Brand died yesterday of pancreatic cancer. He was 67, having spent most of the last decade of his life in a well-meaning but ultimately pointless effort to reform the NCAA. We're already hearing talk that he "transformed the NCAA." What he really did, despite his good intentions, was widen the gap between how the association talked about itself and how it actually behaved. He didn't transform the NCAA so much as double down on its fundamental hypocrisy.

"College sports is not a business," Brand once claimed, and somehow he didn't get laughed out of the room. He was a slumming academic, and he could get away with a certain amount of willful naivete. But even so, it was a staggering claim to make — especially for the president of an organization to which CBS had paid $6 billion for the rights to its men's basketball tournament and which slaps a corporate sticker on every surface in the room. Even the ladder that players climb to snip down the nets is sponsored. And all the while, the athletes, on whose backs all this fabulous money is made, are told time and again, by people like Brand, of the simple grace in playing for nothing but dear old Alma Mater. That's the NCAA's sustaining self-mythology, and Brand believed in it to the hilt.

He was smart enough to see some of the problems here but just clueless enough to propose all the wrong remedies. He didn't like the NBA's minimum-age rule, which created all sorts of bad incentives for one-and-done players to work the game's back channels and recoup some of the money they should've been making in the pros. That's all to the good. (Brand himself pointed out that the rule would likely be illegal if it hadn't been collectively bargained.) His solution was all wrong, though: He lobbied the NBA to increase the minimum age. Leave aside the obnoxious paternalism of telling young, highly employable men that what's actually good for them is an unpaid internship under the likes of John Calipari. What Brand was begging for, in effect, was an additional year of rule-fudging and outright cheating. He was asking for a bigger black market.

Brand made for a poor reformer because he believed deeply in the NCAA's purpose and purity of motive. A good one, like Sonny Vaccaro, would simply advocate blowing the place up. Only an academic could earnestly believe that the values of higher education could somehow be reconciled with those of big-time sports. "What you saw was a moral man," Wally Renfro, a former NCAA spokesman, told Andy Katz. "He changed the way we talk about intercollegiate athletics." This is a nice way of saying Brand was a very good piano player in a very big whorehouse that was unworthy of the man.

Brand changed the way we look at the NCAA [ESPN]
Myles Leaves Indelible Brand on NCAA [FanHouse]

Carroll, who was 60, became known primarily through his autobiography, The Basketball Diaries, later made into a movie premised on the dubious notion that Leo DiCaprio could pass for someone who was able to dunk. An excerpt:

Summer 65: Fucked up yesterday, lost our last game in the summer 15-and-under league up at George Washington High School, and that deuced us out of the championship game today. We had a good squad, mostly cats from down the block in the projects but they had a rule that no Varsity players could play. That ruined our chances of using big Lewie Alcindor even though he's from the neighborhood and all. I mean, shit, most of the teams got ringers but it's a little difficult to sneak in a seven foot All-Everything cat onto a court. He can't exactly use a fucking pair of sunglasses, dig? So I go up to watch the game today and pick up my trophy for the all-league team and what a hassle is steaming as I bop into the gym. THE SUGAR BOWL ALL-STARS, one of the teams playing, are in a rage bitching about the ringers on the RUTGERS team. So true! those cats didn't have a dude under eighteen running for them, none of them played school ball, but they were some of the best playground players in Harlem. I walked over and was rapping to a few friends, Vaughn Harper, an All-American from Boys High, and Earl Manigault, a Harlem legend of 5 ft. 10 in. who can take a half dollar off the top of a backboard. He's invariably on and off his school team because of drug scenes and other shit. These two cats are, with big Lew, the best high school players in the city. Finally the captain of SUGAR BOWL points over to us and tells the other team and the man who runs the gig that if they're gonna use that team, that their team's gonna use Harper, "Goat" Manigault, and me. The bossman axes the idea of letting in Harper and "Goat" but says they can use me, which is fine with the other team who don't even know who the fuck this white boy is. Before I say a fucking word I get a uniform tossed in my mug and since there're bunches of chicks in the stands, my new team mates are huddling around me and I whip on the shit and start warming up. Big fucking difference I'm gonna make 'cause we need leapers for the boards and no backcourt dude like me. Anyway the slaughter starts and I'm hitting long jumpers like a fucker (I gotta say that I always burn up that gym, something about it that I just can't miss, crazy) so we're holding our own by the alf and I got twenty-eight points, each move of which I make sticks out like a hardon because I'm the only whiteman on the court and looking around, in the entire fucking place, in fact; my bright blond-red hair making me the whitest whitey this league has ever seen. So in short we made a good show for a team our age, but can't keep up with the other dudes and lose by ten, but that ain't bad and I got myself forty-seven points and at least got to play for once with these cats I've always had to play against in various tournaments since Biddy League days. Then to bust all kinds of balls, the bossman gets some college scout in the stands to testify the other team got at least three ringers he knows and we are awarded the champ bit. After the gold is handed out and all (I didn't get a trophy for the game 'cause they were one short and I had to say "fuck it," but got an outofsight plaque for All-League), we go in a corner and pose a team picture for the Harlem paper, "The Amsterdam News." We're waiting for the birdie to click when the photog calls over the SUGAR BOWL coach and whispers something to him who then walks over to me and mumbles, "Dig, my man, don't know how to say this but for, well, ..." I cut him short and told I got the message and stepped out of the pix. I guess I would have messed up the texture of the shot or something. Or maybe they didn't want to let the readers get to see that the high scorer was a fucking white boy.

And from Forced Entries, another book of diaries that contains what might be the truest and most affecting line ever written about the game. It's the last one below:

When I say I "fucked up," what I mean is that I'm sitting here watching the NBA All-Star Game on TV and I'm watching guys I used to seriously abuse on the court scoring in double figures now against the best in the game. Ergo, I fucked it up. I should have stayed an athlete, body well-tuned, cruising around with my accountant in a Porsche, maroon and chrome. More important, with basketball there's always only one direction: to the cylinder on the fiberglass rectangle. And you don't have to aim. If you do, you're off.

Poetry has too many variations. Mr. Frost was right about one thing: there are always promises to keep, and variations on that theme. With basketball you can correct your own mistakes, immediately and beautifully, in midair.

Jim Carroll, Poet and Punk Rocker Who Wrote ‘The Basketball Diaries', Dies at 60 [New York Times]

Marzano was a backup major league catcher for 10 seasons, then became a local radio personality and a sports analyst for Comcast and MLB.com, doing color and commentary for both organizations. He was a very smart, outgoing guy and was very generous with his time whenever you needed a good quote or an honest game-inside the game perspective.

The above photo was taken during a '96 Mariners-Yankees series where Marzano went at it with the Yankees Paul O'Neill. You can take the boy out of South Philly...

Funeral services for Marzano will be held this Friday.

Marzano Brought South Philly To The Game [Inquirer]