Manu Ginobili gave life to the San Antonio Spurs
There was a time when no one wanted to watch the San Antonio Spurs play basketball. Ironically, this was also the same period of time when the other 29 teams in the Association were playing the ugliest basketball in the league’s history. Before we allowed the science behind efficiency to smugly insert itself into the conversation about what makes good basketball, we relied on antiquated ideals about numbers to tell us what is effectively good and points earned by way of volume to tell us what kind of basketball was worth watching.
For about eight years, basketball fans were wrong about these two basic basketball principles. Per-game numbers have been cast aside by hoops elitist, and with reason, while volume has been replaced with efficiency models that allow us to better explore the annals of history. What did not change, however, is how we viewed the Spurs — and more importantly, how we viewed one Manu Ginobili, the quirky sixth man who was the only player in the Alamo City who was able to capture the interest of those outside of South Texas with his unique ability to do things that were counter to both the culture he was ingrained in and the culture that was opposed to everything Spursian at the same time.
It was always a bizarre dichotomy; Ginobili always fit in to San Antonio’s system because he didn’t fit in to San Antonio’s system. He was a gambler, a cowboy, a renegade in a room full of choir boys and law-abiding citizens, and that’s why we loved him. The solicitude we feel for Ginobili is starkly contrasted against how we feel about the rest of the league’s superstars. Everything about him was different. He was left-handed, came off the bench for 65 percent of the regular-season games he played in, and he wasn’t American but he wasn’t European, either. He was this outlying enigma who could only thrive in a culture that celebrated "different." But he was also different in a different kind of way than the rest of his teammates.
His presence on the floor always meant there would be a subtle shift in the paragon. Perfection always seemed like an attainable goal in San Antonio, but Ginobili always made sure the road to get there would be much more difficult but so much more fun. With the Spurs, decisions are typically made by left-brained thinkers. Logic and tact are what fuel them, but Ginobili always made decisions with his heart. He did what he loved to do, even if it didn’t make the most sense. There are literally compilation videos of him throwing bounce passes between defenders’ legs.
Even at age 39, Ginobili brought this kind of youthful exuberance to a group that was unafraid of the impossible. With no Tim Duncan, Ginobili continued to help lead the charge off the bench on a Spurs team that won north of 60 games for what felt like the thousandth-consecutive time. He offered a sense of continuity for a franchise that had lost what we thought was its soul. And now with Tony Parker’s future in limbo after a ruptured quad, it’s hard to imagine Ginobili back with the team after he already considered retirement last summer.
When I watched Ginobili walk out of that arena after a fourth consecutive loss to the Golden State Warriors, head down with one finger in the air, no Duncan or Parker by his side, my heart deflated like a fallen soufflé. It’s not just the end of an epoch, but the end of a triumvirate of three careers perfectly woven together like a 15th century Persian rug. Duncan, forever the medallion in the center of everything; Parker, the Arabesque border, charged with maintaining structure when things broke loose; and Ginobili, who constantly transformed into any and every other colorful detail in between. Every element as important as the last, but none is more fascinating than the loosely structured details that gave every rug its identity.
Ginobili didn’t give the Spurs their identity, but he brought it to life in ways no other player in the league’s history ever could. Ginobili’s verve balanced the robotic sensibilities of Duncan and Co., despite that there was nothing inherently balanced about Ginobili himself. He wasn’t a basketball player, but an entertainer who played basketball. When we look back on his career, we won’t measure his accomplishments by the numbers (and trust, you can build a pretty solid case for Ginobili among the greats with just the numbers), but we’ll measure him by the contributions he made to a culture that sat atop the NBA for nearly two decades. There was a time when no one wanted to watch the San Antonio Spurs play basketball, but there was never a time when we didn’t want to watch Ginobili.
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