How Latrell Was Born, and a Sportscaster Redeemed

Marv Albert's return to national broadcasting means that the best basketball play-by-play man in the business is getting a second chance. It means that the lumpy brown recliner in the corner will again have Marv's patented, "Yes!" as company in the nation's living rooms.

It also means that double standards remain as American as apple pie.

Let's refresh our memories.

After Albert was charged with forcible sodomy and sexual assault--the former charge carries a five years to life sentence--Albert's lawyers agreed to a plea arrangement that gave him a year's probation for misdemeanor assault and battery.

One woman had already testified that Albert, decked in women's underwear and a garter belt, propositioned her in a hotel room. Another claimed he had tried to sexually assault her on two separate occasions--again while wearing his trademark garter belt. Albert, it is believed, worked out the plea to prevent further details of his sordid sex life--which allegedly included testimony from a drag queen--from becoming late night talk show fodder.

Albert returned to the Madison Square Garden network one year after his Sep. 1, 1997 resignation, and his recently inked deal with Turner Network Television means he will be back on the national stage in April.

Latrell Sprewell tried to strangle his coach and was suspended for six months. He returned to the NBA when it returned to us, making his debut with the Knicks in a Jan. 27 exhibition game.

Sprewell is just over a year removed from his infraction. While Knicks fans, who grudgingly recognize that beggars can't be choosers, are ready to forgive and forget, Sprewell has already been roundly booed in multiple NBA arenas.

As MSG President Dave Checkouts said the week he traded for him, Sprewell is a "a poster boy for bad behavior in the NBA."

Albert's face lit up when he spoke of letters of encouragement from fans and the public support he has received since the trial ended.

"Everyone has been so favorable in New York at the games and walking on the street," he said.

After we got over the initial shock, it turned merely to humor, and all of a year elapsed before we welcomed Albert back in to the fraternity.

Both men apologized, Sprewell almost immediately and Albert after striking his plea bargain. Why do we allow Albert the repentance we deny Sprewell?

It seems that if we are determined to treat these two men unequally, our sympathy needs to take a 180-degree turn.

Albert told the New York Times in 1991, "I always wanted to be a sportscaster from the third grade on." The bright kid from Brooklyn was raised to have a goal and pursue it vigorously through established channels.

He graduated from Syracuse in 1963, received his journalism degree from New York University a year later, and in 1967, at 23, Albert called his first Knicks game.

He was ambitious. If you don't think it was bred in him, ask his two broadcasting brothers, Steve and Al.

Sprewell is the perfect foil.

If you had told 16-year old Latrell that six years later he would be a professional basketball player, he might have tried to sell you a bridge in Brooklyn.

Until his senior year in high school, Sprewell's basketball playing was limited to the netless rims of playgrounds in Flint, Mich., and Milwaukee. James Gordon, basketball coach at Milwaukee's Washington High School, was the one who decided that the gangly street kid roaming the hallways might just have some game in him.

Gordon was Sprewell's Cus D'Amato. He not only got his graduating rookie to pour in 20.6 points-per-game, but he got him to go to class and helped him get into Missouri's Three Rivers Community College.

Two years later, a kid destined for nothing not so long before was playing for D-I Alabama. Four years later, the Golden State Warriors made him the 24th overall pick in the 1992 draft.

At Alabama, Sprewell hooked up his alarm clock to thunderous stereo speakers to avoid missing the team's early-morning practices. He had discipline, but it was a fragile discipline shaped exclusively by basketball.

Sprewell's circumstances offered basketball as a pathway to social respectability, self-realization, manhood in the mainstream. In the absence of a more effective emasculator than P.J. Carlesimo and the almighty roundball, Sprewell inevitably struck back.

Richard Wright says in How Bigger Was Born that "the environment supplies the instrumentalities through which the organism express itself, and if that environment is warped or tranquil, the mode and manner of behavior will be affected toward deadlocking tensions or orderly fulfillment and satisfaction."

When Golden State stopped being a pleasant basketball experience--Sprewell twice grappled physically with teammates and was bitter about the changing composition of the team--his environment turned from tranquil to warped.

When Scott from Kirkland's world goes awry, he turns to other sources of order--family, friends, school. Latrell from Milwaukee's world in the main stream was shaped by nothing but hoops. He was a recluse from a broken home who learned that it's pretty hard to suckle basketball.

A native son of the pro basketball industrial complex, Sprewell is a victim of the capricious environment that weaned him. Albert is merely the victim of his own depravity.

To paint Albert as a good guy who's only human, but Sprewell as Grandson of Sam, is unjustifiable in a society that measures justice not by action alone, but by accountability. The only ambiguity in my mind is whether the difference in acceptance of these two men results from racism, sexism or both.

Is it a knee-jerk, excessively violent reaction to the crime of a black man against a white man, or undue leniency towards a pattern of violence against women? Either way, it's disgusting.

Vilify both men, or welcome both back with open arms. Just make up your mind.