Ode to a Bald Eagle

 

Pic SS&R

There’s no more joy in Mudville, the cake got left out in the rain and Lakers nation turns its lonely eyes inward. The bald eagle has landed…somewhere else.

There’s no way of figuring out this turn of events, although we’ll probably learn someday. "Cheaping out" is one way of explaining the Lakers' malfeasance, per Harrison Faigen at Silver Screen and Roll.

But for more than a few shining moments over the past few years, an improbable kind of Camelot happened, if you count shining knights as pasty white everymen who hail from the red dirt of College Station, Texas. There was no royal pedigree save for that inherited from a dad who cut his own teeth as a standout at Creighton before signing on as a lifer in high school and college sports at various places and various jobs, from administration to promotions to spectator sports safety and security, including a 30-year mainstay in Aggie athletics where he ultimately retired as Associate Athletic Director for Game Management. 

Mike Caruso passed his love of the game on to his son, or his son simply took the ball and ran—whether that meant Alex’s own unlikely white-men-actually-can-jump antics or chasing after the loose ones that got away as a ball boy for Texas A&M. By the time the father retired in 2018, he was able to watch on TV as his progeny carved out a career in Los Angeles. Now he’ll pop a cold one and watch the kid move on to his next chapter with the Chicago Bulls for a reported $37 million over four years. That cash sure beats the $35K the 6’5” combo guard was pulling in when he first started out in the G-League.

It remains to be seen why the Lakers, who owned the dude’s Bird Rights, couldn’t or wouldn’t cough up the money to keep him. But see paragraph 2. Maybe it will all make sense someday, or even sooner than later, or maybe never at all. You say you know but you don’t know. Sometimes things go sideways.

I wrote about Alex Caruso for Forum Blue and Gold back in his two-way contract days and I wrote about him again this past season. I didn’t think I’d be saying so long this way.

He was a big fish from the scrublands, from the place of cul-de-sacs and Ford Rangers. He never seemed to be “L.A.” in the way that is commonly hyped and amplified, but he certainly fit in with a more bedrock aspect of the city—that being sports culture, and more specifically, the kind of grind-it-out, no complaints, no star trips, balls-out effort, and even the self-effacing good humor that allows one to cut a straight-faced commercial about manscaping—kudos to whatever creative genius came up with that one. 

Memes and Laker fandom and GOAT jokes aside, Caruso is one of the best defenders in the league, a guy who reads the angles, organizes the team and in almost intangible ways, automatically elevates the play and attitudes of fellow teammates as soon as he subs in. You might have missed the moment coming out of a commercial break on national television when the music’s loud and the lights are blinding, but a minute later you notice that fortunes somehow seem to have changed, that momentum has shifted, and that the guy with the headband and sparse mustache just went flying out of bounds while flicking the ball back in. And, somehow made it back to the other end of the floor in time to set a pick or dish a dime or even throw it down.

That’s how you wind up with unworldly plus-minuses and net ratings, even when the highlight reels might not notice. It’s how you go from non-drafted to being very much on the radar of front office execs around the league who are more than happy to open up their wallets. It’s how hearts are broken and hard questions are asked.

It’s how dormant keys are dusted off in the wee hours of the morning, how a chapter closes here and opens there. Past the hour when normal people read, on a barely flickering search for something elusive. Soar on wingman, we wish you well and we'll be watching.