The VHS/DVD championship season recap is a lost art in the era of Youtube, but I’m old enough to remember when it was the only game in town. I’d see ads for them in the immediate aftermath of a title win—a chance to relive a great run through a curated collection of clips and interviews. We had the tape for the 1998 Red Wings in my home growing up, and a disc for the 2004 Pistons, but neither of those affected me quite as much as a video I borrowed from the library as a young kid, which introduced me to the concept of violent, aggressive basketball—a style I decided I wanted to play.
This was a tape recapping the 1988 Detroit Pistons season. That’s not a year in which they actually won a title, you might notice, but it was the first time Detroit ever made the Finals, pushing the Lakers to seven games. I was lucky enough to get taken to the library on a regular basis, and I did the thing that kids do when they go, which is grab whatever they see on topics they’re interested in. My topics included baseball, hockey, planets, those Eyewitness Books with all the cool pictures, and at some point, the Detroit Pistons.
I tried, at least briefly, a bunch of different sports as a kid, and basketball was the one I stuck with the longest. I started at the Y around first grade and then graduated to my city’s (non-tryout) league, which I stuck with through ninth grade. These memories are decades old, so I’m doing the best I can, but I remember third grade as the turning point when being on a basketball team really became part of my identity. Our uniforms mimicked NBA logos. We had a real schedule, with different start times at different gyms. And concurrent with my own fledgling hoop career, the Pistons were becoming an NBA powerhouse filled with hard-charging players any kid would want to emulate. This was the winter of 2003–04, a few months before that Tayshaun Prince block against the Pacers. I believe I had gone to my first-ever Pistons game the season prior, and I was enthralled by both Mason, the inimitable PA announcer, and the roster on the court. A couple of standout memories from traveling to the Palace that year: New Year’s Eve against the Trail Blazers, where the whole crowd booed a star they’d soon come to love; and Game 1 of the first round against Milwaukee, where the blowout was so comprehensive that the fans got to indulge their favorite late-game activity and cheer for the rookie Darko Milicic to get his few allotted minutes of action.
All of this is to say that I was learning about basketball and loving it, hence the rental of a 15-year-old VHS. That tape taught me a lot about a team before my time, but the biggest impression it made was with the thing that everyone still admires or despises about those late-’80s Pistons: they played mean. They slapped, they pushed, they body-checked. The Bad Boys took on their opponents with a snarl that the NBA has worked hard to eradicate from its product. That style was no one-man effort, but it’s most closely associated with Bill Laimbeer. The big white guy at center was, I dare say, ahead of his time as a near-seven-footer who could shoot from distance. But that’s not what anybody remembers about Bill Laimbeer. They remember him for Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball. They remember him for that Beastie Boys namecheck on “Tough Guy.” If they picture Laimbeer in a Pistons uniform, they’re probably imagining Larry Bird getting knocked on his butt.
These Pistons were jerks and proud of it, and they made their torment of their rivals the centerpiece of their branding. On that VHS, the very first thing you see is the introduction of each player on the team. The next thing, before anything about their talents at the sport of basketball, is a whole reel devoted to how rough and intimidating they were on the court. The minute-long montage of quick-cutting clips features exactly one made shot (a dunk); the rest is the team flinging their bodies, knocking people down, putting their hands on opposing stars, trash-talking, smirking, and shoving. When I was eight, this was the coolest thing I had ever seen in my life.
What I took from gazing up at Laimbeer’s retired jersey in the rafters, and the widespread love for the ’04 Pistons’ toughness-first attitude—not to mention the city’s veneration for Darren McCarty, the primary brawler on a Red Wings team I idolized—was that I should be just like them as an athlete. I wanted to stick up for my teammates and intimidate everyone else. I wanted to be fiery. I wanted people to be afraid to dribble near me. I wanted my hustle and my intensity to be a difference-maker. I wanted to bend the rules to find a mental edge. In the middle of my third-grade season I decided that I wanted, basically, to be Bill Laimbeer.
I don’t recall exactly how I got the first tech, but I have a vivid memory of the second. There was a standard tie-up around mid-court. Right about the time the whistle blew, I decided I needed to separate the enemy player from the ball. I ran into the fray, directed all of my 60 pounds at the wrong-colored jersey, and did, in fact, conclude the tie-up, with extreme prejudice. As I remember it, the game stopped. I could see a few of the parents in the stands calling for my ejection. The Metro Detroit area may have had a soft spot for Bill Laimbeer, but my adult neighbors were not about to embrace some little squirt who thought she was guarding Kevin McHale at the Garden. The referee obliged those hecklers, probably thankful that I wasn’t his problem anymore. The player I had walloped was fine, to my knowledge, but I was led off the court and left to cool down in the hallway. The league’s automatic one-game suspension for my ejection added further shame. I had gotten in trouble before with parents and teachers, sure, but it was a weirder feeling to have the consequences for my actions doled out by strangers. It was cold, unflinching cause-and-effect: Act like this, and you can’t play basketball. They never showed that part on the VHS!
Swiftly disabused of the notion that I had a future as an enforcer, I settled into an unremarkable youth basketball career of rebounds and rule-following. I did catch another ejection a year or two later for being a whiny little brat to a ref, but that happens sometimes. What’s important is that I grew up, I learned more about life, I started to understand myself better, and I eventually chilled out. Even if I still wear this t-shirt as a nod to the old days.
As I was growing bigger and getting gentler, Bill Laimbeer was working through a second act in basketball as a WNBA coach. He won three titles with the Detroit Shock between 2003 and 2008, and he was also the head coach in the early days of the Las Vegas Aces, piloting them right to the brink of their back-to-back championships before retiring after the 2021 season. Leaving the sport in his mid-60s, he didn’t sound anything like the attack dog who worked so hard to torment the likes of Barkley, Bird, and Jordan.
“I’ve never spent a summer at my farm in Michigan,” he said. “So I’m looking forward to that. What the future holds, I don’t really have a solid handle on right now. I’m having fun. I’m relaxed.”
I’d be curious if Laimbeer still feels much of a connection with the guy whose face is all over that 1988 VHS. I’m sure it’s more than I feel with my third-grade self, but maybe not by much. Maybe everyone is growing up all of the time.
At the start of my 30s, I am a woman who never yells, a woman who is constantly aware of her body in a public space and always tries to minimize its inconvenience to others, and a woman who to the best of her ability avoids lashing out in anger. I have no roughneck competitiveness in my soul whatsoever; I push myself hard to be good at the things I care about, but I never let the outcome of a game affect that way that I treat people. It’s important to me that I continue to be this kind of person, but it’s worth keeping in mind the dead ends I ran into on the way to finding this road. Just like I’m not Jack Kerouac, David Bowie, or Kristen Stewart, I’m not Bill Laimbeer. A long time ago, I realized this truth, and then I tried something different.