Baron getting it in at ‘The Run’

That sick video we posted earlier with KG, Dwight, Josh Smith, Chauncey and a number of other adidas guys playing pickup might have been staged for a commercial – but the notion that these guys all run together at UCLA is not fiction. We actually covered this run, widely considered the best pickup game in the world, in Dime #42. It’s reprinted here…

On the second floor of one of the oldest buildings on UCLA’s premises, stashed away from the bustling Westwood campus, lays the crown jewel of Southern California’s summer basketball scene. While hoop fanatics congregate in this section of town to worship the game at Pauley Pavilion, few know about the history connected to the three basketball courts inside the Student Activities Center. The courts, lined up side-by-side, have played host to pickup games featuring virtually every NBA great since your pops was young – from Magic, Bill Walton and Kiki Vandeweghe in the late ’70s-early ’80s to Michael, Kobe and KG today.

No matter a player’s level of celebrity, once he sets foot inside the Center, he has to bring his “A” game. There’s nothing resembling the V.I.P. treatment these guys are used to in an NBA facility – there’s no scoreboard and there’s basically no space between the sidelines of adjacent courts. In fact, the side courts aren’t even regulation width, so games are played from sideline-to-wall. Newcomers needs to win their way off of those side courts (both of them) in order to run on the “championship” court.

“It is the best run in the country,” says Baron Davis, who has been playing in these runs since he was in high school. “There are three courts going on at all times and the center court is the championship court. You want to always be playing on that center court.”

“Center court is the Holy Grail,” says former pro Mitchell Butler, who has played in the UCLA pickup runs since he was a Bruins freshman in 1989 and continued through his eight-year NBA career. “You wanna hold down center court. When you get to that day, you talk as much trash as you can in the gym. You let everybody know what the situation is in the gym.”

Imagine the smack coming out of Kevin Garnett’s mouth in the summer of ’03, when he and some combination of Chauncey Billups, Al Harrington, Dahntay Jones, Joe Johnson, Tyronn Lue and Jared Jeffries held down center court for six straight weeks without losing more than once or twice the entire time. With four to five days of action per week, and about 10-12 games played per day, this team took down a smattering of NBA stars in the neighborhood of 350 times.

“Those guys held it down,” says Butler. “You got KG back there blocking shots, guys were funneling plays to the baseline instead of letting them drive middle. They really played solid basketball. Chauncey would win a championship the following year. Joe Johnson was becoming a household name at that particular time. They came out to L.A., to our stomping grounds, and held court. It didn’t sit well with a lot of guys from this side of town, I’ll tell you that.”

It’s no coincidence that Chauncey’s transformation to “Mr. Big Shot” came after his summer as king of the court at UCLA. Joe Johnson also broke out that same year, jumping from a spot-starter who scored 9.8 points a game to a staple of Phoenix’s offense when he averaged 16.7 points a night. And in the summer before he would go on to win the NBA’s Most Improved Player Award, Jalen Rose was a regular at Westwood. More recently, the summer of ’07 saw UCLA guard Russell Westbrook morph from a little-used freshman into the Pac-10 Defensive Player of the Year and likely NBA Lottery pick.

“That gym has made and transformed players,” says the game’s organizer, Adam Mills, a former guard at the University of Texas. “It was almost like one play sparked Russell Westbrook last summer. He came from the free throw line and almost vaulted over somebody to tip-dunk. His groin area was up at their head, and everyone just was like, ‘Where did that come from?!’ That seemed to be the big turning point for him.”

“Guys like Russell Westbrook made a name for himself,” says Davis. “Kevin Love, Gilbert Arenas – even myself. It was a chance to expand your game and compete against the best. So by the time your high school or collegiate season came around after playing against the best in the world, you think your opponent is nothing compared to what you just went through.”

The first time that Westbrook and UCLA teammate Kevin Love played together was during one of these pickup sessions. Since the John Wooden era it’s been an unwritten rule that everyone who dons a Bruin uniform has to come to this run to put in work. But Wooden and Ben Howland aren’t the only ones to mandate that their players prep for the season at the Student Activities Center (formerly known as the Men’s Gym). Mike Dunleavy Sr. sends his whole Clippers crew. Magic brought the world champion Lakers, with the exception of Kareem, to showcase “Showtime.” According to legend, Magic would do absolutely everything in his power to win games – even if that meant bending the rules slightly.

“You’d have some amazing 20-minute games with Magic calling 15 fouls in a row whether someone was near was near him or not,” remembers Mills.

And when Michael Jordan filmed Space Jam at the Warner Brothers studio in Burbank, Calif., while planning a comeback to the League, he would regularly bring the NBA players working out with him to Westwood for daytime games, before spending the evening running on a custom court built just for him at the film studio.

“That might have been the all-time greatest summer of basketball,” says Butler. “Michael, Charles Oakley, Gary Payton, Juwan Howard, Alonzo Mourning, Patrick Ewing, everybody. That wasn’t just NBA basketball. It was All-Star caliber pickup the entire summer.”