Captain Jax Will Get You High Tonight

yes, that's a tattoo of a gun and cross

Outstanding news from the warfront: Stephen Jackson is Charlotte-bound in a deal that ships Raja Bell and Vlad Rad to Oakland. Everyone’s gonna use words like “embattled” and “disgruntled” when they describe Jax because he’s been looking for a trade for a while. It was on my radar, but I didn’t pay it much mind because it’s the Warriors and it’s Nelly, and really, all I knew of the situation was that Bill Simmons thinks the fans up there are pretty awesome and they’re being dicked over.

The NBA’s got a bit of a me-first problem, but that’s the nature of the league. Can you imagine a scenario where Joe Mauer says he’s the best athlete in Minnesota and Adrian Peterson gets him run out of town? With the end of the decade nigh, a lot of Top Ten lists are gonna be coming out, and there damn well better be one that includes Stephen Jackson in some capacity. The man’s done just about anything you could ask of an insane him playing professional sports. Let’s take a walk down memory lane and have a slow, dawning sense of doom as we take a deeper look at the final piece to a playoff-run for the Bobcats, shall we?

This Ain’t Captain Jax First Rodeo Stephen Jackson’s a bit of a journeyman baller, so much so that this isn’t his first team with the Bobcats mascot. He played for the LaCrosse Bobcats of the CBA back in the day. He’s also played in Australia, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic where I assure you he didn’t nothing elicit that would be deemed illegal in America. He was also the high scorer in the 1996 McDonalds All Star game, a team that also had Kobe and Jermaine O’Neal. The Charlotte Bobcats will be his sixth NBA team.

This Ends Well Jax is a close, personal friend of Stephon Marbury, the guy who went batshit once he figured out Ustream. I pray for the young, talented nephew who will one day have to sit down with those two at a holiday meal and get the “truth” about pro sports from them.

It’s All Ron Artest’s Fault It seems so inevitable now: who in their right mind would put Ron Artest and Stephen Jackson on the same team? Besides, it was the Pacers. Indianapolis isn’t exactly known as a hotbed of urban tension, and yet on November 14th, 2004 the powder keg went off like Milton putting strychnine in the guacamole. Aside from Artest getting suspended for the rest of the season, Jax was handed the largest suspension of all: 30 games. He was branded a thug, as were most NBA players back in those days. After that suspension, the public perception of Jackson changed forever.

Club Rio Would Probably Underwhelm You I’ve never been to the Club Rio in Indy, (that’s a strip club’s website. There’s no nudity, but still, prolly NSFW) but I can guarantee you it’s nothing special. I imagine the ladies that work at strip clubs in the industrial part of a somewhat populous midwestern town might look startlingly similar to the girls who worked at the strip clubs back in Winston-Salem when I was in college. Working at Papa Johns, I never felt any apprehension about delivering to these strip clubs, because despite being filled with sad people, strip clubs are generally pretty happy places. Unless you run over Stephen Jackson with your car. Then he fires his 9mm at you. Then he gets traded to the least logical place you could send a guy who, in the span of two years, got in trouble for brawling with fans and firing weapons: Oakland, California.

Whoa Nelly Jackson, essentially, had one highlight during his tenure in Oakland when his ragtag crew of motley Warriors upended the number one seeded Dallas Mavericks in the 2007 playoffs. He played exceptionally well, even while getting ejected from two of the six games. His big, bold personality meshed well with his cantankerous, drunken coach for as long as it could sustain itself before imploding this past nine or ten months.

There’s always going to be an expiration date on Captain Jax’s tenures with teams. That’s a reality you buy into when you trade or acquire him, and that’s why I’m ok with this deal for the Bobcats. It’ll be interesting to see if he’s able to flourish under Larry Brown’s idea of ball, or if this will end up being Jason Richardson 2.0. Regardless, he embodies all that the NBA became over the past decade: entertaining, enigmatic, and unstable. For a team eternally searching for some sort of identity in the league, the Bobcats just took a mighty step forward.

Oh, and Acie Law’s also a badass. That epic Texas-Texas A&M game against Durant was one of the best college basketball games this whole decade.