C-Webb, Human Being

By Crispin Sartwell

Famous people often grow in our minds until they are either non-human or more human than the rest of us. Michael Jackson, for example, and Al Gore mutated in the spotlight into aliens or androids: weird, unreachable, even in their failings somehow incomprehensible. But the most admirable famous people become emblematic of the condition of the rest of us, for better and for worse.

If you watch NBA basketball, you know that Chris Webber, the Sacramento Kings' power forward, is a magnificent athlete, one of the very few players capable of leading an NBA team in points, rebounds, and assists.. And if you watch Sports Center or read sports magazines, you know that he also comes off as a very decent human being: thoughtful, spiritual, gentle: both smart and nice, a rare combination.

And yet Chris Webber seems, as the saying goes, snakebit. With 11 seconds to play in the 1993 NCAA championship game his team - Michigan - was down by 2 points to Duke. It's a situation in which a team would usually call a timeout to set a play, and Webber came down the floor and signaled "T". But the Wolverines had already used all their timeouts. They lost the game on the ensuing technical foul.

Blundering that badly on a stage that big must be a devastating experience, but of course it's an experience to which everyone who takes such a stage makes themselves vulnerable. I myself would be richly capable of calling that timeout if I weren't a 5' 7" forty-something white guy with a six-inch vertical. Indeed, my blunders are usually visible only to myself, my family, and my God. If they were repeated dozens of time in slow motion on national television I'd exile myself to perdition.

As game seven of last year's Western Conference championship game against the Lakers - one of the best basketball games I've ever seen - lurched into overtime, Webber kept trying to make the winning shot...and he kept missing. Sometimes three straight jumpers clang off the rim and it doesn't hardly matter; you just hit the fourth. But sometimes you miss three and then go home in defeat while people say you choked. Of course, Webber has also won games in the clutch, including a game-winning hook against those same hated Lakers with .4 seconds to play.

But some of Webber's problems seem less innocent: his arrest for marijuana possession while he was playing for the Wizards, for example, and his involvement with a Michigan booster who was allegedly paying off players. But even if there are no really good explanations for such things, they still fall well within the range of human frailty for a kid from Detroit turned superstar. Again, if I were confessing, you'd see as bad or worse. But no one really cares.

This year, Chris and the Kings seemed poised to win the NBA championship until Webber "heard something pop" during Game 2 of the series against the Dallas Mavericks. Now he's gone for the remainder of the playoffs, and perhaps Sacramento doesn't have much longer to play either.

In a game of mind-boggling athletes - Iverson, Pierce, Kidd, Bryant, Garnett - Webber seems the most pointedly and poignantly human. As he lurches from success to failure, brilliant plays to terrible mistakes, he seems to be a distillation of what it's actually like to be a person. And because he seems to be trying to be kind, he's also an example of what, in our terrible imperfections, makes us not wholly despicable.

Webber collects bits of African-American history, and his collection is famous. He's got one of only seven existing copies of the first edition of Phyllis Wheatley's poems, and he knows exactly why it is important (Wheatley, a slave girl, had to compose poetry in front of a committee that included John Hancock, because they didn't believe a black person could write so beautifully, or perhaps at all). He's got a signed documents by Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., George Washington Carver, Toussaint L'Ouverture and Booker T. Washington. He's got a postcard from Malcolm X to Alex Haley.

The figures that Webber collects tried to find redemption not for themselves but for others. And in fact, what redeemed them was the ferocity and generosity with which they helped their people. Webber has said that he gets the greatest pleasure from showing his collection to children, and that he himself understands something more about it every time he does. Maybe that's Webber's real redemption from his imperfection - and, potentially, ours - because even with our obsessive focus on his great gifts and great failures, and his own focus on the rim, he is focused, too, on something more important than himself.