What If... History Weren't: Chris Webber

Welcome to the first volume of the BallHype Spotlight Series: What If... History Weren't. Tortured franchises and athletes surround us. The blogdome's best imagine alternate histories for their rooting interests. Today, Tom Ziller from Sactown Royalty considers Chris Webber's fortune.

Chris Webber's career has been defined by the word if.

Supposing all basketball players were created equal to this one, with Webber's inordinate physical presence providing necessary anchor for his insatiable skills and childlike swagger... no player out of 1,000 made from this stock would turn out so bitten by snakes and circumstance. Len Bias may rest conveniently as the patron saint of misspent basketball genius, but this is too simplistic -- Len's vice consumed him before he'd proven a damn thing. It's Webber who defines the idea of frittered genius in a true basketball sense; his failing isn't measured by illicit drugs or injured body, it is measured by what happened exclusively on the polished planks. Basketball measured Webber, and basketball cut him down.

As all things, this is relative. Five All-Star teams, five All-NBA teams, five top 10 MVP vote finishes. Top 50 all-time player, according to Hollinger's ticker tape. The best player on the best team for a string of seasons... which is where we pick up our hero's story. Injuries happen in the NBA, all the time. Look at the present. Andrew Bynum just went down, and a well-reasoned Lakers fan friend of mine has the phrase 'Shoot me now' in his GChat signature line. This very morning, I'm eagerly awaiting the return of two of my favorite teams' top 3 players to the line-up. I am fully aware the impact of injuries is common in basketball, and in sport. And despite what we may believe about Dwyane Wade or Grant Hill or J.D. Drew or Fred Taylor, injuries are not predestined categorically; in most cases, torn ACLs just happen with little justification present or necessary. (Ask my Lakers fan friend.)

But there is one flavor of major malady which seems predestined... and this is where we return to Webber. The institution of basketball (or the Basketball Gods, if that's your denomination) hated Chris Webber. His career resembles a fatal game of Paperboy, with boosters and weed and Don Nelson strung into his path. At every moment, something sat before Webber, threatening his incredible game. That absurd timeout saga nearly crushed C-Webb's spirit; it would have qualified our hero only in the Bias category. Nellie told him to 'shut up and rebound' -- Chris Webber! Shut up and rebound! It's like taking a painter's brushes, a writer's quill, a monster truck driver's monster truck. The beating heart of Webber faintly survived, slipping through his second Juwan Howard Hell before rescue was finally achieved by a pair of basketball's underground crusaders: Geoff Petrie and Rick Adelman. Webber had already met one of these crusaders -- Bill Clinton, who reached out to our hero following the Michigan maelstrom. But Big Dog was a bit... err, busy in 1998. (The establishment tied him down to prevent another Webber resurrection, natch.) Luckily, Petrie and Adelman had ready exile and managed to coax C-Webb away. The rest isn't just history; it is legend.

The spring of 2002 has been relived extensively; suffice it to say, the institution can be blamed for 27 free throws as readily as it can take blame for anything else. Disappointment was apparent and very present, of course, but there was a sense of hope you wouldn't believe or understand in that town, in those ears of Chris Webber. This was a mostly young team, a clandestine operation on the ascent... and it was a tipped pass, a free throw, an inch away from slaying the institution's chosen monster, an inch from glory. These men tasted it and they -- not the least of all Webber -- knew they'd be back.

2003, second round, Game 2. The institution wins. They could not kill Webber with dirty money, with drugs, with nationally televised ridicule, with oppression of style, with Rod Strickland and Darvin Ham... but they always held the dreaded microfracture in reserve, awaiting the necessary trigger moment. The institution does not hand out microfractures lightly -- Darius Miles received his due to the institution's encouragement of Portland's blast toward innocence; Kenyon Martin's was justified as a lesson against giving one-dimensional detonators max contracts; Greg Oden did some shady deeds back in junior high, and he's doing time now in some sort of new rehabilitation program for youth they've got going. Webber's microfracture, the evidence shows, came because he was too close to upsetting the fine balance the institution has achieved with regards to success and whom deserves it. (This is why Mark Madsen and Mitch Richmond have rings and Webber does not. This is also why Darko will never win anything.)

That injury was rare in its impact. It altered two championships (derailing Sacramento's chances in 2003 and mucking the proceedings upon his shaky return in 2004). It destroyed a would-be dynasty, and delivered the building blocks of another (San Antonio). The salary impacts solely stemming from that injury -- in the form of Brad Miller and Kenny Thomas -- will last until 2011. It resulted in Allen Iverson getting traded from the only NBA home he knew. Unless a deal gets done in the next year, it may even have resulted in the loss of professional basketball for a dedicated, spirited city.

It didn't have to be this way. The institution never saw through the bluster to find Webber's good intentions, to grasp his wholly commendable aura. Maybe the Fab Five's baggy shorts set off the whole false persona stuck on C-Webb to this day, that he's just some sort of hoodlum in a three-piece suit. For whatever reason, with this player, all the good is erased or invisible; all that mattered was someone in higher power thought Chris Webber didn't deserve to win. They were wrong. He deserved it. No, he deserves it. There are still crusaders in our midst, ready to rescue Webber from history. It will not be the same cast; their blood has been spilled enough. But there is one last lunge in Webber to get what rightfully he has earned. And though in color and logo I will have nothing to do with it, my tears are heavily invested in seeing the deed completed. I desperately want to believe Webber will rescue himself, and by extension rescue us all.

Previous on What If...: The New York Knicks, the Chicago Cubs, the Los Angeles Lakers, the St. Louis Cardinals, the San Francisco Giants, the Philadelphia Eagles, and the New York Mets. Keep track of the Spotlight Series at the BallHype hub or via the RSS feed. To get involved in future Spotlight Series, contact Tom Ziller.