Basketball Jonesing

Basketball Jonesing.

With the National Basketball Association’s ‘99-‘00 season tipping off, we’re gonna be up to Patrick Ewing’s elbows in $120 million bricklayers for the next seven months. If you still can’t get enough of your favorite NBA b-ballers, check out what the all-stars do when they’re not on the court.

A few years ago, Wilt Chamberlain made a habit of mouthing off about how the league isn’t all that compared to when he was in, blah, blah, blah, and this player and that player didn’t deserve their props, yadee, yadee, and everytime he opened his trap and something insulting and misinformed fell out, I’d think “Oh yeah. Wilt The Stilt. You played Bombaata and wore a yak-skin loincloth in Conan The Destroyer. Nice career.”

On the other hand, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar confined his trash-talkin’ to the courts, and, strangely, my memories of his film roles are fond and not snidely derisive in the least. Kareem was at his skyhookingest in the martial arts fistfest, Game Of Death. As badass badguy Hakim, Kareem unleashed his feet of fury before showdowning with Bruce Lee.

Washington Wizards center Gheorghe Muresan plays Max Sandareskue in Billy Crystal’s My Giant, loosely based on Crystal’s relationship with wrestler Andre the Giant. The affable Muresan is perfectly suited for this charming, funny little family film about a crass Hollywood agent who befriends a 7’7” Roumanian giant on a trip to France and learns a thing or two about what’s important in life.

Double Team. Superspy, Jack Quinn (Van Damme) is “recruited” by the CIA to kill superterrorist, Stavros (Rourke), but Quinn screws up and is imprisoned in “The Colony.” Stavros kidnaps Quinn’s wife and newborn child, Quinn escapes and teams with Yaz (Dennis Rodman), an arms dealer whose operation includes a team of cybermonks -- no, for real. This is a movie. Seriously.

Marshall, Will and Holly, on a routine expedition, met the greatest earthquake ever known. High on the rapids, it struck their tiny raft, ahhhhhhh!, and plunged them down a thousand feet below to the Land Of The Lost. In this anachronistic world, tyrannosaurus rexes and brontosauri roam with a prehistoric race of men known as the Paku and alien lizardpeople called Sleestacks. Future Piston Bill Lambeer was one of the Sleestacks