the preferable destinations) Basketball-wise, it’s a place where a guy like Shawne Williams might actually look good, and maybe actually have some fun.

So, in that sense, the Summer League celebrates talent more than it evaluates it, and including players like Shawne Williams and Darius Miles and Ndudi Ebi once they’re well past their athletic sell-by dates is a part of that. No team is putting Ndudi Ebi-a turbo-bomb whose poignantly brief NBA career makes a strong case for the rule that forbids players to enter the NBA Draft straight from high school-on the floor in a NBA game this year, I promise. But whoever asked Ebi to join Orlando’s Summer League team evidently did want to see Ebi (who is still just 26) play in these ultra-serious pickup games. That nameless decision-maker-probably the same guy who will eventually stop returning phone calls from the agents of all these players-was thinking like a sentimental basketball fan, which means he got the spirit of the Summer League just right.

I imagine that whatever transcendence Shawne Williams once found in the game probably feels a long way away right now. That’s probably also true for Miles and Ebi and all the other hoops desaparecidos who resurfaced in this year’s Summer League. All the more reason to pull for them, then. Basketball gave Shawne Williams much more than he was able to accept, and I imagine he’ll spend much of the rest of his life thinking about that. But I hope that, in those half-empty Orlando gyms, Williams and the rest of the Summer League’s longshots can reclaim some joy in the game that changed their lives so much.

David Roth is a writer from New Jersey who lives in New York. He co-writes the Wall Street Journal’s Daily Fix, contributes to the sports blog Can’t Stop the Bleeding and has his own little website. His favorite Van Halen song is “Hot For Teacher.”

“Frederick Loos was cussing like a sailor the other night, which was surprising given that he is a Roman Catholic priest and his foul-mouthed discourse was delivered from the pulpit to hundreds of faithful gathered before him. He spoke of God, the need to serve him and how he can transform lives. But interspersed in his sermon was the most colorful of street Spanish, which brought smiles to the faces of many of the gang members, addicts and other young people pressed in tight to listen.”
–In case you were too distracted or disgusted by yesterday’s national sports emergency to catch it, you should now read Marc Lacey’s Mexico City Journal piece from yesterday’s Times. It was like Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, Jim Carroll’s The Basketball Diaries and Vincent Bugliosi’s Helter Skelter all crammed into 893 extremely compelling words. Mexico, Jesus!

I had been totally disregarding the health concerns about bisphenol-A, the organic compound found in “reusable water bottles, sippy cups, leftover containers, baby bottles, toys), the lining of canned foods, baby formula and beverages, pizza boxes and other fast food containers” because I thought that they pretty much only affected children, but it turns out that BPA is a total boner killer, which is ABSOLUTELY UNACCEPTABLE. Why is this even still available? Does no one care about the erections? I want a complete ban NOW.