EPISODE 137: Basketball’s Marvin “Bad News” Barnes – With Mike Carey

Marvin “Bad News” Barnes was considered a future Hall of Fame basketball player before he even graduated from college.  A standout at Providence (averaging 20.7 points and 17.9 rebounds a game, and leading the Friars to the NCAA Final Four in 1973), Barnes was a consensus 1974 All-American with the world at his fingertips.

Although Barnes enjoyed two flamboyantly successful years in the American Basketball Association with the colorful Spirits of St. Louis – where he won 1974-75 Rookie of the Year honors, as well as All-Star accolades both seasons – his career quickly fizzled in the post-merger NBA, where he wore out his welcome with the Detroit Pistons, Buffalo Braves, Boston Celtics, and San Diego Clippers in just four years.

By 1980, Barnes’ unpredictable idiosyncrasies – fueled by chronic drug and alcohol abuse – had turned a can’t-miss pro basketball superstar into a prematurely past-his-prime has-been.

Longtime Boston sportswriter Mike Carey ("Bad News": The Turbulent Life of Marvin Barnes, Pro Basketball's Original Renegade) joins this week’s show to delve into the tragic story of a supremely gifted athlete whose self-destructive nature took him from sure-fire basketball greatness to a life of homeless panhandling, drug dealing and pimping on the mean streets of East San Diego, and five years in prison.

Even with seemingly limitless chances to turn things around, Barnes was repeatedly undone by predictable slides back into addiction and reckless behavior – ultimately succumbing to acute cocaine and heroin intoxication in 2014 at age 62. 

The story of Marvin Barnes is one of squandered talent, met by tragically unconquerable inner demons.

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“Bad News”: The Turbulent Life of Marvin Barnes, Pro Basketball’s Original Renegade - buy here

EPISODE 135: The Curse of the Clippers – With Mick Minas

We pick up where we left off in Episode #89 (The NBA Buffalo Braves – With Tim Wendel), with the continuing story of one of pro hoops’ most forlorn franchises – today known as the Los Angeles Clippers.

Author Mick Minas (The Curse: The Colorful & Chaotic History of the LA Clippers) joins the podcast from his home in Melbourne, Australia to help us go deep into the travails of a club labeled by many as the NBA’s most historically dysfunctional – and by some as simply cursed.

From its highly convoluted cross-country relocation to San Diego in 1978 to its still-chaotic life as Los Angeles’ “other” NBA team (and the Staples Center’s third-priority sports tenant) – the Clippers have had enough wayward turns of fate to fill an entire league, let alone a single franchise:

• The high-profile 1979 coup of All-Star center (and San Diego native) Bill Walton, whose career literally and figuratively crumbled under the weight of chronic foot injuries;

• League fines, investigations and lawsuits against team owner Donald Sterling – including the team’s unauthorized relocation to Los Angeles in 1984;

• The “Clipper Triangle” of injuries to star players like Derek Smith, Norm Nixon, Marques Johnson, and Danny Manning – and league-record setting seasons of futility;

• The disruption of the club’s first playoff appearance in 1992 by the Los Angeles riots;

• Siren songs of Anaheim; AND

• The sordid 2014 scandal that led to Sterling’s ouster and subsequent/still-in-process “rebirth” under new owner Steve Ballmer.

PLUS: Will the Clippers stay in LA?

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The Curse: The Colorful & Chaotic History of the LA Clippers - buy here