Skip to main content

Unguarded by Scottie Pippen (with Michael Arkush)

Competent, readable, co-written bio of a great basketball player who was both blessed and cursed to live in Michael Jordan's shadow. For better, more insightful bios I recommend others: Andre Iguodala's book The Sixth Man or Andre Agassi's absolute page-turner, Open. 

The book is full of mixed emotions. Pippen wants to be traded, then was grateful he wasn't. He's happy with, but later deeply disappointed in, coach Phil Jackson. He's angry at Jerry Krause (the Chicago Bulls general manager) for underpaying him and treating him with disrespect, but then he's grateful to him for other reasons. He's angry at Michael Jordan for being a cruel and condescending narcissist, but then grateful to him for all the positive things that being a teammate with Michael Jordan would later lead to. 

One gets the impression that Pippen is still trying to work out how exactly he feels about his experiences across his basketball career, that he's unsettled about it and doesn't really know what he thinks about it all. I think I see where he's coming from. In some ways I feel the same about my (far less decorated!) professional career; I don't know what it all means, and I have my own tangled mix of emotions about it.

A couple of final comments. This book will teach you to be deeply cynical about the media--not that we need the reminder of course, especially in this era. And finally, Pippen constantly gripes about being underpaid, but it's worth noting that he made a decision to sign a long-term contract at a certain wage rate, and his team fulfilled that contract to the dollar. During his contract, however, the economics changed for NBA players as the league grew in popularity and profitability. But this is the risk you take when you lock in a long term deal! Pippen chose a long term contract over the risks of a shorter term contract with potential upside, and the bet didn't work out for him.

More Posts

Hot, Flat and Crowded by Thomas Friedman

I've now read three of Thomas Friedman's books, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, The World Is Flat, and now, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. And Hot Flat and Crowded is--by far--the weakest book of the three. In fact, a cynic might consider it more of a brand extension than a book--a recycling of The World is Flat to include well-meaning and repetitive chapters on energy policy, the environment and global warming. And despite his earnest and palliative writing tone, Friedman's political message has become shrill, and that shrillness debases many of the potentially intriguing ideas and arguments he makes throughout the book. According to Friedman, everything is the Americans' fault. We're supposed to be leaders of the free world, yet we should only act with the consensus blessing of all the rest of the world's countries. We invaded Iraq, which was wrong. We invaded Afghanistan, which was sort of right, but we're making far too many mistakes there. We don't educat...
Read more

A Simple Rule for Getting Rid of Your Excess Books

If you read a lot of books like we do, perhaps you share our problem: Our home is gradually getting overrun by books. Piles of them. Sure, we've made resolutions to control the spread of our collection, like "no more buying books!" and "only get books out of the library!" We've tried these approaches, but unfortunately, not only do rules like these suck the fun out of life, they're also ineffective. The thing is, even though we do get most of our books out of the library, and we don't really make a practice of buying books, we somehow still seem to have more books than we know what to do with. And the piles seem to grow, slowly but surely, with every month and year. Earlier this year, however, we adopted a simple strategy to control our book creep, and it has worked so well for us that I decided to share it with you in this blog: For every new book you bring into your home, you must immediately remove two. It doesn't matter whether you donate th...
Read more

Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger by Philip Marchand [biography]

"Instead of scurrying into a corner and wailing about what media are doing to us, one should charge straight ahead and kick them in the electrodes. They respond beautifully to such resolute treatment and soon become servants rather than masters." Plenty of insights throughout this capably-written biography of Marshall McLuhan. And the book really develops some genuine heft as it documents McLuhan's intellectual "gestation" as he turned away from the predictable life of an English Lit professor and instead began studying modern media. McLuhan would grow into one of the more idiosyncratic and controversial minds of the 20th century. You'd never guess, but McLuhan was revolted by television, and utterly sickened by advertising. But he also believed that careful study of these domains enabled him to understand, and more importantly to resist, their influence. As the author puts it, McLuhan "was one of those men who, without any prompting, find observation o...
Read more