Earlier today, the invaluable @jose3030 was recounting some of the worst contracts ever handed out to terrible players. His main message was that everyone should remember these lessons (not) learned before they get too excited about any deals their favorite teams make this Summer that don’t include LeBron, Flash or CB4. And I have to presume the impetus was the completely illogical and insane five-year, $32-million deal that Milwaukee just gave to Drew Gooden.
Since I’m such a helpful guy, I wanted to make sure he didn’t forget about the deal that New Jersey gave The Original T-Mac, Todd MacCulloch, a decade or so ago. I recalled the contract being in the the neighborhood of Gooden’s deal but had to Google search it first. As it turns out, the MacCulloch deal was closer to five years, $25 million — I think; I never actually bothered to confirm that fact after being distracted by this nugget of gold on Todd’s Wikipedia page.
Pinball career
MacCulloch played pinball whenever he could growing up, at malls, arcades and bowling alleys around town. He began buying up pinball machines when he signed as a free agent with the Nets in 2001 and got his first house. His collection is now greater than 60 pinball and non-pinball arcade games.
MacCulloch has played in several pinball tournaments. He competed in the European pinball championship in Stockholm in 2007, and he played in the Professional & Amateur Pinball Association tournament from 2005 to 2007 and again in 2009, where he qualified for finals in the B Division. MacCulloch has played several matches against two-time world champion Bowen Kerins.
Between his height and his foot condition, MacCulloch is forced to play pinball sitting on a stool. MacCulloch says there are indeed some similarities between pinball and basketball. He relates: “Hand-eye coordination is really important in both, and maintaining your focus is definitely important. I’ve been in some pressure situations in big [basketball] games, and nerves wouldn’t affect me, but I’ve found that in pinball tournaments, I can’t seem to keep those nerves at bay. My heart beats faster, my chest gets tight. Competition is competition, and I thought I’d respond well, but I haven’t been able to rein that in yet.”
I was immediately enthralled.
But since I had never heard about this post-career, professional pinball life of T-Mac, I was skeptical. Sure enough, however, this actually happened. And it is presumably continuing to happen even today. Todd MacCulloch is a pinball wizard. Apologies if you already knew all this, but I honestly had no idea. I mean, this makes Rik Smits’ motocross after-life seem sorta-not-nonsensical by comparison.
And, yes, before you ask, at this point, I consider passing along this information way more interesting and useful to you than anything surrounding the NBA free agency period that began today. I mean, I love the NBA offseason. It’s cool. It’s exciting. And it legitimately re-shapes the league every year in ways that matter.
But it’s not great.
Basketball is great. The NBA Playoffs are great. The NBA Finals are especially great.
Business decisions, agent negotiations and people changing jobs is not great. It’s just not. It’s interesting, it’s intriguing, it’s frenzied, it’s often comical and it’s perhaps hope-inspiring, sure. But it’s not that great.
By the way it’s now covered by pretty much every sports outlet in existence, however, you would think it truly was. Obviously, this year is even crazier than most given the players who are up for grabs, but it was similarly over-speculated-upon, over-hyped and run into the ground thoroughly in all of the past few years that it has ceased being particularly cool to me anymore.
Truly great things can’t be ruined by over-exposure.
Radio, TV and media tried to destroy Jay-Z’s latest single “Empire State of Mind.” It didn’t work. That track is still ill. In the Summer of 2000, I had the pleasure (seriously) of working in a window shade factory out in Southern California, and we listened to Power 106, LA’s most prominent rap radio station, all day, every day as I stood at a table packing window shades into cardboard boxes for shipping. Without exaggeration, every single day, they played a combined 16-ish different tracks off of Dr. Dre’s 2001 and Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP. “Explosive,” “Forgot About Dre,” and “Bitch Please II” were the most popular, getting at least three spins each during my eight-hour shift. I’m not going to lie, as incredible as the drums on “Xxplosive” are, they do begin to wear on you and sound tedious after that kind of exposure for multiple months. But none of those songs were ever ruined. They were all great and, thus, unruinable. (Sidenote: “The Real Slim Shady” was perhaps played more than any other song except “Xxplosive” and since I barely dug that song after hearing it like ten times, hearing it an estimated 1,357 times in three months made me wanna murder bunnies.) When I was like nine years old, I watched the movie The Toy with Richard Pryor after school like every other day for two months whenever I was done playing outside. Admittedly, that movie wasn’t “great.” I thought it was when I was in second grade though so I’m counting it for these purposes. In my college years, it was Anchorman. I have seen this movie dozens upon dozens of times and at every party I went to for a solid four years, douchebag frat boys (and also myself) would quote it ad nauseum. By all accounts I should now hate this movie. But I don’t. It didn’t matter. It’s still great.
NBA free agency is not great though. So with the exposure, hype and discussion it has now been receiving, it has been ruined
And yall ruined it. Thanks a lot, everyone.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
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